“OLD DEVIL RIVER”

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 June 1936, Page 11

“OLD DEVIL RIVER”

FIGHT AGAINST MISSISSIPPI. The negroes do not approve of the new spillway that the Government has cut at Bonnet Carre, 33 miles above New Orleans, and which was dedicated in December, writes Beatrice Ashburn, in the Manchester Guardian. The spillway cost nearly 15,000,000 dollars, and it is a massive concrete weir that is able to remove 250,000 feet of water a second when the Mississippi gets too high and empty it into Lake Pontchartrain. That is what it is supposed to do, at least, and thus New Orleans and all

the delta country from the city to the Gulf will be saved from the danger of floods/ The spillway is on the same

principle as that extra pipe in the

bathtub which prevents the water from overflowing if you forget and leave the faucet on. The floor of the Mississippi is constantly rising as it drains the continent. Year by year and inch by inch the:saud at the bottom of the river grows deeper and deeper and higher and higher above the surface of the surrounding country. It presents an exasperating and expensive problem to the Government engineers as well as to the inhabitants of Louisiana, who view the 'river like an enemy general perpetually at their gates. They are proud of such' a distinguished adversary, but they are afraid of. him too. Terribly afraid. For the river, pays no heed to the laws of civilised warfare.. He hits the little truck farms as well as the great plantations and drowns babies and mothers as casually as he does river packets. In 1701 the river was but a youth, and the provincial archives of the Mississippi provided for “a 3ft high" to give the ..State protection against the river. To-day the levees have grown to a height of 22ft, braced with iron and concrete and mattresses and sandbags. Two thousand miles of Old Father Mississippi have been walled in and shackled and bound. What, wonder that the negroes are afraid? The negroes and the poor whites know the river intimately. They live behind the levees in their little [c-h'icks. gathering driftwood for kindI’ng along its shores, pasturing their goats and cows on the smooth green slopes that look so deceptively like iiills. Old Father Mississippi, born in tinv Lake Itasca far up in Minnesota on the border of Canada and pmptving into the Gulf of Mexico, drains ten' States and innumerable cities, and is the parent of half the rivers on the map of the continent.

Yellow River they call it too. because its muddy current stains the blue waters of the Gulf far out beyond Port Eads. WATCH OUT FOR SORROW.

“Watch out for sorrow when they have big snows in the North” is another thing the negroes say. They have never seen sno.xv'themselves, because most of them have been born within .sight of the cottonfields of Dixie, but they know what snow in the North means. It means trouble. It means broken levees and flooded fields and wasted-corps and floating cabins and corpses caught in trees, and horses and dogs drowned within sight 4 of their own fireside, and babies born on house tops before the relief boats can get, there. The spillway is just another of the white /nan’s foolish ideas. Only God can control the

river, and His ways are beyond any- j one to understand, particularly in the spring when the rivers all run wild and Father Mississippi is the maddest of them all. The white man has worried him too much, they think. Too ■many levees, too many engineers, too many battures, “too many boats runnin’ up and down de surface of de river.” The negroes say that “if you keep on pickin’ on de river he’ll ( come right back at you.” ' | “How silly they are to talk that way,” our Yankee friends laugh gaily when they overhear a in the kitchen. But Yankee friends do not stay down here in the spring. They go home and live safely in cit-1 ies that are built firmly above sea Kvel. A river to them is only a toy, | oi' a scenic attraction, something to j sail boats am, or to run their power mills. “How lovely it looks,” they say,

when we drive them out to the Car-

rollton levee at the bend of the river, just where it curves into the great sickle that gives New Orleans its name of Crescent City. And it is. I Nothing could be more charming than |the river, mild and dimpling in the I sun, ils sandy beaches golden and I sparkling, its far shores edged with the first pale emerald willows of the spring. The levees look lovely too. They are as green as velvet, and they roll back from each side of the river like a range of placid hills. In front of them is another smaller line of hills. These are the protection levees their bases made of concrete and flanked with willow mattresses. Still in front of them is a heavy affair that looks like a crude wooden fence. These are the battures. TH HEE LINES OF DEFENCE.

Three lines of 1 defence against the Mississippi. No wonder Northern visitors think us silly. They have not seen the levees when they are topped with sandbags and guarded by troops, when the water is so high that boats are not allowed at all or if they sail it must, be very, very slowly so that their wake does not cause the river io spill over the top of the levees. They have not looked up at the river instead of down at it as you do in other lands, and seen the boats riding up against the horizon like skyscrapers. and they have not seen the arclights that the Government puts up in high water; lights that play on the levees all night long so that the sentries may see as much as a crack or a trickle, a fissure- no larger than a child’s hand.

‘‘Wat a wonderful place to play,” purr the visitors. “So nice for the children.”

1 'And it is. Children play on the levees, rushing down their slopes with little whoops of joy, for New Orleans children have no hills to play on. Only the levees. Goats are tethered in the lush, green grass, boys fly kites, and babies toddle from their nurses in search of the bright silver water. As far as you can see there is water, for the river is more than a mile wide at Carrolltoni They do not notice the negro men ■ with pick and shovel waiting on the l levee as they walk past, waiting to' .see what His Majesty the Mississippi, [will do next, whether he will nibble I away at the battures, or swirl into new eddies, or rise and hammer at the concrete base of the walls that hem him in. The negroes are singing Jhey sit there, looking out across the swinging water to the palmetto trees on the opposite shore. The song is one that they make up themselves as they go along. It is called “Old Devil River.”