The Wichita Daily Eagle

WORK OF THE MISSISSIPPI.
Every Year the Father of Waters Carries Down a Square Mile of Land

The Mississippi has in the course of ages transported from the mountains and high land within its drainage area sufficient material to make 400,000 square miles of new land by filling up an estuary which extended from its original outfall to the Gulf of Mexico for a length of 500 miles, and in width from 80 to 40 miles. This river, says Longman's Magazine, is still pouring solid matter into the gulf, where it is spread out in a fan-like shape over a coast line of 150 miles, and is filling up at the rate of 362,000,000 tons a year, or six times as much soil as was removed in the construction of the Manchester ship canal, and sufficient to make a square mile of new land, allowing for it having to fill up the gulf to a depth of 80 yards.

Some idea of the vastness of this operation may be conceived when the fact is considered that some of this soil has to be transported more than 3,000 miles; and that if the whole of it had to be carried on boats at the lowest rate at which heavy material is carried on the inland waters of America, or, say, for one-tenth of a penny per ton per mile over an average of half the total distance, the cost would be no less a sum than £238,000,000 a year. Through the vast delta thus formed, the river winds its way, twisting and turning by innumerable bends until it extends its length to nearly 1,200 miles, or more than double the point-to-point length of the delta, continually eroding the banks in one place and building up land in another, occasionally breaking its way across a narrow neck which lies between the two extremities and filling up the old channel.