I was myself apprehended for a foreign spy one day while I was
searching too near to the guns of a present fort for more ancient
monuments.
The great river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of
an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily
to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is
in too much of a hurry to travel by water.
An old Mississippi River steamboat captain [Footnote: George B. Merrick,
"Old Times on the Upper Mississippi," Cleveland, A. H. Clark Co., 1909.]
has written a reminiscent book, in which he tells with sorrow of the
departed majesty and glory of the river, the glamour remaining only in the
memories of those who knew the river sixty years or more ago. He laments
the passing of that mighty fleet, destroyed by the very civilization that
built it--a civilization which cut down the impounding forests and so
removed the great natural dams which must in time be replaced by
artificial ones if the rivers are ever to run full again in the dry
seasons and not overflow in the wet.
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