AYS had gone by and no word had reached Mr. and Mrs. Carruth about the whereabouts of Sibley. From all along the valley, where the rains had fallen and the streams were still rising, there was news of the fight to save people and property. It was a terrific struggle, taxing the strength and resources of whole states, and the National Government itself was making special efforts, Congress having passed an emergency appropriation to rescue those in jeopardy and help the sufferers.
There was plenty of work for Mrs. Carruth in helping to care for refugees who had been brought away from their homes, and were now weak and suffering from exposure and illness. Mr. Carruth, a practical river-man, was needed in the toilsome work of driving cattle from mounds where they had taken refuge, across to the river ridges.
As long as the upper Mississippi continued to rise, skiffs and launches were kept busy in the inundated territory, moving cattle and furniture and farm implements. The flood had begun in March. Moderately high waters, which covered lowlands but jeopardized few people, had appeared in the Missouri, the upper Mississippi, the Ohio, the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee rivers.
Little by little, the flood waves joined at the stream forks, and the stream channels could not carry away the volume of water fast enough, and so the high water spread out across the wide bottom-lands and pressed against the levees raised to protect valuable farm fields from inundation and washes, as well as to prevent waves of sand and gravel from flowing over the rich soil and ruining it.
Inadequate private or local levees above Cape Girardeau gave way before the upper Mississippi tide, and below the Cape the flood swept through the insecure embankments on the west side, spreading over the cleared or wooded bottoms on the way into the swampland streams, Little River, the St. Francis, Lake Nicormy Swamps, and a hundred tortuous bayous and wide waters.
The floods of the great tributaries of the Mississippi flowed together in the main channel and made the highest overflow ever known below the forks of the Ohio. More than seven hundred thousand cubic feet of water in the upper Mississippi flowed past Cape Girardeau in a second. More than nine hundred thousand cubic feet of water poured in a second out of the Ohio River into this upper river flood. The vast tide swept down into the lower-river bottoms; most of it was in the main channel, but there were currents out in the overflow, pouring down through the woods, across fields, and in the channels of bayous and stream-beds sufficient to supply a hundred lesser rivers with flood waters for many a day.
Crowley’s Ridge in the Mississippi bottoms formed the western limit of the flood tide as far down as Helena, Arkansas, and shunted the overflow torrents back into the main channel of the Mississippi there, where the Tunica County levee held the flood to a width of less than two and a half miles. Through these narrows the mighty volume of water rushed at the rate of twelve miles an hour in midstream. The water was a hundred and thirteen feet deep, and the cross-section of the stream was two hundred and thirty-eight thousand square feet. In one second over two million cubic feet of water rushed by the Helena gage, when the flood rose to a height of forty-six feet above low-water mark—say about four stories high!
The flood threatened fourteen hundred and sixty-six miles of levee below Cairo, along more than a thousand miles of river. The levees, containing more than two hundred and forty million cubic yards of dirt have been built to keep floods off the lowlands and out of the towns and plantations, and Bermuda grass has been planted on the levees to protect them from the water-wash. But now whole armies of men were fighting on the levee-tops against the attack of the flood.
Year after year, since 1717, when De la Tour, the French engineer who planned the city of New Orleans, built the first protection along the city’s waterfront, the struggle against the annual flood has been waged on its top, as the levee has been extended up the bottoms. Men, settlements, states, and at last the United States have fought for mastery over the Mississippi, with the issue always doubtful. Sometimes it has been victory for the humans, and sometimes for the river, when a break in the earth barrier let the water through to inundate the backlands with the overflow.