Atchafalaya River Research Paper

The Atchafalaya River is the third- ranking river on the earth. It’s located in South Louisiana, with its base the gulf coast from the mouth of the Mississippi river almost to Texas, its two sides coming together up near the lock and not including New Orleans or Baton Rouge. The Mississippi river with its sand and stuff has created most of Louisiana and couldn’t have done it by remaining in one channel. If it did then southern Louisiana would be a long peninsula reaching into the Gulf of Mexico. Southern Louisiana is still in its form now because the Mississippi river jumped here and there with an arc bout two hundred miles wide. For the Mississippi to make such a big change was completely natural, but in the wait dince the last shift Europeans

It was running at about twelve miles an hour significantly faster than the Yukon after breakup and it was pounding into the so-called stilling basin on the downstream side, the least still place you would ever see. There was a high sill next to this one a separate weir, two-thirds of a mile long and set two feet above the local flood stage, its purpose being to help regulate the flow of extremely high waters. The low sill, as the one we stood on was frequently called, was the prime valve at Old River, and dealt with the water every day. In the mid-sixties, a man alone had come down from Wisconsin in a small double-ended vessel with curling ends and tumblehome a craft that would not have been unfamiliar to the Algonquians, who named the Mississippi. A towboat coming up the Atchafalaya may be running from Corpus Christi to Vicksburg with a cargo of gasoline, or from Houston to St. Paul with ethylene glycol. Occasionally, Rabelais sees a sailboat, more rarely a canoe. One time, a cottonwood-log dugout with a high Viking bow went past Old River. A ship carrying Leif Eriksson himself, however, would be less likely to arrest the undivided attention of the lockmaster than a certain red-trimmed cream-hulled vessel called Mississippi, bearing Major General Thomas

Another was James B. Eads, probably the most brilliant engineer who has ever addressed his attention to the Mississippi River. As a young man, he had walked around on its bottom under a device of his own invention that he called a submarine. As a naval architect in the Civil War, he had designed the first American ironclads. Later, at St. Louis, he had built the first permanent bridge across the main stem of the river south of the Missouri. Every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. In 1882 came the most destructive flood of the nineteenth century. After breaking the levees in two hundred and eighty-four crevasses, the water spread out as much as seventy miles. In the fertile lands on the two sides of Old River, plantations were deeply submerged, and livestock survived in