The Civil War proved a fatal blow to river traffic. Both the Federal and the Confederate government commandeered a large number of vessels for war purposes, and many of those were wrecked and sunk or burnt in battle.
Immediately after the war, railroads began to parallel the Mississippi and its navigable tributaries. The steamboat traffic lingered for a number of years, but it never again attained its former glory, and soon sank into its present insignificance.
Moreover, the great movement of traffic in North America is east and west, while the trend of our great navigable river system is north and south.
Barker and Tatanka, as well as the boys, found life on a Mississippi steamer very attractive.
The broad main channel and bayous, sloughs and oxbow lakes; the high bluffs and the lowland forests, had all in turn lured them on to much hard traveling and many interesting side-trips. But just now they all felt that they had had enough of traveling by birch-bark, enough of camping wherever a good place invited them, and enough of eating whatever they could secure.
Below Cairo the low lands widen. There are no distinct hills or bluffs on the west side, while the Chickasaw Bluffs which stretch from Cairo to Memphis are in places ten miles from the river.
A long time ago the Gulf of Mexico extended probably as far north as Cairo, and the great flood-plain from Cairo to the Gulf is land, which was made by the Mississippi. From the Alleghenies, from the Rocky Mountains, from the Black Hills, the Ozarks, and the prairies of Minnesota, the streams are ever bringing down fine, fertile soil into the Mississippi, which spreads it at times of high water over fields, forests, and swamps and carries some of it into the gulf. So great is the amount of fine soil carried by the great river that every year it would make a vast block a square mile in area and four hundred feet high.
Of all the travelers on the _Grey Hawk_, Tatanka took the keenest interest in everything around him; for he had, before this trip, never seen the Mississippi farther south than La Crosse in Wisconsin. “Why do the white people need so many ships?” he wondered. “What will they do with all the big guns they have, and where are all the soldiers going to fight!”