The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWO MILES ABOVE Vicksburg.
Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut-off.

A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him.
The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat BODILY--is always moving bodily SIDEWISE.
At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy.

As a result, the original SITE of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi.

NEARLY THE WHOLE OF THAT ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED MILES OF OLD MISSISSIPPI RIVER WHICH LA SALLE FLOATED DOWN IN HIS CANOES, TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, IS GOOD SOLID DRY GROUND NOW.

The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places.
Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it.
But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for the present--I will give a few more of them further along in the book.
Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its historical history--so to speak.