For days past newspaper readers have seen accounts from various portions of the country, chronicling great loss of life and property by the high water which has prevailed in the principal tributaries of the Mississippi river, but an accurate idea cannot be formed of the dread reality of the case without one should stand upon the hills near one of the many ill-fated streams and be an eye-witness to the foaming and drift-covered waters that are rushing along and carrying destruction throughout the valleys.
While in Memphis during the past week, we gathered information from parties who had been driven from their homes, and who told us that the Mississippi river from Cairo to Vicksburg, was changed into a monster inland sea, and that the bottom lands, from the hills on the east to the highlands on the west, were all under water.
Thousands upon thousands of valuable stock, houses, and in many cases human life had been swept away. Great fears are entertained that the flood now prevailing will not subside before the spring rise in the Missouri comes down, in which case it will be impossible to till a farm on either side of the Mississippi between the points mentioned above. At Memphis the water is forty miles wide, and in many places, between that point and Madison, Ark., stands to the height of twenty feet over the bottom lands.
No estimate can be formed of the loss already sustained, as the waters rose so fast that people who lived a distance from the highlands were unable to remove any of their household effects, or drive cattle to points of safety. A gentleman from Madison told us that Crowley’s Ridge was the roaming ground of myriads of bear, deer, and wild game of every species familiar to the great swamps and bottom lands, all of which were compelled to leave their old haunts by the merciless flood. At this time Bolivar, Miss., is the only landing between Memphis and Vicksburg.
The Bolivar bulletin. (Bolivar, Hardeman County, Tenn.), 23 March 1867, Page 2. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
