Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/New Orleans

NEW ORLEANS, a city of the United States, situated on the left bank of the Mississippi, 107 miles from its mouth, in that portion of the State of Louisiana which constitutes the river's larger delta. This peculiar region is an irregular expanse of densely-wooded swamps, wide prairies, and sea-marshes, interlaced by innumerable lakes, streams, and bays, formed by the periodic overflows of the river upon the alluvium of its own deposit, and by remnants of the sea which this natural process of land-making has not yet conquered. It embraces the whole coast of Louisiana on its southern border, and, narrowing rapidly northward, presents a total area of some 20,000 square miles of land and water. Through this region the Mississippi, as in its southward course it reaches the 30th parallel of latitude, turns and runs tortuously eastward a few miles south of and parallel with a chain of these delta lakes—Lake Pontchartrain being the chief—which marks the course of the same river in prehistoric, but not

geologically remote, ages. At the 90th degree of longitude it bends abruptly southward, then as suddenly eastward again, then northward and again eastward, thus portioning off on the low, concave land, which is always highest at the river's margin, a shallow basin rudely square in shape and not unlike the palm of one's hand. This deep three-sided bend, some 9 miles in total length, is the harbour of New Orleans, and on the low tract walled in by the dyke or levée that lines its bank, and by a similar defence where Lake Pontchartrain, some 4 to 6 miles to the northward, shuts in the fourth side, lies New Orleans, the principal seaport of the Mississippi valley, and a city of 216,000 inhabitants.

The river at this point varies from 1500 to 3000 feet in width, and its broad channel often stretches almost from shore to shore, with a depth varying frequently at short intervals from 60 to more than 200 feet. Around the margins of this fine harbour a line of steamers and shipping extends for 7 miles on either shore, moored, in the busy season, from two to five abreast, to the outer end of short, broad, unsheltered wooden wharves that rest on piles driven firmly into the tenacious clay of the river's bed. The speed of the current reaches, in times of high water, a rate of 5 miles an hour. Along the immediate front of the city's principal commercial quarter, this current, losing some of its force by change of direction, deposits its alluvium in such quantities as to produce a constant encroachment of the shore upon the harbour. At its widest this new land, or batture, with wharves, streets, and warehouses following eagerly after it, has advanced nearly 1500 feet beyond the water-line of a century and a half ago.

New Orleans is emphatically a commercial city. It was its commercial value as the southern gateway of the immense valley behind it, and as the key to the free navigation of that vast natural system of waterways of which the Mississippi is the great main artery that, upon the achievement of American national autonomy, gave a small, poor, and remote Franco-Spanish-American port its political importance, and in 1803 led to its purchase by the United States, and the purchase with it of the entire province of Louisiana, of which it was the capital in embryo; and it is almost solely as the dispenser of the products of this greatest agricultural valley in the world that New Orleans has grown from the wild and indolent little frontier town of 10,000 inhabitants it then was to the dimensions of a great city. Along its winding harbour front one sees, in the season that follows the harvests of the south and west, the energies and activities of an exporting movement not excelled in volume or value on the American continent save by New York. The levée, the wharves, and the contiguous streets teem with strenuous life, and are gorged with the raw staples of the countries far and near that lie about the Mississippi and its greater and lesser tributaries,—sugar, molasses, rice, tobacco, Indian corn, pork, staves, whisky, wheat, oats, flour in immense quantities, and, over and above all else, nearly one-fourth of the world's entire supply of cotton. All other movement is subsidiary or insignificant: the import trade is small;

manufactures are inconsiderable; mining interests are almost unknown. There are no fisheries, no naval construction, no large transit of immigrants, no notable Government establishments except a branch mint and the custom house. There are no great educational and scientific institutions or important conservatories of art—only the promising germs of such; no famous galleries or museums; no noted monuments; in short, well-nigh none of that multiplicity of pursuits and opportunities that retains and multiplies rapidly a city's wealth, and makes the inspiring tumult of metropolitan life. On any hand it requires but a step or two aside from the current of commercial movement to carry one into the bowery repose of a huge suburb rather than of a city, or, if of a city, a city of villas and cottages, of umbrageous gardens, intersected by 470 miles of unpaved streets shaded by forest trees, haunted by song birds, fragrant with a wealth of flowers that never fails a day in the year, and abundant, in season, with fruit—the fig, the plum, the pomegranate, the orange. No other

large city in America is so laid open to the sunshine and the air. Neither St Louis, nor Chicago, nor Philadelphia, nor New York covers so large a site as New Orleans, whose inhabitants, considerably under a quarter of a million in number, have spread out their town over an area of 155 square miles.