Thursday, December 14, 1848, Hogan’s ship approached the continent. As the outflow of the Mississippi River reached the Berlin, he wrote:
To a person from the British Isles, the United States, as seen at the mouths of the Mississippi, is a mockery of sublime anticipations.
This is possibly my favorite sentence of all the sentences in both memoirs. Encapsulated in those five words (“a mockery of sublime anticipations”) are the romantic dreams of an Irish schoolboy, envisioning the windswept prairies and their indigenous inhabitants awaiting the word of Jesus that he, that dreaming boy, would bring. Never, in his sunny, clear-day imaginings did a scene like this appear. There before him, the riverine drainage system for most of the North American continent carried its sedimentary load from Rockies and the northern forests, from glaciated plains and lowland swamps to the then-sparkling clean Gulf. The rich mud of the continent swirled into the waters his clipper ship cut through, clouding them as they fed the richness of the continent to the teaming estuary.
Hogan’s reference to the “mouths (plural) of the Mississippi” I initially thought was a typo or a fault of the optical character reading program we used to convert the print text to electronic files. But I found him to be precisely accurate in his description when I decided one weekend to explore the areas he described.
Cell phone photo of a chart of the lower Mississippi clearly showing the point at which the river becomes several channels to the Gulf.
This scene was acquired by the ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite on May 24, 2001. This false-color composite was created by combining shortwave infrared, infrared, and near-infrared wavelengths (ASTER bands 4, 3, and 2). Image provided by the USGS EROS Data Center Satellite Systems
“Turbid waters spill out into the Gulf of Mexico where their suspended sediment is deposited to form the Mississippi River Delta. Like the webbing on a duck’s foot, marshes and mudflats prevail between the shipping channels that have been cut into the delta.”
(From NASA Earth Observatory)
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Bishop Hogan recounted his childhood memories and his voyage to America and to the priesthood in Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir, written in 1898 and published in 1907. Our companion volume to Mystery of the Irish Wilderness contains both those memoirs plus additional biographical information I was able to learn from the archives of both the Kansas City-St. Joseph and St. Louis dioceses.
On the Mission in Missouri and Fifty Years Ago: A Memoir is available on our website for 10% off ($22.50), postage paid at www.beautifulozarks.com Companion volume, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness: Land and Legend of Father John Joseph Hogan’s Lost Irish Colony in the Ozark Wilderness, is also available for $17.00, postpaid.