Scenes along the Mississippi 1848 and 2017

 Irish Wilderness, Lens & Pen Press, On the Mission and Fifty Years Ago, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 272024
 

Hogan describes the scenery along the river as the tug pulls the clipper ship slowly toward New Orleans, 107 miles distant.

Once I looked out over the ship’s bulwarks and saw we were between what seemed to be two long, low earth-mounds, one on either side of the river; there was a bend in the river at the place. These mounds, on which there were trees and houses and gardens and people, were the first patches of elevated grounds that I saw since the tug took us in tow. I was told they were fortifications or land batteries, Fort St. Philip and Fort Jackson by name, guarding the approach to New Orleans from invasion by sea.

At the end of our day of exploring Passe a Loutre we took time to ride and walk through the remains of the two forts Hogan mentions.

Fort St. Philip on the eastern bank of the Mississippi, is only accessible by boat or helicopter. Despite its deteriorating condition, it was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1960. “The earthen works fort was established in the 18th century. Fort St. Philip’s major engagements were 10-day naval sieges during the War of 1812 and American Civil War. The site is privately owned and deteriorating. Recent hurricanes like Katrina have added to the damage.” (Wikipedia)

Fort St. Philip is accessible by boat or helicopter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fort Jackson (below) on the west bank, is a historic masonry fort, constructed as a coastal defense of New Orleans, between 1822 and 1832, and it was a battle site during the Civil War. It is now a National Historic Landmark. It was damaged by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and its condition is threatened

Since 1970, The grounds of Fort Jackson have been the site of both the Plaquemines Parish Fair and Orange Festival. The fort was used to treat oily birds in the early weeks of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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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. His second memoir covered his early missionary years on the Missouri frontier, to his consecration as bishop of St. Joseph in 1868.  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.

 

“The Mouths of the Mississippi”

 Irish Wilderness, Lens & Pen Press, On the Mission and Fifty Years Ago, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Dec 202023
 

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)

 

 

 

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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.