REPORTS OF MISSISSIPPI FLOODS NOT OVERDRAWN

The following interview was given to the Crimson by W. W. Daly '14, who has recently returned from the district afflicted by the Mississippi floods where he had gone to attend the Memphis convention of Harvard Clubs.

To those of us who have been reading the stories of the flood situation in the South, it may seem that there is much exaggeration, but from my own observation of conditions in Southern Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee last week, I do not feel that the stories printed in the Metropolitan papers are at all over drawn. To be sure, those of us who visited Memphis and the surrounding country had very little opportunity to see much of the extended flood areas. We did, however, see sufficient to convince us that the local people were probably right when they said this was one of the worst floods, if not the worst, in the history of the Mississippi Valley.

Railroad Bed Submerged.

Our first view of the flood came at about 3 o'clock in the morning when we reached Southern Illinois and the Cairo district. For more than three hours the train crept very slowly over road beds which were almost entirely submerged. It gave one a rather creepy feeling to go along mile after mile and watch the water from one tram windows--water which in many cases was over the rails on which we were riding, and which entirely hid from our view the rails next us on the embankment.

Telegraph wires are supposedly high in the air, but in many cases the lower stands of wire either appeared to be resting on the water or were entirely out of sight.

The city of Memphis is on a bluff high above the River so there is no danger to the city itself from floods. The out-lying districts, however, both north and south, were threatened at the time of our arrival, and before we left on Saturday, they were already becoming uninhabitable.

Floods Stand Over Pastures.

The first day of our visit there, some of us crossed the River into Arkansas, and went West a distance of ten or twelve miles. How greatly the River has swollen may be judged from the fact that whereas ordinarily the shore of the River is about four and a half miles from the Levee, the water had risen to such an extent that it was within four feet of the top of the Levee. This means that all over this wide space of ground the water was from ten to twenty feet deep over around which is ordinarily used for grazing purposes. North and South this situation exists for several hundred miles.

On Thursday there were more than two hundred refugees in the city, and by Saturday this number had increased to several times that number. During our trip into Arkansas we were constantly passing rickety wagons, carts and occasional autos holding the families of the refugees, and all the worldly possessions they had been able to save. Chairs, beds, tables, springs, and poultry seemed to have been piled helter-skelter. The draft animals looked very poor and scrawny, and there were so many people moving that it seemed almost like a migration.

Before we left the Executives of the American Red Cross had taken up their headquarters in Memphis and were handling the relief work. Such is the organization that has been developed and so many have been the things that have been done for the relief work, that where as several years ago the deaths would very probably have mounted into the hundreds, and probably in other floods did number even thousands, in this present situation the casualty list is now something under one hundred people.

In spite of this tremendous local problem, however, the Memphis people carried on their business activities, the necessary relief activities, and their program of entertainment for the Associated Harvard Clubs.