Read it through once

The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat _bodily_--is always moving bodily _sidewise_. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original _site _of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. _Nearly the whole of that one thousand three hundred miles of old mississippi river which la salle floated down in his canoes, two hundred years ago, is good solid dry ground now_. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places.