If the Mississippi River were a book, it would have more twists and turns than the plot of “Gone With the Wind.”
The Indian tribes who once shared its bounty were shunted aside by the Europeans. Greedy European explorers made their names by “finding” the Mississippi, but lost their lives as they tried to conquer it. It was an afterthought in one of the most astonishing real-estate deals of all time but became the core of a new nation. Countless men and women slaved, fought, loved, prospered and were ruined on its banks or even, in riverboat days, on its waters.
You could use most of the superlatives in Roget’s Thesaurus and not overestimate the importance of the Mississippi River system to our past, present and future.
More than four centuries after the first European saw its wide waters, the Mississippi is the heart of this country, with arteries that reach far past its central corridor.
Ten of millions of people live on its banks. On an average day, millions of tons of cargo are being pushed along its waters. It feeds the fields that feed us, providing irrigation and naturally fertilizing some of the richest farmland in the country.
If you still can’t quite grasp the importance of the Mississippi, unfold a U.S. map and follow the river from its source at Itaska Lake, Minn., to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. Look east, west, north and south for tributaries like the Missouri, the Illinois, the Ohio, the Des Moines, the Arkansas, the Yazoo. If your map is detailed enough, look for their tributaries, following, for instance, the Missouri River until just south of Omaha, where it meets the Platte after that river wends through Colorado and Nebraska; or catch the Ohio at Cairo, Ill., and trace it past Louisville and Cincinnati until you spot Pittsburgh.
It took millions of years to create the river known to several Indian tribes as the Misi-zibi, or Father of Waters. It began to form during the Pleistocene Ice Age, as melting ice from glaciers poured in through what are now the Missouri and Ohio Rivers.
The great north-south waterway actually springs from a small lake in northwest Minnesota, meanders east through other lakes and streams until Grand Rapids, when it finally begins to journey south. Five hundred miles from the source, it reaches the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the point where its real task as an aquatic highway begins.
As the Mississippi rushes to the Gulf of Mexico, it touches 10 states to the east and west: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Alone, it would rank below 15 other rivers, including the Missouri, in length. But if you added the 2,466 miles of the Missouri to the 2,348 miles of the navigable Mississippi, it becomes the third-longest river in the world.
A triumph of networking
The real majesty of the Mississippi, though, comes not from its length but from the widespread effects of its system. Together, the Mississippi and its hundreds of tributaries form the world’s fifth-largest drainage system, covering about 1.244 million square miles of North America. That includes part or all of 31 states and two provinces of Canada.
All roads may once have led to Rome, but nearly all rivers and streams in this country seem to lead to the Mississippi.
Of course, this summer it seems as though most of those rivers and streams, including the Mississippi, are trying to carve out new territory or reclaim old ground. Some areas have been flooding since April; others began to feel the pain in the last few weeks.
Once again, the Mississippi is shrugging its shoulders at the efforts of people to control its powerful course.
What is now a desire to control began as sheer defense. French settlers of New Orleans built the first levee-18 feet wide and 900 feet long-in 1717, an often futile effort to keep the mighty Mississippi from crashing through the fledgling settlement.
Later levees were usually agricultural. In the lower Mississippi, plantation owners used slave labor to protect their sugar, cotton and livestock from the vagaries of the river. As each levee was raised, neighboring plantation owners would order their own in self-defense. Up and down the river, farmers built their own levees, digging trenches and piling dirt in earthen beams. Each altered the pattern of the river, though they could not always keep it at bay.
Efforts to control
The levees were a sword that cut both ways. To keep the river from seeping in, you had to risk a gush of water that could swamp whole farms in a matter of hours should the levee prove insufficient.
When the waters rose to threatening levels, some people would sneak out at night and break a neighboring levee to relieve the pressure on their own. During the Civil War, as the late Hodding Carter describes in “Man and the River: The Mississippi,” “federal troops deliberately butchered the levees, making an ally of the inundating waters.”
Eventually, it occurred to some that it might be possible to do more than defend against the river. Perhaps you could control it, bend it to your own will.
In the late 1870s, James B. Eads, the brilliant engineer who built ironclad riverboats for the Army and designed the first bridge to span the Mississippi, was so certain he could control the river that he bet the government millions of dollars on the outcome. For more than 100 years, shippers had been frustrated by the dangers of navigating through the mouth of the Mississippi at New Orleans.
Eads offered to open the passage for no fee unless he could achieve a 20-foot depth within two years. That feat would earn him $1 million, an almost unimaginable sum in the 1870s. For each additional 2 feet up to 28 feet, the bright captain would earn another $1 million.
By constructing jetties at the mouth of the Mississippi, Eads forced the river to keep moving and carve out a deeper passage. By 1879 Eads exceeded even his own expectations with a passage 30 feet deep.
The same year, Congress enacted the Mississippi River Commission and charged it with coordinating navigational improvements.
A skeptical Mark Twain
Old river hand and author Mark Twain was one of many who took a dim view of the attempt to control one of nature’s great forces. In his “Life on the Mississippi” (1896) he wrote, “Ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, `Go here,’ or `Go there,’ and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.”
The River Commission and the Army Corps of Engineers undertook a series of control projects stretching the length of the Mississippi and its major arteries. A system of locks and dams from the Twin Cities to Cairo provides a constant, 9-foot navigation channel; some floodways offer a detour for rising waters; vast federal levees stand between the river and many of the cities to which it gave birth.
Flood control wasn’t mandated as a federal mission until the Flood Control Act of 1928, which appropriated $300 million. This, as John McPhee points out in his book “The Control of Nature,” “was more money in one bill . . . than had been spent on Mississippi levees in all of colonial and American history.”
Since then, billions of tax dollars have been spent on flood control, but still, people can do little to control the weather that gives the Mississippi its strength. Torrential rain and heavy amounts of melting snow still have the power to shut down traffic. So does the lack of rain when combined with the searing sun for a lengthy drought that forces the river to subside.
A complex system
When trying to leash nature, one must also be aware of the consequences. In this case, that means remembering that the Mississippi is part of an ecological system encompassing more than the river and its tributaries.
That system includes a wide range of marine life and wildlife (every year about 8 million geese, ducks and their kin alone migrate via the Mississippi Flyway); soil that is now losing nutrients because it isn’t routinely replenished naturally; and wetlands that are being nibbled away (an estimated 50 square miles of Louisiana is lost each year).
“If you disturb any part of the system, it ripples throughout the rest of the system,” said Raymond Arvidson, a professor and chairman of the department of earth and plantary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. “That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to control it to some extent, but you have to look at the overall ramifications.”
A century ago, thinking of Eads’ accomplishments, Twain wrote:
“West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they can conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.”
He couldn’t resist adding: “Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.”
