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Speaker 1: The Mississippi River is so central every element of American history.

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Speaker 1: The entire system was key to all transportation and communication

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Speaker 1: across much of the country.

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Speaker 2: On this episode, we're talking about what some Native American

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Speaker 2: tribes called the river beyond any Age, and others called

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Speaker 2: it the Father of waters. We're talking about the Mississippi River.

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Speaker 2: This is a big bite, and it will take a

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Speaker 2: diverse cast of storytellers for us to understand the river

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Speaker 2: and its impact on America. New York Times bestselling author

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Speaker 2: John Berry will be our guests, along with author Hank Berdine.

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Speaker 2: A hydraulic engineer also will be here, a fisheries biologist,

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Speaker 2: and a feller by the name of Will Primos, And

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Speaker 2: we'll even hear the words of Mark Twain and T. S.

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Speaker 3: Eliott.

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Speaker 2: This has been a long time coming for me, and

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Speaker 2: I'm on a personal journey to understand the significance of

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Speaker 2: this American river on this country and on my life.

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Speaker 2: The current will be swift in the water muddy, but

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Speaker 2: I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one.

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Speaker 4: You got the West Coast, you got the Gulf Coast,

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Speaker 4: you got to Atlantic Coast, and you've got the Missippi

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Speaker 4: River on and right up the middle of America.

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Speaker 3: That's the fourth Coast.

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Speaker 2: My name is Klay nukemb and this is the Bear

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Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search

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Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the

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Speaker 2: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.

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Speaker 2: Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and

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Speaker 2: fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the

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Speaker 2: place as we explore.

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Speaker 1: I do not know much about gods, but I think

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Speaker 1: that the River is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed,

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Speaker 1: and intractable, patient to some degree. At first recognized as

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Speaker 1: a frontier, useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce, then

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Speaker 1: only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem,

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Speaker 1: once solved, the brown God is almost forgotten by the

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Speaker 1: dwellers in cities. Ever, however, implacable, keeping his seasons and

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Speaker 1: rages destroyer reminder of what men choose to forget, unhonored,

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Speaker 1: unpropitiated by worshippers of the machine. But watching, waiting, and watching.

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Speaker 2: I'm in a twenty three foot flat bottom boat. She's sturdy,

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Speaker 2: but looks like she's been up the river a few times,

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Speaker 2: but so does my captain Hank. Where are we going, Hank?

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Speaker 3: On the river, the Mississippi River.

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Speaker 2: I once asked Hank how old he was, and he

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Speaker 2: told me he quit keeping track, but he thought his

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Speaker 2: daughter knew. His hair looks like a cluster of white

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Speaker 2: cotton balls. His face shows the dignity of age, and

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Speaker 2: his accent sounds about what you figure an alligator would

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Speaker 2: sound like.

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Speaker 4: I mean Lay Fertherson that used to be the river

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Speaker 4: in nineteen thirty eight, took out the gravel, bene created

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Speaker 4: the flag of water harbor.

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Speaker 3: He got thirty eight mile to the river. Lem he

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Speaker 3: running up and I see what he did.

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Speaker 2: The river is always changing. The only constant of an

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Speaker 2: alluvial river is change. Only in the last one hundred

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Speaker 2: and fifty years has that change been induced by man.

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Speaker 2: This is the story of an ancient, untameable system in

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Speaker 2: man's connection to it. That poem that you heard a

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Speaker 2: few minutes ago, the one that said, I think the

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Speaker 2: river is a strong brown god. This is the beginning

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Speaker 2: of a poem by T. S. Eliot describing the Mississippi River.

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Speaker 2: But that was the voice reading it of the author

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Speaker 2: John Barry. He wrote a book in nineteen ninety seven

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Speaker 2: called Rising Tide, The Great Mississippi Flood of nineteen twenty

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Speaker 2: seven and How It Changed America. The book is considered

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Speaker 2: by many to be one of the top works of

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Speaker 2: American non fiction in modern times. This is the opening

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Speaker 2: paragraph of his book. The Valley of the Mississippi River

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Speaker 2: stretches north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico,

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Speaker 2: east from New York and North Carolina, and west to

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Speaker 2: Idaho and New Mexico. It is a valley twenty percent

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Speaker 2: larger than that of China's Yellow River, double that of

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Speaker 2: Africa's Nile, and India's Ganges, fifteen times that of Europe's Rhine.

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Speaker 2: Within it lies forty one percent of the continentally United States,

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Speaker 2: including all or part of thirty one states. No river

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Speaker 2: in Europe, no river in the Orient, no river in

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Speaker 2: the ancient civilized world compares to it. Only the Amazon

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Speaker 2: and barely the Congo have a larger drainage basin measured

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Speaker 2: from the head of its tributary. The Missouri River as

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Speaker 2: a logical starting point as any. The Mississippi is the

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Speaker 2: longest river in the world, and it pulses like the

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Speaker 2: artery of the American heartland. To control the Mississippi River,

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Speaker 2: not simply to find a modus vivendi with it, but

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Speaker 2: to control it, to dictate it, to make it conform,

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Speaker 2: is a mighty task. It requires more than confidence, It

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Speaker 2: requires hubris. This is a big river that helped define

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Speaker 2: the American character. This is a big story. I've always

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Speaker 2: been mesmerized and frankly fearful of big dark water. But

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Speaker 2: why is this water dark? Like a strong brown god.

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Speaker 2: The answer to this question is core to the identity

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Speaker 2: of the river. Here's our boat captain and lifelong connoisseur

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Speaker 2: of dark water, Hank Burdine.

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Speaker 3: To me, it's all about the dirt. It's the dirt.

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Speaker 4: It's the dirt that has come from forty one percent

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Speaker 4: of the continental United States, in two provinces of Canada,

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Speaker 4: all the way from the Allegany Mountain to New York

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Speaker 4: to the Rocky Mountain of Montana. It's the watershed. It

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Speaker 4: has brought what we call the Mississippi Delta and form

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Speaker 4: the Misissippi Delta, which is the alluvial bottomland area of

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Speaker 4: the Mississippi in the y Azure River. We call it

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Speaker 4: the delta, and through the millenniums, the floods every year

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Speaker 4: spring time winter time have brought saw from all over

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Speaker 4: this country down here.

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Speaker 2: If we could anthropomorphize the river and view it as

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Speaker 2: a living bean, this monstrous alluvial river acts with great

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Speaker 2: force to do one thing, move dirt. Moving dirt is

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Speaker 2: its obsession, it's daily bread. Stay with me for a

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Speaker 2: minute for a metaphor. If the banks of the river

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Speaker 2: were the skeleton of a great beast and the floodplain

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Speaker 2: its flesh, the water would be its blood, and the

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Speaker 2: sediment load the dirt that the water carries would be

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Speaker 2: the life in the blood. The river is furious and

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Speaker 2: relentless in moving Dirt's one thing it can't not do.

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Speaker 2: And we can't understand the story of this river until

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Speaker 2: we understand the inner motivations and workings of the river.

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Speaker 2: Though it is not a sentient being, it operates like

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Speaker 2: one when it comes to adherence to the mission, and

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Speaker 2: that mission influences man. I'm wildly interested in how natural

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Speaker 2: systems impact men in ways we don't perceive. Alluvial rivers

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Speaker 2: are incredibly complex. Water turbulence of river hydraulics are mysterious.

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Speaker 2: A famous physicist once said that he'd like to ask

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Speaker 2: God too questions, why relativity and why turbulence? And then

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Speaker 2: he said, I think God may have the answer to

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Speaker 2: the first question, insinuating that God doesn't even understand turbulence.

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Speaker 2: I take umbrage at the assumption, but I get the point.

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Speaker 2: It's complex, and there are people who've dedicated their lives

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Speaker 2: to understanding rivers.

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Speaker 5: When I first went to work with the Vicksburg District

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Speaker 5: Corp of Engineers, I was in what they called the

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Speaker 5: potomology section. Potomology is not probably ringing a beil with you. Nope,

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Speaker 5: it doesn't ring a bell with most anybody. But potomology

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Speaker 5: is a science of rivers.

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Speaker 2: That was doctor David Beadenharn, a research hydraulic engineer for

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Speaker 2: the Core of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In his own words,

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Speaker 2: he's a river geek. He's got an equation drawn on

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Speaker 2: a whiteboard, and we're about to get a science lesson.

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Speaker 5: Actually, i've drawn it up on the board there. That's

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Speaker 5: not an equation up at the top. That's a relationship

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Speaker 5: that says that the water discharge, how much water is

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Speaker 5: in the river times the slope of the river. How

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Speaker 5: steep is the river. That's what we call stream power.

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Speaker 5: That's the ability of the river to do work. Rivers

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Speaker 5: they can either have more water to get energy, or

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Speaker 5: they can increase their slope to get more energy and discharge.

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Speaker 5: Q try and slope. It's a surrogate for a stream power.

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Speaker 2: The energy and work is moving sediment moving exactly.

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Speaker 5: And that's the other side of the relationship that Q subs.

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Speaker 5: That's the settlement load. That's how much sediment is moving.

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Speaker 5: So on the left hand side of that relationship is

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Speaker 5: the power.

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Speaker 3: And the energy that a river has.

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Speaker 5: And on the right hand side is what it is

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Speaker 5: doing that spending that power and energy to do do

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Speaker 5: work and move sediment. That's the way rivers behave.

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Speaker 2: Stream power is the river's ability to do work. That's

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Speaker 2: the way rivers behave. Like a beaver building dams. The

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Speaker 2: core of this river is moving dirt. Here's an example

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Speaker 2: of how much dirt the river can move and how

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Speaker 2: quickly it can be done. A revetment, which he's about

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Speaker 2: to talk about, is a concrete mattress placed on the

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Speaker 2: riverbank to stop erosion.

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Speaker 5: It was down in the New Orleans district where the

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Speaker 5: revetment was placed on the river bank in nineteen seventy eight,

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Speaker 5: and the mattress goes, you know, from top bank all

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Speaker 5: the way down to what we call the thowl wag

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Speaker 5: of the river of thoal Wag is just the lowest

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Speaker 5: point in the cross section of the cover, so the

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Speaker 5: bottom of the river, okayvalwag. They came back and they

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Speaker 5: surveyed it and at the bed of the river where

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Speaker 5: the mattress met the bed back in nineteen seventy eight,

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Speaker 5: they surveyed it in May of nineteen eighty four. It

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Speaker 5: is scoured sixty feet. Sixty feet is a pretty big

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Speaker 5: scour hole. Wow, well, that got their attention, so they

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Speaker 5: mobilize the troops. They're going to come back in and

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Speaker 5: do some repair work to make sure that revetment is

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Speaker 5: stable and so in the process. One month later, in

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Speaker 5: June of nineteen eighty four, they came back to get

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Speaker 5: another survey to know exactly what they had. It filled

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Speaker 5: back in forty feet.

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Speaker 2: That's an incredible amount of dirt moving around in a

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Speaker 2: sixty foot dar deep scour. Filling in forty feet in

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Speaker 2: a month, that's incredible. Here's another excerpt from John Berry's

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Speaker 2: rising tide, the river's main current can reach nine miles

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Speaker 2: an hour, while some currents can move much faster During floods,

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Speaker 2: measurable effects of an approaching floodcrest can roar down river

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Speaker 2: at almost eighteen miles an hour. And for the last

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Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi's flow, the

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Speaker 2: river bed lies below sea level, fifteen feet below sea

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Speaker 2: level at Vicksburg well over one hundred and seventy feet

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Speaker 2: below sea level at New Orleans. For this four hundred

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Speaker 2: and fifty miles, the water on the bottom has no

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Speaker 2: reason to flow at all, but the water above it does.

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Speaker 2: This creates a tumbling effect as water spills over itself

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Speaker 2: like an enormous, ever breaking internal wave. This tumbling effect

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Speaker 2: can attack a river bank or a levee like a buzzsaal.

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Speaker 2: But the final complexity of the lower mia Mississippi is

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Speaker 2: its sediment load, an understanding that was key to understanding

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Speaker 2: how to control the river. Every day, the river deposits

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Speaker 2: between several hundred thousand and several million tons of earth

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Speaker 2: into the Gulf of Mexico. At least some geologists put

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Speaker 2: this figure even higher. Historically, at an average of more

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Speaker 2: than two million tons a day by geologic standards. The

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Speaker 2: Lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream and runs

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Speaker 2: through what is known as the Mississippi Embayment, a declevity

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Speaker 2: covering approximately thirty five thousand miles that begins thirty miles

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Speaker 2: north of Kiro to Cape Girardo, Missouri, geologically the true

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Speaker 2: head of the Mississippi Delta, and extends to the Gulf

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Speaker 2: of Mexico. At one time, the Gulf itself reached to

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Speaker 2: Cape Girardo. Then sea level fell. Over thousands of years,

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Speaker 2: the river and its tributaries have poured twelve hundred and

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Speaker 2: eighty cubic miles of sediment, the equivalent of twelve hundred

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Speaker 2: and eighty separate mountains of earth, each one mile high,

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Speaker 2: a mile wide, and a mile long, into this declevity.

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Speaker 2: Aided by the falling sea level, this sediment filled in

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Speaker 2: the Embayment and made land throughout the mississippis alluvial valley.

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Speaker 2: This sedimentary deposit has an average thickness of one hundred

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Speaker 2: and thirty two feet. In some areas the deposits reach

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Speaker 2: down three hundred and fifty feet. Its weight is great

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Speaker 2: enough that some geologists believe its downward pressure pushed up

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Speaker 2: surrounding land, creating hills. We've had a poet T. S. Eliot,

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Speaker 2: a delta philosopher Hank Berdine, a writer John Barry, and

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Speaker 2: a hydrologist, doctor Beadenharn tell us the same thing. It's

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Speaker 2: all about the dirt where science, culture and art meet.

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Speaker 2: That's where you find the story. An alluvial river is

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Speaker 2: one in which the banks are mobile and shift. It

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Speaker 2: meanders and weaves through its floodplain, as opposed to a

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Speaker 2: river with bedroo banks in a bed that never shifts.

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Speaker 2: The floodplain is the area along the river subject to flooding.

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Speaker 2: The Mississippi has been putting on a dirt moving clinic

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Speaker 2: since before the first humans arrived on this continent and

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Speaker 2: when giant ground sloss walked on their knuckles on its banks.

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Speaker 2: But to understand the Mississippi River today, we've got to

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Speaker 2: understand the size of its drainage basin. Thirty one states

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Speaker 2: two Canadian provinces are drained by the river. Here's John Berry.

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Speaker 1: Well, the drainage basin is the third largest drainage basin.

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Speaker 1: You know, the Amazon's the biggest, and the Nile just

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Speaker 1: barely edges out the Mississi.

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Speaker 2: Square mileage of drainage.

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Speaker 1: It's like one point two four million square miles, Okay,

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Speaker 1: So that's it's a lot of square miles. And you know,

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Speaker 1: in terms of flow, you know, the state of Texas

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Speaker 1: is looking out twenty thirty years to its water needs,

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Speaker 1: and it thinks it needs something like ten million acre

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Speaker 1: feet of water in future years to meet its needs.

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Speaker 1: A year in flood, the Mississippi River is carrying in

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Speaker 1: a great flood, you know, maybe four and a half

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Speaker 1: million acre feet a day. So you just think of that,

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Speaker 1: that a couple of days flow of the Mississippi River

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Speaker 1: in a flood is it would be enough to satisfy

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Speaker 1: all the water needs for the state of Texas for

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Speaker 1: a year. You know, when I think of the Mississippi River,

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Speaker 1: I actually think of the entire system. When you think

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Speaker 1: of it, you may just think of essentially a straight

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Speaker 1: line from Minnesota to the Gulf, but that's not how

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Speaker 1: I conceive of it.

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Speaker 2: In the world, only the Amazon and Nile rivers have

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Speaker 2: larger drainage basins. That's an incredible amount of water, and

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Speaker 2: an acre foot is a weird unit of measurement to understand,

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Speaker 2: but it's the amount of water needed to flood one

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Speaker 2: acre at the depth of one foot. It takes a

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Speaker 2: lot of voices to tell a story about the Mississippi River.

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Speaker 2: This is doctor Jack Kilgore with two l's, a fisheries

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Speaker 2: biologist for the corp of Engineers, telling the most unique

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Speaker 2: feature of the river today. This is something to be

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Speaker 2: proud of.

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Speaker 6: All the other great rivers of the word, the Congo,

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Speaker 6: the Nile of the ynt Sea, all of those they

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Speaker 6: have dams near the mouth of the river, whereas the Mississippi,

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Speaker 6: the first damn you encounter is up in Saint Louis,

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Speaker 6: which is twelve hundred miles up. However, a fish can

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Speaker 6: take a left on the Missouri and go another twelve

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Speaker 6: hundred miles to the Gavin's Point damn on the Missouri.

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Speaker 6: So I tell people this that if you put all

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Speaker 6: of that together, there's almost twenty four hundred miles of

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Speaker 6: free flowing Mississippi Missouri River. There's nothing else like that

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Speaker 6: in the world except for the Amazon. All the other

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Speaker 6: great rivers have been dammed, which influences settiment, transport, water quality,

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Speaker 6: migratory fish, you know, has all those negative impacts.

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Speaker 2: The Missouri River is roughly twenty four hundred miles long

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Speaker 2: and is America's longest river. It's longer than the Mississippi.

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Speaker 2: It is dammed twelve hundred miles from its mouth. The

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Speaker 2: Mississippi River, give or take, is about twenty three hundred

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Speaker 2: and fifty miles in length from its headwater on Lake

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Speaker 2: Atasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The first

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Speaker 2: dam of the Mississippi River is in Saint Louis, one

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Speaker 2: thousand miles from its mouth at the gulf. That's also

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Speaker 2: where the Missouri runs into the Mississippi. I hope this

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Speaker 2: is all adding up to you. That's a lot of

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Speaker 2: numbers unless you've got a scratch pad. Let me do

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Speaker 2: the math. Combining the Missouri and Mississippi. There's almost twenty

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Speaker 2: four hundred miles of free flowing river free of dams.

293
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Speaker 2: Free flowing means free of dams. This is major. It's

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Speaker 2: probably even tattoo worthy. I can see it now, the

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Speaker 2: number twenty four hundred sketched over a muddy river with

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Speaker 2: an American flag blowing on the bank, with an eagle

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Speaker 2: flying through the sky. I'm kidding. Don't get that tattooed.

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Speaker 3: On you.

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Speaker 2: But long before America had a flag and tattoos were trendy,

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Speaker 2: this land had the river. But how long has the

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Speaker 2: river been here? Here's doctor Kilgore.

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Speaker 6: Really, it was formed at the end of when the

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Speaker 6: glaciers began to melt about ten thousand years ago, and

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Speaker 6: all of that glacial and all that material started pouring

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Speaker 6: down and creating this meandering river. It became kind of

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Speaker 6: more of a braided river because of all that washlow.

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Speaker 6: It remained unchanged for ten thousand years, and then in

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Speaker 6: nineteen thirty the Core came in there and started their

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Speaker 6: Massy flood control project, and that's what locked the river

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Speaker 6: in place.

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Speaker 2: That was a simple answer to a very complex question.

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Speaker 2: And I can't keep these guys from getting too far

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Speaker 2: ahead in our story. He just jumped from ten thousand

314
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Speaker 2: years ago to the infamous nineteen twenty seven flood like

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Speaker 2: it was a ballet step. We'll talk about that later, Doc. Basically,

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Speaker 2: the river has been in its current form since the

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Speaker 2: last ice age, which ended ten thousand years ago. The

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Speaker 2: Mississippi River Valley drainage basin, the whole thing from the

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Speaker 2: Rockies to the Appalachians was formed by the Laurentide ice

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Speaker 2: sheet and carved out the valley over seventy million years ago.

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Speaker 2: I think it's kind of arrogant to name an ice

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Speaker 2: sheet like you'd name a pet, but whatever, I understand

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Speaker 2: the pragmatism of it. But no human that our culture

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Speaker 2: has had correspondence with saw this ice sheet to report

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Speaker 2: about it to us. And I'm not saying that because

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Speaker 2: I doubt that it was there. The ice sheet was there,

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Speaker 2: but it's just kind of wild the amount of data

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Speaker 2: that we can pull from the Earth's cryptic diary about

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Speaker 2: its past life. It has recording mechanisms that take the

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Speaker 2: form of glacially formed valley in lakes, mysterious piles of rock,

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Speaker 2: and striations on bedrock that came from a two mile

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Speaker 2: deep cap of ice that covered two thirds of North America.

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Speaker 2: Lord have mercy. Perhaps it is self focused, but natural

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00:21:20,240 --> 00:21:22,920
Speaker 2: systems make more sense to us when we understand their

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00:21:22,960 --> 00:21:27,000
Speaker 2: overlap with our story, the human story. We've truly gotten

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Speaker 2: no way of knowing who or where the first humans

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Speaker 2: saw the Mississippi River, and it's kind of unfair that

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Speaker 2: we give the Spaniard Hernando de Soto so much fanfare

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Speaker 2: for being the first European to see the river in

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Speaker 2: fifteen forty one, which he was, or you know, someone

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Speaker 2: from his crew. But I'd like to take a minute

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00:21:46,680 --> 00:21:50,720
Speaker 2: and think about the first human that ever saw the river.

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Speaker 2: Just slow down for a second. There was a very

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Speaker 2: primitive man or woman that was the first to see it,

345
00:21:58,960 --> 00:22:01,160
Speaker 2: or maybe it was a group of travelers who saw

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Speaker 2: it all about the same time. Most archaeologists believed that

347
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Speaker 2: the first humans on this continent came across the baring

348
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Speaker 2: Land Bridge about fifteen thousand years ago, So that story

349
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Speaker 2: would have these people approaching the river from the west.

350
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Speaker 2: Now this is personal speculation. I've never read this, but

351
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Speaker 2: it seems like it would have been somewhere south of Missouri,

352
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Speaker 2: which was the southernmost tip of the Laurentide ice sheet.

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Speaker 2: You should name your next dog Laurentide or even your

354
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Speaker 2: kid without getting into a geology lesson. If that assumption

355
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Speaker 2: is true, it's unlikely they'd have traveled across the Ozarks

356
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Speaker 2: to get to the river, but likely went down the

357
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Speaker 2: Arkansas River Valley, traveling in a southwesterly direction, perhaps seeing

358
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Speaker 2: this great river for the first time around where the

359
00:22:47,760 --> 00:22:52,240
Speaker 2: Arkansas and Mississippi meet. This is not scientific. It's just

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Speaker 2: an exercise on a mental treadmill.

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Speaker 5: You know.

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Speaker 2: The story of human migration coming from the west is

363
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Speaker 2: contested by the cosmology of the Cherokee and others, who

364
00:23:02,600 --> 00:23:05,680
Speaker 2: say they entered this land from the south, crossing a

365
00:23:05,720 --> 00:23:09,399
Speaker 2: great passage of water. My point is this, we know

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Speaker 2: a lot of stuff, but the best minds in the

367
00:23:12,000 --> 00:23:15,680
Speaker 2: world will never know the answer of who saw the

368
00:23:15,680 --> 00:23:19,119
Speaker 2: Mississippi River first. Hernando de Soto was the first to

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Speaker 2: write it down in an English based language. He had

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Speaker 2: been on a great expedition from Florida to what is

371
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Speaker 2: now Tennessee and approached from the east and likely saw

372
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Speaker 2: it near current Memphis in fifteen forty one. He originally

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Speaker 2: called it the River of the Holy Spirit, spoken in Spanish.

374
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Speaker 2: Of course, De Soto's trek through the Southern US is

375
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Speaker 2: probably as wild and experienced as a human has ever had.

376
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Speaker 2: For both the Spanish and the Native Americans, this was

377
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Speaker 2: the native's first contact with Europeans, their first time seeing horses,

378
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Speaker 2: war dogs, and pigs. It would have been like coming

379
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Speaker 2: into contact with aliens. It was also their first contact

380
00:23:59,680 --> 00:24:02,879
Speaker 2: with the diseases of the modern cities of Europe. De

381
00:24:02,960 --> 00:24:06,240
Speaker 2: Soto crossed the river into Arkansas. He was the first

382
00:24:06,280 --> 00:24:09,240
Speaker 2: European to see it and cross it. And when he

383
00:24:09,359 --> 00:24:13,240
Speaker 2: got here, the Mississippi River Valley was a thriving civilization

384
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Speaker 2: of many nations of indigenous people. Many natives believe De

385
00:24:17,680 --> 00:24:20,600
Speaker 2: Soto was a god, which was good for his purposes

386
00:24:20,640 --> 00:24:24,760
Speaker 2: of looking for gold and land. He didn't find gold, however,

387
00:24:24,800 --> 00:24:28,520
Speaker 2: in May fifteen forty two, De Soto, at age forty two,

388
00:24:28,760 --> 00:24:32,080
Speaker 2: would die of fever and his men would bury him

389
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Speaker 2: in the river. And this next part of the story

390
00:24:35,080 --> 00:24:40,399
Speaker 2: is almost too wild, But no Europeans came back for

391
00:24:40,520 --> 00:24:45,159
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty years. One hundred and twenty years.

392
00:24:45,640 --> 00:24:50,760
Speaker 2: That's an incredible gap of time. Okay, So now I

393
00:24:50,800 --> 00:24:53,719
Speaker 2: would like to introduce you to another character in our

394
00:24:53,800 --> 00:24:58,320
Speaker 2: eclectic cast of Mississippi River storytellers. A big river takes

395
00:24:58,359 --> 00:25:02,080
Speaker 2: a lot of voices. This man's name is Samuel Clemens.

396
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Speaker 2: You may know him as Mark Twain. In eighteen eighty

397
00:25:05,640 --> 00:25:09,120
Speaker 2: three he published a book called Life on the Mississippi,

398
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Speaker 2: and he had something to say about De Soto and

399
00:25:13,240 --> 00:25:20,399
Speaker 2: this mysterious one hundred and twenty year gap. De Soto

400
00:25:20,560 --> 00:25:24,080
Speaker 2: merely glimpsed the river died and was buried in it

401
00:25:24,160 --> 00:25:27,160
Speaker 2: by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests

402
00:25:27,200 --> 00:25:30,800
Speaker 2: and soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten, the

403
00:25:30,840 --> 00:25:34,800
Speaker 2: Spanish custom of the day, and thus move other adventurers

404
00:25:34,840 --> 00:25:38,000
Speaker 2: to go at once and explore it. On the contrary,

405
00:25:38,080 --> 00:25:41,080
Speaker 2: their narratives when they reached home did not excite that

406
00:25:41,160 --> 00:25:45,480
Speaker 2: amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites

407
00:25:45,560 --> 00:25:48,440
Speaker 2: during a term of years that seems incredible in our

408
00:25:48,600 --> 00:25:52,520
Speaker 2: energetic days. One may sense the interval to his mind,

409
00:25:52,680 --> 00:25:55,760
Speaker 2: after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way.

410
00:25:56,359 --> 00:25:59,800
Speaker 2: After de Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of

411
00:25:59,800 --> 00:26:03,560
Speaker 2: a quarter century had elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born,

412
00:26:04,160 --> 00:26:06,639
Speaker 2: lived a trifle more than a half century, then died,

413
00:26:07,119 --> 00:26:09,640
Speaker 2: and when he had been in his grave considerably more

414
00:26:09,680 --> 00:26:13,560
Speaker 2: than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi.

415
00:26:13,960 --> 00:26:17,080
Speaker 2: In our day, we don't allow one hundred and thirty

416
00:26:17,160 --> 00:26:20,400
Speaker 2: years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. For more

417
00:26:20,440 --> 00:26:22,720
Speaker 2: than one hundred and fifty years there has been white

418
00:26:22,760 --> 00:26:26,440
Speaker 2: settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate

419
00:26:26,480 --> 00:26:31,200
Speaker 2: communication with the Indians in the south. The Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering,

420
00:26:31,320 --> 00:26:35,880
Speaker 2: and slaving and converting them. Necessarily, then these various clusters

421
00:26:35,880 --> 00:26:37,919
Speaker 2: of whites must have heard of the great river of

422
00:26:37,960 --> 00:26:41,440
Speaker 2: the far West, And indeed they did hear of it vaguely,

423
00:26:42,000 --> 00:26:47,000
Speaker 2: so vaguely and indefinitely that its course, proportions, and locality

424
00:26:47,040 --> 00:26:50,960
Speaker 2: were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter

425
00:26:51,160 --> 00:26:55,119
Speaker 2: ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration. But this

426
00:26:55,280 --> 00:26:58,920
Speaker 2: did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river,

427
00:26:59,160 --> 00:27:02,600
Speaker 2: nobody needed, nobody was curious about it. So for a

428
00:27:02,640 --> 00:27:05,199
Speaker 2: century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the

429
00:27:05,240 --> 00:27:08,520
Speaker 2: market and undisturbed. When de Soto found it, he was

430
00:27:08,560 --> 00:27:11,320
Speaker 2: not hunting for a river, and he had no present

431
00:27:11,400 --> 00:27:15,159
Speaker 2: occasion for one. Consequently, he did not value it or

432
00:27:15,200 --> 00:27:18,240
Speaker 2: even take any particular notice of it. But at last

433
00:27:18,359 --> 00:27:22,040
Speaker 2: LaSalle the Frenchman, conceived the idea of seeking out that

434
00:27:22,160 --> 00:27:25,560
Speaker 2: river and exploring it. It always happens that when a

435
00:27:25,600 --> 00:27:29,639
Speaker 2: man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed

436
00:27:29,640 --> 00:27:32,560
Speaker 2: with the same notion crop up all around. It happened,

437
00:27:32,560 --> 00:27:36,960
Speaker 2: so in this instance, naturally, the question suggests itself why

438
00:27:36,960 --> 00:27:39,400
Speaker 2: did these people want the river now when nobody had

439
00:27:39,440 --> 00:27:43,320
Speaker 2: wanted it in the five preceding generations. Apparently it was

440
00:27:43,359 --> 00:27:46,400
Speaker 2: because at this late day they thought they had discovered

441
00:27:46,440 --> 00:27:48,720
Speaker 2: a way to make it useful. For it had come

442
00:27:48,760 --> 00:27:51,280
Speaker 2: to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf

443
00:27:51,320 --> 00:27:55,320
Speaker 2: of California and therefore added a short cut from Canada

444
00:27:55,400 --> 00:27:59,480
Speaker 2: to China. Previously, the supposition had been that it emptied

445
00:27:59,520 --> 00:28:06,119
Speaker 2: into the Atlantic or the Sea of Virginia. Twain's prose

446
00:28:06,200 --> 00:28:08,639
Speaker 2: in this book is some of America's finest literature, but

447
00:28:08,720 --> 00:28:12,040
Speaker 2: he also dropped a history lesson on us, describing in

448
00:28:12,080 --> 00:28:14,280
Speaker 2: detail that one hundred and twenty year gap between De

449
00:28:14,400 --> 00:28:18,760
Speaker 2: Soto and LaSalle, and when Lasau arrived he found the

450
00:28:18,800 --> 00:28:24,439
Speaker 2: great civilization. De Soto described almost gone. The people were gone,

451
00:28:25,000 --> 00:28:29,280
Speaker 2: the cities were ruins. It's believe that during that gap,

452
00:28:29,560 --> 00:28:33,680
Speaker 2: the European diseases that De Soto brought with him almost

453
00:28:33,880 --> 00:28:39,400
Speaker 2: wiped out the Native Americans. That's almost unfathomable. Can you

454
00:28:39,440 --> 00:28:43,640
Speaker 2: imagine your people dying a mysterious death over the course

455
00:28:43,680 --> 00:28:47,920
Speaker 2: of several generations. Can you imagine living on the Atlantic

456
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:52,000
Speaker 2: coast and not knowing where the Mississippi River emptied. Can

457
00:28:52,040 --> 00:28:56,840
Speaker 2: you imagine the unknowns of a world like that? LaSalle

458
00:28:57,000 --> 00:28:59,880
Speaker 2: and his traveling partner Detante would be the first year

459
00:28:59,880 --> 00:29:03,360
Speaker 2: of to call the river the Mississippi, which is a

460
00:29:03,440 --> 00:29:10,160
Speaker 2: transliteration of a Chippewa word Michasippe, or great water. Often

461
00:29:10,200 --> 00:29:12,760
Speaker 2: it's referred to as the father of waters. You'll hear

462
00:29:12,800 --> 00:29:16,400
Speaker 2: that a lot. An alternate story, though, arose from a

463
00:29:16,520 --> 00:29:20,240
Speaker 2: chief of the Chalk Talls, a man named Peter Pitchlan,

464
00:29:20,560 --> 00:29:24,720
Speaker 2: who wrote a letter about returning to the land beyond

465
00:29:24,880 --> 00:29:29,640
Speaker 2: the micha Subkui, which meant the river beyond any age.

466
00:29:30,360 --> 00:29:33,720
Speaker 2: He wrote in his letter that white man never writes

467
00:29:33,800 --> 00:29:39,000
Speaker 2: Indian names correctly, but the word which we pronounce, Mishasippe,

468
00:29:39,480 --> 00:29:43,360
Speaker 2: is spelt nearer your own river. He wrote that in

469
00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:46,560
Speaker 2: a letter and said that that name meant the river

470
00:29:46,800 --> 00:29:50,960
Speaker 2: beyond any age. Pichland was a legit dude, and I

471
00:29:51,000 --> 00:29:54,440
Speaker 2: think he was dropping some knowledge. Whatever it means, the

472
00:29:54,440 --> 00:29:57,680
Speaker 2: Mississippi River has been the name of this river for

473
00:29:57,760 --> 00:30:01,040
Speaker 2: a very short period of its existence, and who knows,

474
00:30:01,480 --> 00:30:05,840
Speaker 2: it likely won't always be called that. Our society could

475
00:30:05,840 --> 00:30:11,080
Speaker 2: be forgotten, lost, misrepresented, just as easy as his was.

476
00:30:11,960 --> 00:30:16,040
Speaker 2: If you remember ts Eliott's poem, the river is patiently

477
00:30:16,320 --> 00:30:20,880
Speaker 2: waiting and watching to human trapped in time. Everything always

478
00:30:20,920 --> 00:30:25,960
Speaker 2: seems so permanent, but it's not natural. Systems outlast humans,

479
00:30:26,240 --> 00:30:32,400
Speaker 2: and rivers don't perceive time or think like men. No

480
00:30:32,600 --> 00:30:35,440
Speaker 2: river has ever played a greater role in a country

481
00:30:35,640 --> 00:30:39,200
Speaker 2: than the Mississippi River in America. It cuts through the

482
00:30:39,240 --> 00:30:43,160
Speaker 2: heart of this country like a jugular vein. Here's John Berry.

483
00:30:44,000 --> 00:30:46,800
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was always interested in the Mississippi River. You know,

484
00:30:47,280 --> 00:30:50,360
Speaker 1: when people ask me where I ever got the idea

485
00:30:50,400 --> 00:30:53,160
Speaker 1: to write that book, I always say, well, I grew

486
00:30:53,240 --> 00:30:55,480
Speaker 1: up in Rhode Island, so it's perfectly natural for me

487
00:30:55,520 --> 00:30:58,280
Speaker 1: to want to write about the Mississippi River. And as

488
00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:02,400
Speaker 1: you just did, they almost always chuckle. But the reality

489
00:31:02,520 --> 00:31:04,720
Speaker 1: is it's true if you carry it at all about

490
00:31:05,160 --> 00:31:09,880
Speaker 1: American history. The Mississippi River is so central every element

491
00:31:09,920 --> 00:31:14,600
Speaker 1: of American history. It has to interest you, if not

492
00:31:14,720 --> 00:31:18,400
Speaker 1: fascinated you. And growing up in Rhode Island, you know,

493
00:31:18,920 --> 00:31:21,520
Speaker 1: grew up in Providence with my grandfather, you know, was

494
00:31:21,560 --> 00:31:26,239
Speaker 1: in Newport on the ocean there every summer. Nonetheless, it

495
00:31:26,280 --> 00:31:29,240
Speaker 1: was always the Mississippi River. I love the Atlantic Ocean too,

496
00:31:29,320 --> 00:31:32,720
Speaker 1: But the Mississippi River I just always wanted to write about.

497
00:31:32,920 --> 00:31:35,520
Speaker 2: And it was a massive It was a very formidable

498
00:31:36,360 --> 00:31:40,320
Speaker 2: had a very formidable presence in the American frontier, in

499
00:31:40,360 --> 00:31:41,320
Speaker 2: American expansion.

500
00:31:41,480 --> 00:31:44,120
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean it was you know, at the beginning,

501
00:31:45,160 --> 00:31:47,880
Speaker 1: it was everything. It was a combination of you know,

502
00:31:48,880 --> 00:31:55,959
Speaker 1: rail boats, airplanes, you know, fiber optics, you know, telegraph, telephone.

503
00:31:56,120 --> 00:31:59,880
Speaker 1: All that was the Mississippi River and its tribute to

504
00:31:59,920 --> 00:32:04,840
Speaker 1: it's the entire system was key to all transportation and

505
00:32:05,160 --> 00:32:11,000
Speaker 1: communication across much of the country until the development of

506
00:32:11,240 --> 00:32:11,920
Speaker 1: the telegraphic.

507
00:32:13,280 --> 00:32:15,800
Speaker 2: His point is that the river was the lifeblood of

508
00:32:15,800 --> 00:32:20,080
Speaker 2: communication and transportation on this continent before modern technology. It

509
00:32:20,160 --> 00:32:24,040
Speaker 2: acted in place of the coming railroads, airplanes, fiber optics,

510
00:32:24,040 --> 00:32:28,600
Speaker 2: and telephone. It was key to America becoming America.

511
00:32:29,360 --> 00:32:34,040
Speaker 4: Here's Hank the thing to me about the essence are

512
00:32:34,200 --> 00:32:37,480
Speaker 4: of the Mississippi River. It's not only the third largest

513
00:32:37,520 --> 00:32:40,240
Speaker 4: river in the world, if we had included the Missouri

514
00:32:40,320 --> 00:32:42,800
Speaker 4: and the Missippi, it'd be the biggest fe in the world.

515
00:32:42,880 --> 00:32:47,080
Speaker 4: More than likely. It splits right down the middle of

516
00:32:47,080 --> 00:32:51,320
Speaker 4: this northern hemisphere. People say, well, we got free coasts

517
00:32:51,800 --> 00:32:55,880
Speaker 4: of America we got full coasts. You got the West Coast,

518
00:32:56,160 --> 00:32:58,520
Speaker 4: you got the Gulf Coast, you got the Atlantic Coast,

519
00:32:58,800 --> 00:33:00,800
Speaker 4: and you got the Missisippi River on and right.

520
00:33:00,720 --> 00:33:03,760
Speaker 3: Up the middle of America. That's the fourth coast.

521
00:33:04,640 --> 00:33:08,720
Speaker 4: Look at the goods and produce the products, the sand

522
00:33:08,760 --> 00:33:13,240
Speaker 4: of the gravel, the timber, everything, the petroleum products that

523
00:33:13,360 --> 00:33:16,280
Speaker 4: flow up and down at Mississippi Room. It is a

524
00:33:17,160 --> 00:33:20,640
Speaker 4: not only a force to be reckoned with because of

525
00:33:20,680 --> 00:33:25,760
Speaker 4: its wildness, but its economic value. It's unbelievable to what

526
00:33:25,840 --> 00:33:28,600
Speaker 4: America is and what it does for America.

527
00:33:29,920 --> 00:33:34,000
Speaker 2: The Mississippi River was undoubtedly a cornerstone in the building

528
00:33:34,120 --> 00:33:37,560
Speaker 2: of the American Empire. And I really like the idea

529
00:33:37,600 --> 00:33:40,920
Speaker 2: of the Mississippi being the fourth coast. The river has

530
00:33:41,000 --> 00:33:45,880
Speaker 2: more sand beaches than the Gulf Coast. Here's doctor Bedenhearn.

531
00:33:46,120 --> 00:33:50,640
Speaker 5: The amount of cargo and fuel and supplies that are

532
00:33:50,760 --> 00:33:52,760
Speaker 5: transported every day on the river.

533
00:33:52,840 --> 00:33:54,280
Speaker 3: But it's it's huge.

534
00:33:54,600 --> 00:33:57,920
Speaker 5: And we've got the ports that you know, New Orleans,

535
00:33:58,000 --> 00:33:59,800
Speaker 5: Baton Rouge and some of the biggest ports in the

536
00:33:59,800 --> 00:34:02,600
Speaker 5: world world and you know, the United States. I'm not

537
00:34:02,720 --> 00:34:06,560
Speaker 5: gonna say we're lucky, but we've got this major river

538
00:34:06,640 --> 00:34:09,400
Speaker 5: system that goes right up through a bread basket, you

539
00:34:09,400 --> 00:34:13,480
Speaker 5: know of farmland. You know, not all countries have that.

540
00:34:13,920 --> 00:34:16,319
Speaker 5: They may have big rivers, but they maybe flow through

541
00:34:16,320 --> 00:34:19,960
Speaker 5: the Amazon. There's no real you know, agriculture there. But

542
00:34:20,000 --> 00:34:24,040
Speaker 5: we've kind of got a combination of a big river

543
00:34:24,080 --> 00:34:26,879
Speaker 5: that we can navigate. Of course we have, we had

544
00:34:26,960 --> 00:34:29,840
Speaker 5: a lot of work to get that to be the

545
00:34:30,000 --> 00:34:34,160
Speaker 5: dependable navigation system we wanted. But it also navigates right

546
00:34:34,280 --> 00:34:37,919
Speaker 5: up through the heartland of of you know, the bread

547
00:34:37,960 --> 00:34:38,960
Speaker 5: basket of America.

548
00:34:40,520 --> 00:34:44,120
Speaker 2: Transportation is key to empire building and this river being

549
00:34:44,160 --> 00:34:47,759
Speaker 2: situated in the middle is more than significant. Think about

550
00:34:47,760 --> 00:34:51,279
Speaker 2: all the crop land from Minnesota to Louisiana. This is

551
00:34:51,360 --> 00:34:55,120
Speaker 2: big and it's not just any cropland the Mississippi Delta

552
00:34:55,280 --> 00:34:58,560
Speaker 2: is considered some of the most fertile land in the world.

553
00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:02,439
Speaker 4: Most areas in the country topsail is six eight inches deep.

554
00:35:03,120 --> 00:35:05,360
Speaker 4: Our average topsail is about one hundred and sixty to

555
00:35:05,360 --> 00:35:08,120
Speaker 4: one hundred and eighty feet deep. Here it has been

556
00:35:08,480 --> 00:35:12,560
Speaker 4: called some of the richest soil in the world compared

557
00:35:12,560 --> 00:35:15,399
Speaker 4: to the river. Now and there's an old saying that

558
00:35:16,320 --> 00:35:20,239
Speaker 4: the Lord will won Deer Creek about six miles east

559
00:35:20,280 --> 00:35:23,200
Speaker 4: of here that the Lord could have made better dirt,

560
00:35:23,920 --> 00:35:25,400
Speaker 4: but he figured he just didn't need to.

561
00:35:26,840 --> 00:35:29,759
Speaker 2: Deer Creek is a tributary of the Mississippi with some

562
00:35:29,800 --> 00:35:32,719
Speaker 2: of the Delta's finest soil. It's hard to get a

563
00:35:32,719 --> 00:35:35,239
Speaker 2: definitive answer for how deep the soil is in the

564
00:35:35,239 --> 00:35:38,840
Speaker 2: Delta because its depth varies and top soil is a

565
00:35:38,880 --> 00:35:42,560
Speaker 2: colloquial term, but it's also a scientific term. But the

566
00:35:42,600 --> 00:35:46,680
Speaker 2: truth is that it's just extremely deep. In places it's

567
00:35:46,680 --> 00:35:50,399
Speaker 2: alluvial soil, meaning it was deposited there by a flooding river.

568
00:35:50,719 --> 00:35:53,960
Speaker 2: This is important. We did a podcast on soil formation

569
00:35:54,080 --> 00:35:58,000
Speaker 2: on Bear Grease episode twenty called From the Earth. Soil

570
00:35:58,040 --> 00:36:01,640
Speaker 2: building is one of the Earth's most fascinating processes, takes

571
00:36:01,680 --> 00:36:04,279
Speaker 2: an incredible amount of time, can be squandered in a

572
00:36:04,360 --> 00:36:08,080
Speaker 2: generation of mismanagement, and has caused the rise and fall

573
00:36:08,200 --> 00:36:12,400
Speaker 2: of empires. You may not touch much soil or daily

574
00:36:12,520 --> 00:36:15,520
Speaker 2: perceive its connection to your life, but it is the

575
00:36:15,719 --> 00:36:20,520
Speaker 2: foundation of your physical body. Everything comes from the soil,

576
00:36:20,680 --> 00:36:24,360
Speaker 2: and you will go back to it. In terms of

577
00:36:24,400 --> 00:36:28,080
Speaker 2: where we're at in our story Lut's level, we're establishing

578
00:36:28,200 --> 00:36:31,279
Speaker 2: a baseline of understanding the natural features of the river

579
00:36:31,400 --> 00:36:34,520
Speaker 2: in man's early connection to it. We have to view

580
00:36:34,560 --> 00:36:38,320
Speaker 2: the river as a complex, ancient system that will outlive

581
00:36:38,440 --> 00:36:42,200
Speaker 2: you and your offspring should the earth persist, and not

582
00:36:42,360 --> 00:36:44,880
Speaker 2: just a narrow body of muddy water. You cross on

583
00:36:44,960 --> 00:36:47,719
Speaker 2: a bridge and honk your horn because you've passed into

584
00:36:47,760 --> 00:36:52,520
Speaker 2: a new state. Let's keep heading down river. Here's John

585
00:36:52,600 --> 00:36:57,440
Speaker 2: Berry the Mississippi River in general, describing it. It's two

586
00:36:57,520 --> 00:37:02,239
Speaker 2: hundred feet deep and a mile wide inside the bigger sections,

587
00:37:02,560 --> 00:37:06,240
Speaker 2: and it drops the slope of three inches per mile,

588
00:37:06,680 --> 00:37:09,240
Speaker 2: flows through some of the flattest land in the world.

589
00:37:09,719 --> 00:37:14,240
Speaker 2: Generally flows about nine miles per hour, and the last

590
00:37:14,280 --> 00:37:16,880
Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi River is

591
00:37:16,920 --> 00:37:20,320
Speaker 2: below sea level. Can you help me understand how that's possible.

592
00:37:20,360 --> 00:37:22,840
Speaker 1: Well, those stats are accurate, but they're a little bit selected.

593
00:37:22,840 --> 00:37:25,439
Speaker 1: For example, obviously the river's not two hundred feet deep

594
00:37:25,640 --> 00:37:29,280
Speaker 1: the whole, yeah, you know, but some of the deepest sections,

595
00:37:29,280 --> 00:37:33,399
Speaker 1: which are you know, right in Orleans, are probably two

596
00:37:33,440 --> 00:37:36,719
Speaker 1: forty practically right at the French quarter. It's called the

597
00:37:36,760 --> 00:37:40,480
Speaker 1: Crescent City because it's sharp turns here and when you

598
00:37:40,560 --> 00:37:44,160
Speaker 1: get a high water the river on the outer bank,

599
00:37:44,640 --> 00:37:48,400
Speaker 1: you know, just like on a racetrack, it's actually higher

600
00:37:48,440 --> 00:37:51,919
Speaker 1: than the water on the other bank, maybe a foot

601
00:37:51,960 --> 00:37:55,120
Speaker 1: higher in terms of the bottom of the river being

602
00:37:55,640 --> 00:37:58,360
Speaker 1: below sea level for several hundred miles.

603
00:37:58,760 --> 00:38:01,320
Speaker 2: Okay, at the bottom of the room being level.

604
00:38:01,360 --> 00:38:03,800
Speaker 1: What you have is the force of all the water

605
00:38:04,040 --> 00:38:09,520
Speaker 1: draining from thirty one states pushing against the sea coming up.

606
00:38:09,680 --> 00:38:12,280
Speaker 2: So there's a force behind it. Yeah, it's not gravity

607
00:38:12,320 --> 00:38:13,000
Speaker 2: pulling it down.

608
00:38:13,400 --> 00:38:15,719
Speaker 1: Well, it's yeah, Well, I mean you're right, because well,

609
00:38:15,800 --> 00:38:19,440
Speaker 1: you know, water flows downhill and if it warn't, you know,

610
00:38:19,480 --> 00:38:22,799
Speaker 1: you got something other factor that is that is affecting it,

611
00:38:22,960 --> 00:38:26,760
Speaker 1: that's forcing it. And it's it's not uphill, it's still

612
00:38:26,760 --> 00:38:31,600
Speaker 1: going downhill. But you know, right now record low water

613
00:38:31,719 --> 00:38:34,960
Speaker 1: and a lot of the river the ocean is pushing

614
00:38:35,080 --> 00:38:36,560
Speaker 1: salt water up river.

615
00:38:37,040 --> 00:38:39,040
Speaker 2: It's always been like that. It's it's kind of a

616
00:38:39,080 --> 00:38:41,120
Speaker 2: silly question. When when I was a kid, I remember

617
00:38:41,200 --> 00:38:43,480
Speaker 2: there's a big mountain within side of the town we

618
00:38:43,520 --> 00:38:46,160
Speaker 2: lived in in Arkansas, and I asked my dad one time,

619
00:38:46,200 --> 00:38:48,760
Speaker 2: I said, was that mountain here when you were a kid?

620
00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:52,080
Speaker 2: So this is question is kind of like that is

621
00:38:52,120 --> 00:38:55,320
Speaker 2: the bottom of the river always been below sea level?

622
00:38:55,680 --> 00:38:56,480
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty much.

623
00:38:58,040 --> 00:39:03,920
Speaker 2: Okay, dumb questions get dumb answers. It's pretty hard to

624
00:39:03,920 --> 00:39:06,680
Speaker 2: wrap your head around the last four hundred and fifty

625
00:39:06,719 --> 00:39:09,279
Speaker 2: miles of the river being below sea level. I thought

626
00:39:09,280 --> 00:39:11,719
Speaker 2: maybe this had to do with man's imprint on the river.

627
00:39:12,200 --> 00:39:16,440
Speaker 2: I guess not. We're still learning about the physical attributes

628
00:39:16,440 --> 00:39:19,319
Speaker 2: of the river. But the river is very different in

629
00:39:19,360 --> 00:39:23,920
Speaker 2: different sections. Here's doctor Jack Kilgore describing the sections of

630
00:39:23,960 --> 00:39:24,919
Speaker 2: the Mississippi River.

631
00:39:25,560 --> 00:39:28,319
Speaker 6: Well, first of all, this layout the Lower Mess. There's

632
00:39:28,360 --> 00:39:31,680
Speaker 6: really five or six different reaches of the lower Mississippi River.

633
00:39:31,960 --> 00:39:34,120
Speaker 6: A lot of people think, oh, it's just the Lower Mess.

634
00:39:34,160 --> 00:39:37,600
Speaker 6: Well no, so from New Orleans down the last one

635
00:39:37,680 --> 00:39:40,640
Speaker 6: hundred miles that's where, of course it runs into the

636
00:39:40,640 --> 00:39:43,360
Speaker 6: Gulf of Mexico. But you have a combination of fresh

637
00:39:43,400 --> 00:39:47,360
Speaker 6: water and escherine fish, and the river just pours into

638
00:39:47,400 --> 00:39:52,400
Speaker 6: all these estuaries and that's what sustains the lifeblood of

639
00:39:52,719 --> 00:39:57,400
Speaker 6: Louisiana and Mississippi coastal wetlands. Then when you get above

640
00:39:57,440 --> 00:40:00,359
Speaker 6: New Orleans, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, you don't

641
00:40:00,360 --> 00:40:04,359
Speaker 6: really have a floodplain and it's highly industrialized, and it's

642
00:40:04,400 --> 00:40:08,120
Speaker 6: also within the deep water navigation channel. And when I

643
00:40:08,160 --> 00:40:11,760
Speaker 6: say deep water from Baton Rouge down to the Gulf,

644
00:40:11,960 --> 00:40:15,080
Speaker 6: it's forty It has to be forty five feet in

645
00:40:15,160 --> 00:40:19,000
Speaker 6: order for the sea going ships to traverse up and

646
00:40:19,040 --> 00:40:23,240
Speaker 6: down the river. Above Baton Rouge, the minimum is twelve feet.

647
00:40:23,640 --> 00:40:26,400
Speaker 6: And that's of course all you have are the barges,

648
00:40:26,560 --> 00:40:28,840
Speaker 6: which have a much shallower draft.

649
00:40:35,960 --> 00:40:38,280
Speaker 2: So from the mouth of the river to one hundred

650
00:40:38,320 --> 00:40:42,040
Speaker 2: miles inland it's heavily influenced by the saltwater of the Gulf.

651
00:40:42,440 --> 00:40:45,319
Speaker 2: The first section from the Gulf to New Orleans is

652
00:40:45,360 --> 00:40:49,560
Speaker 2: a wide web of brackish wetlands. New Orleans sits about

653
00:40:49,560 --> 00:40:53,000
Speaker 2: forty or fifty miles inland from the Gulf proper. The

654
00:40:53,040 --> 00:40:55,960
Speaker 2: second section from New Orleans to Baton Rouge is a

655
00:40:56,040 --> 00:41:00,880
Speaker 2: highly industrialized, narrow section of the river with no floodplain,

656
00:41:01,440 --> 00:41:02,719
Speaker 2: lots of big boats.

657
00:41:03,040 --> 00:41:07,080
Speaker 6: But then above Baton Rouge, from Baton Rouge to Natchez

658
00:41:07,760 --> 00:41:11,600
Speaker 6: really all the way up to Memphis. Between Memphis and

659
00:41:11,960 --> 00:41:16,439
Speaker 6: Baton Rouge, the core cut off fourteen meander bins back

660
00:41:16,480 --> 00:41:19,799
Speaker 6: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and to shorten the

661
00:41:19,880 --> 00:41:22,120
Speaker 6: river in the name of flood control, thinking that that

662
00:41:22,680 --> 00:41:27,520
Speaker 6: by straightening the river, the flood pulses would evacuate the

663
00:41:27,600 --> 00:41:31,680
Speaker 6: valley quicker than a meandering river. Well that worked, I

664
00:41:31,680 --> 00:41:34,920
Speaker 6: mean it dropped the stages, but the river is still

665
00:41:34,960 --> 00:41:38,960
Speaker 6: adjusting from man made cutoffs seventy five years ago.

666
00:41:40,400 --> 00:41:44,160
Speaker 2: Haink talked about those cutoffs earlier in the podcast. Baton

667
00:41:44,239 --> 00:41:48,399
Speaker 2: Rouge to Memphis has that classic big wide, wild Mississippi

668
00:41:48,440 --> 00:41:52,080
Speaker 2: River delta field. It has an intact floodplain, I meaning

669
00:41:52,120 --> 00:41:54,640
Speaker 2: the river is allowed to have its natural flood patterns,

670
00:41:54,840 --> 00:41:58,520
Speaker 2: and usually the levees sit a long ways off the

671
00:41:58,520 --> 00:42:02,040
Speaker 2: main river the mountains. I was an adult before I

672
00:42:02,120 --> 00:42:04,239
Speaker 2: learned what a levee was. It was hard for me

673
00:42:04,320 --> 00:42:06,440
Speaker 2: to wrap my mind around it until I was standing

674
00:42:06,440 --> 00:42:09,000
Speaker 2: there and understood it. But it's basically a dam of

675
00:42:09,040 --> 00:42:12,560
Speaker 2: dirt that runs along the river, protecting the surrounding areas

676
00:42:12,560 --> 00:42:14,960
Speaker 2: from floods. In a minute, we're going to learn more

677
00:42:14,960 --> 00:42:16,840
Speaker 2: about levees. But here's doctor Kilgore.

678
00:42:17,520 --> 00:42:21,080
Speaker 6: And then once you get though above Memphis, you get

679
00:42:21,120 --> 00:42:24,120
Speaker 6: out of the cutoffs and you get into a lot

680
00:42:24,160 --> 00:42:25,160
Speaker 6: of gravel.

681
00:42:24,719 --> 00:42:27,200
Speaker 2: Bars north of Memphis.

682
00:42:26,800 --> 00:42:29,400
Speaker 6: North of Memphis all the way up to the Ohio Okay,

683
00:42:29,520 --> 00:42:32,719
Speaker 6: So it's kind of a lot of secondary channel. There's

684
00:42:32,719 --> 00:42:35,040
Speaker 6: about one hundred second I'll talk about that in a minute.

685
00:42:35,200 --> 00:42:38,080
Speaker 6: But from there up to the Ohio, you get a

686
00:42:38,120 --> 00:42:41,240
Speaker 6: lot of gravel bars, but you still have an intact floodplane.

687
00:42:41,520 --> 00:42:43,760
Speaker 6: So the levees are still a place.

688
00:42:43,880 --> 00:42:48,759
Speaker 2: Further back from Memphis to kro Illinois, where the Ohio

689
00:42:48,920 --> 00:42:51,920
Speaker 2: comes in, there are more gravel bars, but there's still

690
00:42:51,960 --> 00:42:54,239
Speaker 2: an intact floodplain. Let's keep going.

691
00:42:54,840 --> 00:42:57,960
Speaker 6: And then once you get in above the Ohio, between

692
00:42:58,040 --> 00:43:01,160
Speaker 6: the Ohio and Saint Lewis is what we call the

693
00:43:01,200 --> 00:43:05,680
Speaker 6: Middle Miss. The river narrows. There's no floodplain, it's very

694
00:43:05,719 --> 00:43:10,200
Speaker 6: high velocity, and there's just a lot of dikes. So

695
00:43:10,360 --> 00:43:12,520
Speaker 6: what they do is they'll put these dikes in there

696
00:43:12,600 --> 00:43:15,640
Speaker 6: to create this self scouring channel so the core doesn't

697
00:43:15,680 --> 00:43:18,440
Speaker 6: have to dredge. So the Middle Miss really doesn't have

698
00:43:18,520 --> 00:43:20,560
Speaker 6: It's kind of like the Lower Miss, but it didn't

699
00:43:20,560 --> 00:43:22,600
Speaker 6: have a floodplain. And then, of course, once you get

700
00:43:22,600 --> 00:43:26,040
Speaker 6: above Saint Louis and Alton, you have the twenty seven

701
00:43:26,120 --> 00:43:26,920
Speaker 6: locking dams.

702
00:43:28,160 --> 00:43:31,440
Speaker 2: From Kroad to Saint Louis is the middle Mississippi, and

703
00:43:31,440 --> 00:43:34,320
Speaker 2: that Saint Louis is the first dam of the river,

704
00:43:34,520 --> 00:43:37,920
Speaker 2: which totally changes it. So there you go. Now you

705
00:43:37,960 --> 00:43:41,400
Speaker 2: have a general understanding of the Middle and Lower Mississippi,

706
00:43:41,719 --> 00:43:44,080
Speaker 2: but it would be helpful to officially learn what some

707
00:43:44,120 --> 00:43:47,000
Speaker 2: of the man made features of the river are. I'm serious,

708
00:43:47,120 --> 00:43:48,600
Speaker 2: I was a grown man before I knew what a

709
00:43:48,680 --> 00:43:51,360
Speaker 2: levee was. We've got to understand levees.

710
00:43:52,040 --> 00:43:55,000
Speaker 6: And the levees, of course, are giant earthern mounds on

711
00:43:55,040 --> 00:43:59,600
Speaker 6: each side of the river. But fortunately when they realign

712
00:43:59,680 --> 00:44:03,640
Speaker 6: the le they put them far enough back to allow

713
00:44:03,760 --> 00:44:05,200
Speaker 6: the river to have a floodplain.

714
00:44:05,360 --> 00:44:08,400
Speaker 2: Still, okay, so it can get over its banks.

715
00:44:08,480 --> 00:44:11,000
Speaker 6: Yes, from levee to levee it can be up to

716
00:44:11,040 --> 00:44:14,720
Speaker 6: fourteen miles wide. So there is a two million acre

717
00:44:15,160 --> 00:44:19,400
Speaker 6: floodplain that this river is associated with, and that is

718
00:44:19,840 --> 00:44:23,040
Speaker 6: one of the natural features of the Lower miss Unlike

719
00:44:23,440 --> 00:44:27,480
Speaker 6: most other great rivers of the world except for the Amazon.

720
00:44:28,320 --> 00:44:32,000
Speaker 2: Levees are the magic, the bread and butter, the flashy mule,

721
00:44:32,080 --> 00:44:35,120
Speaker 2: and the pasture of the Mississippi River. They make the

722
00:44:35,160 --> 00:44:38,360
Speaker 2: region outside of the levee habitable. The land between the

723
00:44:38,440 --> 00:44:41,319
Speaker 2: levee and river is subject to seasonal flooding, meaning you

724
00:44:41,360 --> 00:44:45,120
Speaker 2: can't farm or build cities inside the levee. However, there

725
00:44:45,160 --> 00:44:48,000
Speaker 2: are a lot of hunting camps inside the levee, usually

726
00:44:48,000 --> 00:44:51,240
Speaker 2: built on stilts or built in some way that expects flooding.

727
00:44:52,440 --> 00:44:56,200
Speaker 2: See if you recognize this Mississippi voice, you know, other

728
00:44:56,239 --> 00:44:58,760
Speaker 2: than my voice, because I talk some here too. Here's

729
00:44:58,760 --> 00:45:03,520
Speaker 2: more on levees. You know, what's interesting to think about

730
00:45:03,920 --> 00:45:08,000
Speaker 2: in terms of the way humans have manipulated the earth

731
00:45:08,040 --> 00:45:10,200
Speaker 2: so that we can live in places that we maybe

732
00:45:10,320 --> 00:45:12,600
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been able to. Like you think of the

733
00:45:12,600 --> 00:45:15,080
Speaker 2: Middle East. There's there are places in the Middle East

734
00:45:15,120 --> 00:45:19,200
Speaker 2: that are basically would be uninhabitable by humans because of

735
00:45:19,280 --> 00:45:21,160
Speaker 2: lack of water, but now we have ways to get

736
00:45:21,160 --> 00:45:26,920
Speaker 2: water there. The Mississippi River delta would have seasonally flooded

737
00:45:27,000 --> 00:45:29,640
Speaker 2: to the point that it would have been very hard

738
00:45:30,120 --> 00:45:32,360
Speaker 2: to live here year round, grow crops.

739
00:45:33,560 --> 00:45:35,040
Speaker 3: Yeah, or without the levees.

740
00:45:35,080 --> 00:45:38,719
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, So that's Wilber Primos. Yeah, I mean we've

741
00:45:38,719 --> 00:45:41,880
Speaker 2: got civilization just right outside the levees that for the

742
00:45:41,960 --> 00:45:46,640
Speaker 2: last eon of time has flooded. That's right, And that's

743
00:45:46,680 --> 00:45:49,640
Speaker 2: so interesting. I mean, we just take so much for granted.

744
00:45:49,680 --> 00:45:52,799
Speaker 2: And when you understand the levee system and how you know,

745
00:45:52,920 --> 00:45:55,319
Speaker 2: only the last one hundred and seventy years, I guess

746
00:45:55,360 --> 00:45:58,319
Speaker 2: we've had these levees and it's just you couldn't even

747
00:45:58,360 --> 00:45:59,120
Speaker 2: live down here.

748
00:45:59,280 --> 00:46:02,360
Speaker 7: No, no, you could not, you know, not not in

749
00:46:02,480 --> 00:46:04,319
Speaker 7: the fall and winter for sure.

750
00:46:04,640 --> 00:46:04,839
Speaker 3: Yeah.

751
00:46:04,920 --> 00:46:07,839
Speaker 7: When you ride down the Mississippi Levee and you look

752
00:46:08,080 --> 00:46:11,800
Speaker 7: down to the typically on the outside of the levee,

753
00:46:11,840 --> 00:46:14,520
Speaker 7: not the river side, but the other side, you'll see

754
00:46:14,560 --> 00:46:17,360
Speaker 7: a little lake as a hole, and the name of

755
00:46:17,400 --> 00:46:20,600
Speaker 7: that hole is typically a bar pit. That is slang

756
00:46:21,280 --> 00:46:24,960
Speaker 7: for borrow pit b O r r o w borrow pit.

757
00:46:25,560 --> 00:46:28,560
Speaker 7: They borrowed the dirt and dug a hole and put

758
00:46:28,600 --> 00:46:32,399
Speaker 7: it to make the levee, so that becomes a bar pit.

759
00:46:32,680 --> 00:46:34,799
Speaker 2: So there's a big ditch and then there's a big

760
00:46:34,840 --> 00:46:35,439
Speaker 2: pile of dirt.

761
00:46:35,640 --> 00:46:39,160
Speaker 7: And bar pits can be great fishing holes. They leased

762
00:46:39,160 --> 00:46:41,839
Speaker 7: the levee to a lot of cattle farmers because it's

763
00:46:41,880 --> 00:46:45,279
Speaker 7: grass that yeah, you know, and they lease it for hay,

764
00:46:45,440 --> 00:46:47,440
Speaker 7: so you're they're cutting it, cut it, yeah, because you

765
00:46:47,440 --> 00:46:49,320
Speaker 7: got to keep trees off of the trees would be

766
00:46:49,360 --> 00:46:52,279
Speaker 7: bad for the levee because the roots or whatever are

767
00:46:52,320 --> 00:46:56,520
Speaker 7: creating avenues for water and other problems, So it's a

768
00:46:56,640 --> 00:46:57,560
Speaker 7: huge project.

769
00:46:58,840 --> 00:47:01,640
Speaker 2: The Mississippi River heavy system is one of the greatest

770
00:47:01,680 --> 00:47:05,920
Speaker 2: engineering feats in American history. If a man or woman

771
00:47:06,080 --> 00:47:08,560
Speaker 2: were to claim to understand the story of this nation

772
00:47:09,080 --> 00:47:12,400
Speaker 2: but don't understand the history of the Mississippi River levies,

773
00:47:12,840 --> 00:47:16,480
Speaker 2: they'd be like a wayward coon hound slick trend barking

774
00:47:16,560 --> 00:47:19,360
Speaker 2: up a tree with no coon. This story is big.

775
00:47:20,040 --> 00:47:22,520
Speaker 2: Here's me and John Berry. This is the kind of

776
00:47:22,560 --> 00:47:26,120
Speaker 2: stuff that I would have taken for granted in terms

777
00:47:26,160 --> 00:47:30,919
Speaker 2: of understanding how this nation was built and how central

778
00:47:30,920 --> 00:47:34,320
Speaker 2: the Mississippi River was. But when people first started wanting

779
00:47:34,360 --> 00:47:38,080
Speaker 2: to control the river, it was you said in the

780
00:47:38,080 --> 00:47:40,759
Speaker 2: book that it was more dangerous to go down the

781
00:47:40,760 --> 00:47:44,240
Speaker 2: Mississippi River than it was to cross the ocean. Yeah,

782
00:47:44,280 --> 00:47:50,279
Speaker 2: I mean it. It was this like wild, untouched American river, right,

783
00:47:50,760 --> 00:47:53,520
Speaker 2: And then at what point did man come in and

784
00:47:53,560 --> 00:47:55,960
Speaker 2: start to want to influence that and tame that.

785
00:47:56,400 --> 00:47:59,880
Speaker 1: Well, the Native Americans tended to live with the real

786
00:48:00,280 --> 00:48:03,359
Speaker 1: They built mounds, so you know, in the delta and

787
00:48:03,400 --> 00:48:07,920
Speaker 1: so forth, so when it flooded they would remained okay.

788
00:48:08,560 --> 00:48:13,200
Speaker 1: But obviously I guess they started building levees in New

789
00:48:13,280 --> 00:48:19,439
Speaker 1: Orleans really almost immediately after it was settled, so that's

790
00:48:19,760 --> 00:48:23,759
Speaker 1: three hundred years ago. And of course, before the Civil War,

791
00:48:23,880 --> 00:48:27,480
Speaker 1: there was a pretty complete levee system on a lot

792
00:48:27,520 --> 00:48:30,720
Speaker 1: of the lower Mississippi River, but the levees weren't very high.

793
00:48:31,040 --> 00:48:34,480
Speaker 1: They got really really they thought they had a pretty

794
00:48:34,480 --> 00:48:38,880
Speaker 1: good levee system. By the early nineteen hundreds, they discovered

795
00:48:39,080 --> 00:48:42,600
Speaker 1: that was not the case. After the nineteen twenty seven flood,

796
00:48:42,960 --> 00:48:47,400
Speaker 1: which was a you know, tremendous flood in terms of

797
00:48:47,680 --> 00:48:52,960
Speaker 1: percentage of gross domestic product impact, it had more impact

798
00:48:52,960 --> 00:48:55,799
Speaker 1: than any other event in American history.

799
00:48:56,320 --> 00:48:58,720
Speaker 2: Really, any other natural disaster in American history.

800
00:48:59,080 --> 00:49:04,560
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, considerably more than Katrina, you know, several

801
00:49:04,600 --> 00:49:09,720
Speaker 1: times more than Hurricane Sandy. Right, it was enormous. Plus

802
00:49:09,800 --> 00:49:12,439
Speaker 1: at displaced, it flooded almost one percent of the entire

803
00:49:12,480 --> 00:49:17,480
Speaker 1: population of the country. So after that flood, which killed

804
00:49:17,520 --> 00:49:24,160
Speaker 1: people from Virginia to Oklahoma, but really devastated Mississippi, Arkansas,

805
00:49:24,200 --> 00:49:28,399
Speaker 1: and Louisiana, you know, they built a very good levee

806
00:49:28,480 --> 00:49:33,279
Speaker 1: system and some other measures to contain the river, and

807
00:49:33,680 --> 00:49:36,720
Speaker 1: on the lower Mississippi there hasn't been a flood since.

808
00:49:37,280 --> 00:49:39,319
Speaker 2: I like what you said, in the book that the

809
00:49:39,440 --> 00:49:44,920
Speaker 2: nineteenth century was the perfect century for a man to

810
00:49:45,080 --> 00:49:48,239
Speaker 2: try to conquer something like the Mississippi River. You said

811
00:49:48,239 --> 00:49:49,239
Speaker 2: it took hubris.

812
00:49:49,560 --> 00:49:52,120
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was the century of the engineer, you know.

813
00:49:52,239 --> 00:49:53,759
Speaker 2: In eighteen hundreds.

814
00:49:54,000 --> 00:49:57,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then in the nineteen hundreds you start getting

815
00:49:58,120 --> 00:50:02,600
Speaker 1: plenty of hubris. Still little more recognition, you know, of

816
00:50:02,880 --> 00:50:06,640
Speaker 1: relativity and you know, quantum physics and things like that.

817
00:50:06,960 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 1: Uncertainty principles and you know, all sorts of things that

818
00:50:10,840 --> 00:50:15,600
Speaker 1: scientists and engineers recognized made things more complicated. But in

819
00:50:15,680 --> 00:50:19,360
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century things looked a lot more linear and

820
00:50:19,680 --> 00:50:24,319
Speaker 1: you know, simpler. Frankly, they thought they could control the river.

821
00:50:25,239 --> 00:50:27,839
Speaker 1: They couldn't, you know, we sill can.

822
00:50:30,440 --> 00:50:34,560
Speaker 2: The nineteen twenty seven flood was major and it changed America.

823
00:50:35,280 --> 00:50:38,560
Speaker 2: Native Americans built mounds to escape floods, and the French

824
00:50:38,600 --> 00:50:41,920
Speaker 2: built the first primitive levees in the early seventeen hundreds

825
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:45,960
Speaker 2: in New Orleans, and from then on, primitive hand built

826
00:50:46,040 --> 00:50:50,000
Speaker 2: levees were along the river, often built by slaves. In

827
00:50:50,040 --> 00:50:53,600
Speaker 2: eighteen forty four, crude and small levees less than ten

828
00:50:53,640 --> 00:50:56,000
Speaker 2: feet high, a lot of them like five feet high,

829
00:50:56,280 --> 00:50:58,719
Speaker 2: went from New Orleans up to the mouth of the

830
00:50:58,800 --> 00:51:03,920
Speaker 2: Arkansas River. By eighteen fifty eight, small levees reached intermittently

831
00:51:04,239 --> 00:51:07,200
Speaker 2: all the way to kro Illinois, but it wasn't until

832
00:51:07,239 --> 00:51:10,040
Speaker 2: after the Civil War. In eighteen seventy nine, the Mississippi

833
00:51:10,120 --> 00:51:13,880
Speaker 2: River Levee Commission was formed, giving levee building and control

834
00:51:13,920 --> 00:51:16,880
Speaker 2: to the federal government. This is big today. The levees

835
00:51:16,960 --> 00:51:20,080
Speaker 2: starting near Cape Girardo, Missouri and end of the Gulf

836
00:51:20,120 --> 00:51:24,200
Speaker 2: of Mexico and include over thirty seven hundred miles of levee.

837
00:51:24,480 --> 00:51:28,399
Speaker 2: Today most of them are thirty feet tall. But let's

838
00:51:28,480 --> 00:51:32,359
Speaker 2: get back to our story. So inside the levees, the

839
00:51:32,480 --> 00:51:36,400
Speaker 2: river side, the flood prone side, the river meanders and

840
00:51:36,480 --> 00:51:42,080
Speaker 2: follows its natural pattern of flooding. Here's will Primos.

841
00:51:41,960 --> 00:51:44,960
Speaker 7: To pound it into you to understand. There is a

842
00:51:45,040 --> 00:51:52,120
Speaker 7: place south of Vicksburg called Windsor Ruins. It was a

843
00:51:52,160 --> 00:51:56,279
Speaker 7: plantation home at today's time. I have no how many

844
00:51:56,480 --> 00:51:58,840
Speaker 7: how many tens of millions the home would have cost,

845
00:51:58,920 --> 00:52:01,120
Speaker 7: but a lot of the the stuff was shipped in

846
00:52:01,320 --> 00:52:04,800
Speaker 7: by boat from France and up the river and built

847
00:52:05,239 --> 00:52:07,560
Speaker 7: from the home. I understand.

848
00:52:07,719 --> 00:52:09,560
Speaker 3: All that's left from Windsor.

849
00:52:09,280 --> 00:52:13,400
Speaker 7: Ruins is the columns is the I guess they're granite.

850
00:52:14,160 --> 00:52:16,640
Speaker 7: You could go and see them. They're beautiful columns that

851
00:52:16,719 --> 00:52:19,920
Speaker 7: are tall. They're in the middle of the woods. From

852
00:52:19,960 --> 00:52:25,360
Speaker 7: that location, which is near the town I believe it's Bruinsburg, Mississippi,

853
00:52:26,040 --> 00:52:29,000
Speaker 7: you could see the Mississippi River. You can no longer

854
00:52:29,040 --> 00:52:33,160
Speaker 7: see the Mississippi River from there because the river changed courses.

855
00:52:33,920 --> 00:52:38,640
Speaker 7: That's why I may be on the Louisiana side of

856
00:52:38,680 --> 00:52:42,640
Speaker 7: the river, but I'm actually standing on Mississippi soil, because

857
00:52:42,680 --> 00:52:46,880
Speaker 7: when the boundaries were drawn, that was Mississippi land. But

858
00:52:46,920 --> 00:52:51,759
Speaker 7: the river changed courses, so the river doesn't necessarily split Arkansas,

859
00:52:51,800 --> 00:52:56,440
Speaker 7: Louisiana and Mississippi perfectly. There is Arkansas land that is

860
00:52:56,480 --> 00:52:59,640
Speaker 7: on the Mississippi right side of the river. Because the

861
00:52:59,760 --> 00:53:01,760
Speaker 7: river changed courses.

862
00:53:02,480 --> 00:53:06,280
Speaker 2: The river creates the boundary line between many states Missouri

863
00:53:06,280 --> 00:53:11,920
Speaker 2: and Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, Mississippi and Louisiana.

864
00:53:12,000 --> 00:53:14,239
Speaker 2: Go look at your on X and you'll see the

865
00:53:14,360 --> 00:53:17,720
Speaker 2: jumble of islands, oxbow lakes, and cut off meander bins

866
00:53:17,719 --> 00:53:20,759
Speaker 2: along the river, especially the lower Mississippi from Memphis to

867
00:53:20,800 --> 00:53:23,520
Speaker 2: Baton Rouge, and you'll see an incredible amount of these

868
00:53:23,560 --> 00:53:25,960
Speaker 2: states that are now on the other side of the

869
00:53:26,040 --> 00:53:30,439
Speaker 2: river from their state. We're still learning the man made

870
00:53:30,480 --> 00:53:34,200
Speaker 2: structures of the river. Let's talk about dikes or jetties.

871
00:53:34,840 --> 00:53:37,040
Speaker 2: Here's doctor Kilgore with double l's.

872
00:53:40,040 --> 00:53:43,080
Speaker 6: So they are about eight hundred dikes along the lower

873
00:53:43,080 --> 00:53:47,400
Speaker 6: Mississippi River and they're a stone structure that can extend

874
00:53:47,760 --> 00:53:52,080
Speaker 6: two thousand feet perpendicular to the shore. And their purpose

875
00:53:52,640 --> 00:53:56,880
Speaker 6: is to create and maintain a self scouring channel. So

876
00:53:57,040 --> 00:54:00,680
Speaker 6: as the water is coming from upstream to downstream, they'll

877
00:54:00,719 --> 00:54:04,520
Speaker 6: hit these dikes. The dikes then funnel the water out

878
00:54:04,560 --> 00:54:08,560
Speaker 6: towards the main channel and you get higher velocities, which

879
00:54:08,600 --> 00:54:13,720
Speaker 6: then scours the main channel and keeps it free of sediment.

880
00:54:14,800 --> 00:54:17,080
Speaker 6: And so the whole purpose of the dikes is to

881
00:54:17,239 --> 00:54:18,640
Speaker 6: minimize dredging.

882
00:54:18,800 --> 00:54:21,719
Speaker 2: Okay, so if you didn't have dikes, you might have

883
00:54:21,880 --> 00:54:24,719
Speaker 2: a wide, shallow channel exactly.

884
00:54:25,040 --> 00:54:28,640
Speaker 6: In fact, pre European the Mississippi River was a lot

885
00:54:28,680 --> 00:54:31,760
Speaker 6: more braided than it is today. It's more now it's

886
00:54:31,840 --> 00:54:36,000
Speaker 6: really just a sinuous, snaky kind of river, and it's

887
00:54:36,040 --> 00:54:39,000
Speaker 6: called meander belts. And those meander belts have switched back

888
00:54:39,040 --> 00:54:41,680
Speaker 6: and forth over the last two or three thousand years

889
00:54:42,000 --> 00:54:46,520
Speaker 6: they've been mapped, creating this one hundred mile wide valley

890
00:54:46,600 --> 00:54:47,160
Speaker 6: down here.

891
00:54:47,480 --> 00:54:49,640
Speaker 2: So you would say from the dead center of the

892
00:54:49,680 --> 00:54:53,759
Speaker 2: Mississippi River, fifty miles on either side would have been

893
00:54:53,840 --> 00:54:56,840
Speaker 2: fair game to be flooded free Europea.

894
00:54:57,000 --> 00:54:59,759
Speaker 6: During the nineteen twenty seven flood, you could take a

895
00:54:59,760 --> 00:55:04,400
Speaker 6: boat from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Monroe, Louisiana, seventy miles because

896
00:55:04,440 --> 00:55:05,400
Speaker 6: the levees had broken.

897
00:55:06,320 --> 00:55:10,280
Speaker 2: The actual natural floodplain of the river before levees wouldn't

898
00:55:10,320 --> 00:55:12,680
Speaker 2: have been as clearcut as fifty miles on either side

899
00:55:12,680 --> 00:55:15,840
Speaker 2: of the river. Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less,

900
00:55:16,080 --> 00:55:19,040
Speaker 2: but the idea of a one hundred mile wide floodplain

901
00:55:19,280 --> 00:55:24,080
Speaker 2: is legit. In summary, we've been learning about the energy

902
00:55:24,120 --> 00:55:27,640
Speaker 2: of rivers and their hydraulic complexity and their drive to

903
00:55:27,680 --> 00:55:31,560
Speaker 2: carry sediment. We've learned about levees and dykes or jetties

904
00:55:32,040 --> 00:55:34,760
Speaker 2: and cutoffs, and we got a sense of the sheer

905
00:55:34,920 --> 00:55:38,200
Speaker 2: size of this river. We've learned some about the early

906
00:55:38,320 --> 00:55:41,600
Speaker 2: human history of the river and its importance to America.

907
00:55:42,360 --> 00:55:46,680
Speaker 2: Here's Hank Burdine. Lake Ferguson is an oxbow lake of

908
00:55:46,680 --> 00:55:47,480
Speaker 2: the Mississippi.

909
00:55:48,320 --> 00:55:52,839
Speaker 3: Growing up on Lake Ferguson, Dad had a boat. We'd

910
00:55:52,880 --> 00:55:55,319
Speaker 3: go out on the lake. Didn't go out on the

911
00:55:55,400 --> 00:55:56,960
Speaker 3: river much. He did.

912
00:55:57,880 --> 00:56:01,480
Speaker 4: We did, miss kids, and once I got up to

913
00:56:01,520 --> 00:56:04,640
Speaker 4: where I had my own boat, it was always to you.

914
00:56:04,640 --> 00:56:06,879
Speaker 4: You didn't go out on the river because that river

915
00:56:06,960 --> 00:56:12,040
Speaker 4: was a bad bogart hunah, and there was a inherent

916
00:56:12,440 --> 00:56:15,880
Speaker 4: I'm not going to say fear. You were taught to

917
00:56:15,920 --> 00:56:19,080
Speaker 4: stay in the lake, stay in slack water because the

918
00:56:19,120 --> 00:56:23,520
Speaker 4: big river had currents. You had eighties, you had whirlpools,

919
00:56:23,800 --> 00:56:27,040
Speaker 4: you had upsurges, you had dropped down where rivers dropped

920
00:56:27,080 --> 00:56:30,319
Speaker 4: down two three feet and come back up. Because of

921
00:56:30,400 --> 00:56:34,360
Speaker 4: the nature of the river, it is a dangerous system

922
00:56:34,400 --> 00:56:34,880
Speaker 4: out there.

923
00:56:35,080 --> 00:56:36,400
Speaker 3: You got to be real careful.

924
00:56:37,080 --> 00:56:40,480
Speaker 4: Yet, as we grew up and began to nudge ot

925
00:56:40,560 --> 00:56:42,720
Speaker 4: in there, we learned.

926
00:56:43,000 --> 00:56:45,640
Speaker 3: Respect for the river. You learned what to look for.

927
00:56:46,239 --> 00:56:51,080
Speaker 4: You learned the intricacies of what the river is and

928
00:56:51,120 --> 00:56:54,840
Speaker 4: what it does, how it does it, and why it

929
00:56:54,920 --> 00:56:58,479
Speaker 4: does it. I don't say fear the river, never feel

930
00:56:58,520 --> 00:57:02,840
Speaker 4: the river. Respect the river, and respect the river for

931
00:57:02,920 --> 00:57:04,719
Speaker 4: what it is and what.

932
00:57:04,719 --> 00:57:05,480
Speaker 3: It can do.

933
00:57:06,440 --> 00:57:11,840
Speaker 4: The river is such a dynamic system in itself. To me,

934
00:57:12,760 --> 00:57:17,720
Speaker 4: the Mississippi River is one of our last wilderness areas.

935
00:57:17,280 --> 00:57:20,240
Speaker 3: We have, and I love what stay that way.

936
00:57:21,240 --> 00:57:22,880
Speaker 4: You know, we're getting a lot of cruise boats up

937
00:57:22,920 --> 00:57:26,080
Speaker 4: in there now, coming up from all over every where,

938
00:57:26,520 --> 00:57:29,040
Speaker 4: paddlewheel boats, tourists, hear all about it. We want to

939
00:57:29,040 --> 00:57:32,880
Speaker 4: see it, want to get on it. But uh, I

940
00:57:33,040 --> 00:57:35,000
Speaker 4: like to hit that river when you don't see anybody

941
00:57:35,000 --> 00:57:38,840
Speaker 4: for three hours other than towboat every nine there, you

942
00:57:38,880 --> 00:57:39,840
Speaker 4: know that's the river.

943
00:57:40,080 --> 00:57:43,040
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an interesting thought to think about a river

944
00:57:43,760 --> 00:57:47,280
Speaker 2: as wilderness. I like it, I mean, and I think

945
00:57:47,320 --> 00:57:50,760
Speaker 2: it's real because it's it's a system. Even though it's

946
00:57:50,760 --> 00:57:54,880
Speaker 2: been manipulated by man, the system is still very natural

947
00:57:55,200 --> 00:57:57,160
Speaker 2: and is it's a wild place.

948
00:57:57,440 --> 00:58:01,320
Speaker 4: It is, especially what we call the lower from Kroe

949
00:58:01,320 --> 00:58:05,640
Speaker 4: down where you've got floodwater areas, where we've got levees,

950
00:58:06,280 --> 00:58:07,800
Speaker 4: other areas and on other rivers.

951
00:58:07,800 --> 00:58:09,040
Speaker 3: You've got towns.

952
00:58:08,640 --> 00:58:11,360
Speaker 4: Here, you've got little parks here, you got all there

953
00:58:11,440 --> 00:58:13,360
Speaker 4: somewhat tame rivers here.

954
00:58:13,360 --> 00:58:14,840
Speaker 3: You've got a wildly wool of river.

955
00:58:15,520 --> 00:58:18,240
Speaker 4: A good part of it down here is protected by

956
00:58:18,320 --> 00:58:23,280
Speaker 4: levees within the what we call the batcher between the levees.

957
00:58:23,320 --> 00:58:26,960
Speaker 4: The land between the levees that flood. You can't build

958
00:58:26,960 --> 00:58:29,160
Speaker 4: a house, and unless you build it fifteen sixteen twenty

959
00:58:29,200 --> 00:58:30,120
Speaker 4: feet up off the ground.

960
00:58:40,760 --> 00:58:43,600
Speaker 2: What I didn't understand until I went on the river

961
00:58:43,680 --> 00:58:47,160
Speaker 2: myself is that from Memphis to Vicksburg there are very

962
00:58:47,200 --> 00:58:50,880
Speaker 2: few towns that actually touch the Mississippi River. It floods

963
00:58:50,920 --> 00:58:53,760
Speaker 2: and you can't build inside the levees. So if you're

964
00:58:53,800 --> 00:58:57,240
Speaker 2: traveling down the river you see Sits not much different

965
00:58:57,280 --> 00:59:00,000
Speaker 2: than Mark Twain did, and it's a bit of a stretch,

966
00:59:00,560 --> 00:59:03,200
Speaker 2: but not as much as you'd think. It probably looks

967
00:59:03,280 --> 00:59:08,280
Speaker 2: close to what Hernando DeSoto saw, a wild, wooly river,

968
00:59:08,880 --> 00:59:13,960
Speaker 2: a wilderness. We've got an incredible cast of storytellers guiding

969
00:59:14,040 --> 00:59:17,200
Speaker 2: us into an understanding of this mighty river. If we

970
00:59:17,360 --> 00:59:20,000
Speaker 2: just heard from people from one discipline, our view would

971
00:59:20,000 --> 00:59:22,680
Speaker 2: be narrow. But we've had people looking at the river

972
00:59:22,800 --> 00:59:26,600
Speaker 2: from many different angles and disciplines. My whole life, I've

973
00:59:26,640 --> 00:59:29,960
Speaker 2: wanted to understand this river, and I knew that I didn't.

974
00:59:30,560 --> 00:59:35,040
Speaker 2: This series is my personal journey to understand it. On

975
00:59:35,200 --> 00:59:39,360
Speaker 2: this episode, we laid a foundation, but we're just getting started.

976
00:59:39,880 --> 00:59:42,160
Speaker 2: In the next episode, we'll talk about the men who

977
00:59:42,280 --> 00:59:45,880
Speaker 2: tame this river, the engineers, and the ones who told

978
00:59:45,960 --> 00:59:50,120
Speaker 2: America about its soul, the writers. I can't thank you

979
00:59:50,240 --> 00:59:53,720
Speaker 2: enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our podcast

980
00:59:53,800 --> 00:59:57,400
Speaker 2: with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes.

981
00:59:58,000 --> 01:00:01,760
Speaker 2: I look forward to talking all the folks on The

982
01:00:01,760 --> 01:00:04,240
Speaker 2: Bearer Is Render next week.