WEBVTT - Ep. 126: The Mississippi River - Strong Brown God (Part 1) 0:00:05.360 --> 0:00:09.600 The Mississippi River is so central every element of American history. 0:00:10.000 --> 0:00:15.280 The entire system was key to all transportation and communication 0:00:15.840 --> 0:00:17.720 across much of the country. 0:00:18.760 --> 0:00:22.440 On this episode, we're talking about what some Native American 0:00:22.520 --> 0:00:26.639 tribes called the river beyond any Age, and others called 0:00:26.640 --> 0:00:30.000 it the Father of waters. We're talking about the Mississippi River. 0:00:30.680 --> 0:00:32.839 This is a big bite, and it will take a 0:00:33.000 --> 0:00:36.560 diverse cast of storytellers for us to understand the river 0:00:37.040 --> 0:00:41.040 and its impact on America. New York Times bestselling author 0:00:41.200 --> 0:00:45.400 John Berry will be our guests, along with author Hank Berdine. 0:00:45.880 --> 0:00:49.840 A hydraulic engineer also will be here, a fisheries biologist, 0:00:50.000 --> 0:00:52.599 and a feller by the name of Will Primos, And 0:00:52.640 --> 0:00:55.840 we'll even hear the words of Mark Twain and T. S. 0:00:55.880 --> 0:00:56.360 Eliott. 0:00:56.920 --> 0:00:59.360 This has been a long time coming for me, and 0:00:59.400 --> 0:01:02.960 I'm on a personal journey to understand the significance of 0:01:02.960 --> 0:01:06.400 this American river on this country and on my life. 0:01:07.160 --> 0:01:10.160 The current will be swift in the water muddy, but 0:01:10.240 --> 0:01:13.000 I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one. 0:01:13.400 --> 0:01:15.720 You got the West Coast, you got the Gulf Coast, 0:01:15.959 --> 0:01:18.440 you got to Atlantic Coast, and you've got the Missippi 0:01:18.520 --> 0:01:21.200 River on and right up the middle of America. 0:01:21.360 --> 0:01:22.360 That's the fourth Coast. 0:01:31.760 --> 0:01:34.400 My name is Klay nukemb and this is the Bear 0:01:34.480 --> 0:01:39.440 Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search 0:01:39.520 --> 0:01:43.160 for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the 0:01:43.200 --> 0:01:47.320 story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. 0:01:48.000 --> 0:01:53.720 Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and 0:01:53.800 --> 0:01:57.240 fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the 0:01:57.280 --> 0:01:58.480 place as we explore. 0:02:06.040 --> 0:02:08.560 I do not know much about gods, but I think 0:02:08.600 --> 0:02:13.160 that the River is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed, 0:02:13.360 --> 0:02:18.079 and intractable, patient to some degree. At first recognized as 0:02:18.120 --> 0:02:24.079 a frontier, useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce, then 0:02:24.120 --> 0:02:28.120 only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem, 0:02:28.160 --> 0:02:30.919 once solved, the brown God is almost forgotten by the 0:02:31.000 --> 0:02:36.680 dwellers in cities. Ever, however, implacable, keeping his seasons and 0:02:36.800 --> 0:02:42.880 rages destroyer reminder of what men choose to forget, unhonored, 0:02:43.600 --> 0:02:50.280 unpropitiated by worshippers of the machine. But watching, waiting, and watching. 0:03:06.720 --> 0:03:10.639 I'm in a twenty three foot flat bottom boat. She's sturdy, 0:03:10.919 --> 0:03:13.360 but looks like she's been up the river a few times, 0:03:14.000 --> 0:03:18.240 but so does my captain Hank. Where are we going, Hank? 0:03:19.040 --> 0:03:22.040 On the river, the Mississippi River. 0:03:23.520 --> 0:03:25.680 I once asked Hank how old he was, and he 0:03:25.720 --> 0:03:28.280 told me he quit keeping track, but he thought his 0:03:28.520 --> 0:03:31.720 daughter knew. His hair looks like a cluster of white 0:03:31.760 --> 0:03:36.160 cotton balls. His face shows the dignity of age, and 0:03:36.240 --> 0:03:39.400 his accent sounds about what you figure an alligator would 0:03:39.440 --> 0:03:39.880 sound like. 0:03:40.880 --> 0:03:44.040 I mean Lay Fertherson that used to be the river 0:03:45.160 --> 0:03:49.920 in nineteen thirty eight, took out the gravel, bene created 0:03:49.920 --> 0:03:51.800 the flag of water harbor. 0:03:52.720 --> 0:03:55.360 He got thirty eight mile to the river. Lem he 0:03:55.440 --> 0:03:56.560 running up and I see what he did. 0:04:05.440 --> 0:04:09.160 The river is always changing. The only constant of an 0:04:09.200 --> 0:04:12.920 alluvial river is change. Only in the last one hundred 0:04:12.920 --> 0:04:15.680 and fifty years has that change been induced by man. 0:04:16.240 --> 0:04:20.320 This is the story of an ancient, untameable system in 0:04:20.440 --> 0:04:23.599 man's connection to it. That poem that you heard a 0:04:23.600 --> 0:04:26.760 few minutes ago, the one that said, I think the 0:04:26.880 --> 0:04:30.600 river is a strong brown god. This is the beginning 0:04:30.640 --> 0:04:34.240 of a poem by T. S. Eliot describing the Mississippi River. 0:04:34.960 --> 0:04:38.039 But that was the voice reading it of the author 0:04:38.160 --> 0:04:41.039 John Barry. He wrote a book in nineteen ninety seven 0:04:41.200 --> 0:04:45.159 called Rising Tide, The Great Mississippi Flood of nineteen twenty 0:04:45.200 --> 0:04:48.839 seven and How It Changed America. The book is considered 0:04:48.880 --> 0:04:51.240 by many to be one of the top works of 0:04:51.320 --> 0:04:56.320 American non fiction in modern times. This is the opening 0:04:56.440 --> 0:05:03.120 paragraph of his book. The Valley of the Mississippi River 0:05:03.200 --> 0:05:07.360 stretches north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico, 0:05:07.560 --> 0:05:11.120 east from New York and North Carolina, and west to 0:05:11.200 --> 0:05:14.880 Idaho and New Mexico. It is a valley twenty percent 0:05:15.040 --> 0:05:18.400 larger than that of China's Yellow River, double that of 0:05:18.480 --> 0:05:24.560 Africa's Nile, and India's Ganges, fifteen times that of Europe's Rhine. 0:05:25.120 --> 0:05:29.040 Within it lies forty one percent of the continentally United States, 0:05:29.279 --> 0:05:33.559 including all or part of thirty one states. No river 0:05:33.680 --> 0:05:36.839 in Europe, no river in the Orient, no river in 0:05:36.880 --> 0:05:40.880 the ancient civilized world compares to it. Only the Amazon 0:05:41.000 --> 0:05:44.919 and barely the Congo have a larger drainage basin measured 0:05:44.960 --> 0:05:47.800 from the head of its tributary. The Missouri River as 0:05:47.839 --> 0:05:50.760 a logical starting point as any. The Mississippi is the 0:05:50.880 --> 0:05:54.400 longest river in the world, and it pulses like the 0:05:54.520 --> 0:05:59.080 artery of the American heartland. To control the Mississippi River, 0:05:59.520 --> 0:06:02.719 not simply to find a modus vivendi with it, but 0:06:02.800 --> 0:06:06.279 to control it, to dictate it, to make it conform, 0:06:06.760 --> 0:06:10.720 is a mighty task. It requires more than confidence, It 0:06:10.800 --> 0:06:16.520 requires hubris. This is a big river that helped define 0:06:16.600 --> 0:06:21.120 the American character. This is a big story. I've always 0:06:21.200 --> 0:06:25.880 been mesmerized and frankly fearful of big dark water. But 0:06:26.040 --> 0:06:29.520 why is this water dark? Like a strong brown god. 0:06:30.000 --> 0:06:33.160 The answer to this question is core to the identity 0:06:33.200 --> 0:06:37.760 of the river. Here's our boat captain and lifelong connoisseur 0:06:37.839 --> 0:06:40.200 of dark water, Hank Burdine. 0:06:40.760 --> 0:06:43.560 To me, it's all about the dirt. It's the dirt. 0:06:44.320 --> 0:06:46.919 It's the dirt that has come from forty one percent 0:06:47.680 --> 0:06:51.400 of the continental United States, in two provinces of Canada, 0:06:52.560 --> 0:06:54.840 all the way from the Allegany Mountain to New York 0:06:55.360 --> 0:06:59.080 to the Rocky Mountain of Montana. It's the watershed. It 0:06:59.120 --> 0:07:03.719 has brought what we call the Mississippi Delta and form 0:07:03.800 --> 0:07:10.200 the Misissippi Delta, which is the alluvial bottomland area of 0:07:10.240 --> 0:07:13.600 the Mississippi in the y Azure River. We call it 0:07:13.640 --> 0:07:18.800 the delta, and through the millenniums, the floods every year 0:07:19.320 --> 0:07:23.120 spring time winter time have brought saw from all over 0:07:23.120 --> 0:07:24.080 this country down here. 0:07:25.680 --> 0:07:28.680 If we could anthropomorphize the river and view it as 0:07:28.680 --> 0:07:32.880 a living bean, this monstrous alluvial river acts with great 0:07:32.960 --> 0:07:37.640 force to do one thing, move dirt. Moving dirt is 0:07:37.680 --> 0:07:41.400 its obsession, it's daily bread. Stay with me for a 0:07:41.440 --> 0:07:44.240 minute for a metaphor. If the banks of the river 0:07:44.280 --> 0:07:47.440 were the skeleton of a great beast and the floodplain 0:07:47.560 --> 0:07:51.080 its flesh, the water would be its blood, and the 0:07:51.120 --> 0:07:54.680 sediment load the dirt that the water carries would be 0:07:54.680 --> 0:07:58.120 the life in the blood. The river is furious and 0:07:58.200 --> 0:08:01.760 relentless in moving Dirt's one thing it can't not do. 0:08:02.160 --> 0:08:04.520 And we can't understand the story of this river until 0:08:04.520 --> 0:08:07.960 we understand the inner motivations and workings of the river. 0:08:08.720 --> 0:08:12.320 Though it is not a sentient being, it operates like 0:08:12.400 --> 0:08:15.440 one when it comes to adherence to the mission, and 0:08:15.480 --> 0:08:20.640 that mission influences man. I'm wildly interested in how natural 0:08:20.640 --> 0:08:25.320 systems impact men in ways we don't perceive. Alluvial rivers 0:08:25.360 --> 0:08:30.280 are incredibly complex. Water turbulence of river hydraulics are mysterious. 0:08:30.800 --> 0:08:33.920 A famous physicist once said that he'd like to ask 0:08:34.000 --> 0:08:39.480 God too questions, why relativity and why turbulence? And then 0:08:39.520 --> 0:08:42.200 he said, I think God may have the answer to 0:08:42.240 --> 0:08:46.280 the first question, insinuating that God doesn't even understand turbulence. 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:50.800 I take umbrage at the assumption, but I get the point. 0:08:51.160 --> 0:08:55.400 It's complex, and there are people who've dedicated their lives 0:08:55.400 --> 0:08:56.720 to understanding rivers. 0:08:58.920 --> 0:09:01.640 When I first went to work with the Vicksburg District 0:09:01.679 --> 0:09:04.560 Corp of Engineers, I was in what they called the 0:09:04.559 --> 0:09:09.040 potomology section. Potomology is not probably ringing a beil with you. Nope, 0:09:09.440 --> 0:09:13.360 it doesn't ring a bell with most anybody. But potomology 0:09:13.480 --> 0:09:15.520 is a science of rivers. 0:09:16.640 --> 0:09:20.920 That was doctor David Beadenharn, a research hydraulic engineer for 0:09:20.960 --> 0:09:24.720 the Core of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In his own words, 0:09:24.760 --> 0:09:28.200 he's a river geek. He's got an equation drawn on 0:09:28.280 --> 0:09:31.080 a whiteboard, and we're about to get a science lesson. 0:09:31.760 --> 0:09:34.800 Actually, i've drawn it up on the board there. That's 0:09:34.840 --> 0:09:38.320 not an equation up at the top. That's a relationship 0:09:38.920 --> 0:09:42.440 that says that the water discharge, how much water is 0:09:42.440 --> 0:09:45.000 in the river times the slope of the river. How 0:09:45.040 --> 0:09:48.160 steep is the river. That's what we call stream power. 0:09:49.040 --> 0:09:52.560 That's the ability of the river to do work. Rivers 0:09:52.760 --> 0:09:55.880 they can either have more water to get energy, or 0:09:55.920 --> 0:10:00.680 they can increase their slope to get more energy and discharge. 0:10:00.800 --> 0:10:04.840 Q try and slope. It's a surrogate for a stream power. 0:10:05.240 --> 0:10:08.600 The energy and work is moving sediment moving exactly. 0:10:08.640 --> 0:10:12.120 And that's the other side of the relationship that Q subs. 0:10:12.840 --> 0:10:16.000 That's the settlement load. That's how much sediment is moving. 0:10:16.440 --> 0:10:19.720 So on the left hand side of that relationship is 0:10:19.760 --> 0:10:21.320 the power. 0:10:21.000 --> 0:10:22.520 And the energy that a river has. 0:10:23.160 --> 0:10:24.800 And on the right hand side is what it is 0:10:24.880 --> 0:10:28.680 doing that spending that power and energy to do do 0:10:28.800 --> 0:10:32.040 work and move sediment. That's the way rivers behave. 0:10:33.800 --> 0:10:37.520 Stream power is the river's ability to do work. That's 0:10:37.559 --> 0:10:41.840 the way rivers behave. Like a beaver building dams. The 0:10:41.880 --> 0:10:45.240 core of this river is moving dirt. Here's an example 0:10:45.360 --> 0:10:48.319 of how much dirt the river can move and how 0:10:48.360 --> 0:10:51.520 quickly it can be done. A revetment, which he's about 0:10:51.559 --> 0:10:55.000 to talk about, is a concrete mattress placed on the 0:10:55.120 --> 0:10:56.800 riverbank to stop erosion. 0:10:57.440 --> 0:11:00.160 It was down in the New Orleans district where the 0:11:00.880 --> 0:11:04.560 revetment was placed on the river bank in nineteen seventy eight, 0:11:04.800 --> 0:11:08.560 and the mattress goes, you know, from top bank all 0:11:08.600 --> 0:11:10.520 the way down to what we call the thowl wag 0:11:10.760 --> 0:11:13.640 of the river of thoal Wag is just the lowest 0:11:13.880 --> 0:11:15.959 point in the cross section of the cover, so the 0:11:15.960 --> 0:11:20.160 bottom of the river, okayvalwag. They came back and they 0:11:20.200 --> 0:11:22.920 surveyed it and at the bed of the river where 0:11:22.960 --> 0:11:27.000 the mattress met the bed back in nineteen seventy eight, 0:11:27.360 --> 0:11:29.920 they surveyed it in May of nineteen eighty four. It 0:11:30.000 --> 0:11:33.959 is scoured sixty feet. Sixty feet is a pretty big 0:11:34.000 --> 0:11:38.240 scour hole. Wow, well, that got their attention, so they 0:11:38.240 --> 0:11:41.000 mobilize the troops. They're going to come back in and 0:11:41.040 --> 0:11:43.640 do some repair work to make sure that revetment is 0:11:43.720 --> 0:11:47.400 stable and so in the process. One month later, in 0:11:47.480 --> 0:11:49.920 June of nineteen eighty four, they came back to get 0:11:49.920 --> 0:11:53.360 another survey to know exactly what they had. It filled 0:11:53.400 --> 0:11:54.480 back in forty feet. 0:11:55.679 --> 0:11:58.960 That's an incredible amount of dirt moving around in a 0:11:59.120 --> 0:12:02.240 sixty foot dar deep scour. Filling in forty feet in 0:12:02.280 --> 0:12:07.000 a month, that's incredible. Here's another excerpt from John Berry's 0:12:07.200 --> 0:12:12.920 rising tide, the river's main current can reach nine miles 0:12:12.960 --> 0:12:17.040 an hour, while some currents can move much faster During floods, 0:12:17.240 --> 0:12:20.920 measurable effects of an approaching floodcrest can roar down river 0:12:21.200 --> 0:12:24.960 at almost eighteen miles an hour. And for the last 0:12:25.040 --> 0:12:28.160 four hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi's flow, the 0:12:28.280 --> 0:12:32.800 river bed lies below sea level, fifteen feet below sea 0:12:32.840 --> 0:12:36.319 level at Vicksburg well over one hundred and seventy feet 0:12:36.320 --> 0:12:39.439 below sea level at New Orleans. For this four hundred 0:12:39.440 --> 0:12:42.080 and fifty miles, the water on the bottom has no 0:12:42.240 --> 0:12:45.240 reason to flow at all, but the water above it does. 0:12:45.640 --> 0:12:49.000 This creates a tumbling effect as water spills over itself 0:12:49.360 --> 0:12:53.840 like an enormous, ever breaking internal wave. This tumbling effect 0:12:53.920 --> 0:12:57.040 can attack a river bank or a levee like a buzzsaal. 0:12:58.000 --> 0:13:00.839 But the final complexity of the lower mia Mississippi is 0:13:00.880 --> 0:13:05.040 its sediment load, an understanding that was key to understanding 0:13:05.120 --> 0:13:08.360 how to control the river. Every day, the river deposits 0:13:08.360 --> 0:13:12.439 between several hundred thousand and several million tons of earth 0:13:12.480 --> 0:13:15.600 into the Gulf of Mexico. At least some geologists put 0:13:15.640 --> 0:13:18.719 this figure even higher. Historically, at an average of more 0:13:18.760 --> 0:13:22.599 than two million tons a day by geologic standards. The 0:13:22.640 --> 0:13:26.840 Lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream and runs 0:13:26.880 --> 0:13:30.440 through what is known as the Mississippi Embayment, a declevity 0:13:30.480 --> 0:13:34.320 covering approximately thirty five thousand miles that begins thirty miles 0:13:34.360 --> 0:13:39.240 north of Kiro to Cape Girardo, Missouri, geologically the true 0:13:39.360 --> 0:13:42.320 head of the Mississippi Delta, and extends to the Gulf 0:13:42.360 --> 0:13:46.320 of Mexico. At one time, the Gulf itself reached to 0:13:46.400 --> 0:13:50.920 Cape Girardo. Then sea level fell. Over thousands of years, 0:13:50.960 --> 0:13:54.360 the river and its tributaries have poured twelve hundred and 0:13:54.440 --> 0:13:58.480 eighty cubic miles of sediment, the equivalent of twelve hundred 0:13:58.480 --> 0:14:02.280 and eighty separate mountains of earth, each one mile high, 0:14:02.640 --> 0:14:06.360 a mile wide, and a mile long, into this declevity. 0:14:07.000 --> 0:14:10.280 Aided by the falling sea level, this sediment filled in 0:14:10.400 --> 0:14:14.760 the Embayment and made land throughout the mississippis alluvial valley. 0:14:14.800 --> 0:14:18.360 This sedimentary deposit has an average thickness of one hundred 0:14:18.360 --> 0:14:21.560 and thirty two feet. In some areas the deposits reach 0:14:21.680 --> 0:14:25.200 down three hundred and fifty feet. Its weight is great 0:14:25.320 --> 0:14:29.880 enough that some geologists believe its downward pressure pushed up 0:14:30.000 --> 0:14:36.760 surrounding land, creating hills. We've had a poet T. S. Eliot, 0:14:36.920 --> 0:14:40.920 a delta philosopher Hank Berdine, a writer John Barry, and 0:14:40.960 --> 0:14:45.320 a hydrologist, doctor Beadenharn tell us the same thing. It's 0:14:45.320 --> 0:14:48.800 all about the dirt where science, culture and art meet. 0:14:48.960 --> 0:14:52.600 That's where you find the story. An alluvial river is 0:14:52.640 --> 0:14:55.280 one in which the banks are mobile and shift. It 0:14:55.400 --> 0:14:59.160 meanders and weaves through its floodplain, as opposed to a 0:14:59.240 --> 0:15:02.200 river with bedroo banks in a bed that never shifts. 0:15:02.680 --> 0:15:06.760 The floodplain is the area along the river subject to flooding. 0:15:07.280 --> 0:15:09.920 The Mississippi has been putting on a dirt moving clinic 0:15:10.040 --> 0:15:13.280 since before the first humans arrived on this continent and 0:15:13.320 --> 0:15:17.000 when giant ground sloss walked on their knuckles on its banks. 0:15:17.400 --> 0:15:20.400 But to understand the Mississippi River today, we've got to 0:15:20.480 --> 0:15:25.000 understand the size of its drainage basin. Thirty one states 0:15:25.320 --> 0:15:31.880 two Canadian provinces are drained by the river. Here's John Berry. 0:15:32.240 --> 0:15:37.160 Well, the drainage basin is the third largest drainage basin. 0:15:37.760 --> 0:15:40.480 You know, the Amazon's the biggest, and the Nile just 0:15:40.560 --> 0:15:42.960 barely edges out the Mississi. 0:15:42.520 --> 0:15:44.040 Square mileage of drainage. 0:15:44.200 --> 0:15:48.200 It's like one point two four million square miles, Okay, 0:15:48.760 --> 0:15:51.720 So that's it's a lot of square miles. And you know, 0:15:51.840 --> 0:15:54.680 in terms of flow, you know, the state of Texas 0:15:54.800 --> 0:15:57.840 is looking out twenty thirty years to its water needs, 0:15:58.280 --> 0:16:01.840 and it thinks it needs something like ten million acre 0:16:01.840 --> 0:16:05.280 feet of water in future years to meet its needs. 0:16:06.080 --> 0:16:12.080 A year in flood, the Mississippi River is carrying in 0:16:12.120 --> 0:16:15.440 a great flood, you know, maybe four and a half 0:16:15.800 --> 0:16:21.160 million acre feet a day. So you just think of that, 0:16:21.160 --> 0:16:24.320 that a couple of days flow of the Mississippi River 0:16:24.400 --> 0:16:27.680 in a flood is it would be enough to satisfy 0:16:28.280 --> 0:16:30.400 all the water needs for the state of Texas for 0:16:30.400 --> 0:16:33.520 a year. You know, when I think of the Mississippi River, 0:16:33.800 --> 0:16:36.760 I actually think of the entire system. When you think 0:16:36.760 --> 0:16:38.840 of it, you may just think of essentially a straight 0:16:38.880 --> 0:16:42.120 line from Minnesota to the Gulf, but that's not how 0:16:42.160 --> 0:16:42.920 I conceive of it. 0:16:44.400 --> 0:16:47.600 In the world, only the Amazon and Nile rivers have 0:16:47.760 --> 0:16:51.880 larger drainage basins. That's an incredible amount of water, and 0:16:51.920 --> 0:16:55.040 an acre foot is a weird unit of measurement to understand, 0:16:55.080 --> 0:16:57.400 but it's the amount of water needed to flood one 0:16:57.520 --> 0:17:00.800 acre at the depth of one foot. It takes a 0:17:00.800 --> 0:17:03.440 lot of voices to tell a story about the Mississippi River. 0:17:03.960 --> 0:17:07.720 This is doctor Jack Kilgore with two l's, a fisheries 0:17:07.760 --> 0:17:11.520 biologist for the corp of Engineers, telling the most unique 0:17:11.560 --> 0:17:14.760 feature of the river today. This is something to be 0:17:14.800 --> 0:17:15.239 proud of. 0:17:16.160 --> 0:17:18.640 All the other great rivers of the word, the Congo, 0:17:18.800 --> 0:17:22.920 the Nile of the ynt Sea, all of those they 0:17:22.960 --> 0:17:27.320 have dams near the mouth of the river, whereas the Mississippi, 0:17:27.560 --> 0:17:30.040 the first damn you encounter is up in Saint Louis, 0:17:30.080 --> 0:17:33.920 which is twelve hundred miles up. However, a fish can 0:17:33.960 --> 0:17:36.720 take a left on the Missouri and go another twelve 0:17:36.840 --> 0:17:39.920 hundred miles to the Gavin's Point damn on the Missouri. 0:17:40.440 --> 0:17:43.640 So I tell people this that if you put all 0:17:43.680 --> 0:17:47.919 of that together, there's almost twenty four hundred miles of 0:17:48.040 --> 0:17:52.760 free flowing Mississippi Missouri River. There's nothing else like that 0:17:52.880 --> 0:17:55.680 in the world except for the Amazon. All the other 0:17:55.720 --> 0:18:01.440 great rivers have been dammed, which influences settiment, transport, water quality, 0:18:01.920 --> 0:18:05.760 migratory fish, you know, has all those negative impacts. 0:18:07.760 --> 0:18:11.200 The Missouri River is roughly twenty four hundred miles long 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:15.040 and is America's longest river. It's longer than the Mississippi. 0:18:15.640 --> 0:18:19.560 It is dammed twelve hundred miles from its mouth. The 0:18:19.560 --> 0:18:23.480 Mississippi River, give or take, is about twenty three hundred 0:18:23.480 --> 0:18:26.359 and fifty miles in length from its headwater on Lake 0:18:26.400 --> 0:18:30.320 Atasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The first 0:18:30.359 --> 0:18:33.000 dam of the Mississippi River is in Saint Louis, one 0:18:33.000 --> 0:18:36.560 thousand miles from its mouth at the gulf. That's also 0:18:36.600 --> 0:18:39.520 where the Missouri runs into the Mississippi. I hope this 0:18:39.600 --> 0:18:41.280 is all adding up to you. That's a lot of 0:18:41.359 --> 0:18:44.359 numbers unless you've got a scratch pad. Let me do 0:18:44.480 --> 0:18:49.800 the math. Combining the Missouri and Mississippi. There's almost twenty 0:18:49.800 --> 0:18:53.600 four hundred miles of free flowing river free of dams. 0:18:53.800 --> 0:18:57.720 Free flowing means free of dams. This is major. It's 0:18:57.760 --> 0:19:01.280 probably even tattoo worthy. I can see it now, the 0:19:01.400 --> 0:19:04.439 number twenty four hundred sketched over a muddy river with 0:19:04.480 --> 0:19:07.320 an American flag blowing on the bank, with an eagle 0:19:07.359 --> 0:19:12.040 flying through the sky. I'm kidding. Don't get that tattooed. 0:19:12.040 --> 0:19:12.240 On you. 0:19:12.800 --> 0:19:16.800 But long before America had a flag and tattoos were trendy, 0:19:17.320 --> 0:19:21.000 this land had the river. But how long has the 0:19:21.119 --> 0:19:23.960 river been here? Here's doctor Kilgore. 0:19:25.240 --> 0:19:28.639 Really, it was formed at the end of when the 0:19:28.640 --> 0:19:32.119 glaciers began to melt about ten thousand years ago, and 0:19:32.240 --> 0:19:35.320 all of that glacial and all that material started pouring 0:19:35.400 --> 0:19:39.439 down and creating this meandering river. It became kind of 0:19:39.520 --> 0:19:41.800 more of a braided river because of all that washlow. 0:19:42.119 --> 0:19:45.760 It remained unchanged for ten thousand years, and then in 0:19:45.840 --> 0:19:48.680 nineteen thirty the Core came in there and started their 0:19:48.760 --> 0:19:52.600 Massy flood control project, and that's what locked the river 0:19:52.680 --> 0:19:53.159 in place. 0:19:56.000 --> 0:19:58.800 That was a simple answer to a very complex question. 0:19:59.280 --> 0:20:01.640 And I can't keep these guys from getting too far 0:20:01.680 --> 0:20:04.600 ahead in our story. He just jumped from ten thousand 0:20:04.680 --> 0:20:07.800 years ago to the infamous nineteen twenty seven flood like 0:20:07.800 --> 0:20:12.320 it was a ballet step. We'll talk about that later, Doc. Basically, 0:20:12.760 --> 0:20:14.919 the river has been in its current form since the 0:20:15.000 --> 0:20:18.399 last ice age, which ended ten thousand years ago. The 0:20:18.400 --> 0:20:22.080 Mississippi River Valley drainage basin, the whole thing from the 0:20:22.200 --> 0:20:25.880 Rockies to the Appalachians was formed by the Laurentide ice 0:20:25.920 --> 0:20:29.639 sheet and carved out the valley over seventy million years ago. 0:20:30.200 --> 0:20:32.240 I think it's kind of arrogant to name an ice 0:20:32.240 --> 0:20:35.879 sheet like you'd name a pet, but whatever, I understand 0:20:35.880 --> 0:20:39.440 the pragmatism of it. But no human that our culture 0:20:39.520 --> 0:20:43.520 has had correspondence with saw this ice sheet to report 0:20:43.600 --> 0:20:46.520 about it to us. And I'm not saying that because 0:20:46.520 --> 0:20:49.080 I doubt that it was there. The ice sheet was there, 0:20:49.560 --> 0:20:51.520 but it's just kind of wild the amount of data 0:20:51.560 --> 0:20:54.639 that we can pull from the Earth's cryptic diary about 0:20:54.640 --> 0:20:58.080 its past life. It has recording mechanisms that take the 0:20:58.080 --> 0:21:02.400 form of glacially formed valley in lakes, mysterious piles of rock, 0:21:02.480 --> 0:21:06.200 and striations on bedrock that came from a two mile 0:21:06.400 --> 0:21:09.960 deep cap of ice that covered two thirds of North America. 0:21:10.680 --> 0:21:20.199 Lord have mercy. Perhaps it is self focused, but natural 0:21:20.240 --> 0:21:22.920 systems make more sense to us when we understand their 0:21:22.960 --> 0:21:27.000 overlap with our story, the human story. We've truly gotten 0:21:27.040 --> 0:21:30.240 no way of knowing who or where the first humans 0:21:30.280 --> 0:21:33.719 saw the Mississippi River, and it's kind of unfair that 0:21:33.760 --> 0:21:37.320 we give the Spaniard Hernando de Soto so much fanfare 0:21:37.440 --> 0:21:39.959 for being the first European to see the river in 0:21:40.000 --> 0:21:43.560 fifteen forty one, which he was, or you know, someone 0:21:43.600 --> 0:21:46.480 from his crew. But I'd like to take a minute 0:21:46.680 --> 0:21:50.720 and think about the first human that ever saw the river. 0:21:51.480 --> 0:21:55.160 Just slow down for a second. There was a very 0:21:55.200 --> 0:21:58.439 primitive man or woman that was the first to see it, 0:21:58.960 --> 0:22:01.160 or maybe it was a group of travelers who saw 0:22:01.200 --> 0:22:04.879 it all about the same time. Most archaeologists believed that 0:22:04.920 --> 0:22:07.359 the first humans on this continent came across the baring 0:22:07.440 --> 0:22:11.400 Land Bridge about fifteen thousand years ago, So that story 0:22:11.720 --> 0:22:14.840 would have these people approaching the river from the west. 0:22:15.440 --> 0:22:18.919 Now this is personal speculation. I've never read this, but 0:22:19.040 --> 0:22:22.720 it seems like it would have been somewhere south of Missouri, 0:22:23.000 --> 0:22:25.680 which was the southernmost tip of the Laurentide ice sheet. 0:22:26.200 --> 0:22:28.800 You should name your next dog Laurentide or even your 0:22:28.880 --> 0:22:32.960 kid without getting into a geology lesson. If that assumption 0:22:33.119 --> 0:22:36.960 is true, it's unlikely they'd have traveled across the Ozarks 0:22:37.000 --> 0:22:39.560 to get to the river, but likely went down the 0:22:39.640 --> 0:22:44.680 Arkansas River Valley, traveling in a southwesterly direction, perhaps seeing 0:22:44.720 --> 0:22:47.600 this great river for the first time around where the 0:22:47.760 --> 0:22:52.240 Arkansas and Mississippi meet. This is not scientific. It's just 0:22:52.280 --> 0:22:55.480 an exercise on a mental treadmill. 0:22:55.520 --> 0:22:55.760 You know. 0:22:55.920 --> 0:22:59.000 The story of human migration coming from the west is 0:22:59.080 --> 0:23:02.520 contested by the cosmology of the Cherokee and others, who 0:23:02.600 --> 0:23:05.680 say they entered this land from the south, crossing a 0:23:05.720 --> 0:23:09.399 great passage of water. My point is this, we know 0:23:09.480 --> 0:23:11.960 a lot of stuff, but the best minds in the 0:23:12.000 --> 0:23:15.680 world will never know the answer of who saw the 0:23:15.680 --> 0:23:19.119 Mississippi River first. Hernando de Soto was the first to 0:23:19.200 --> 0:23:22.760 write it down in an English based language. He had 0:23:22.840 --> 0:23:25.679 been on a great expedition from Florida to what is 0:23:25.720 --> 0:23:29.280 now Tennessee and approached from the east and likely saw 0:23:29.280 --> 0:23:33.280 it near current Memphis in fifteen forty one. He originally 0:23:33.400 --> 0:23:36.960 called it the River of the Holy Spirit, spoken in Spanish. 0:23:37.040 --> 0:23:40.320 Of course, De Soto's trek through the Southern US is 0:23:40.359 --> 0:23:44.040 probably as wild and experienced as a human has ever had. 0:23:44.280 --> 0:23:47.639 For both the Spanish and the Native Americans, this was 0:23:47.680 --> 0:23:52.480 the native's first contact with Europeans, their first time seeing horses, 0:23:52.960 --> 0:23:56.120 war dogs, and pigs. It would have been like coming 0:23:56.160 --> 0:23:59.600 into contact with aliens. It was also their first contact 0:23:59.680 --> 0:24:02.879 with the diseases of the modern cities of Europe. De 0:24:02.960 --> 0:24:06.240 Soto crossed the river into Arkansas. He was the first 0:24:06.280 --> 0:24:09.240 European to see it and cross it. And when he 0:24:09.359 --> 0:24:13.240 got here, the Mississippi River Valley was a thriving civilization 0:24:13.359 --> 0:24:17.560 of many nations of indigenous people. Many natives believe De 0:24:17.680 --> 0:24:20.600 Soto was a god, which was good for his purposes 0:24:20.640 --> 0:24:24.760 of looking for gold and land. He didn't find gold, however, 0:24:24.800 --> 0:24:28.520 in May fifteen forty two, De Soto, at age forty two, 0:24:28.760 --> 0:24:32.080 would die of fever and his men would bury him 0:24:32.200 --> 0:24:34.959 in the river. And this next part of the story 0:24:35.080 --> 0:24:40.399 is almost too wild, But no Europeans came back for 0:24:40.520 --> 0:24:45.159 one hundred and twenty years. One hundred and twenty years. 0:24:45.640 --> 0:24:50.760 That's an incredible gap of time. Okay, So now I 0:24:50.800 --> 0:24:53.719 would like to introduce you to another character in our 0:24:53.800 --> 0:24:58.320 eclectic cast of Mississippi River storytellers. A big river takes 0:24:58.359 --> 0:25:02.080 a lot of voices. This man's name is Samuel Clemens. 0:25:02.560 --> 0:25:05.639 You may know him as Mark Twain. In eighteen eighty 0:25:05.640 --> 0:25:09.120 three he published a book called Life on the Mississippi, 0:25:09.560 --> 0:25:13.159 and he had something to say about De Soto and 0:25:13.240 --> 0:25:20.399 this mysterious one hundred and twenty year gap. De Soto 0:25:20.560 --> 0:25:24.080 merely glimpsed the river died and was buried in it 0:25:24.160 --> 0:25:27.160 by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests 0:25:27.200 --> 0:25:30.800 and soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten, the 0:25:30.840 --> 0:25:34.800 Spanish custom of the day, and thus move other adventurers 0:25:34.840 --> 0:25:38.000 to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, 0:25:38.080 --> 0:25:41.080 their narratives when they reached home did not excite that 0:25:41.160 --> 0:25:45.480 amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites 0:25:45.560 --> 0:25:48.440 during a term of years that seems incredible in our 0:25:48.600 --> 0:25:52.520 energetic days. One may sense the interval to his mind, 0:25:52.680 --> 0:25:55.760 after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way. 0:25:56.359 --> 0:25:59.800 After de Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of 0:25:59.800 --> 0:26:03.560 a quarter century had elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born, 0:26:04.160 --> 0:26:06.639 lived a trifle more than a half century, then died, 0:26:07.119 --> 0:26:09.640 and when he had been in his grave considerably more 0:26:09.680 --> 0:26:13.560 than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. 0:26:13.960 --> 0:26:17.080 In our day, we don't allow one hundred and thirty 0:26:17.160 --> 0:26:20.400 years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. For more 0:26:20.440 --> 0:26:22.720 than one hundred and fifty years there has been white 0:26:22.760 --> 0:26:26.440 settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate 0:26:26.480 --> 0:26:31.200 communication with the Indians in the south. The Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, 0:26:31.320 --> 0:26:35.880 and slaving and converting them. Necessarily, then these various clusters 0:26:35.880 --> 0:26:37.919 of whites must have heard of the great river of 0:26:37.960 --> 0:26:41.440 the far West, And indeed they did hear of it vaguely, 0:26:42.000 --> 0:26:47.000 so vaguely and indefinitely that its course, proportions, and locality 0:26:47.040 --> 0:26:50.960 were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter 0:26:51.160 --> 0:26:55.119 ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration. But this 0:26:55.280 --> 0:26:58.920 did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, 0:26:59.160 --> 0:27:02.600 nobody needed, nobody was curious about it. So for a 0:27:02.640 --> 0:27:05.199 century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the 0:27:05.240 --> 0:27:08.520 market and undisturbed. When de Soto found it, he was 0:27:08.560 --> 0:27:11.320 not hunting for a river, and he had no present 0:27:11.400 --> 0:27:15.159 occasion for one. Consequently, he did not value it or 0:27:15.200 --> 0:27:18.240 even take any particular notice of it. But at last 0:27:18.359 --> 0:27:22.040 LaSalle the Frenchman, conceived the idea of seeking out that 0:27:22.160 --> 0:27:25.560 river and exploring it. It always happens that when a 0:27:25.600 --> 0:27:29.639 man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed 0:27:29.640 --> 0:27:32.560 with the same notion crop up all around. It happened, 0:27:32.560 --> 0:27:36.960 so in this instance, naturally, the question suggests itself why 0:27:36.960 --> 0:27:39.400 did these people want the river now when nobody had 0:27:39.440 --> 0:27:43.320 wanted it in the five preceding generations. Apparently it was 0:27:43.359 --> 0:27:46.400 because at this late day they thought they had discovered 0:27:46.440 --> 0:27:48.720 a way to make it useful. For it had come 0:27:48.760 --> 0:27:51.280 to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf 0:27:51.320 --> 0:27:55.320 of California and therefore added a short cut from Canada 0:27:55.400 --> 0:27:59.480 to China. Previously, the supposition had been that it emptied 0:27:59.520 --> 0:28:06.119 into the Atlantic or the Sea of Virginia. Twain's prose 0:28:06.200 --> 0:28:08.639 in this book is some of America's finest literature, but 0:28:08.720 --> 0:28:12.040 he also dropped a history lesson on us, describing in 0:28:12.080 --> 0:28:14.280 detail that one hundred and twenty year gap between De 0:28:14.400 --> 0:28:18.760 Soto and LaSalle, and when Lasau arrived he found the 0:28:18.800 --> 0:28:24.439 great civilization. De Soto described almost gone. The people were gone, 0:28:25.000 --> 0:28:29.280 the cities were ruins. It's believe that during that gap, 0:28:29.560 --> 0:28:33.680 the European diseases that De Soto brought with him almost 0:28:33.880 --> 0:28:39.400 wiped out the Native Americans. That's almost unfathomable. Can you 0:28:39.440 --> 0:28:43.640 imagine your people dying a mysterious death over the course 0:28:43.680 --> 0:28:47.920 of several generations. Can you imagine living on the Atlantic 0:28:48.000 --> 0:28:52.000 coast and not knowing where the Mississippi River emptied. Can 0:28:52.040 --> 0:28:56.840 you imagine the unknowns of a world like that? LaSalle 0:28:57.000 --> 0:28:59.880 and his traveling partner Detante would be the first year 0:28:59.880 --> 0:29:03.360 of to call the river the Mississippi, which is a 0:29:03.440 --> 0:29:10.160 transliteration of a Chippewa word Michasippe, or great water. Often 0:29:10.200 --> 0:29:12.760 it's referred to as the father of waters. You'll hear 0:29:12.800 --> 0:29:16.400 that a lot. An alternate story, though, arose from a 0:29:16.520 --> 0:29:20.240 chief of the Chalk Talls, a man named Peter Pitchlan, 0:29:20.560 --> 0:29:24.720 who wrote a letter about returning to the land beyond 0:29:24.880 --> 0:29:29.640 the micha Subkui, which meant the river beyond any age. 0:29:30.360 --> 0:29:33.720 He wrote in his letter that white man never writes 0:29:33.800 --> 0:29:39.000 Indian names correctly, but the word which we pronounce, Mishasippe, 0:29:39.480 --> 0:29:43.360 is spelt nearer your own river. He wrote that in 0:29:43.400 --> 0:29:46.560 a letter and said that that name meant the river 0:29:46.800 --> 0:29:50.960 beyond any age. Pichland was a legit dude, and I 0:29:51.000 --> 0:29:54.440 think he was dropping some knowledge. Whatever it means, the 0:29:54.440 --> 0:29:57.680 Mississippi River has been the name of this river for 0:29:57.760 --> 0:30:01.040 a very short period of its existence, and who knows, 0:30:01.480 --> 0:30:05.840 it likely won't always be called that. Our society could 0:30:05.840 --> 0:30:11.080 be forgotten, lost, misrepresented, just as easy as his was. 0:30:11.960 --> 0:30:16.040 If you remember ts Eliott's poem, the river is patiently 0:30:16.320 --> 0:30:20.880 waiting and watching to human trapped in time. Everything always 0:30:20.920 --> 0:30:25.960 seems so permanent, but it's not natural. Systems outlast humans, 0:30:26.240 --> 0:30:32.400 and rivers don't perceive time or think like men. No 0:30:32.600 --> 0:30:35.440 river has ever played a greater role in a country 0:30:35.640 --> 0:30:39.200 than the Mississippi River in America. It cuts through the 0:30:39.240 --> 0:30:43.160 heart of this country like a jugular vein. Here's John Berry. 0:30:44.000 --> 0:30:46.800 Yeah, I was always interested in the Mississippi River. You know, 0:30:47.280 --> 0:30:50.360 when people ask me where I ever got the idea 0:30:50.400 --> 0:30:53.160 to write that book, I always say, well, I grew 0:30:53.240 --> 0:30:55.480 up in Rhode Island, so it's perfectly natural for me 0:30:55.520 --> 0:30:58.280 to want to write about the Mississippi River. And as 0:30:58.320 --> 0:31:02.400 you just did, they almost always chuckle. But the reality 0:31:02.520 --> 0:31:04.720 is it's true if you carry it at all about 0:31:05.160 --> 0:31:09.880 American history. The Mississippi River is so central every element 0:31:09.920 --> 0:31:14.600 of American history. It has to interest you, if not 0:31:14.720 --> 0:31:18.400 fascinated you. And growing up in Rhode Island, you know, 0:31:18.920 --> 0:31:21.520 grew up in Providence with my grandfather, you know, was 0:31:21.560 --> 0:31:26.239 in Newport on the ocean there every summer. Nonetheless, it 0:31:26.280 --> 0:31:29.240 was always the Mississippi River. I love the Atlantic Ocean too, 0:31:29.320 --> 0:31:32.720 But the Mississippi River I just always wanted to write about. 0:31:32.920 --> 0:31:35.520 And it was a massive It was a very formidable 0:31:36.360 --> 0:31:40.320 had a very formidable presence in the American frontier, in 0:31:40.360 --> 0:31:41.320 American expansion. 0:31:41.480 --> 0:31:44.120 Sure, I mean it was you know, at the beginning, 0:31:45.160 --> 0:31:47.880 it was everything. It was a combination of you know, 0:31:48.880 --> 0:31:55.959 rail boats, airplanes, you know, fiber optics, you know, telegraph, telephone. 0:31:56.120 --> 0:31:59.880 All that was the Mississippi River and its tribute to 0:31:59.920 --> 0:32:04.840 it's the entire system was key to all transportation and 0:32:05.160 --> 0:32:11.000 communication across much of the country until the development of 0:32:11.240 --> 0:32:11.920 the telegraphic. 0:32:13.280 --> 0:32:15.800 His point is that the river was the lifeblood of 0:32:15.800 --> 0:32:20.080 communication and transportation on this continent before modern technology. It 0:32:20.160 --> 0:32:24.040 acted in place of the coming railroads, airplanes, fiber optics, 0:32:24.040 --> 0:32:28.600 and telephone. It was key to America becoming America. 0:32:29.360 --> 0:32:34.040 Here's Hank the thing to me about the essence are 0:32:34.200 --> 0:32:37.480 of the Mississippi River. It's not only the third largest 0:32:37.520 --> 0:32:40.240 river in the world, if we had included the Missouri 0:32:40.320 --> 0:32:42.800 and the Missippi, it'd be the biggest fe in the world. 0:32:42.880 --> 0:32:47.080 More than likely. It splits right down the middle of 0:32:47.080 --> 0:32:51.320 this northern hemisphere. People say, well, we got free coasts 0:32:51.800 --> 0:32:55.880 of America we got full coasts. You got the West Coast, 0:32:56.160 --> 0:32:58.520 you got the Gulf Coast, you got the Atlantic Coast, 0:32:58.800 --> 0:33:00.800 and you got the Missisippi River on and right. 0:33:00.720 --> 0:33:03.760 Up the middle of America. That's the fourth coast. 0:33:04.640 --> 0:33:08.720 Look at the goods and produce the products, the sand 0:33:08.760 --> 0:33:13.240 of the gravel, the timber, everything, the petroleum products that 0:33:13.360 --> 0:33:16.280 flow up and down at Mississippi Room. It is a 0:33:17.160 --> 0:33:20.640 not only a force to be reckoned with because of 0:33:20.680 --> 0:33:25.760 its wildness, but its economic value. It's unbelievable to what 0:33:25.840 --> 0:33:28.600 America is and what it does for America. 0:33:29.920 --> 0:33:34.000 The Mississippi River was undoubtedly a cornerstone in the building 0:33:34.120 --> 0:33:37.560 of the American Empire. And I really like the idea 0:33:37.600 --> 0:33:40.920 of the Mississippi being the fourth coast. The river has 0:33:41.000 --> 0:33:45.880 more sand beaches than the Gulf Coast. Here's doctor Bedenhearn. 0:33:46.120 --> 0:33:50.640 The amount of cargo and fuel and supplies that are 0:33:50.760 --> 0:33:52.760 transported every day on the river. 0:33:52.840 --> 0:33:54.280 But it's it's huge. 0:33:54.600 --> 0:33:57.920 And we've got the ports that you know, New Orleans, 0:33:58.000 --> 0:33:59.800 Baton Rouge and some of the biggest ports in the 0:33:59.800 --> 0:34:02.600 world world and you know, the United States. I'm not 0:34:02.720 --> 0:34:06.560 gonna say we're lucky, but we've got this major river 0:34:06.640 --> 0:34:09.400 system that goes right up through a bread basket, you 0:34:09.400 --> 0:34:13.480 know of farmland. You know, not all countries have that. 0:34:13.920 --> 0:34:16.319 They may have big rivers, but they maybe flow through 0:34:16.320 --> 0:34:19.960 the Amazon. There's no real you know, agriculture there. But 0:34:20.000 --> 0:34:24.040 we've kind of got a combination of a big river 0:34:24.080 --> 0:34:26.879 that we can navigate. Of course we have, we had 0:34:26.960 --> 0:34:29.840 a lot of work to get that to be the 0:34:30.000 --> 0:34:34.160 dependable navigation system we wanted. But it also navigates right 0:34:34.280 --> 0:34:37.919 up through the heartland of of you know, the bread 0:34:37.960 --> 0:34:38.960 basket of America. 0:34:40.520 --> 0:34:44.120 Transportation is key to empire building and this river being 0:34:44.160 --> 0:34:47.759 situated in the middle is more than significant. Think about 0:34:47.760 --> 0:34:51.279 all the crop land from Minnesota to Louisiana. This is 0:34:51.360 --> 0:34:55.120 big and it's not just any cropland the Mississippi Delta 0:34:55.280 --> 0:34:58.560 is considered some of the most fertile land in the world. 0:34:59.360 --> 0:35:02.439 Most areas in the country topsail is six eight inches deep. 0:35:03.120 --> 0:35:05.360 Our average topsail is about one hundred and sixty to 0:35:05.360 --> 0:35:08.120 one hundred and eighty feet deep. Here it has been 0:35:08.480 --> 0:35:12.560 called some of the richest soil in the world compared 0:35:12.560 --> 0:35:15.399 to the river. Now and there's an old saying that 0:35:16.320 --> 0:35:20.239 the Lord will won Deer Creek about six miles east 0:35:20.280 --> 0:35:23.200 of here that the Lord could have made better dirt, 0:35:23.920 --> 0:35:25.400 but he figured he just didn't need to. 0:35:26.840 --> 0:35:29.759 Deer Creek is a tributary of the Mississippi with some 0:35:29.800 --> 0:35:32.719 of the Delta's finest soil. It's hard to get a 0:35:32.719 --> 0:35:35.239 definitive answer for how deep the soil is in the 0:35:35.239 --> 0:35:38.840 Delta because its depth varies and top soil is a 0:35:38.880 --> 0:35:42.560 colloquial term, but it's also a scientific term. But the 0:35:42.600 --> 0:35:46.680 truth is that it's just extremely deep. In places it's 0:35:46.680 --> 0:35:50.399 alluvial soil, meaning it was deposited there by a flooding river. 0:35:50.719 --> 0:35:53.960 This is important. We did a podcast on soil formation 0:35:54.080 --> 0:35:58.000 on Bear Grease episode twenty called From the Earth. Soil 0:35:58.040 --> 0:36:01.640 building is one of the Earth's most fascinating processes, takes 0:36:01.680 --> 0:36:04.279 an incredible amount of time, can be squandered in a 0:36:04.360 --> 0:36:08.080 generation of mismanagement, and has caused the rise and fall 0:36:08.200 --> 0:36:12.400 of empires. You may not touch much soil or daily 0:36:12.520 --> 0:36:15.520 perceive its connection to your life, but it is the 0:36:15.719 --> 0:36:20.520 foundation of your physical body. Everything comes from the soil, 0:36:20.680 --> 0:36:24.360 and you will go back to it. In terms of 0:36:24.400 --> 0:36:28.080 where we're at in our story Lut's level, we're establishing 0:36:28.200 --> 0:36:31.279 a baseline of understanding the natural features of the river 0:36:31.400 --> 0:36:34.520 in man's early connection to it. We have to view 0:36:34.560 --> 0:36:38.320 the river as a complex, ancient system that will outlive 0:36:38.440 --> 0:36:42.200 you and your offspring should the earth persist, and not 0:36:42.360 --> 0:36:44.880 just a narrow body of muddy water. You cross on 0:36:44.960 --> 0:36:47.719 a bridge and honk your horn because you've passed into 0:36:47.760 --> 0:36:52.520 a new state. Let's keep heading down river. Here's John 0:36:52.600 --> 0:36:57.440 Berry the Mississippi River in general, describing it. It's two 0:36:57.520 --> 0:37:02.239 hundred feet deep and a mile wide inside the bigger sections, 0:37:02.560 --> 0:37:06.240 and it drops the slope of three inches per mile, 0:37:06.680 --> 0:37:09.240 flows through some of the flattest land in the world. 0:37:09.719 --> 0:37:14.240 Generally flows about nine miles per hour, and the last 0:37:14.280 --> 0:37:16.880 four hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi River is 0:37:16.920 --> 0:37:20.320 below sea level. Can you help me understand how that's possible. 0:37:20.360 --> 0:37:22.840 Well, those stats are accurate, but they're a little bit selected. 0:37:22.840 --> 0:37:25.439 For example, obviously the river's not two hundred feet deep 0:37:25.640 --> 0:37:29.280 the whole, yeah, you know, but some of the deepest sections, 0:37:29.280 --> 0:37:33.399 which are you know, right in Orleans, are probably two 0:37:33.440 --> 0:37:36.719 forty practically right at the French quarter. It's called the 0:37:36.760 --> 0:37:40.480 Crescent City because it's sharp turns here and when you 0:37:40.560 --> 0:37:44.160 get a high water the river on the outer bank, 0:37:44.640 --> 0:37:48.400 you know, just like on a racetrack, it's actually higher 0:37:48.440 --> 0:37:51.919 than the water on the other bank, maybe a foot 0:37:51.960 --> 0:37:55.120 higher in terms of the bottom of the river being 0:37:55.640 --> 0:37:58.360 below sea level for several hundred miles. 0:37:58.760 --> 0:38:01.320 Okay, at the bottom of the room being level. 0:38:01.360 --> 0:38:03.800 What you have is the force of all the water 0:38:04.040 --> 0:38:09.520 draining from thirty one states pushing against the sea coming up. 0:38:09.680 --> 0:38:12.280 So there's a force behind it. Yeah, it's not gravity 0:38:12.320 --> 0:38:13.000 pulling it down. 0:38:13.400 --> 0:38:15.719 Well, it's yeah, Well, I mean you're right, because well, 0:38:15.800 --> 0:38:19.440 you know, water flows downhill and if it warn't, you know, 0:38:19.480 --> 0:38:22.799 you got something other factor that is that is affecting it, 0:38:22.960 --> 0:38:26.760 that's forcing it. And it's it's not uphill, it's still 0:38:26.760 --> 0:38:31.600 going downhill. But you know, right now record low water 0:38:31.719 --> 0:38:34.960 and a lot of the river the ocean is pushing 0:38:35.080 --> 0:38:36.560 salt water up river. 0:38:37.040 --> 0:38:39.040 It's always been like that. It's it's kind of a 0:38:39.080 --> 0:38:41.120 silly question. When when I was a kid, I remember 0:38:41.200 --> 0:38:43.480 there's a big mountain within side of the town we 0:38:43.520 --> 0:38:46.160 lived in in Arkansas, and I asked my dad one time, 0:38:46.200 --> 0:38:48.760 I said, was that mountain here when you were a kid? 0:38:49.960 --> 0:38:52.080 So this is question is kind of like that is 0:38:52.120 --> 0:38:55.320 the bottom of the river always been below sea level? 0:38:55.680 --> 0:38:56.480 Yeah, pretty much. 0:38:58.040 --> 0:39:03.920 Okay, dumb questions get dumb answers. It's pretty hard to 0:39:03.920 --> 0:39:06.680 wrap your head around the last four hundred and fifty 0:39:06.719 --> 0:39:09.279 miles of the river being below sea level. I thought 0:39:09.280 --> 0:39:11.719 maybe this had to do with man's imprint on the river. 0:39:12.200 --> 0:39:16.440 I guess not. We're still learning about the physical attributes 0:39:16.440 --> 0:39:19.319 of the river. But the river is very different in 0:39:19.360 --> 0:39:23.920 different sections. Here's doctor Jack Kilgore describing the sections of 0:39:23.960 --> 0:39:24.919 the Mississippi River. 0:39:25.560 --> 0:39:28.319 Well, first of all, this layout the Lower Mess. There's 0:39:28.360 --> 0:39:31.680 really five or six different reaches of the lower Mississippi River. 0:39:31.960 --> 0:39:34.120 A lot of people think, oh, it's just the Lower Mess. 0:39:34.160 --> 0:39:37.600 Well no, so from New Orleans down the last one 0:39:37.680 --> 0:39:40.640 hundred miles that's where, of course it runs into the 0:39:40.640 --> 0:39:43.360 Gulf of Mexico. But you have a combination of fresh 0:39:43.400 --> 0:39:47.360 water and escherine fish, and the river just pours into 0:39:47.400 --> 0:39:52.400 all these estuaries and that's what sustains the lifeblood of 0:39:52.719 --> 0:39:57.400 Louisiana and Mississippi coastal wetlands. Then when you get above 0:39:57.440 --> 0:40:00.359 New Orleans, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, you don't 0:40:00.360 --> 0:40:04.359 really have a floodplain and it's highly industrialized, and it's 0:40:04.400 --> 0:40:08.120 also within the deep water navigation channel. And when I 0:40:08.160 --> 0:40:11.760 say deep water from Baton Rouge down to the Gulf, 0:40:11.960 --> 0:40:15.080 it's forty It has to be forty five feet in 0:40:15.160 --> 0:40:19.000 order for the sea going ships to traverse up and 0:40:19.040 --> 0:40:23.240 down the river. Above Baton Rouge, the minimum is twelve feet. 0:40:23.640 --> 0:40:26.400 And that's of course all you have are the barges, 0:40:26.560 --> 0:40:28.840 which have a much shallower draft. 0:40:35.960 --> 0:40:38.280 So from the mouth of the river to one hundred 0:40:38.320 --> 0:40:42.040 miles inland it's heavily influenced by the saltwater of the Gulf. 0:40:42.440 --> 0:40:45.319 The first section from the Gulf to New Orleans is 0:40:45.360 --> 0:40:49.560 a wide web of brackish wetlands. New Orleans sits about 0:40:49.560 --> 0:40:53.000 forty or fifty miles inland from the Gulf proper. The 0:40:53.040 --> 0:40:55.960 second section from New Orleans to Baton Rouge is a 0:40:56.040 --> 0:41:00.880 highly industrialized, narrow section of the river with no floodplain, 0:41:01.440 --> 0:41:02.719 lots of big boats. 0:41:03.040 --> 0:41:07.080 But then above Baton Rouge, from Baton Rouge to Natchez 0:41:07.760 --> 0:41:11.600 really all the way up to Memphis. Between Memphis and 0:41:11.960 --> 0:41:16.439 Baton Rouge, the core cut off fourteen meander bins back 0:41:16.480 --> 0:41:19.799 in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and to shorten the 0:41:19.880 --> 0:41:22.120 river in the name of flood control, thinking that that 0:41:22.680 --> 0:41:27.520 by straightening the river, the flood pulses would evacuate the 0:41:27.600 --> 0:41:31.680 valley quicker than a meandering river. Well that worked, I 0:41:31.680 --> 0:41:34.920 mean it dropped the stages, but the river is still 0:41:34.960 --> 0:41:38.960 adjusting from man made cutoffs seventy five years ago. 0:41:40.400 --> 0:41:44.160 Haink talked about those cutoffs earlier in the podcast. Baton 0:41:44.239 --> 0:41:48.399 Rouge to Memphis has that classic big wide, wild Mississippi 0:41:48.440 --> 0:41:52.080 River delta field. It has an intact floodplain, I meaning 0:41:52.120 --> 0:41:54.640 the river is allowed to have its natural flood patterns, 0:41:54.840 --> 0:41:58.520 and usually the levees sit a long ways off the 0:41:58.520 --> 0:42:02.040 main river the mountains. I was an adult before I 0:42:02.120 --> 0:42:04.239 learned what a levee was. It was hard for me 0:42:04.320 --> 0:42:06.440 to wrap my mind around it until I was standing 0:42:06.440 --> 0:42:09.000 there and understood it. But it's basically a dam of 0:42:09.040 --> 0:42:12.560 dirt that runs along the river, protecting the surrounding areas 0:42:12.560 --> 0:42:14.960 from floods. In a minute, we're going to learn more 0:42:14.960 --> 0:42:16.840 about levees. But here's doctor Kilgore. 0:42:17.520 --> 0:42:21.080 And then once you get though above Memphis, you get 0:42:21.120 --> 0:42:24.120 out of the cutoffs and you get into a lot 0:42:24.160 --> 0:42:25.160 of gravel. 0:42:24.719 --> 0:42:27.200 Bars north of Memphis. 0:42:26.800 --> 0:42:29.400 North of Memphis all the way up to the Ohio Okay, 0:42:29.520 --> 0:42:32.719 So it's kind of a lot of secondary channel. There's 0:42:32.719 --> 0:42:35.040 about one hundred second I'll talk about that in a minute. 0:42:35.200 --> 0:42:38.080 But from there up to the Ohio, you get a 0:42:38.120 --> 0:42:41.240 lot of gravel bars, but you still have an intact floodplane. 0:42:41.520 --> 0:42:43.760 So the levees are still a place. 0:42:43.880 --> 0:42:48.759 Further back from Memphis to kro Illinois, where the Ohio 0:42:48.920 --> 0:42:51.920 comes in, there are more gravel bars, but there's still 0:42:51.960 --> 0:42:54.239 an intact floodplain. Let's keep going. 0:42:54.840 --> 0:42:57.960 And then once you get in above the Ohio, between 0:42:58.040 --> 0:43:01.160 the Ohio and Saint Lewis is what we call the 0:43:01.200 --> 0:43:05.680 Middle Miss. The river narrows. There's no floodplain, it's very 0:43:05.719 --> 0:43:10.200 high velocity, and there's just a lot of dikes. So 0:43:10.360 --> 0:43:12.520 what they do is they'll put these dikes in there 0:43:12.600 --> 0:43:15.640 to create this self scouring channel so the core doesn't 0:43:15.680 --> 0:43:18.440 have to dredge. So the Middle Miss really doesn't have 0:43:18.520 --> 0:43:20.560 It's kind of like the Lower Miss, but it didn't 0:43:20.560 --> 0:43:22.600 have a floodplain. And then, of course, once you get 0:43:22.600 --> 0:43:26.040 above Saint Louis and Alton, you have the twenty seven 0:43:26.120 --> 0:43:26.920 locking dams. 0:43:28.160 --> 0:43:31.440 From Kroad to Saint Louis is the middle Mississippi, and 0:43:31.440 --> 0:43:34.320 that Saint Louis is the first dam of the river, 0:43:34.520 --> 0:43:37.920 which totally changes it. So there you go. Now you 0:43:37.960 --> 0:43:41.400 have a general understanding of the Middle and Lower Mississippi, 0:43:41.719 --> 0:43:44.080 but it would be helpful to officially learn what some 0:43:44.120 --> 0:43:47.000 of the man made features of the river are. I'm serious, 0:43:47.120 --> 0:43:48.600 I was a grown man before I knew what a 0:43:48.680 --> 0:43:51.360 levee was. We've got to understand levees. 0:43:52.040 --> 0:43:55.000 And the levees, of course, are giant earthern mounds on 0:43:55.040 --> 0:43:59.600 each side of the river. But fortunately when they realign 0:43:59.680 --> 0:44:03.640 the le they put them far enough back to allow 0:44:03.760 --> 0:44:05.200 the river to have a floodplain. 0:44:05.360 --> 0:44:08.400 Still, okay, so it can get over its banks. 0:44:08.480 --> 0:44:11.000 Yes, from levee to levee it can be up to 0:44:11.040 --> 0:44:14.720 fourteen miles wide. So there is a two million acre 0:44:15.160 --> 0:44:19.400 floodplain that this river is associated with, and that is 0:44:19.840 --> 0:44:23.040 one of the natural features of the Lower miss Unlike 0:44:23.440 --> 0:44:27.480 most other great rivers of the world except for the Amazon. 0:44:28.320 --> 0:44:32.000 Levees are the magic, the bread and butter, the flashy mule, 0:44:32.080 --> 0:44:35.120 and the pasture of the Mississippi River. They make the 0:44:35.160 --> 0:44:38.360 region outside of the levee habitable. The land between the 0:44:38.440 --> 0:44:41.319 levee and river is subject to seasonal flooding, meaning you 0:44:41.360 --> 0:44:45.120 can't farm or build cities inside the levee. However, there 0:44:45.160 --> 0:44:48.000 are a lot of hunting camps inside the levee, usually 0:44:48.000 --> 0:44:51.240 built on stilts or built in some way that expects flooding. 0:44:52.440 --> 0:44:56.200 See if you recognize this Mississippi voice, you know, other 0:44:56.239 --> 0:44:58.760 than my voice, because I talk some here too. Here's 0:44:58.760 --> 0:45:03.520 more on levees. You know, what's interesting to think about 0:45:03.920 --> 0:45:08.000 in terms of the way humans have manipulated the earth 0:45:08.040 --> 0:45:10.200 so that we can live in places that we maybe 0:45:10.320 --> 0:45:12.600 wouldn't have been able to. Like you think of the 0:45:12.600 --> 0:45:15.080 Middle East. There's there are places in the Middle East 0:45:15.120 --> 0:45:19.200 that are basically would be uninhabitable by humans because of 0:45:19.280 --> 0:45:21.160 lack of water, but now we have ways to get 0:45:21.160 --> 0:45:26.920 water there. The Mississippi River delta would have seasonally flooded 0:45:27.000 --> 0:45:29.640 to the point that it would have been very hard 0:45:30.120 --> 0:45:32.360 to live here year round, grow crops. 0:45:33.560 --> 0:45:35.040 Yeah, or without the levees. 0:45:35.080 --> 0:45:38.719 Yeah, absolutely, So that's Wilber Primos. Yeah, I mean we've 0:45:38.719 --> 0:45:41.880 got civilization just right outside the levees that for the 0:45:41.960 --> 0:45:46.640 last eon of time has flooded. That's right, And that's 0:45:46.680 --> 0:45:49.640 so interesting. I mean, we just take so much for granted. 0:45:49.680 --> 0:45:52.799 And when you understand the levee system and how you know, 0:45:52.920 --> 0:45:55.319 only the last one hundred and seventy years, I guess 0:45:55.360 --> 0:45:58.319 we've had these levees and it's just you couldn't even 0:45:58.360 --> 0:45:59.120 live down here. 0:45:59.280 --> 0:46:02.360 No, no, you could not, you know, not not in 0:46:02.480 --> 0:46:04.319 the fall and winter for sure. 0:46:04.640 --> 0:46:04.839 Yeah. 0:46:04.920 --> 0:46:07.839 When you ride down the Mississippi Levee and you look 0:46:08.080 --> 0:46:11.800 down to the typically on the outside of the levee, 0:46:11.840 --> 0:46:14.520 not the river side, but the other side, you'll see 0:46:14.560 --> 0:46:17.360 a little lake as a hole, and the name of 0:46:17.400 --> 0:46:20.600 that hole is typically a bar pit. That is slang 0:46:21.280 --> 0:46:24.960 for borrow pit b O r r o w borrow pit. 0:46:25.560 --> 0:46:28.560 They borrowed the dirt and dug a hole and put 0:46:28.600 --> 0:46:32.399 it to make the levee, so that becomes a bar pit. 0:46:32.680 --> 0:46:34.799 So there's a big ditch and then there's a big 0:46:34.840 --> 0:46:35.439 pile of dirt. 0:46:35.640 --> 0:46:39.160 And bar pits can be great fishing holes. They leased 0:46:39.160 --> 0:46:41.839 the levee to a lot of cattle farmers because it's 0:46:41.880 --> 0:46:45.279 grass that yeah, you know, and they lease it for hay, 0:46:45.440 --> 0:46:47.440 so you're they're cutting it, cut it, yeah, because you 0:46:47.440 --> 0:46:49.320 got to keep trees off of the trees would be 0:46:49.360 --> 0:46:52.279 bad for the levee because the roots or whatever are 0:46:52.320 --> 0:46:56.520 creating avenues for water and other problems, So it's a 0:46:56.640 --> 0:46:57.560 huge project. 0:46:58.840 --> 0:47:01.640 The Mississippi River heavy system is one of the greatest 0:47:01.680 --> 0:47:05.920 engineering feats in American history. If a man or woman 0:47:06.080 --> 0:47:08.560 were to claim to understand the story of this nation 0:47:09.080 --> 0:47:12.400 but don't understand the history of the Mississippi River levies, 0:47:12.840 --> 0:47:16.480 they'd be like a wayward coon hound slick trend barking 0:47:16.560 --> 0:47:19.360 up a tree with no coon. This story is big. 0:47:20.040 --> 0:47:22.520 Here's me and John Berry. This is the kind of 0:47:22.560 --> 0:47:26.120 stuff that I would have taken for granted in terms 0:47:26.160 --> 0:47:30.919 of understanding how this nation was built and how central 0:47:30.920 --> 0:47:34.320 the Mississippi River was. But when people first started wanting 0:47:34.360 --> 0:47:38.080 to control the river, it was you said in the 0:47:38.080 --> 0:47:40.759 book that it was more dangerous to go down the 0:47:40.760 --> 0:47:44.240 Mississippi River than it was to cross the ocean. Yeah, 0:47:44.280 --> 0:47:50.279 I mean it. It was this like wild, untouched American river, right, 0:47:50.760 --> 0:47:53.520 And then at what point did man come in and 0:47:53.560 --> 0:47:55.960 start to want to influence that and tame that. 0:47:56.400 --> 0:47:59.880 Well, the Native Americans tended to live with the real 0:48:00.280 --> 0:48:03.359 They built mounds, so you know, in the delta and 0:48:03.400 --> 0:48:07.920 so forth, so when it flooded they would remained okay. 0:48:08.560 --> 0:48:13.200 But obviously I guess they started building levees in New 0:48:13.280 --> 0:48:19.439 Orleans really almost immediately after it was settled, so that's 0:48:19.760 --> 0:48:23.759 three hundred years ago. And of course, before the Civil War, 0:48:23.880 --> 0:48:27.480 there was a pretty complete levee system on a lot 0:48:27.520 --> 0:48:30.720 of the lower Mississippi River, but the levees weren't very high. 0:48:31.040 --> 0:48:34.480 They got really really they thought they had a pretty 0:48:34.480 --> 0:48:38.880 good levee system. By the early nineteen hundreds, they discovered 0:48:39.080 --> 0:48:42.600 that was not the case. After the nineteen twenty seven flood, 0:48:42.960 --> 0:48:47.400 which was a you know, tremendous flood in terms of 0:48:47.680 --> 0:48:52.960 percentage of gross domestic product impact, it had more impact 0:48:52.960 --> 0:48:55.799 than any other event in American history. 0:48:56.320 --> 0:48:58.720 Really, any other natural disaster in American history. 0:48:59.080 --> 0:49:04.560 Yeah, you know, considerably more than Katrina, you know, several 0:49:04.600 --> 0:49:09.720 times more than Hurricane Sandy. Right, it was enormous. Plus 0:49:09.800 --> 0:49:12.439 at displaced, it flooded almost one percent of the entire 0:49:12.480 --> 0:49:17.480 population of the country. So after that flood, which killed 0:49:17.520 --> 0:49:24.160 people from Virginia to Oklahoma, but really devastated Mississippi, Arkansas, 0:49:24.200 --> 0:49:28.399 and Louisiana, you know, they built a very good levee 0:49:28.480 --> 0:49:33.279 system and some other measures to contain the river, and 0:49:33.680 --> 0:49:36.720 on the lower Mississippi there hasn't been a flood since. 0:49:37.280 --> 0:49:39.319 I like what you said, in the book that the 0:49:39.440 --> 0:49:44.920 nineteenth century was the perfect century for a man to 0:49:45.080 --> 0:49:48.239 try to conquer something like the Mississippi River. You said 0:49:48.239 --> 0:49:49.239 it took hubris. 0:49:49.560 --> 0:49:52.120 Yeah, it was the century of the engineer, you know. 0:49:52.239 --> 0:49:53.759 In eighteen hundreds. 0:49:54.000 --> 0:49:57.680 Yeah, and then in the nineteen hundreds you start getting 0:49:58.120 --> 0:50:02.600 plenty of hubris. Still little more recognition, you know, of 0:50:02.880 --> 0:50:06.640 relativity and you know, quantum physics and things like that. 0:50:06.960 --> 0:50:10.400 Uncertainty principles and you know, all sorts of things that 0:50:10.840 --> 0:50:15.600 scientists and engineers recognized made things more complicated. But in 0:50:15.680 --> 0:50:19.360 the nineteenth century things looked a lot more linear and 0:50:19.680 --> 0:50:24.319 you know, simpler. Frankly, they thought they could control the river. 0:50:25.239 --> 0:50:27.839 They couldn't, you know, we sill can. 0:50:30.440 --> 0:50:34.560 The nineteen twenty seven flood was major and it changed America. 0:50:35.280 --> 0:50:38.560 Native Americans built mounds to escape floods, and the French 0:50:38.600 --> 0:50:41.920 built the first primitive levees in the early seventeen hundreds 0:50:41.960 --> 0:50:45.960 in New Orleans, and from then on, primitive hand built 0:50:46.040 --> 0:50:50.000 levees were along the river, often built by slaves. In 0:50:50.040 --> 0:50:53.600 eighteen forty four, crude and small levees less than ten 0:50:53.640 --> 0:50:56.000 feet high, a lot of them like five feet high, 0:50:56.280 --> 0:50:58.719 went from New Orleans up to the mouth of the 0:50:58.800 --> 0:51:03.920 Arkansas River. By eighteen fifty eight, small levees reached intermittently 0:51:04.239 --> 0:51:07.200 all the way to kro Illinois, but it wasn't until 0:51:07.239 --> 0:51:10.040 after the Civil War. In eighteen seventy nine, the Mississippi 0:51:10.120 --> 0:51:13.880 River Levee Commission was formed, giving levee building and control 0:51:13.920 --> 0:51:16.880 to the federal government. This is big today. The levees 0:51:16.960 --> 0:51:20.080 starting near Cape Girardo, Missouri and end of the Gulf 0:51:20.120 --> 0:51:24.200 of Mexico and include over thirty seven hundred miles of levee. 0:51:24.480 --> 0:51:28.399 Today most of them are thirty feet tall. But let's 0:51:28.480 --> 0:51:32.359 get back to our story. So inside the levees, the 0:51:32.480 --> 0:51:36.400 river side, the flood prone side, the river meanders and 0:51:36.480 --> 0:51:42.080 follows its natural pattern of flooding. Here's will Primos. 0:51:41.960 --> 0:51:44.960 To pound it into you to understand. There is a 0:51:45.040 --> 0:51:52.120 place south of Vicksburg called Windsor Ruins. It was a 0:51:52.160 --> 0:51:56.279 plantation home at today's time. I have no how many 0:51:56.480 --> 0:51:58.840 how many tens of millions the home would have cost, 0:51:58.920 --> 0:52:01.120 but a lot of the the stuff was shipped in 0:52:01.320 --> 0:52:04.800 by boat from France and up the river and built 0:52:05.239 --> 0:52:07.560 from the home. I understand. 0:52:07.719 --> 0:52:09.560 All that's left from Windsor. 0:52:09.280 --> 0:52:13.400 Ruins is the columns is the I guess they're granite. 0:52:14.160 --> 0:52:16.640 You could go and see them. They're beautiful columns that 0:52:16.719 --> 0:52:19.920 are tall. They're in the middle of the woods. From 0:52:19.960 --> 0:52:25.360 that location, which is near the town I believe it's Bruinsburg, Mississippi, 0:52:26.040 --> 0:52:29.000 you could see the Mississippi River. You can no longer 0:52:29.040 --> 0:52:33.160 see the Mississippi River from there because the river changed courses. 0:52:33.920 --> 0:52:38.640 That's why I may be on the Louisiana side of 0:52:38.680 --> 0:52:42.640 the river, but I'm actually standing on Mississippi soil, because 0:52:42.680 --> 0:52:46.880 when the boundaries were drawn, that was Mississippi land. But 0:52:46.920 --> 0:52:51.759 the river changed courses, so the river doesn't necessarily split Arkansas, 0:52:51.800 --> 0:52:56.440 Louisiana and Mississippi perfectly. There is Arkansas land that is 0:52:56.480 --> 0:52:59.640 on the Mississippi right side of the river. Because the 0:52:59.760 --> 0:53:01.760 river changed courses. 0:53:02.480 --> 0:53:06.280 The river creates the boundary line between many states Missouri 0:53:06.280 --> 0:53:11.920 and Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, Mississippi and Louisiana. 0:53:12.000 --> 0:53:14.239 Go look at your on X and you'll see the 0:53:14.360 --> 0:53:17.720 jumble of islands, oxbow lakes, and cut off meander bins 0:53:17.719 --> 0:53:20.759 along the river, especially the lower Mississippi from Memphis to 0:53:20.800 --> 0:53:23.520 Baton Rouge, and you'll see an incredible amount of these 0:53:23.560 --> 0:53:25.960 states that are now on the other side of the 0:53:26.040 --> 0:53:30.439 river from their state. We're still learning the man made 0:53:30.480 --> 0:53:34.200 structures of the river. Let's talk about dikes or jetties. 0:53:34.840 --> 0:53:37.040 Here's doctor Kilgore with double l's. 0:53:40.040 --> 0:53:43.080 So they are about eight hundred dikes along the lower 0:53:43.080 --> 0:53:47.400 Mississippi River and they're a stone structure that can extend 0:53:47.760 --> 0:53:52.080 two thousand feet perpendicular to the shore. And their purpose 0:53:52.640 --> 0:53:56.880 is to create and maintain a self scouring channel. So 0:53:57.040 --> 0:54:00.680 as the water is coming from upstream to downstream, they'll 0:54:00.719 --> 0:54:04.520 hit these dikes. The dikes then funnel the water out 0:54:04.560 --> 0:54:08.560 towards the main channel and you get higher velocities, which 0:54:08.600 --> 0:54:13.720 then scours the main channel and keeps it free of sediment. 0:54:14.800 --> 0:54:17.080 And so the whole purpose of the dikes is to 0:54:17.239 --> 0:54:18.640 minimize dredging. 0:54:18.800 --> 0:54:21.719 Okay, so if you didn't have dikes, you might have 0:54:21.880 --> 0:54:24.719 a wide, shallow channel exactly. 0:54:25.040 --> 0:54:28.640 In fact, pre European the Mississippi River was a lot 0:54:28.680 --> 0:54:31.760 more braided than it is today. It's more now it's 0:54:31.840 --> 0:54:36.000 really just a sinuous, snaky kind of river, and it's 0:54:36.040 --> 0:54:39.000 called meander belts. And those meander belts have switched back 0:54:39.040 --> 0:54:41.680 and forth over the last two or three thousand years 0:54:42.000 --> 0:54:46.520 they've been mapped, creating this one hundred mile wide valley 0:54:46.600 --> 0:54:47.160 down here. 0:54:47.480 --> 0:54:49.640 So you would say from the dead center of the 0:54:49.680 --> 0:54:53.759 Mississippi River, fifty miles on either side would have been 0:54:53.840 --> 0:54:56.840 fair game to be flooded free Europea. 0:54:57.000 --> 0:54:59.759 During the nineteen twenty seven flood, you could take a 0:54:59.760 --> 0:55:04.400 boat from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Monroe, Louisiana, seventy miles because 0:55:04.440 --> 0:55:05.400 the levees had broken. 0:55:06.320 --> 0:55:10.280 The actual natural floodplain of the river before levees wouldn't 0:55:10.320 --> 0:55:12.680 have been as clearcut as fifty miles on either side 0:55:12.680 --> 0:55:15.840 of the river. Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less, 0:55:16.080 --> 0:55:19.040 but the idea of a one hundred mile wide floodplain 0:55:19.280 --> 0:55:24.080 is legit. In summary, we've been learning about the energy 0:55:24.120 --> 0:55:27.640 of rivers and their hydraulic complexity and their drive to 0:55:27.680 --> 0:55:31.560 carry sediment. We've learned about levees and dykes or jetties 0:55:32.040 --> 0:55:34.760 and cutoffs, and we got a sense of the sheer 0:55:34.920 --> 0:55:38.200 size of this river. We've learned some about the early 0:55:38.320 --> 0:55:41.600 human history of the river and its importance to America. 0:55:42.360 --> 0:55:46.680 Here's Hank Burdine. Lake Ferguson is an oxbow lake of 0:55:46.680 --> 0:55:47.480 the Mississippi. 0:55:48.320 --> 0:55:52.839 Growing up on Lake Ferguson, Dad had a boat. We'd 0:55:52.880 --> 0:55:55.319 go out on the lake. Didn't go out on the 0:55:55.400 --> 0:55:56.960 river much. He did. 0:55:57.880 --> 0:56:01.480 We did, miss kids, and once I got up to 0:56:01.520 --> 0:56:04.640 where I had my own boat, it was always to you. 0:56:04.640 --> 0:56:06.879 You didn't go out on the river because that river 0:56:06.960 --> 0:56:12.040 was a bad bogart hunah, and there was a inherent 0:56:12.440 --> 0:56:15.880 I'm not going to say fear. You were taught to 0:56:15.920 --> 0:56:19.080 stay in the lake, stay in slack water because the 0:56:19.120 --> 0:56:23.520 big river had currents. You had eighties, you had whirlpools, 0:56:23.800 --> 0:56:27.040 you had upsurges, you had dropped down where rivers dropped 0:56:27.080 --> 0:56:30.319 down two three feet and come back up. Because of 0:56:30.400 --> 0:56:34.360 the nature of the river, it is a dangerous system 0:56:34.400 --> 0:56:34.880 out there. 0:56:35.080 --> 0:56:36.400 You got to be real careful. 0:56:37.080 --> 0:56:40.480 Yet, as we grew up and began to nudge ot 0:56:40.560 --> 0:56:42.720 in there, we learned. 0:56:43.000 --> 0:56:45.640 Respect for the river. You learned what to look for. 0:56:46.239 --> 0:56:51.080 You learned the intricacies of what the river is and 0:56:51.120 --> 0:56:54.840 what it does, how it does it, and why it 0:56:54.920 --> 0:56:58.479 does it. I don't say fear the river, never feel 0:56:58.520 --> 0:57:02.840 the river. Respect the river, and respect the river for 0:57:02.920 --> 0:57:04.719 what it is and what. 0:57:04.719 --> 0:57:05.480 It can do. 0:57:06.440 --> 0:57:11.840 The river is such a dynamic system in itself. To me, 0:57:12.760 --> 0:57:17.720 the Mississippi River is one of our last wilderness areas. 0:57:17.280 --> 0:57:20.240 We have, and I love what stay that way. 0:57:21.240 --> 0:57:22.880 You know, we're getting a lot of cruise boats up 0:57:22.920 --> 0:57:26.080 in there now, coming up from all over every where, 0:57:26.520 --> 0:57:29.040 paddlewheel boats, tourists, hear all about it. We want to 0:57:29.040 --> 0:57:32.880 see it, want to get on it. But uh, I 0:57:33.040 --> 0:57:35.000 like to hit that river when you don't see anybody 0:57:35.000 --> 0:57:38.840 for three hours other than towboat every nine there, you 0:57:38.880 --> 0:57:39.840 know that's the river. 0:57:40.080 --> 0:57:43.040 Yeah, that's an interesting thought to think about a river 0:57:43.760 --> 0:57:47.280 as wilderness. I like it, I mean, and I think 0:57:47.320 --> 0:57:50.760 it's real because it's it's a system. Even though it's 0:57:50.760 --> 0:57:54.880 been manipulated by man, the system is still very natural 0:57:55.200 --> 0:57:57.160 and is it's a wild place. 0:57:57.440 --> 0:58:01.320 It is, especially what we call the lower from Kroe 0:58:01.320 --> 0:58:05.640 down where you've got floodwater areas, where we've got levees, 0:58:06.280 --> 0:58:07.800 other areas and on other rivers. 0:58:07.800 --> 0:58:09.040 You've got towns. 0:58:08.640 --> 0:58:11.360 Here, you've got little parks here, you got all there 0:58:11.440 --> 0:58:13.360 somewhat tame rivers here. 0:58:13.360 --> 0:58:14.840 You've got a wildly wool of river. 0:58:15.520 --> 0:58:18.240 A good part of it down here is protected by 0:58:18.320 --> 0:58:23.280 levees within the what we call the batcher between the levees. 0:58:23.320 --> 0:58:26.960 The land between the levees that flood. You can't build 0:58:26.960 --> 0:58:29.160 a house, and unless you build it fifteen sixteen twenty 0:58:29.200 --> 0:58:30.120 feet up off the ground. 0:58:40.760 --> 0:58:43.600 What I didn't understand until I went on the river 0:58:43.680 --> 0:58:47.160 myself is that from Memphis to Vicksburg there are very 0:58:47.200 --> 0:58:50.880 few towns that actually touch the Mississippi River. It floods 0:58:50.920 --> 0:58:53.760 and you can't build inside the levees. So if you're 0:58:53.800 --> 0:58:57.240 traveling down the river you see Sits not much different 0:58:57.280 --> 0:59:00.000 than Mark Twain did, and it's a bit of a stretch, 0:59:00.560 --> 0:59:03.200 but not as much as you'd think. It probably looks 0:59:03.280 --> 0:59:08.280 close to what Hernando DeSoto saw, a wild, wooly river, 0:59:08.880 --> 0:59:13.960 a wilderness. We've got an incredible cast of storytellers guiding 0:59:14.040 --> 0:59:17.200 us into an understanding of this mighty river. If we 0:59:17.360 --> 0:59:20.000 just heard from people from one discipline, our view would 0:59:20.000 --> 0:59:22.680 be narrow. But we've had people looking at the river 0:59:22.800 --> 0:59:26.600 from many different angles and disciplines. My whole life, I've 0:59:26.640 --> 0:59:29.960 wanted to understand this river, and I knew that I didn't. 0:59:30.560 --> 0:59:35.040 This series is my personal journey to understand it. On 0:59:35.200 --> 0:59:39.360 this episode, we laid a foundation, but we're just getting started. 0:59:39.880 --> 0:59:42.160 In the next episode, we'll talk about the men who 0:59:42.280 --> 0:59:45.880 tame this river, the engineers, and the ones who told 0:59:45.960 --> 0:59:50.120 America about its soul, the writers. I can't thank you 0:59:50.240 --> 0:59:53.720 enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our podcast 0:59:53.800 --> 0:59:57.400 with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes. 0:59:58.000 --> 1:00:01.760 I look forward to talking all the folks on The 1:00:01.760 --> 1:00:04.240 Bearer Is Render next week.