Speaker 1: The Mississippi River is so central every element of American history.
Speaker 1: The entire system was key to all transportation and communication
Speaker 1: across much of the country.
Speaker 2: On this episode, we're talking about what some Native American
Speaker 2: tribes called the river beyond any Age, and others called
Speaker 2: it the Father of waters. We're talking about the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2: This is a big bite, and it will take a
Speaker 2: diverse cast of storytellers for us to understand the river
Speaker 2: and its impact on America. New York Times bestselling author
Speaker 2: John Berry will be our guests, along with author Hank Berdine.
Speaker 2: A hydraulic engineer also will be here, a fisheries biologist,
Speaker 2: and a feller by the name of Will Primos, And
Speaker 2: we'll even hear the words of Mark Twain and T. S.
Speaker 3: Eliott.
Speaker 2: This has been a long time coming for me, and
Speaker 2: I'm on a personal journey to understand the significance of
Speaker 2: this American river on this country and on my life.
Speaker 2: The current will be swift in the water muddy, but
Speaker 2: I really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one.
Speaker 4: You got the West Coast, you got the Gulf Coast,
Speaker 4: you got to Atlantic Coast, and you've got the Missippi
Speaker 4: River on and right up the middle of America.
Speaker 3: That's the fourth Coast.
Speaker 2: My name is Klay nukemb and this is the Bear
Speaker 2: Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
Speaker 2: for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
Speaker 2: story of Americans who live their lives close to the land.
Speaker 2: Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and
Speaker 2: fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
Speaker 2: place as we explore.
Speaker 1: I do not know much about gods, but I think
Speaker 1: that the River is a strong brown god, sullen, untamed,
Speaker 1: and intractable, patient to some degree. At first recognized as
Speaker 1: a frontier, useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce, then
Speaker 1: only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem,
Speaker 1: once solved, the brown God is almost forgotten by the
Speaker 1: dwellers in cities. Ever, however, implacable, keeping his seasons and
Speaker 1: rages destroyer reminder of what men choose to forget, unhonored,
Speaker 1: unpropitiated by worshippers of the machine. But watching, waiting, and watching.
Speaker 2: I'm in a twenty three foot flat bottom boat. She's sturdy,
Speaker 2: but looks like she's been up the river a few times,
Speaker 2: but so does my captain Hank. Where are we going, Hank?
Speaker 3: On the river, the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2: I once asked Hank how old he was, and he
Speaker 2: told me he quit keeping track, but he thought his
Speaker 2: daughter knew. His hair looks like a cluster of white
Speaker 2: cotton balls. His face shows the dignity of age, and
Speaker 2: his accent sounds about what you figure an alligator would
Speaker 2: sound like.
Speaker 4: I mean Lay Fertherson that used to be the river
Speaker 4: in nineteen thirty eight, took out the gravel, bene created
Speaker 4: the flag of water harbor.
Speaker 3: He got thirty eight mile to the river. Lem he
Speaker 3: running up and I see what he did.
Speaker 2: The river is always changing. The only constant of an
Speaker 2: alluvial river is change. Only in the last one hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty years has that change been induced by man.
Speaker 2: This is the story of an ancient, untameable system in
Speaker 2: man's connection to it. That poem that you heard a
Speaker 2: few minutes ago, the one that said, I think the
Speaker 2: river is a strong brown god. This is the beginning
Speaker 2: of a poem by T. S. Eliot describing the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2: But that was the voice reading it of the author
Speaker 2: John Barry. He wrote a book in nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 2: called Rising Tide, The Great Mississippi Flood of nineteen twenty
Speaker 2: seven and How It Changed America. The book is considered
Speaker 2: by many to be one of the top works of
Speaker 2: American non fiction in modern times. This is the opening
Speaker 2: paragraph of his book. The Valley of the Mississippi River
Speaker 2: stretches north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico,
Speaker 2: east from New York and North Carolina, and west to
Speaker 2: Idaho and New Mexico. It is a valley twenty percent
Speaker 2: larger than that of China's Yellow River, double that of
Speaker 2: Africa's Nile, and India's Ganges, fifteen times that of Europe's Rhine.
Speaker 2: Within it lies forty one percent of the continentally United States,
Speaker 2: including all or part of thirty one states. No river
Speaker 2: in Europe, no river in the Orient, no river in
Speaker 2: the ancient civilized world compares to it. Only the Amazon
Speaker 2: and barely the Congo have a larger drainage basin measured
Speaker 2: from the head of its tributary. The Missouri River as
Speaker 2: a logical starting point as any. The Mississippi is the
Speaker 2: longest river in the world, and it pulses like the
Speaker 2: artery of the American heartland. To control the Mississippi River,
Speaker 2: not simply to find a modus vivendi with it, but
Speaker 2: to control it, to dictate it, to make it conform,
Speaker 2: is a mighty task. It requires more than confidence, It
Speaker 2: requires hubris. This is a big river that helped define
Speaker 2: the American character. This is a big story. I've always
Speaker 2: been mesmerized and frankly fearful of big dark water. But
Speaker 2: why is this water dark? Like a strong brown god.
Speaker 2: The answer to this question is core to the identity
Speaker 2: of the river. Here's our boat captain and lifelong connoisseur
Speaker 2: of dark water, Hank Burdine.
Speaker 3: To me, it's all about the dirt. It's the dirt.
Speaker 4: It's the dirt that has come from forty one percent
Speaker 4: of the continental United States, in two provinces of Canada,
Speaker 4: all the way from the Allegany Mountain to New York
Speaker 4: to the Rocky Mountain of Montana. It's the watershed. It
Speaker 4: has brought what we call the Mississippi Delta and form
Speaker 4: the Misissippi Delta, which is the alluvial bottomland area of
Speaker 4: the Mississippi in the y Azure River. We call it
Speaker 4: the delta, and through the millenniums, the floods every year
Speaker 4: spring time winter time have brought saw from all over
Speaker 4: this country down here.
Speaker 2: If we could anthropomorphize the river and view it as
Speaker 2: a living bean, this monstrous alluvial river acts with great
Speaker 2: force to do one thing, move dirt. Moving dirt is
Speaker 2: its obsession, it's daily bread. Stay with me for a
Speaker 2: minute for a metaphor. If the banks of the river
Speaker 2: were the skeleton of a great beast and the floodplain
Speaker 2: its flesh, the water would be its blood, and the
Speaker 2: sediment load the dirt that the water carries would be
Speaker 2: the life in the blood. The river is furious and
Speaker 2: relentless in moving Dirt's one thing it can't not do.
Speaker 2: And we can't understand the story of this river until
Speaker 2: we understand the inner motivations and workings of the river.
Speaker 2: Though it is not a sentient being, it operates like
Speaker 2: one when it comes to adherence to the mission, and
Speaker 2: that mission influences man. I'm wildly interested in how natural
Speaker 2: systems impact men in ways we don't perceive. Alluvial rivers
Speaker 2: are incredibly complex. Water turbulence of river hydraulics are mysterious.
Speaker 2: A famous physicist once said that he'd like to ask
Speaker 2: God too questions, why relativity and why turbulence? And then
Speaker 2: he said, I think God may have the answer to
Speaker 2: the first question, insinuating that God doesn't even understand turbulence.
Speaker 2: I take umbrage at the assumption, but I get the point.
Speaker 2: It's complex, and there are people who've dedicated their lives
Speaker 2: to understanding rivers.
Speaker 5: When I first went to work with the Vicksburg District
Speaker 5: Corp of Engineers, I was in what they called the
Speaker 5: potomology section. Potomology is not probably ringing a beil with you. Nope,
Speaker 5: it doesn't ring a bell with most anybody. But potomology
Speaker 5: is a science of rivers.
Speaker 2: That was doctor David Beadenharn, a research hydraulic engineer for
Speaker 2: the Core of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In his own words,
Speaker 2: he's a river geek. He's got an equation drawn on
Speaker 2: a whiteboard, and we're about to get a science lesson.
Speaker 5: Actually, i've drawn it up on the board there. That's
Speaker 5: not an equation up at the top. That's a relationship
Speaker 5: that says that the water discharge, how much water is
Speaker 5: in the river times the slope of the river. How
Speaker 5: steep is the river. That's what we call stream power.
Speaker 5: That's the ability of the river to do work. Rivers
Speaker 5: they can either have more water to get energy, or
Speaker 5: they can increase their slope to get more energy and discharge.
Speaker 5: Q try and slope. It's a surrogate for a stream power.
Speaker 2: The energy and work is moving sediment moving exactly.
Speaker 5: And that's the other side of the relationship that Q subs.
Speaker 5: That's the settlement load. That's how much sediment is moving.
Speaker 5: So on the left hand side of that relationship is
Speaker 5: the power.
Speaker 3: And the energy that a river has.
Speaker 5: And on the right hand side is what it is
Speaker 5: doing that spending that power and energy to do do
Speaker 5: work and move sediment. That's the way rivers behave.
Speaker 2: Stream power is the river's ability to do work. That's
Speaker 2: the way rivers behave. Like a beaver building dams. The
Speaker 2: core of this river is moving dirt. Here's an example
Speaker 2: of how much dirt the river can move and how
Speaker 2: quickly it can be done. A revetment, which he's about
Speaker 2: to talk about, is a concrete mattress placed on the
Speaker 2: riverbank to stop erosion.
Speaker 5: It was down in the New Orleans district where the
Speaker 5: revetment was placed on the river bank in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 5: and the mattress goes, you know, from top bank all
Speaker 5: the way down to what we call the thowl wag
Speaker 5: of the river of thoal Wag is just the lowest
Speaker 5: point in the cross section of the cover, so the
Speaker 5: bottom of the river, okayvalwag. They came back and they
Speaker 5: surveyed it and at the bed of the river where
Speaker 5: the mattress met the bed back in nineteen seventy eight,
Speaker 5: they surveyed it in May of nineteen eighty four. It
Speaker 5: is scoured sixty feet. Sixty feet is a pretty big
Speaker 5: scour hole. Wow, well, that got their attention, so they
Speaker 5: mobilize the troops. They're going to come back in and
Speaker 5: do some repair work to make sure that revetment is
Speaker 5: stable and so in the process. One month later, in
Speaker 5: June of nineteen eighty four, they came back to get
Speaker 5: another survey to know exactly what they had. It filled
Speaker 5: back in forty feet.
Speaker 2: That's an incredible amount of dirt moving around in a
Speaker 2: sixty foot dar deep scour. Filling in forty feet in
Speaker 2: a month, that's incredible. Here's another excerpt from John Berry's
Speaker 2: rising tide, the river's main current can reach nine miles
Speaker 2: an hour, while some currents can move much faster During floods,
Speaker 2: measurable effects of an approaching floodcrest can roar down river
Speaker 2: at almost eighteen miles an hour. And for the last
Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi's flow, the
Speaker 2: river bed lies below sea level, fifteen feet below sea
Speaker 2: level at Vicksburg well over one hundred and seventy feet
Speaker 2: below sea level at New Orleans. For this four hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty miles, the water on the bottom has no
Speaker 2: reason to flow at all, but the water above it does.
Speaker 2: This creates a tumbling effect as water spills over itself
Speaker 2: like an enormous, ever breaking internal wave. This tumbling effect
Speaker 2: can attack a river bank or a levee like a buzzsaal.
Speaker 2: But the final complexity of the lower mia Mississippi is
Speaker 2: its sediment load, an understanding that was key to understanding
Speaker 2: how to control the river. Every day, the river deposits
Speaker 2: between several hundred thousand and several million tons of earth
Speaker 2: into the Gulf of Mexico. At least some geologists put
Speaker 2: this figure even higher. Historically, at an average of more
Speaker 2: than two million tons a day by geologic standards. The
Speaker 2: Lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream and runs
Speaker 2: through what is known as the Mississippi Embayment, a declevity
Speaker 2: covering approximately thirty five thousand miles that begins thirty miles
Speaker 2: north of Kiro to Cape Girardo, Missouri, geologically the true
Speaker 2: head of the Mississippi Delta, and extends to the Gulf
Speaker 2: of Mexico. At one time, the Gulf itself reached to
Speaker 2: Cape Girardo. Then sea level fell. Over thousands of years,
Speaker 2: the river and its tributaries have poured twelve hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty cubic miles of sediment, the equivalent of twelve hundred
Speaker 2: and eighty separate mountains of earth, each one mile high,
Speaker 2: a mile wide, and a mile long, into this declevity.
Speaker 2: Aided by the falling sea level, this sediment filled in
Speaker 2: the Embayment and made land throughout the mississippis alluvial valley.
Speaker 2: This sedimentary deposit has an average thickness of one hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty two feet. In some areas the deposits reach
Speaker 2: down three hundred and fifty feet. Its weight is great
Speaker 2: enough that some geologists believe its downward pressure pushed up
Speaker 2: surrounding land, creating hills. We've had a poet T. S. Eliot,
Speaker 2: a delta philosopher Hank Berdine, a writer John Barry, and
Speaker 2: a hydrologist, doctor Beadenharn tell us the same thing. It's
Speaker 2: all about the dirt where science, culture and art meet.
Speaker 2: That's where you find the story. An alluvial river is
Speaker 2: one in which the banks are mobile and shift. It
Speaker 2: meanders and weaves through its floodplain, as opposed to a
Speaker 2: river with bedroo banks in a bed that never shifts.
Speaker 2: The floodplain is the area along the river subject to flooding.
Speaker 2: The Mississippi has been putting on a dirt moving clinic
Speaker 2: since before the first humans arrived on this continent and
Speaker 2: when giant ground sloss walked on their knuckles on its banks.
Speaker 2: But to understand the Mississippi River today, we've got to
Speaker 2: understand the size of its drainage basin. Thirty one states
Speaker 2: two Canadian provinces are drained by the river. Here's John Berry.
Speaker 1: Well, the drainage basin is the third largest drainage basin.
Speaker 1: You know, the Amazon's the biggest, and the Nile just
Speaker 1: barely edges out the Mississi.
Speaker 2: Square mileage of drainage.
Speaker 1: It's like one point two four million square miles, Okay,
Speaker 1: So that's it's a lot of square miles. And you know,
Speaker 1: in terms of flow, you know, the state of Texas
Speaker 1: is looking out twenty thirty years to its water needs,
Speaker 1: and it thinks it needs something like ten million acre
Speaker 1: feet of water in future years to meet its needs.
Speaker 1: A year in flood, the Mississippi River is carrying in
Speaker 1: a great flood, you know, maybe four and a half
Speaker 1: million acre feet a day. So you just think of that,
Speaker 1: that a couple of days flow of the Mississippi River
Speaker 1: in a flood is it would be enough to satisfy
Speaker 1: all the water needs for the state of Texas for
Speaker 1: a year. You know, when I think of the Mississippi River,
Speaker 1: I actually think of the entire system. When you think
Speaker 1: of it, you may just think of essentially a straight
Speaker 1: line from Minnesota to the Gulf, but that's not how
Speaker 1: I conceive of it.
Speaker 2: In the world, only the Amazon and Nile rivers have
Speaker 2: larger drainage basins. That's an incredible amount of water, and
Speaker 2: an acre foot is a weird unit of measurement to understand,
Speaker 2: but it's the amount of water needed to flood one
Speaker 2: acre at the depth of one foot. It takes a
Speaker 2: lot of voices to tell a story about the Mississippi River.
Speaker 2: This is doctor Jack Kilgore with two l's, a fisheries
Speaker 2: biologist for the corp of Engineers, telling the most unique
Speaker 2: feature of the river today. This is something to be
Speaker 2: proud of.
Speaker 6: All the other great rivers of the word, the Congo,
Speaker 6: the Nile of the ynt Sea, all of those they
Speaker 6: have dams near the mouth of the river, whereas the Mississippi,
Speaker 6: the first damn you encounter is up in Saint Louis,
Speaker 6: which is twelve hundred miles up. However, a fish can
Speaker 6: take a left on the Missouri and go another twelve
Speaker 6: hundred miles to the Gavin's Point damn on the Missouri.
Speaker 6: So I tell people this that if you put all
Speaker 6: of that together, there's almost twenty four hundred miles of
Speaker 6: free flowing Mississippi Missouri River. There's nothing else like that
Speaker 6: in the world except for the Amazon. All the other
Speaker 6: great rivers have been dammed, which influences settiment, transport, water quality,
Speaker 6: migratory fish, you know, has all those negative impacts.
Speaker 2: The Missouri River is roughly twenty four hundred miles long
Speaker 2: and is America's longest river. It's longer than the Mississippi.
Speaker 2: It is dammed twelve hundred miles from its mouth. The
Speaker 2: Mississippi River, give or take, is about twenty three hundred
Speaker 2: and fifty miles in length from its headwater on Lake
Speaker 2: Atasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. The first
Speaker 2: dam of the Mississippi River is in Saint Louis, one
Speaker 2: thousand miles from its mouth at the gulf. That's also
Speaker 2: where the Missouri runs into the Mississippi. I hope this
Speaker 2: is all adding up to you. That's a lot of
Speaker 2: numbers unless you've got a scratch pad. Let me do
Speaker 2: the math. Combining the Missouri and Mississippi. There's almost twenty
Speaker 2: four hundred miles of free flowing river free of dams.
Speaker 2: Free flowing means free of dams. This is major. It's
Speaker 2: probably even tattoo worthy. I can see it now, the
Speaker 2: number twenty four hundred sketched over a muddy river with
Speaker 2: an American flag blowing on the bank, with an eagle
Speaker 2: flying through the sky. I'm kidding. Don't get that tattooed.
Speaker 3: On you.
Speaker 2: But long before America had a flag and tattoos were trendy,
Speaker 2: this land had the river. But how long has the
Speaker 2: river been here? Here's doctor Kilgore.
Speaker 6: Really, it was formed at the end of when the
Speaker 6: glaciers began to melt about ten thousand years ago, and
Speaker 6: all of that glacial and all that material started pouring
Speaker 6: down and creating this meandering river. It became kind of
Speaker 6: more of a braided river because of all that washlow.
Speaker 6: It remained unchanged for ten thousand years, and then in
Speaker 6: nineteen thirty the Core came in there and started their
Speaker 6: Massy flood control project, and that's what locked the river
Speaker 6: in place.
Speaker 2: That was a simple answer to a very complex question.
Speaker 2: And I can't keep these guys from getting too far
Speaker 2: ahead in our story. He just jumped from ten thousand
Speaker 2: years ago to the infamous nineteen twenty seven flood like
Speaker 2: it was a ballet step. We'll talk about that later, Doc. Basically,
Speaker 2: the river has been in its current form since the
Speaker 2: last ice age, which ended ten thousand years ago. The
Speaker 2: Mississippi River Valley drainage basin, the whole thing from the
Speaker 2: Rockies to the Appalachians was formed by the Laurentide ice
Speaker 2: sheet and carved out the valley over seventy million years ago.
Speaker 2: I think it's kind of arrogant to name an ice
Speaker 2: sheet like you'd name a pet, but whatever, I understand
Speaker 2: the pragmatism of it. But no human that our culture
Speaker 2: has had correspondence with saw this ice sheet to report
Speaker 2: about it to us. And I'm not saying that because
Speaker 2: I doubt that it was there. The ice sheet was there,
Speaker 2: but it's just kind of wild the amount of data
Speaker 2: that we can pull from the Earth's cryptic diary about
Speaker 2: its past life. It has recording mechanisms that take the
Speaker 2: form of glacially formed valley in lakes, mysterious piles of rock,
Speaker 2: and striations on bedrock that came from a two mile
Speaker 2: deep cap of ice that covered two thirds of North America.
Speaker 2: Lord have mercy. Perhaps it is self focused, but natural
Speaker 2: systems make more sense to us when we understand their
Speaker 2: overlap with our story, the human story. We've truly gotten
Speaker 2: no way of knowing who or where the first humans
Speaker 2: saw the Mississippi River, and it's kind of unfair that
Speaker 2: we give the Spaniard Hernando de Soto so much fanfare
Speaker 2: for being the first European to see the river in
Speaker 2: fifteen forty one, which he was, or you know, someone
Speaker 2: from his crew. But I'd like to take a minute
Speaker 2: and think about the first human that ever saw the river.
Speaker 2: Just slow down for a second. There was a very
Speaker 2: primitive man or woman that was the first to see it,
Speaker 2: or maybe it was a group of travelers who saw
Speaker 2: it all about the same time. Most archaeologists believed that
Speaker 2: the first humans on this continent came across the baring
Speaker 2: Land Bridge about fifteen thousand years ago, So that story
Speaker 2: would have these people approaching the river from the west.
Speaker 2: Now this is personal speculation. I've never read this, but
Speaker 2: it seems like it would have been somewhere south of Missouri,
Speaker 2: which was the southernmost tip of the Laurentide ice sheet.
Speaker 2: You should name your next dog Laurentide or even your
Speaker 2: kid without getting into a geology lesson. If that assumption
Speaker 2: is true, it's unlikely they'd have traveled across the Ozarks
Speaker 2: to get to the river, but likely went down the
Speaker 2: Arkansas River Valley, traveling in a southwesterly direction, perhaps seeing
Speaker 2: this great river for the first time around where the
Speaker 2: Arkansas and Mississippi meet. This is not scientific. It's just
Speaker 2: an exercise on a mental treadmill.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: The story of human migration coming from the west is
Speaker 2: contested by the cosmology of the Cherokee and others, who
Speaker 2: say they entered this land from the south, crossing a
Speaker 2: great passage of water. My point is this, we know
Speaker 2: a lot of stuff, but the best minds in the
Speaker 2: world will never know the answer of who saw the
Speaker 2: Mississippi River first. Hernando de Soto was the first to
Speaker 2: write it down in an English based language. He had
Speaker 2: been on a great expedition from Florida to what is
Speaker 2: now Tennessee and approached from the east and likely saw
Speaker 2: it near current Memphis in fifteen forty one. He originally
Speaker 2: called it the River of the Holy Spirit, spoken in Spanish.
Speaker 2: Of course, De Soto's trek through the Southern US is
Speaker 2: probably as wild and experienced as a human has ever had.
Speaker 2: For both the Spanish and the Native Americans, this was
Speaker 2: the native's first contact with Europeans, their first time seeing horses,
Speaker 2: war dogs, and pigs. It would have been like coming
Speaker 2: into contact with aliens. It was also their first contact
Speaker 2: with the diseases of the modern cities of Europe. De
Speaker 2: Soto crossed the river into Arkansas. He was the first
Speaker 2: European to see it and cross it. And when he
Speaker 2: got here, the Mississippi River Valley was a thriving civilization
Speaker 2: of many nations of indigenous people. Many natives believe De
Speaker 2: Soto was a god, which was good for his purposes
Speaker 2: of looking for gold and land. He didn't find gold, however,
Speaker 2: in May fifteen forty two, De Soto, at age forty two,
Speaker 2: would die of fever and his men would bury him
Speaker 2: in the river. And this next part of the story
Speaker 2: is almost too wild, But no Europeans came back for
Speaker 2: one hundred and twenty years. One hundred and twenty years.
Speaker 2: That's an incredible gap of time. Okay, So now I
Speaker 2: would like to introduce you to another character in our
Speaker 2: eclectic cast of Mississippi River storytellers. A big river takes
Speaker 2: a lot of voices. This man's name is Samuel Clemens.
Speaker 2: You may know him as Mark Twain. In eighteen eighty
Speaker 2: three he published a book called Life on the Mississippi,
Speaker 2: and he had something to say about De Soto and
Speaker 2: this mysterious one hundred and twenty year gap. De Soto
Speaker 2: merely glimpsed the river died and was buried in it
Speaker 2: by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests
Speaker 2: and soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten, the
Speaker 2: Spanish custom of the day, and thus move other adventurers
Speaker 2: to go at once and explore it. On the contrary,
Speaker 2: their narratives when they reached home did not excite that
Speaker 2: amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites
Speaker 2: during a term of years that seems incredible in our
Speaker 2: energetic days. One may sense the interval to his mind,
Speaker 2: after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way.
Speaker 2: After de Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of
Speaker 2: a quarter century had elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born,
Speaker 2: lived a trifle more than a half century, then died,
Speaker 2: and when he had been in his grave considerably more
Speaker 2: than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi.
Speaker 2: In our day, we don't allow one hundred and thirty
Speaker 2: years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. For more
Speaker 2: than one hundred and fifty years there has been white
Speaker 2: settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate
Speaker 2: communication with the Indians in the south. The Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering,
Speaker 2: and slaving and converting them. Necessarily, then these various clusters
Speaker 2: of whites must have heard of the great river of
Speaker 2: the far West, And indeed they did hear of it vaguely,
Speaker 2: so vaguely and indefinitely that its course, proportions, and locality
Speaker 2: were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter
Speaker 2: ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration. But this
Speaker 2: did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river,
Speaker 2: nobody needed, nobody was curious about it. So for a
Speaker 2: century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the
Speaker 2: market and undisturbed. When de Soto found it, he was
Speaker 2: not hunting for a river, and he had no present
Speaker 2: occasion for one. Consequently, he did not value it or
Speaker 2: even take any particular notice of it. But at last
Speaker 2: LaSalle the Frenchman, conceived the idea of seeking out that
Speaker 2: river and exploring it. It always happens that when a
Speaker 2: man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed
Speaker 2: with the same notion crop up all around. It happened,
Speaker 2: so in this instance, naturally, the question suggests itself why
Speaker 2: did these people want the river now when nobody had
Speaker 2: wanted it in the five preceding generations. Apparently it was
Speaker 2: because at this late day they thought they had discovered
Speaker 2: a way to make it useful. For it had come
Speaker 2: to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf
Speaker 2: of California and therefore added a short cut from Canada
Speaker 2: to China. Previously, the supposition had been that it emptied
Speaker 2: into the Atlantic or the Sea of Virginia. Twain's prose
Speaker 2: in this book is some of America's finest literature, but
Speaker 2: he also dropped a history lesson on us, describing in
Speaker 2: detail that one hundred and twenty year gap between De
Speaker 2: Soto and LaSalle, and when Lasau arrived he found the
Speaker 2: great civilization. De Soto described almost gone. The people were gone,
Speaker 2: the cities were ruins. It's believe that during that gap,
Speaker 2: the European diseases that De Soto brought with him almost
Speaker 2: wiped out the Native Americans. That's almost unfathomable. Can you
Speaker 2: imagine your people dying a mysterious death over the course
Speaker 2: of several generations. Can you imagine living on the Atlantic
Speaker 2: coast and not knowing where the Mississippi River emptied. Can
Speaker 2: you imagine the unknowns of a world like that? LaSalle
Speaker 2: and his traveling partner Detante would be the first year
Speaker 2: of to call the river the Mississippi, which is a
Speaker 2: transliteration of a Chippewa word Michasippe, or great water. Often
Speaker 2: it's referred to as the father of waters. You'll hear
Speaker 2: that a lot. An alternate story, though, arose from a
Speaker 2: chief of the Chalk Talls, a man named Peter Pitchlan,
Speaker 2: who wrote a letter about returning to the land beyond
Speaker 2: the micha Subkui, which meant the river beyond any age.
Speaker 2: He wrote in his letter that white man never writes
Speaker 2: Indian names correctly, but the word which we pronounce, Mishasippe,
Speaker 2: is spelt nearer your own river. He wrote that in
Speaker 2: a letter and said that that name meant the river
Speaker 2: beyond any age. Pichland was a legit dude, and I
Speaker 2: think he was dropping some knowledge. Whatever it means, the
Speaker 2: Mississippi River has been the name of this river for
Speaker 2: a very short period of its existence, and who knows,
Speaker 2: it likely won't always be called that. Our society could
Speaker 2: be forgotten, lost, misrepresented, just as easy as his was.
Speaker 2: If you remember ts Eliott's poem, the river is patiently
Speaker 2: waiting and watching to human trapped in time. Everything always
Speaker 2: seems so permanent, but it's not natural. Systems outlast humans,
Speaker 2: and rivers don't perceive time or think like men. No
Speaker 2: river has ever played a greater role in a country
Speaker 2: than the Mississippi River in America. It cuts through the
Speaker 2: heart of this country like a jugular vein. Here's John Berry.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was always interested in the Mississippi River. You know,
Speaker 1: when people ask me where I ever got the idea
Speaker 1: to write that book, I always say, well, I grew
Speaker 1: up in Rhode Island, so it's perfectly natural for me
Speaker 1: to want to write about the Mississippi River. And as
Speaker 1: you just did, they almost always chuckle. But the reality
Speaker 1: is it's true if you carry it at all about
Speaker 1: American history. The Mississippi River is so central every element
Speaker 1: of American history. It has to interest you, if not
Speaker 1: fascinated you. And growing up in Rhode Island, you know,
Speaker 1: grew up in Providence with my grandfather, you know, was
Speaker 1: in Newport on the ocean there every summer. Nonetheless, it
Speaker 1: was always the Mississippi River. I love the Atlantic Ocean too,
Speaker 1: But the Mississippi River I just always wanted to write about.
Speaker 2: And it was a massive It was a very formidable
Speaker 2: had a very formidable presence in the American frontier, in
Speaker 2: American expansion.
Speaker 1: Sure, I mean it was you know, at the beginning,
Speaker 1: it was everything. It was a combination of you know,
Speaker 1: rail boats, airplanes, you know, fiber optics, you know, telegraph, telephone.
Speaker 1: All that was the Mississippi River and its tribute to
Speaker 1: it's the entire system was key to all transportation and
Speaker 1: communication across much of the country until the development of
Speaker 1: the telegraphic.
Speaker 2: His point is that the river was the lifeblood of
Speaker 2: communication and transportation on this continent before modern technology. It
Speaker 2: acted in place of the coming railroads, airplanes, fiber optics,
Speaker 2: and telephone. It was key to America becoming America.
Speaker 4: Here's Hank the thing to me about the essence are
Speaker 4: of the Mississippi River. It's not only the third largest
Speaker 4: river in the world, if we had included the Missouri
Speaker 4: and the Missippi, it'd be the biggest fe in the world.
Speaker 4: More than likely. It splits right down the middle of
Speaker 4: this northern hemisphere. People say, well, we got free coasts
Speaker 4: of America we got full coasts. You got the West Coast,
Speaker 4: you got the Gulf Coast, you got the Atlantic Coast,
Speaker 4: and you got the Missisippi River on and right.
Speaker 3: Up the middle of America. That's the fourth coast.
Speaker 4: Look at the goods and produce the products, the sand
Speaker 4: of the gravel, the timber, everything, the petroleum products that
Speaker 4: flow up and down at Mississippi Room. It is a
Speaker 4: not only a force to be reckoned with because of
Speaker 4: its wildness, but its economic value. It's unbelievable to what
Speaker 4: America is and what it does for America.
Speaker 2: The Mississippi River was undoubtedly a cornerstone in the building
Speaker 2: of the American Empire. And I really like the idea
Speaker 2: of the Mississippi being the fourth coast. The river has
Speaker 2: more sand beaches than the Gulf Coast. Here's doctor Bedenhearn.
Speaker 5: The amount of cargo and fuel and supplies that are
Speaker 5: transported every day on the river.
Speaker 3: But it's it's huge.
Speaker 5: And we've got the ports that you know, New Orleans,
Speaker 5: Baton Rouge and some of the biggest ports in the
Speaker 5: world world and you know, the United States. I'm not
Speaker 5: gonna say we're lucky, but we've got this major river
Speaker 5: system that goes right up through a bread basket, you
Speaker 5: know of farmland. You know, not all countries have that.
Speaker 5: They may have big rivers, but they maybe flow through
Speaker 5: the Amazon. There's no real you know, agriculture there. But
Speaker 5: we've kind of got a combination of a big river
Speaker 5: that we can navigate. Of course we have, we had
Speaker 5: a lot of work to get that to be the
Speaker 5: dependable navigation system we wanted. But it also navigates right
Speaker 5: up through the heartland of of you know, the bread
Speaker 5: basket of America.
Speaker 2: Transportation is key to empire building and this river being
Speaker 2: situated in the middle is more than significant. Think about
Speaker 2: all the crop land from Minnesota to Louisiana. This is
Speaker 2: big and it's not just any cropland the Mississippi Delta
Speaker 2: is considered some of the most fertile land in the world.
Speaker 4: Most areas in the country topsail is six eight inches deep.
Speaker 4: Our average topsail is about one hundred and sixty to
Speaker 4: one hundred and eighty feet deep. Here it has been
Speaker 4: called some of the richest soil in the world compared
Speaker 4: to the river. Now and there's an old saying that
Speaker 4: the Lord will won Deer Creek about six miles east
Speaker 4: of here that the Lord could have made better dirt,
Speaker 4: but he figured he just didn't need to.
Speaker 2: Deer Creek is a tributary of the Mississippi with some
Speaker 2: of the Delta's finest soil. It's hard to get a
Speaker 2: definitive answer for how deep the soil is in the
Speaker 2: Delta because its depth varies and top soil is a
Speaker 2: colloquial term, but it's also a scientific term. But the
Speaker 2: truth is that it's just extremely deep. In places it's
Speaker 2: alluvial soil, meaning it was deposited there by a flooding river.
Speaker 2: This is important. We did a podcast on soil formation
Speaker 2: on Bear Grease episode twenty called From the Earth. Soil
Speaker 2: building is one of the Earth's most fascinating processes, takes
Speaker 2: an incredible amount of time, can be squandered in a
Speaker 2: generation of mismanagement, and has caused the rise and fall
Speaker 2: of empires. You may not touch much soil or daily
Speaker 2: perceive its connection to your life, but it is the
Speaker 2: foundation of your physical body. Everything comes from the soil,
Speaker 2: and you will go back to it. In terms of
Speaker 2: where we're at in our story Lut's level, we're establishing
Speaker 2: a baseline of understanding the natural features of the river
Speaker 2: in man's early connection to it. We have to view
Speaker 2: the river as a complex, ancient system that will outlive
Speaker 2: you and your offspring should the earth persist, and not
Speaker 2: just a narrow body of muddy water. You cross on
Speaker 2: a bridge and honk your horn because you've passed into
Speaker 2: a new state. Let's keep heading down river. Here's John
Speaker 2: Berry the Mississippi River in general, describing it. It's two
Speaker 2: hundred feet deep and a mile wide inside the bigger sections,
Speaker 2: and it drops the slope of three inches per mile,
Speaker 2: flows through some of the flattest land in the world.
Speaker 2: Generally flows about nine miles per hour, and the last
Speaker 2: four hundred and fifty miles of the Mississippi River is
Speaker 2: below sea level. Can you help me understand how that's possible.
Speaker 1: Well, those stats are accurate, but they're a little bit selected.
Speaker 1: For example, obviously the river's not two hundred feet deep
Speaker 1: the whole, yeah, you know, but some of the deepest sections,
Speaker 1: which are you know, right in Orleans, are probably two
Speaker 1: forty practically right at the French quarter. It's called the
Speaker 1: Crescent City because it's sharp turns here and when you
Speaker 1: get a high water the river on the outer bank,
Speaker 1: you know, just like on a racetrack, it's actually higher
Speaker 1: than the water on the other bank, maybe a foot
Speaker 1: higher in terms of the bottom of the river being
Speaker 1: below sea level for several hundred miles.
Speaker 2: Okay, at the bottom of the room being level.
Speaker 1: What you have is the force of all the water
Speaker 1: draining from thirty one states pushing against the sea coming up.
Speaker 2: So there's a force behind it. Yeah, it's not gravity
Speaker 2: pulling it down.
Speaker 1: Well, it's yeah, Well, I mean you're right, because well,
Speaker 1: you know, water flows downhill and if it warn't, you know,
Speaker 1: you got something other factor that is that is affecting it,
Speaker 1: that's forcing it. And it's it's not uphill, it's still
Speaker 1: going downhill. But you know, right now record low water
Speaker 1: and a lot of the river the ocean is pushing
Speaker 1: salt water up river.
Speaker 2: It's always been like that. It's it's kind of a
Speaker 2: silly question. When when I was a kid, I remember
Speaker 2: there's a big mountain within side of the town we
Speaker 2: lived in in Arkansas, and I asked my dad one time,
Speaker 2: I said, was that mountain here when you were a kid?
Speaker 2: So this is question is kind of like that is
Speaker 2: the bottom of the river always been below sea level?
Speaker 1: Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 2: Okay, dumb questions get dumb answers. It's pretty hard to
Speaker 2: wrap your head around the last four hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: miles of the river being below sea level. I thought
Speaker 2: maybe this had to do with man's imprint on the river.
Speaker 2: I guess not. We're still learning about the physical attributes
Speaker 2: of the river. But the river is very different in
Speaker 2: different sections. Here's doctor Jack Kilgore describing the sections of
Speaker 2: the Mississippi River.
Speaker 6: Well, first of all, this layout the Lower Mess. There's
Speaker 6: really five or six different reaches of the lower Mississippi River.
Speaker 6: A lot of people think, oh, it's just the Lower Mess.
Speaker 6: Well no, so from New Orleans down the last one
Speaker 6: hundred miles that's where, of course it runs into the
Speaker 6: Gulf of Mexico. But you have a combination of fresh
Speaker 6: water and escherine fish, and the river just pours into
Speaker 6: all these estuaries and that's what sustains the lifeblood of
Speaker 6: Louisiana and Mississippi coastal wetlands. Then when you get above
Speaker 6: New Orleans, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, you don't
Speaker 6: really have a floodplain and it's highly industrialized, and it's
Speaker 6: also within the deep water navigation channel. And when I
Speaker 6: say deep water from Baton Rouge down to the Gulf,
Speaker 6: it's forty It has to be forty five feet in
Speaker 6: order for the sea going ships to traverse up and
Speaker 6: down the river. Above Baton Rouge, the minimum is twelve feet.
Speaker 6: And that's of course all you have are the barges,
Speaker 6: which have a much shallower draft.
Speaker 2: So from the mouth of the river to one hundred
Speaker 2: miles inland it's heavily influenced by the saltwater of the Gulf.
Speaker 2: The first section from the Gulf to New Orleans is
Speaker 2: a wide web of brackish wetlands. New Orleans sits about
Speaker 2: forty or fifty miles inland from the Gulf proper. The
Speaker 2: second section from New Orleans to Baton Rouge is a
Speaker 2: highly industrialized, narrow section of the river with no floodplain,
Speaker 2: lots of big boats.
Speaker 6: But then above Baton Rouge, from Baton Rouge to Natchez
Speaker 6: really all the way up to Memphis. Between Memphis and
Speaker 6: Baton Rouge, the core cut off fourteen meander bins back
Speaker 6: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and to shorten the
Speaker 6: river in the name of flood control, thinking that that
Speaker 6: by straightening the river, the flood pulses would evacuate the
Speaker 6: valley quicker than a meandering river. Well that worked, I
Speaker 6: mean it dropped the stages, but the river is still
Speaker 6: adjusting from man made cutoffs seventy five years ago.
Speaker 2: Haink talked about those cutoffs earlier in the podcast. Baton
Speaker 2: Rouge to Memphis has that classic big wide, wild Mississippi
Speaker 2: River delta field. It has an intact floodplain, I meaning
Speaker 2: the river is allowed to have its natural flood patterns,
Speaker 2: and usually the levees sit a long ways off the
Speaker 2: main river the mountains. I was an adult before I
Speaker 2: learned what a levee was. It was hard for me
Speaker 2: to wrap my mind around it until I was standing
Speaker 2: there and understood it. But it's basically a dam of
Speaker 2: dirt that runs along the river, protecting the surrounding areas
Speaker 2: from floods. In a minute, we're going to learn more
Speaker 2: about levees. But here's doctor Kilgore.
Speaker 6: And then once you get though above Memphis, you get
Speaker 6: out of the cutoffs and you get into a lot
Speaker 6: of gravel.
Speaker 2: Bars north of Memphis.
Speaker 6: North of Memphis all the way up to the Ohio Okay,
Speaker 6: So it's kind of a lot of secondary channel. There's
Speaker 6: about one hundred second I'll talk about that in a minute.
Speaker 6: But from there up to the Ohio, you get a
Speaker 6: lot of gravel bars, but you still have an intact floodplane.
Speaker 6: So the levees are still a place.
Speaker 2: Further back from Memphis to kro Illinois, where the Ohio
Speaker 2: comes in, there are more gravel bars, but there's still
Speaker 2: an intact floodplain. Let's keep going.
Speaker 6: And then once you get in above the Ohio, between
Speaker 6: the Ohio and Saint Lewis is what we call the
Speaker 6: Middle Miss. The river narrows. There's no floodplain, it's very
Speaker 6: high velocity, and there's just a lot of dikes. So
Speaker 6: what they do is they'll put these dikes in there
Speaker 6: to create this self scouring channel so the core doesn't
Speaker 6: have to dredge. So the Middle Miss really doesn't have
Speaker 6: It's kind of like the Lower Miss, but it didn't
Speaker 6: have a floodplain. And then, of course, once you get
Speaker 6: above Saint Louis and Alton, you have the twenty seven
Speaker 6: locking dams.
Speaker 2: From Kroad to Saint Louis is the middle Mississippi, and
Speaker 2: that Saint Louis is the first dam of the river,
Speaker 2: which totally changes it. So there you go. Now you
Speaker 2: have a general understanding of the Middle and Lower Mississippi,
Speaker 2: but it would be helpful to officially learn what some
Speaker 2: of the man made features of the river are. I'm serious,
Speaker 2: I was a grown man before I knew what a
Speaker 2: levee was. We've got to understand levees.
Speaker 6: And the levees, of course, are giant earthern mounds on
Speaker 6: each side of the river. But fortunately when they realign
Speaker 6: the le they put them far enough back to allow
Speaker 6: the river to have a floodplain.
Speaker 2: Still, okay, so it can get over its banks.
Speaker 6: Yes, from levee to levee it can be up to
Speaker 6: fourteen miles wide. So there is a two million acre
Speaker 6: floodplain that this river is associated with, and that is
Speaker 6: one of the natural features of the Lower miss Unlike
Speaker 6: most other great rivers of the world except for the Amazon.
Speaker 2: Levees are the magic, the bread and butter, the flashy mule,
Speaker 2: and the pasture of the Mississippi River. They make the
Speaker 2: region outside of the levee habitable. The land between the
Speaker 2: levee and river is subject to seasonal flooding, meaning you
Speaker 2: can't farm or build cities inside the levee. However, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of hunting camps inside the levee, usually
Speaker 2: built on stilts or built in some way that expects flooding.
Speaker 2: See if you recognize this Mississippi voice, you know, other
Speaker 2: than my voice, because I talk some here too. Here's
Speaker 2: more on levees. You know, what's interesting to think about
Speaker 2: in terms of the way humans have manipulated the earth
Speaker 2: so that we can live in places that we maybe
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been able to. Like you think of the
Speaker 2: Middle East. There's there are places in the Middle East
Speaker 2: that are basically would be uninhabitable by humans because of
Speaker 2: lack of water, but now we have ways to get
Speaker 2: water there. The Mississippi River delta would have seasonally flooded
Speaker 2: to the point that it would have been very hard
Speaker 2: to live here year round, grow crops.
Speaker 3: Yeah, or without the levees.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, So that's Wilber Primos. Yeah, I mean we've
Speaker 2: got civilization just right outside the levees that for the
Speaker 2: last eon of time has flooded. That's right, And that's
Speaker 2: so interesting. I mean, we just take so much for granted.
Speaker 2: And when you understand the levee system and how you know,
Speaker 2: only the last one hundred and seventy years, I guess
Speaker 2: we've had these levees and it's just you couldn't even
Speaker 2: live down here.
Speaker 7: No, no, you could not, you know, not not in
Speaker 7: the fall and winter for sure.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: When you ride down the Mississippi Levee and you look
Speaker 7: down to the typically on the outside of the levee,
Speaker 7: not the river side, but the other side, you'll see
Speaker 7: a little lake as a hole, and the name of
Speaker 7: that hole is typically a bar pit. That is slang
Speaker 7: for borrow pit b O r r o w borrow pit.
Speaker 7: They borrowed the dirt and dug a hole and put
Speaker 7: it to make the levee, so that becomes a bar pit.
Speaker 2: So there's a big ditch and then there's a big
Speaker 2: pile of dirt.
Speaker 7: And bar pits can be great fishing holes. They leased
Speaker 7: the levee to a lot of cattle farmers because it's
Speaker 7: grass that yeah, you know, and they lease it for hay,
Speaker 7: so you're they're cutting it, cut it, yeah, because you
Speaker 7: got to keep trees off of the trees would be
Speaker 7: bad for the levee because the roots or whatever are
Speaker 7: creating avenues for water and other problems, So it's a
Speaker 7: huge project.
Speaker 2: The Mississippi River heavy system is one of the greatest
Speaker 2: engineering feats in American history. If a man or woman
Speaker 2: were to claim to understand the story of this nation
Speaker 2: but don't understand the history of the Mississippi River levies,
Speaker 2: they'd be like a wayward coon hound slick trend barking
Speaker 2: up a tree with no coon. This story is big.
Speaker 2: Here's me and John Berry. This is the kind of
Speaker 2: stuff that I would have taken for granted in terms
Speaker 2: of understanding how this nation was built and how central
Speaker 2: the Mississippi River was. But when people first started wanting
Speaker 2: to control the river, it was you said in the
Speaker 2: book that it was more dangerous to go down the
Speaker 2: Mississippi River than it was to cross the ocean. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean it. It was this like wild, untouched American river, right,
Speaker 2: And then at what point did man come in and
Speaker 2: start to want to influence that and tame that.
Speaker 1: Well, the Native Americans tended to live with the real
Speaker 1: They built mounds, so you know, in the delta and
Speaker 1: so forth, so when it flooded they would remained okay.
Speaker 1: But obviously I guess they started building levees in New
Speaker 1: Orleans really almost immediately after it was settled, so that's
Speaker 1: three hundred years ago. And of course, before the Civil War,
Speaker 1: there was a pretty complete levee system on a lot
Speaker 1: of the lower Mississippi River, but the levees weren't very high.
Speaker 1: They got really really they thought they had a pretty
Speaker 1: good levee system. By the early nineteen hundreds, they discovered
Speaker 1: that was not the case. After the nineteen twenty seven flood,
Speaker 1: which was a you know, tremendous flood in terms of
Speaker 1: percentage of gross domestic product impact, it had more impact
Speaker 1: than any other event in American history.
Speaker 2: Really, any other natural disaster in American history.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, considerably more than Katrina, you know, several
Speaker 1: times more than Hurricane Sandy. Right, it was enormous. Plus
Speaker 1: at displaced, it flooded almost one percent of the entire
Speaker 1: population of the country. So after that flood, which killed
Speaker 1: people from Virginia to Oklahoma, but really devastated Mississippi, Arkansas,
Speaker 1: and Louisiana, you know, they built a very good levee
Speaker 1: system and some other measures to contain the river, and
Speaker 1: on the lower Mississippi there hasn't been a flood since.
Speaker 2: I like what you said, in the book that the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century was the perfect century for a man to
Speaker 2: try to conquer something like the Mississippi River. You said
Speaker 2: it took hubris.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was the century of the engineer, you know.
Speaker 2: In eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and then in the nineteen hundreds you start getting
Speaker 1: plenty of hubris. Still little more recognition, you know, of
Speaker 1: relativity and you know, quantum physics and things like that.
Speaker 1: Uncertainty principles and you know, all sorts of things that
Speaker 1: scientists and engineers recognized made things more complicated. But in
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century things looked a lot more linear and
Speaker 1: you know, simpler. Frankly, they thought they could control the river.
Speaker 1: They couldn't, you know, we sill can.
Speaker 2: The nineteen twenty seven flood was major and it changed America.
Speaker 2: Native Americans built mounds to escape floods, and the French
Speaker 2: built the first primitive levees in the early seventeen hundreds
Speaker 2: in New Orleans, and from then on, primitive hand built
Speaker 2: levees were along the river, often built by slaves. In
Speaker 2: eighteen forty four, crude and small levees less than ten
Speaker 2: feet high, a lot of them like five feet high,
Speaker 2: went from New Orleans up to the mouth of the
Speaker 2: Arkansas River. By eighteen fifty eight, small levees reached intermittently
Speaker 2: all the way to kro Illinois, but it wasn't until
Speaker 2: after the Civil War. In eighteen seventy nine, the Mississippi
Speaker 2: River Levee Commission was formed, giving levee building and control
Speaker 2: to the federal government. This is big today. The levees
Speaker 2: starting near Cape Girardo, Missouri and end of the Gulf
Speaker 2: of Mexico and include over thirty seven hundred miles of levee.
Speaker 2: Today most of them are thirty feet tall. But let's
Speaker 2: get back to our story. So inside the levees, the
Speaker 2: river side, the flood prone side, the river meanders and
Speaker 2: follows its natural pattern of flooding. Here's will Primos.
Speaker 7: To pound it into you to understand. There is a
Speaker 7: place south of Vicksburg called Windsor Ruins. It was a
Speaker 7: plantation home at today's time. I have no how many
Speaker 7: how many tens of millions the home would have cost,
Speaker 7: but a lot of the the stuff was shipped in
Speaker 7: by boat from France and up the river and built
Speaker 7: from the home. I understand.
Speaker 3: All that's left from Windsor.
Speaker 7: Ruins is the columns is the I guess they're granite.
Speaker 7: You could go and see them. They're beautiful columns that
Speaker 7: are tall. They're in the middle of the woods. From
Speaker 7: that location, which is near the town I believe it's Bruinsburg, Mississippi,
Speaker 7: you could see the Mississippi River. You can no longer
Speaker 7: see the Mississippi River from there because the river changed courses.
Speaker 7: That's why I may be on the Louisiana side of
Speaker 7: the river, but I'm actually standing on Mississippi soil, because
Speaker 7: when the boundaries were drawn, that was Mississippi land. But
Speaker 7: the river changed courses, so the river doesn't necessarily split Arkansas,
Speaker 7: Louisiana and Mississippi perfectly. There is Arkansas land that is
Speaker 7: on the Mississippi right side of the river. Because the
Speaker 7: river changed courses.
Speaker 2: The river creates the boundary line between many states Missouri
Speaker 2: and Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, Mississippi and Louisiana.
Speaker 2: Go look at your on X and you'll see the
Speaker 2: jumble of islands, oxbow lakes, and cut off meander bins
Speaker 2: along the river, especially the lower Mississippi from Memphis to
Speaker 2: Baton Rouge, and you'll see an incredible amount of these
Speaker 2: states that are now on the other side of the
Speaker 2: river from their state. We're still learning the man made
Speaker 2: structures of the river. Let's talk about dikes or jetties.
Speaker 2: Here's doctor Kilgore with double l's.
Speaker 6: So they are about eight hundred dikes along the lower
Speaker 6: Mississippi River and they're a stone structure that can extend
Speaker 6: two thousand feet perpendicular to the shore. And their purpose
Speaker 6: is to create and maintain a self scouring channel. So
Speaker 6: as the water is coming from upstream to downstream, they'll
Speaker 6: hit these dikes. The dikes then funnel the water out
Speaker 6: towards the main channel and you get higher velocities, which
Speaker 6: then scours the main channel and keeps it free of sediment.
Speaker 6: And so the whole purpose of the dikes is to
Speaker 6: minimize dredging.
Speaker 2: Okay, so if you didn't have dikes, you might have
Speaker 2: a wide, shallow channel exactly.
Speaker 6: In fact, pre European the Mississippi River was a lot
Speaker 6: more braided than it is today. It's more now it's
Speaker 6: really just a sinuous, snaky kind of river, and it's
Speaker 6: called meander belts. And those meander belts have switched back
Speaker 6: and forth over the last two or three thousand years
Speaker 6: they've been mapped, creating this one hundred mile wide valley
Speaker 6: down here.
Speaker 2: So you would say from the dead center of the
Speaker 2: Mississippi River, fifty miles on either side would have been
Speaker 2: fair game to be flooded free Europea.
Speaker 6: During the nineteen twenty seven flood, you could take a
Speaker 6: boat from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Monroe, Louisiana, seventy miles because
Speaker 6: the levees had broken.
Speaker 2: The actual natural floodplain of the river before levees wouldn't
Speaker 2: have been as clearcut as fifty miles on either side
Speaker 2: of the river. Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less,
Speaker 2: but the idea of a one hundred mile wide floodplain
Speaker 2: is legit. In summary, we've been learning about the energy
Speaker 2: of rivers and their hydraulic complexity and their drive to
Speaker 2: carry sediment. We've learned about levees and dykes or jetties
Speaker 2: and cutoffs, and we got a sense of the sheer
Speaker 2: size of this river. We've learned some about the early
Speaker 2: human history of the river and its importance to America.
Speaker 2: Here's Hank Burdine. Lake Ferguson is an oxbow lake of
Speaker 2: the Mississippi.
Speaker 3: Growing up on Lake Ferguson, Dad had a boat. We'd
Speaker 3: go out on the lake. Didn't go out on the
Speaker 3: river much. He did.
Speaker 4: We did, miss kids, and once I got up to
Speaker 4: where I had my own boat, it was always to you.
Speaker 4: You didn't go out on the river because that river
Speaker 4: was a bad bogart hunah, and there was a inherent
Speaker 4: I'm not going to say fear. You were taught to
Speaker 4: stay in the lake, stay in slack water because the
Speaker 4: big river had currents. You had eighties, you had whirlpools,
Speaker 4: you had upsurges, you had dropped down where rivers dropped
Speaker 4: down two three feet and come back up. Because of
Speaker 4: the nature of the river, it is a dangerous system
Speaker 4: out there.
Speaker 3: You got to be real careful.
Speaker 4: Yet, as we grew up and began to nudge ot
Speaker 4: in there, we learned.
Speaker 3: Respect for the river. You learned what to look for.
Speaker 4: You learned the intricacies of what the river is and
Speaker 4: what it does, how it does it, and why it
Speaker 4: does it. I don't say fear the river, never feel
Speaker 4: the river. Respect the river, and respect the river for
Speaker 4: what it is and what.
Speaker 3: It can do.
Speaker 4: The river is such a dynamic system in itself. To me,
Speaker 4: the Mississippi River is one of our last wilderness areas.
Speaker 3: We have, and I love what stay that way.
Speaker 4: You know, we're getting a lot of cruise boats up
Speaker 4: in there now, coming up from all over every where,
Speaker 4: paddlewheel boats, tourists, hear all about it. We want to
Speaker 4: see it, want to get on it. But uh, I
Speaker 4: like to hit that river when you don't see anybody
Speaker 4: for three hours other than towboat every nine there, you
Speaker 4: know that's the river.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's an interesting thought to think about a river
Speaker 2: as wilderness. I like it, I mean, and I think
Speaker 2: it's real because it's it's a system. Even though it's
Speaker 2: been manipulated by man, the system is still very natural
Speaker 2: and is it's a wild place.
Speaker 4: It is, especially what we call the lower from Kroe
Speaker 4: down where you've got floodwater areas, where we've got levees,
Speaker 4: other areas and on other rivers.
Speaker 3: You've got towns.
Speaker 4: Here, you've got little parks here, you got all there
Speaker 4: somewhat tame rivers here.
Speaker 3: You've got a wildly wool of river.
Speaker 4: A good part of it down here is protected by
Speaker 4: levees within the what we call the batcher between the levees.
Speaker 4: The land between the levees that flood. You can't build
Speaker 4: a house, and unless you build it fifteen sixteen twenty
Speaker 4: feet up off the ground.
Speaker 2: What I didn't understand until I went on the river
Speaker 2: myself is that from Memphis to Vicksburg there are very
Speaker 2: few towns that actually touch the Mississippi River. It floods
Speaker 2: and you can't build inside the levees. So if you're
Speaker 2: traveling down the river you see Sits not much different
Speaker 2: than Mark Twain did, and it's a bit of a stretch,
Speaker 2: but not as much as you'd think. It probably looks
Speaker 2: close to what Hernando DeSoto saw, a wild, wooly river,
Speaker 2: a wilderness. We've got an incredible cast of storytellers guiding
Speaker 2: us into an understanding of this mighty river. If we
Speaker 2: just heard from people from one discipline, our view would
Speaker 2: be narrow. But we've had people looking at the river
Speaker 2: from many different angles and disciplines. My whole life, I've
Speaker 2: wanted to understand this river, and I knew that I didn't.
Speaker 2: This series is my personal journey to understand it. On
Speaker 2: this episode, we laid a foundation, but we're just getting started.
Speaker 2: In the next episode, we'll talk about the men who
Speaker 2: tame this river, the engineers, and the ones who told
Speaker 2: America about its soul, the writers. I can't thank you
Speaker 2: enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our podcast
Speaker 2: with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes.
Speaker 2: I look forward to talking all the folks on The
Speaker 2: Bearer Is Render next week.