Thus it does link the nation, top to bottom. It has its origin close to one American frontier, and its terminus is close to another. It passes from almost Canada to almost Mexico. In doing so, it progresses from the nearly arctic to the subtropical. It flows through an unimaginably vast valley filled with numberless tributaries. It leaves endless trails of oxbow lakes as relics of where it once had been. In places the state boundaries that the river once marked are now quite out of date, their own twists and turns out of sync with the river’s new twists and turns. Finally it eases itself down into a long and muddy delta that is scored with dependent streams known as distributaries, and though it wiggles about a good deal, it does so basically moving in a series of fairly straight-trending lines, from north to southeast. Finally, at a place known as the Heads of Passes (a point to and from which all the lower-river distances are measured),* it divides into three long navigable tubeways of sand and mud that splay like a chicken’s foot and passes out into the warm salt waters of the open sea.
The basin of the Mississippi encompasses a good two thirds of the contiguous forty-eight states, thirty-one of which—together with two Canadian provinces—contribute waters to its flow. The very existence of this million-and-a-quarter-square-mile wedge-shaped watershed, which enfolds places as different from each other as Montana and Maryland, New Mexico and Kentucky, Wisconsin and Oklahoma, Idaho and Iowa, has created, if unintentionally, a distinct kind of oneness in the middle of America.
A rancher beside the Yellowstone River, a canoeist on the upper reaches of the Monongahela, an ice fisherman jigging for walleye in northern Minnesota, a plantation owner with a lawn sweeping down to the Red River in Louisiana—all of these and millions more can take some kind of conforming comfort in knowing that the Mississippi connects them all. As with the midrib of a leaf or the shaft of a feather, the river provides for all some kind of half-imagined structure, offering a kind of geographic strength, a degree of certainty, stability. The river is, after all, always there, an ultimate destination for their own fresh waters, for their goods, their supplies, and their commerce, as certain and comforting and immortal as the still more distant sea.
Some relish the romance of such connections. The great Depression-era filmmaker and poet Pare Lorentz was one. His 1938 short government-financed documentary The River, which called attention to the damage that man was doing to the stream, won awards in Venice, and his script was nominated for a Pulitzer prize. The opening minutes are accompanied by a catalog of an enduring loveliness:
Down the Yellowstone, the Milk, the White and Cheyenne;
The Cannonball, the Musselshell, the James and the Sioux;
Down the Judith, the Grand, the Osage and the Platte,
The Skunk, the Salt, the Black and Minnesota;
Down the Rock, the Illinois, and the Kankakee,
The Allegheny, the Monongahela, Kanawha, and Muskingum;
Down the Miami, the Wabash, the Licking and the Green,
The Cumberland, the Kentucky, and the Tennessee;
Down the Ouachita, the Witchita, the Red, and Yazoo.
Down the Missouri, three thousand miles from the Rockies;
Down the Ohio, a thousand miles from the Alleghenies;
Down the Arkansas, fifteen hundred miles from the Great Divide;
Down the Red, a thousand miles from Texas;
Down the great Valley, twenty-five hundred miles from Minnesota,
Carrying every rivulet and brook, creek and rill,
Carrying all the rivers that run down two-thirds the continent—
The Mississippi runs to the Gulf.
For most of the two hundred years that American mankind has lived beside the river and its feeder streams, the human connection has been based almost wholly upon commerce and trade. In this sense, the Mississippi has much more in common with the Yangtze, in China, than it has with the other two great world rivers, the Nile and the Amazon. Both of these latter flow through and water the soils of many countries and are important less for internal navigation and mercantile matters than they are for their benefits of irrigation and nutrition. The Yangtze and the Mississippi, however, each exercise a monumental influence over essentially only one nation.
Each plays an immense role in the cultural and social geography of its national home. The east-running Yangtze divides China more or less amiably into two peoples. Those to the river’s north are generally thought of as being taller, paler skinned, wheat growing, noodle eating, Putonghua-speaking, aesthetically aware guardians of the ancient Chinese ways. Those to the south, by contrast, are seen as smaller, swarthier, rice eating, coastal dialect speaking, arithmetically able, and commercially adroit peoples who are more concerned with business than with culture. The river is a national treasure, regarded with pride and awe by all.
In this sense, Ol’ Man River is much the same—running in a ninety-degree different direction, true, but crudely also parsing the country into two—with industry and academia and antique culture on the eastern side, pioneering and pastureland and cattle culture on the western side. And here, too, aboriginal peoples once bestrode every inch of the river’s banks—and for no tribe did the river itself serve as an entity that fully divided them. So up in the north the Ojibwa and the Santee, the Illinois and the Iowa were to be found on both sides of the Mississippi. In the middle of the country, the unknown “mound people” who built the city of Cahokia, whose structures Lewis and Clark encountered when they first set off up the Missouri, constructed their earthen marvels with a careless disdain for which side of the river they were on. The Quapaw and the Chickasaw people—the former settled on the river’s west, the latter on the eastern side—fought occasionally as proxies for the French and their enemies, though because the river is so wide, it was harder for those on one side to reach the other, so the battles were minor and not at the Indians’ own choosing. Farther south still, the Tunica, the Natchez, the Choctaw, and the delta-living Chitimacha people all saw the Mississippi as a source of water and fish and good living for all, and only infrequently did they fight one another across it or over it or because of it.
No such humiliation as the presence of a foreign gunboat was ever visited on the Mississippi, at least not in the two centuries that have elapsed since it became fully a part of American territory. (To imagine a flotilla of Chinese warships cruising by absolute right between Hannibal and Vicksburg today, their captains dispensing instant justice in the riverside towns they passed, is perhaps to know briefly how it must have felt to the Chinese in the early years of the twentieth century, to know imperialism from the other side.) No foreign warships; but foreign cargo ships aplenty, because the commerce on the Mississippi is similar to that on the Yangtze, only far, far greater. The Mississippi is a working river, an industrial river, like few others.
Today there are fewer passengers boats, true—the car and the plane take most Americans places. And there are a handful of resurrected stern-wheelers, cliché ships with calliopes and Dixieland jazz ensembles and Mark Twain cocktail bars; but they serve a small tourist market and have no business with those who travel out of need. Most rivercraft today are enormous and almost unpeopled barges and tows, some as much as six acres in extent, heading ponderously north and south with vast tonnages of materials of one kind and another in bulk. The southbound vessels, in particular, disgorge immense volumes of wheat, corn, soybeans, coal, and lumber, and they load it onto cargo ships drawn up at the docks in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which then take it onward to customers around the world.
The Mississippi, indeed, sends so much of America’s produce down and onto the world’s oceans that it seems more often than not that the river is where the country is being turned inside out. Back in Depression times, this was happening quite literally. Pare Lorentz and others chronicled a great American tragedy as billions of tons of topsoil were torn from Iowa and Louisiana and Missouri by steel plows and leached from Southern cotton plantations to be gushed out as liquid mud into the sea and
away from America.
It was as if the country was having its very heart torn out, and during those years, the years of the Dust Bowl, the forced migration of the hopeless, and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Lorentz’s River, it must have seemed as though the nation’s greatest river was indeed bent on destroying the very countryside that had given it birth. Campaigning for the river’s rights began in earnest once the New Deal had been struck and the war was done. Nowadays the Mississippi is not merely loved and revered and admired by all; it is now also quite well cared for, protected and preserved, and has in large measure reverted to its original role and purpose—it transports, it irrigates, it nourishes and sustains, and it links the peoples of its valley together. For many years it did not, but now, generally speaking, it does.
The federal government is substantially involved, even though the national mood has lately become hostile to immense taxpayer-funded bureaucracies. Even the source of the river has a connection with the taxpayer: the stepping-stones that mark its official exit point from Lake Itasca were put in place by youths of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a body established during the Depression as a way of providing young men with work.
Lower down the river, the US Army Corps of Engineers is in pole position, and because it is a direct descendant of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, which performed much of the country’s early surveying and mapmaking, it is a body that considers its role fully deserved. The corps has been responsible since the 1820s for keeping the river open to navigation and preventing it from flooding, roles that, in times of peril and poor weather, can be mutually exclusive. The navigational side is not normally so challenging. The corps’s mandate requires it to keep a nine-foot-deep channel open between Minneapolis and Vicksburg, a twelve-foot channel down to Baton Rouge, and then for large oceangoing vessels, a channel forty feet deep down to the gulf.
Flood control is something else. Huge levees on both sides of the river try to keep the mightily ponderous torrent in check, even when the combined snowmelt from the Rockies tears down the Missouri and threatens flooding on an epic scale. The levees were seldom easy to build, not least because of a persistent want of material strong enough to put in them. Engineers have tried concrete, mats of grass, articulated cement mattresses, curtains of woven wattles. And of course, rocks in great abundance. Except there are no rocks in the Mississippi Valley. For tens of thousands of years, the valley has been essentially a grassy wilderness of alluvial mud and clay, with not a rock bluff or a cliff of anything truly hard in sight. So it can fairly be said that every piece of rock larger than a football that now lies in the levees or lines the banks and even the floor of the river was brought and dumped there by barge by the men and machines of the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
This same body of men that built Cape Canaveral, the Los Alamos atomic bomb labs, the Washington Monument, the Panama Canal, and the Pentagon now tries to control this river. The corps owns and runs the two dozen locks and dams that lie along the Upper Mississippi. At some of the dams, it generates electricity, the US Army competing with the major utility companies. And it has built and still runs the mighty diversions and spillways and pumping stations that try, at times desperately, to keep this gigantic and unimaginably powerful body of water from overreaching itself and bringing catastrophe to millions who live close by.
Time after time, the corpsmen have been severely tested, most recently in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina, which resulted in the overtopping and failure of many miles of levees, and by the great Mississippi flood of 2011, which for the first time in thirty-five years resulted in the opening of gates along the enormous Morganza Spillway, dumping trillions of gallons of floodwater into a river known as the Atchafalaya—a name that sends a shiver down the spines of most who live and make their living in New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
It does so because of one of the more pressing realities of hydrology. The Mississippi is a river that like most has a mind of its own, and according to today’s hydrologists, it has lately wearied of flowing into the gulf by way of New Orleans. It seems to want instead to move its mouth scores of miles to the west and emerge into the sea along the course of what is now simply a deep and short distributary stream, the Atchafalaya. Such a natural shift in the watercourse* would spell ruin for the two great cities of Louisiana, by quite simply taking their river away. Everything—every dockside crane, wharf, loading bay, waterfront hotel, and business center—would then have to be shifted, most probably to a currently little-known port, Morgan City (whose motto, presciently, is “Right in the middle of everything”). On the advice of the body that runs the river, the Mississippi River Commission, troops from the Corps of Engineers constructed the gargantuan four-thousand-foot-long Morganza Spillway in 1954 and what is known as the Old River Control Structure in 1963 to make sure that no such thing is ever allowed to happen.
The purpose of these enormous confections of iron and concrete and cranes and gates is to prevent avulsion, the natural process whereby a river suddenly abandons one channel and finds another better suited for its purpose. The Atchafalaya, which these days offers a deeper and more direct route to the sea, must seem awfully tempting to the Mississippi waters, and most hydrologists believe that one day, despite humankind’s best and costliest efforts, they will take it.
In his 1883 Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain warned of man’s puniness when pitted against the overwhelming avulsive power of the river, and he cautioned against hubris:
One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver . . . that ten thousand River Commissions . . . cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it Go here or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known about their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the scientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it.
The notion of keeping still, lying low, and waiting may well have been suited to the wise men of science, but to the Americans of the later nineteenth century, bustle and hustle and ambition and yearning were becoming the more familiar watchwords. To be sure, the Erie and the Chicago Sanitary, the Mississippi and the Middlesex and the Santee all helped to knit the states into one, but the men and the craft that made use of these hydraulic pathways did so in a necessarily ponderous fashion. By now impatience was beginning to become an American virtue. A growing sense of fierce urgency was starting to shoulder out of the way the old ideas of tranquil floating progress. Before long came times when the country, while still bent on uniting itself ever more fully, became convinced by technology that it should now try to do so at a far greater speed. The moccasin and the covered wagon and the canal boat were not fast enough. Now it was necessary to harness raw power and bring engines of one kind and another to bear in bringing the nation together.
And engines—whether steam engines, the external combustion engines propelling riverboats and railway trains, or internal combustion engines moving automobiles or trucks or buses, or electric motors or jet engines—all required fuel to be burned to produce raw energy, usually in the form of heat. Ultimately it was various kinds of heat, harnessed with care and cleverness, that allowed America and her now perpetually hurried Americans to become physically united. The harnessing of these various kinds of heat allowed them to be propelled up and down and around and across the country at a newly useful speed, and now in contraptions that were always and essentially powered by fire.
PART IV
WHEN the AMERICAN STORY Was FANNED by FIRE
1811–1956
On April 27, 2005, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) . . . published the Final Rule on the Use of Locomotive Horns at Highway-Rail Grade Crossings. Effecti
ve June 24, 2005, the Final Rule requires that locomotive horns be sounded at all public grade crossings 15–20 seconds before entering a crossing, but not more than one-quarter mile in advance.
The pattern for blowing the horn remains two long, one short, and one long sounding to be repeated as necessary until the locomotive clears the crossing. Locomotive engineers will retain the authority to vary this pattern as necessary for crossings in close proximity and will be allowed to sound the horn in emergency situations.
—UNION PACIFIC RAILROAD INTERPRETATION OF THE NEWEST RULING ON THE USE OF TRAIN HORNS
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.
—WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD,” Leaves of Grass, 1856
Today in El Paso all the planes are asleep on the runway.
—MATTHEW ZAPRUDER, FROM “APRIL SNOW,” 2010
MAY THE ROADS RISE UP
Long before there were engines to run along them, there existed thousands of miles of American roads. The country was covered by a tracery of highways, many of them laid out and built by soldiers and most of them then used by postal dispatch riders. British colonial forces had built the first of them, facing considerable challenges in making them because of factors unimagined in the tiny kingdom back across the sea: the sheer vastness of the countryside, the often extreme weather, and a topography that was pitiless and challenging. The forests were dark and mysterious, the rivers wide and fast, the land filled with exotic and often unpleasantly dangerous animals (the Britons seldom saw bears or mountain lions back home) and an indigenous people who were less than eager to have their traditional grounds crisscrossed by a network of alien pathways.