Learning from the Many Missteps Along the Mississippi
With Boyce Upholt
Amid the political headlines over the last few weeks, one piece of news went under the radar: how freaking hot it’s been. To bring us back to earth, I thought I’d share a recent conversation with journalist Boyce Upholt about the Mississippi River.
In The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, Boyce delivers a winding history of the “chaos” of the river and American efforts to tame it. In our conversation, we discussed the ever-changing nature of the Mississippi and the transformation of surrounding areas from Indigenous homeland into private property. There are lessons to learn, Boyce says, by not fighting against the river.
A condensed transcript, edited for clarity, is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes more Indigenous history, overlooked details of the Louisiana Purchase, one guy who single-handedly changed the ecosystem of the antebellum South, many shenanigans pulled by the Army Corps of Engineers, Dwight Schrute, and more:
Ben: To begin, I wonder if you can talk about the formation of the Mississippi, and what you mean by it being “made and unmade” over centuries.
BU: For me, making and unmaking are often the same thing. The idea is that over the past several centuries, we've made a new Mississippi, which in turn has unmade the river that used to exist. The Mississippi River is always changing, especially over the lower, southernmost thousand miles. Once European-style settlement arrived on its banks in the early 18th century, and more significantly in the 19th century, the river had to be modified to support cities and farms.
Ben: You talk about Hernando de Soto and early Spanish “explorers” who encountered the Mississippi. One of his soldiers described the river's width by saying a man on one shore couldn't be distinguished from something else on the other side.
BU: Right.
Ben: I can relate. The further people get from me, the more they confuse me with a porcelain doll.
BU: I can see it.
Ben: You also mention that the mud beneath New Orleans is some of the youngest land on the continent, just more than 4,000 years old. Can you talk about what that means?
BU: The delta, where the river splits into distributaries, is particularly young. As the river slows down and reaches the ocean, it drops sediment, creating new land. Nothing on the coast of Louisiana is more than 7,000 years old. Interestingly, by extension, the land has been inhabited by humans even before its creation.
I wound up in Mississippi in 2009 for a job and lived near what people called an Indian mound, but it took me years to understand its significance. These earthworks, located near the river, were some of the most important on the continent. For Indigenous groups, the Mississippi had spiritual significance, which contrasts with the modern view of the river as something to be controlled.
Learn more about the history of mounds and 1000-year-old Native cities below:
In 1824, the Supreme Court declared that navigable rivers were federal property, opening the door for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to oversee them. Early efforts focused on removing snags, or dangerous driftwood, which led to significant changes in the river's shape.
Ben: “The easier it was to travel, the farther the empire could spread,” you add. What do you mean by that?
BU: The Mississippi and its tributaries were crucial highways in the early 19th century, when roads were poor. Steam travel dramatically shortened distances; a trip from St. Louis to New Orleans, which used to be very long, was reduced to four days by the mid-19th century. This connectivity allowed the frontier nation to expand rapidly. However, the river also facilitated the transportation of slaves from the upper to the lower South, and the forced relocation of southeastern Indigenous peoples. Moreover, the expansion northward up the Mississippi fueled the timber industry, which stripped Indigenous territories of resources.
Ben: Going further down some of those darker pathways of history, you detail the racial history intertwined with the Mississippi's development. Can you talk about those dynamics?
BU: Sure. The Mississippi has a vast floodplain, which people saw as fertile farmland. However, this land was often flooded, so levees were built, initially with mixed success. It wasn't until after the Civil War, when the federal government started building more effective levees, that the floodplain became the heart of the cotton kingdom.
Ben: This is the area where the Yazoo Basin is, right?
BU: Yes, the Mississippi Delta is often referred to as the Yazoo Basin. By 1910, the U.S. Census of Agriculture noted that the plantation system, code for sharecropping, was deeply entrenched in the Yazoo Basin. Levee camps, where Black laborers worked under harsh conditions, were part of this system. Despite some sense of autonomy, these camps were highly exploitative.
Ben: A white boss at one of the camps boasted that “we levee contractors created a billion dollars’ worth of land and property.” The swamps had been tamed, turned into money, “and that big green wall protects that wealth.”
BU: Yeah. I was driving along the levee in New Orleans last week and I was like, I'm 100 feet from the city river, but all I can see is this big hunk of grass.
Ben: You’re making me think that maybe we should refer to the Great Wall of China as “The Big Brown Stone Ribbon.”
BU: I think the Great Wall of China is a good comparison. The Great Wall is bigger, but there's a 380-mile stretch of levee along the Mississippi which, according to a textbook I came across, is the largest human-made landform besides the Great Wall of China. And yet, because it's just this gentle slope of grass, it can be naturalized much more easily. It's like, Oh yeah, this is what it's supposed to be.
But building levees and trying to tame the river isn’t a natural response so much as the natural response to the economic system that we've built here.
Ben: Private property along the Mississippi is fast becoming a theme of our conversation, just like it is in the book. Can you talk about land consolidation along the Mississippi?
BU: So the consolidation that I look at is again mostly in the Mississippi Delta, or the Yazoo Basin, once the epicenter of plantation-style farming.
Back in 1910, there were a number of small Black landowners. A significant number of Black locals had an intimate relationship to the landscape.
And then during the Great Depression, in an effort to prop up the slumping farm economy, we sort of first introduced the ideas of government support for farmers. The support wound up going to larger landowners who pocketed the money and used it to buy tractors to clear more land. They depopulated the landscape along the river, and the plantations started to get even larger. At the same time, economic forces made it tougher and tougher to be a Black farmer.
Ben: You cite a research team that recently calculated that between 1950 to 1964 alone, Black farmers lost eight hundred thousand acres in Mississippi. The land, including lost income, was valued at somewhere between $3.7 billion and $6.6 billion.
BU: Yes, and the large farms have since become quite sprawling. People like Bill Gates now own 120,000 acres in Louisiana and Arkansas.
Ben: I assume he needs all that land to build houses and harvest Microsoft Windows.
BU: Ha, that must be it.
Meanwhile, on the Upper Mississippi, big dams and reservoirs have led to funky things with water flow. We aren't quite sure what's going to happen. Forests are dying and new species are coming in, and as is the case anywhere in the Mississippi River, probably everywhere in the world, it's up to us as a society to ask what should these ecosystems look like?
I wrote this book because I fell in love with what I saw on the Mississippi River. And maybe it’s a little woo-woo and floofy, but I think that one of the first steps towards figuring out what a better policy around the Mississippi might be is more people developing a relationship with this river. We could establish a Lower Mississippi River National Park, which I think would help us realize that the river is not just an opponent to fight against but an asset we can live with and enjoy.
Either way, climate change is chaos, and chaos is coming. The Mississippi River has always been chaos, and learning how to live with it offers wider lessons.
Ben: A good reminder and a fitting encapsulation of a wonderful book. Boyce, thanks so much for speaking with me about it.
BU: Thanks for having me, Ben. It was wonderful.