Old Man River: The Mississippi River In North American History, Schneider - B

"It is impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi. The river's history is our history." Any moving water below the Great Lakes and between the the Appalachians and the Rockies, fully 41% of the water in the country, is part of the Mississippi watershed. It is the busiest waterway in the world,  moving half a billion metric tons per year. The first European to interact with native Americans was de Soto in 1542. The French settled Quebec in 1608. Fur traders and Jesuits headed west into the Great Lakes. The Indians told them of a great river to  the south and west. The hope was that it flowed to the Pacific. An expedition under Joliet entered the Mississippi watershed in Wisconsin in the spring of 1673. He and Marquette went as far south as the Arkansas, realized the river drained to the Gulf of Mexico and headed north. A decade later, La Salle descended the river to its mouth. For the next century and a half, French voyageurs explored every river, creek and by-water in the basin, going as far west as the sources of the Missouri and Arkansas Rivers. The claim to the west for New France was based upon their fur traders, and a hundred years later, the French era in America would come to an end. The British evicted France from Canada and Napoleon sold Louisiana to the Americans. In the 19th century, the river became the highway to the west, and in the later half of the century, became a central part of American lore, under the pen of Samuel Clemens. However, its largest role was as a battlefield  in the Civil War. Both New Orleans and Vicksburg were immensely important, cutting the Confederacy in two and assuring eventual Union victory. Lincoln's comment upon receiving Grant's telegram about the capture of Vicksburg is one of my favorites. "The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." In the last chapters of the book, the author refers to the river as a 'lake of engineers'. The act of taming the river and its floods has dramatically altered forever the channel of the Mississippi. Distributary streams, starting 100 miles north of New Orleans, once made the delta. Today, it is one long canal running strait to the Gulf, and at this stage, diverted from a western flow in order to keep the port of New Orleans open.  Someday, it will once again flow on the course it has for hundreds of thousands of years.