The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi, Upholt - B

                "The Mississippi River drains more than a million square miles, an expanse that encompasses forty percent of the continental United States: all of seven states,  parts of another twenty-five, and a small scratch of two Canadian provinces." This is a story of The Great River, as it once was, and all of the engineering efforts that the US Corps of Engineers has used to tame it.

                   Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to travel the river in 1541. Two Frenchmen, Marquette and Joliet, arrived a century and a quarter later. La Salle was the first to descend the river to the gulf. Explorers, trappers, missionaries, and farmers followed. When France sold the Louisiana Territory to America in 1803, the entire watershed became part of the US.  

                   Mankind's first interference with the river came when an Ohioan created a boat with a winch that was able to clear the underwater snags of trees that blocked the river.  The snagboat "did more to change the ecosystem of the antebellum south bashing open the Mississippi's ancient waterways so thoroughly that, in a strange way they began to disappear." Congress asked the Corps of Engineers to improve navigation on the Mississippi and the Ohio. Rocks and rapids were dynamited, and after the snags were removed, so were trees along the banks. With the trees  gone however, the banks began to shift. The steam powered riverboat changed the Mississippi, as it became a busy highway moving the nations' people and goods in both directions. However, as the Civil War approached, the railroads became the prime movers in America.

                  The levees on the river had started "as a waist-high barrier along the New Orleans riverbank in 1720." They spread north and south but were not able to stop flooding. Among hydrologists, there were two schools of thought: one believed in expanded levees and the other proposed extensive reservoirs to control the flooding. The eventual conclusion was to deepen the river by channeling it between extensive levees. By the 1920's, ninety-percent of the floodplain was cut behind levees. The river was tamed, or so it seemed. In August 1926, the Great Flood began. It rained in the heartland for months. By the following April, a million acres were underwater and fifty thousand people lost their homes. Levees failed all along the lower basin. "By the end of that spring, the levees along the Mississippi and its tributaries had failed in more than two hundred places. In June, a second flood crest caused by snowmelt in the north, poured through the still-open gaps. Water covered 16.5 million acres across seven states." The Flood Control Act of 1928 acknowledged that the river could not be channeled, and must have outlets in the lower basin. Spillways were constructed in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. In 1954, the Mississippi River and Tributaries project was completed.

                  Since then, there have been new and many challenges. Attention turned to expanding locks and replacing aging dams. Thanks to Clean Water laws, the river is cleaner and safer than ever before, but a significant challenge has been keeping the Asian carp away from the Great Lakes. Today, the river faces the consequences of climate change. Reading this, one thinks of the old Yiddish adage - 'Man plans and God laughs.'