Mississippi Churning

Time And Again, The Father Of Waters Has Asserted Its Authority Over Mortals

July 21, 1993|By Staci D. Kramer, Special To The Tribune.

ST. LOUIS — If the Mississippi River were a book, it would have more twists and turns than the plot of "Gone With the Wind."

The Indian tribes who once shared its bounty were shunted aside by the Europeans. Greedy European explorers made their names by "finding" the Mississippi, but lost their lives as they tried to conquer it. It was an afterthought in one of the most astonishing real-estate deals of all time but became the core of a new nation. Countless men and women slaved, fought, loved, prospered and were ruined on its banks or even, in riverboat days, on its waters.

You could use most of the superlatives in Roget's Thesaurus and not overestimate the importance of the Mississippi River system to our past, present and future.

More than four centuries after the first European saw its wide waters, the Mississippi is the heart of this country, with arteries that reach far past its central corridor.

Ten of millions of people live on its banks. On an average day, millions of tons of cargo are being pushed along its waters. It feeds the fields that feed us, providing irrigation and naturally fertilizing some of the richest farmland in the country.

If you still can't quite grasp the importance of the Mississippi, unfold a U.S. map and follow the river from its source at Itaska Lake, Minn., to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. Look east, west, north and south for tributaries like the Missouri, the Illinois, the Ohio, the Des Moines, the Arkansas, the Yazoo. If your map is detailed enough, look for their tributaries, following, for instance, the Missouri River until just south of Omaha, where it meets the Platte after that river wends through Colorado and Nebraska; or catch the Ohio at Cairo, Ill., and trace it past Louisville and Cincinnati until you spot Pittsburgh.

It took millions of years to create the river known to several Indian tribes as the Misi-zibi, or Father of Waters. It began to form during the Pleistocene Ice Age, as melting ice from glaciers poured in through what are now the Missouri and Ohio Rivers.

The great north-south waterway actually springs from a small lake in northwest Minnesota, meanders east through other lakes and streams until Grand Rapids, when it finally begins to journey south. Five hundred miles from the source, it reaches the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, the point where its real task as an aquatic highway begins.

As the Mississippi rushes to the Gulf of Mexico, it touches 10 states to the east and west: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana.

Alone, it would rank below 15 other rivers, including the Missouri, in length. But if you added the 2,466 miles of the Missouri to the 2,348 miles of the navigable Mississippi, it becomes the third-longest river in the world.

A triumph of networking

The real majesty of the Mississippi, though, comes not from its length but from the widespread effects of its system. Together, the Mississippi and its hundreds of tributaries form the world's fifth-largest drainage system, covering about 1.244 million square miles of North America. That includes part or all of 31 states and two provinces of Canada.

All roads may once have led to Rome, but nearly all rivers and streams in this country seem to lead to the Mississippi.

Of course, this summer it seems as though most of those rivers and streams, including the Mississippi, are trying to carve out new territory or reclaim old ground. Some areas have been flooding since April; others began to feel the pain in the last few weeks.

Once again, the Mississippi is shrugging its shoulders at the efforts of people to control its powerful course.

What is now a desire to control began as sheer defense. French settlers of New Orleans built the first levee-18 feet wide and 900 feet long-in 1717, an often futile effort to keep the mighty Mississippi from crashing through the fledgling settlement.

Later levees were usually agricultural. In the lower Mississippi, plantation owners used slave labor to protect their sugar, cotton and livestock from the vagaries of the river. As each levee was raised, neighboring plantation owners would order their own in self-defense. Up and down the river, farmers built their own levees, digging trenches and piling dirt in earthen beams. Each altered the pattern of the river, though they could not always keep it at bay.

Efforts to control

The levees were a sword that cut both ways. To keep the river from seeping in, you had to risk a gush of water that could swamp whole farms in a matter of hours should the levee prove insufficient.

When the waters rose to threatening levels, some people would sneak out at night and break a neighboring levee to relieve the pressure on their own. During the Civil War, as the late Hodding Carter describes in "Man and the River: The Mississippi," "federal troops deliberately butchered the levees, making an ally of the inundating waters."