The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
Boyce Upholt
W.W. Norton & Company
(c) 2024 by the author

The Mississippi River is one of the longest rivers in the world. Add its many tributaries to it – the Ohio, the Missouri, the Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Red – and you’ve got one of the greatest river systems on the planet. Upholt concentrates on the “Big Muddy” itself, giving a rough history of how people have used and tried to control it.

It’s not a perfectly linear history; like the river itself, he meanders quite a bit. A quick look at how people decided on what would be the source of the river gives way to the geological history of the river basin, which goes right in to its ‘discovery’ and exploration by Europeans. Then comes its role in the development and growth of the United States, complete with steamboats and river rafts. And then it’s back to the past as people start wondering about all those odd mounds that seem to pop up all around the river.

Steamboat travel began the era of attempts to sculpt the river for navigational purposes, from clearing snags and other navigational hazards to deepening the main channel. Flood control comes next, bringing us to the present time, where we have to decide if flood control is worth the environmental changes that are the consequence.

Other than some minor references to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Upholt does not say much about the river in popular culture; that’s well outside his remit. He does, nonetheless, mention Alan Lomax’ search for the origins of “Delta Blues” in the labor camps that built the original levee system and the plantations on the alluvial plains that were run like company towns.

Upholt travels the river (well, usually just the lower portion south of Memphis), meeting and talking with people who work on and with and around the Mississippi. The crews maintaining the levees…. The small farmers eking out a living on the flood plains of places like the Yazoo Basin need the river to be controlled so they can keep their land; letting the river loose to flood naturally will wipe them out…. Controlling the river upstream usually just pushes any problems downstream…. The river really, really, really wants to go down the Atchafalaya Basin – but if that happens, it will bypass New Orleans, destroying that city’s economy…. Is it worth trying to save the small communities in the delta that just happen to be built on constantly changing mud and silt?

It’s a huge, messy patchwork of concerns. Upholt does a fair job of mentioning as many sides as he can, without taking one himself. It’s quite the enthralling read (even if it could have used a few more maps and photos). It’s also rather humbling to really understand that whatever we puny humans try to do, that Old Man River will just keep rollin’ along*.

* Couldn’t resist. Not sorry.