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.

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