Lee Sandlin - Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild

Copyright 2010 by Lee Sandlin

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Images from the Davy Crockett Almanacs are reproduced courtesy of Dorothy Sloan Rare Books. The Ribbon Map of the Great Mississippi River is from the Library of Congress.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sandlin, Lee.
Wicked river : the Mississippi when it last ran wild / Lee Sandlin.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-37951-1
1. Mississippi RiverHistory19th century. 2. Mississippi RiverGeography. 3. Mississippi RiverEnvironmental conditions. 4. River lifeMississippi River RegionHistory19th century. 5. Community lifeMississippi River RegionHistory19th century. 6. Mississippi River RegionHistory19th century. 7. Mississippi River RegionBiography. 8. Mississippi River RegionSocial life and customs19th century. 9. Social changeMississippi River RegionHistory19th century. 10. DisastersMississippi River RegionHistory19th century. I. Title.
F353.S26 2010 977dc22 2010008511

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v3.1

FOR JOANNE FOX
SINE QUA NON

The path of the Mississippi River, from its source at Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico

THERE IS A TRIBUTARY of the Mississippi River running through my neighborhood in Chicago. Its not easy to spot; you have to know just where to look. Its by the bus stop on a cluttered commercial block. Right at the curb is a manhole. The manhole cover is embossed with a decorative pattern of fish, and it carries the message DUMP NO WASTE! DRAINS TO WATERWAYS! Down below is water bound for the Mississippi.

Sometimes when Im waiting for the bus, I pass the time by imagining the course the water is running. Its invisible at street level, but there is a maze of piping underneath Chicago: water mains and sewer mains and gas mains, electrical conduit and fiber-optic cabling. The water is gurgling through this spaghetti tangle for mile after mile, below the ranges of highrises and the decaying industrial districts and the limitless veldts of bungalows. It doesnt surface until it reaches a pumping station past the southern city limits. There it empties into the Illinois River. The Illinois runs in a meandering course roughly southwest, past the suburban counties around Chicago, out through the exurban fringe, then south through the farm country in the middle of the state, and then west again, until at last, just north of St. Louis, it drains into the Mississippi.

This is a serpentine route, but its not an unusual one. There are countless streams just like it. In the nineteenth century, it was estimated that the Mississippi had roughly one hundred thousand natural tributariesthat is, there were a hundred thousand distinct, individually named brooks, creeks, rivulets, and rivers emptying their waters into its gargantuan current. Today there are far more than a hundred thousand, and the majority of them are artificial. Theyre like the manhole by the bus stop: theyre conduits and cisterns and sewage pipes, obscure canals and neglected culverts and out-of-the-way storm drains. The Mississippi is surrounded by a vast network of concealed plumbing that underlies the whole of the American Midwest.

As for the great river at the heart of this maze, it is now for all intents and purposes a man-made artifact. Every inch of its course from its headwaters to its delta is regulated by synthetic meansby locks and dams and artificial lakes, revetments and spillways and control structures, chevrons and wing dams and bendway weirs. The resulting edifice can barely be called a river at all, in any traditional sense. The Mississippi has been dredged, and walled in, and reshaped, and fixed; it has been turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the worlds largest industrial sewer. It hasnt run wild as a river does in nature for more than a hundred years.

Its waters are notoriously foul. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi was well known for its murkiness and filth, but today it swirls with all the effluvia of the modern age. Theres the storm runoff, thick with the glistening sheen of automotive waste. The drainage from the enormous mechanized farms of the heartland, and from millions of suburban lawns, is rich with pesticides and fertilizers like atrazine, alachlor, cyanazine, and metolachlor. A ceaseless drizzle comes from the chemical plants along the riverbanks that manufacture neoprene, polychloroprene, and an assortment of other refrigerants and performance elastomers. And then there are the waste products of steel mills, of sulfuric acid regeneration facilities, and of the refineries that produce gasoline, fuel oil, asphalt, propane, propylene, isobutane, kerosene, and coke. The Mississippi is one of the busiest industrial corridors in the world.

I get a little reminder of the health of this system every time I pass by that bus stop. Theres a reason why the one particular manhole stands out among all the clutter of ancient grilles and grates along the block. It reeks. Winter and summer, it emits a peculiar odor, a compound of sewer gas, stale grease, and some kind of pungent chemical reminiscent of sour mint. I can tell how bad it is on any given day by the behavior of the people waiting at the curb. Sometimes they have to hang so far back that the bus blows past the corner without a pause.

Of course it seems all wrong to think of the Mississippi River this way, as an industrial drainage system the length of a continent. Its not how we want to picture Old Man Riverthe river of the paddle-wheel steamboats, the river that Huck and Jim escaped down when they rode their raft to freedom. That river, we like to imagine, is still running wild the way it always was. The wistful old song Moon River, popular back in the sixties, caught the feeling perfectly: