Lisa Knopp - What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

Lisa Knopp has the eyes of an archeologist and the soul of a great blue heron as she renders this intimate portrayal of three national treasuresthe Mississippi, Platte, and Missouri rivers. Here we visit places as exotic as Little Egypt yet as familiar as streams connecting our own backyards to these great waterways. Knopp asks hard questions about human interactionand interferencewith these watery corridors which are largely responsible for American expansion. Journeying through these pages, we also find tales of the shell button industry, Indian burial mounds, Mormon settlement, catastrophic flooding, barge commerce, and everyday lives of people who work and play along the shores. What this book carries? Majesty. Knowledge. Inspiration.

KATHERINE FISCHER, author of Dreaming the Mississippi

A river gathers the countryside, drawing the current of tributary streams into a single flow, offering passage to travelers, nurturing all manner of creatures, and eventually, perhaps by way of larger rivers, delivering its waters to the sea. Just so, in the hands of a skillful writer like Lisa Knopp, an essay draws material from a varied terrain of memory, history, folklore, observation, and reflection, gathering farflung sources into a forceful narrative. Linked together, these narratives trace the ways in which three great rivers have been used, abused, and partly restored by humans over the past ten thousand yearsa panoramic history that should be of interest to any reader whos curious about the shaping of Americas interior.

SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS, author of Earth Works and A Conservationist Manifesto

Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte

Lisa Knopp

University of Missouri Press
Columbia and London

Copyright 2012 by

The Curators of the University of Missouri

University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201

Printed and bound in the United States of America

All rights reserved

5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12

Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8262-1974-9

ISBN 978-0-8262-7276-8 (ebook)

This paper meets the requirements of the

American National Standard for Permanence of Paper

for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

Designer: Stephanie Foley

Typesetter: FoleyDesign

Printer and binder: Thompson-Shore, Inc.

Typefaces: Minion and Utopia

For my traveling companions

Contents

Preface

I love rivers. Wide ones, narrow ones, straight ones, winding ones, fast ones, slow ones, single-channeled and braided ones. I love a rivers mysterious depths and bottoms, its reflectiveness, its changeability and rhythmsspring thaw, annual rise, low water, winter freeze. I love that a rivers rushing waters stir my imagination and connect me with other parts of the region, country, continent, earth. In truth, Ive never met a river that I didnt love or grow to love. But three rivers, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and Nebraskas Platte, are especially dear to me. These rivers and the different ways in which I know each of them are the subjects of this book.

I was born and raised just a few blocks from the Mississippi in Burlington, Iowa, and returned to live there twice as an adult. The most essential knowledge about my home stretch of that river came to me when I was a child, through repeated experiences (watching floods come and go; seeing the river almost every day and usually from more than one perspectivebluff top, bridge, boat, and bank) and through stories that my grandparents, parents, brothers, and friends told about it. Consequently, I know a forty-mile stretch of the river in southeastern Iowa and west-central Illinois from the viewpoint of an insider, inhabitant, native, or what the bioregionalist calls a dweller in the land. Not only is this river landscape filled with personal memories and family history, but its so integral to my sense of belonging and identity that one of the first things I tell a new acquaintance is that I grew up on the Mississippi. Now when I return to my part of the river, its as if Im visiting a beloved family member, with whom I have a deep, rich history. When I explore other parts of the Upper Mississippi, that part of the river between the headwaters at Lake Itasca in Minnesota and Cairo, Illinois, I feel that Im encountering distant kin: the family resemblance is there, but the long, close relationship is not.

Many times during the three years that I lived in Omaha, and later, during the three years in which I had reason to be in St. Louis several times a month, and more recently, in my rambles in the Midwest and Great Plains, Ive come across the Missouri. But because I didnt grow up near it, eat fish drawn from its waters, go to steamboat or catfish festivals on its banks, witness its floods and mayfly swarms, ride in motorboats over its rough or calm waters, or dream about crossing it on bridges that are too high and convoluted or that break mid-journey or that offer smooth passage over beautiful, shining water, I have no attachment to it. Until I began working on this book, the Missouri was merely a familiar stranger, one that I observed but never interacted with. On its banks, I was an outsider, tourist, traveler, or sojourner, marveling at or puzzling over the new, capturing my experiences with a camera and notebook, and then returning to my home near the banks of a different river, which was an even different river than the one that winds its way through my dreams. Most of what I know about the Missouri, I learned from experts and dwellers in the land that have a long and committed relationship with a part of the river, and so my knowledge is largely mediated or secondhand rather than direct and experiential. These guides led me from merely noticing things and surfaces to perceiving connections and meanings. Even so, while exploring the Missouri, I often felt that I was a guest at someone elses family reunion.

Now I live in land watered by the Platte. Here, Ive consciously sought to become less of an outsider and more of an insider, which is yet another way of knowing landscape. Over the past twenty years, Ive learned about the Platte from books and classes, experts and inhabitants, and have experienced it through extended residence and, most importantly, through my children, for whom the Platte is a first river, a first exterior landscape. Growing to love a landscape is similar to growing to love a person. Both require time and intention, if one is to develop and sustain a love that is deep and committed.

This book is divided into three parts, one for each river. Each part presents that river from various perspectives: what the river was like in its wild state; how travelers, both historical and contemporary, have seen it; how it came by its various names; how First Americans lived near and with it; how those in industry and agriculture have used it; what the river is like after a century or two of human tinkering and engineering; how the culture, politics, and philosophy of the people who live in a watershed have been and continue to be shaped by the river; how the river looks and smells and sounds. The genre Ive chosen for exploring my encounters with these rivers is the essay, whose various subgenres and forms allowed me to narrate, report, confess, speculate, reflect, imagine, and expound. In other words, I could speak of these rivers in different voices and from different angles. Within this collection, youll find travel, autobiographical, and natural-history essays, as well as those that blend the personal and the scholarly. I offer my river stories as but one persons perspective on the complex process of coming to know and love both familiar and foreign places.