The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi.

The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. Boyce Upholt. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024. 330 pp. $29.99, hardcover.

The Great River is a marvelous geological, natural, political, cultural, and technological history of the river at the center of the North American continent, a river that rises in Minnesota, flows nearly due south, collecting waters from numerous large tributaries along the way, and empties into the Gulf of Mexico as an almost unrecognizable beast.  The Mississippi drains nearly half the landmass of the United States and has helped to define much of our history.

Boyce Upholt is a journalist who grew up in Connecticut and first visited the Lower Mississippi region in 2015 to report on a story there.  Entranced, he stayed to learn as much as he could about the river, the people who live near it, and the history of how people have interacted with it.  Upton sets the stage for his rendition of the Mississippi by noting that the river is much more than its main stem.  Some of its main tributaries have greater superlatives.  The Missouri River, which enters the Mississippi near St. Louis, is nearly twice as long.  Two hundred miles downstream, at Cairo, Illinois, the Ohio River joins, doubling the Mississippi’s volume.  This is the point at which the Lower Mississippi begins, a river completely distinct in behavior from the Upper Mississippi. 

Upholt describes an experience of James Buchanan Eads, the engineer who designed the first bridge across the Mississippi at St. Louis, and who in the mid-nineteenth century lowered himself underwater near Cairo trying to salvage cargo from a steamboat.  Eads’ feet never hit bottom; rather, the mud flowing past him merely got more dense with depth.  Another nineteenth-century engineer, Andrew Humphreys, conducted the first technical study of the river for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  He described eddies half the width of the river that could move upstream at seven miles per hour.  Humphries wrote that the Mississippi was a “turbid and boiling torrent, immense in volume and force.”  Upholt writes, “A few sentences later [Humphries] added, rather hopefully, that all this water was ‘governed by laws.’”

The Great River proceeds in two chronological directions.  The opening section first describes how early Spanish, French, and American explorers tried to apprehend the river, next describes the indigenous peoples the explorers encountered along the river, and then describes what we know about the more ancient civilizations who populated the Mississippi watershed.  Each of these peoples found different ways to relate to the river. The middle and longest part of the book, five chapters comprising a section called “American River,” chronicles the more than century-long effort, from Thomas Jefferson forward, to understand the Mississippi River scientifically and control it through engineering.  Last chapter in the section is “The Great Flood,” about the 1927 event.  Along the way, Upholt investigates the interactions of cultures that intertwined with the river: American settlers displacing indigenous people, plantation owners enslaving Africans in the Mississippi Delta.

The last section of The Great River is called “The Unmade Mississippi.”  It is about the consequences of twentieth-century efforts to design the river to serve a technological society, as policy-makers and engineers struggle to balance preservation of infrastructure with preservation of ecosystems.  New Orleans is a huge city and an important port, so levies have been built to protect that urban area from floods.  Other levies have been built along the Delta region as far upstream as Missouri to try to protect industrialized agriculture from flooding.  Diversion structures have been built and new channels opened to try to send flood waters away from protected areas.  All those interventions have altered the flow of sediment to the mouth of the Mississippi and, in turn, the ecology of the marshes downstream of New Orleans and in the Gulf of Mexico.  The petrochemical industry along the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans has created pollution so bad the region is called Cancer Alley.  These various interventions had altered the lives of the Acadians from Canada who became Cajuns of Louisiana, living in the bayou regions of the Louisiana coast.  Upholt describes all of this recent history, including apparent successes and the challenges residents of Mississippi watershed will likely face in the future.   Climate change is adding to the complexity and the immediacy of the challenges.

As a Minnesotan, I was satisfied with the attention Upholt gives the headwaters of the Mississippi, but the enormity of problems facing the Lower Mississippi is clearly center stage in the Great River.  Folks who live in Montana (headwaters of the Missouri River) and Pennsylvania (headwaters of the Ohio River) will also be satisfied, especially as we learn how our actions in the upstream regions affect the Lower Mississippi.  For example, farmers’ installation of drain tiles beneath fields in Minnesota have greatly added to the volume of flow in the Mississippi discharging from our state and especially of the flow discharging from the Minnesota River into the Mississippi.  The Great River adds scope to our appreciation of this wonderful river we are a part of.

Fredric L. Quivik