Midwestern Rivers: Critical Insight into American Culture

Environmental historians have explored human/river interaction as an ongoing dynamic. When people decide to change the course of rivers, their engineering efforts create intended and unintended consequences. Economic imperatives change over time, which lead to further control efforts. Rivers demand constant attention as they undo human attempts to keep them at bay. Rivers also have a habit of seeping into culture. The varied human relationships revolving around interaction with rivers radiate into the society that produces the initial contact with the riverine environment. Rich lore centers on rivers in American life. Rivers appear in song and story. Artists’ depictions become modes of popular entertainment and cultural tropes that permeate the society at large. These four new books concerning rivers cover environmental, social, and cultural aspects of rivers’ influence on Americans. Each yields perspectives on American rivers that draw on interdisciplinary research and highlights the importance of rivers in American history.

The Mississippi River serves both as backdrop and actor in Christopher Morris’ The Big Muddy. Tracing the connected human and natural history of the Big Muddy, Morris maintains that, “There are two Mississippi Valleys. One is wet, the other dry” (1). From Spain’s first explorations of the valley to the modern day, Europeans and Americans reimagined the muddy valley as a space of human and environmental relations that supported farming and sedentary populations. Due to their culture and background, they sought to make the wet valley a dry one—in a sense to transform it from a savage, disordered environment to a tame, civilized place of commerce and European culture.

For millennia before Europeans’ arrival in the valley, plant and animal diversity provided Indigenous people so much that they made little effort at sedentary agriculture. Europeans, however, found a paucity of resources on which to thrive. It took over two centuries between the arrival of de Soto and French colonization for Europeans to establish a foothold in the valley’s watery universe—and this only through much trial and error. After the Louisiana Purchase, Americans dried the land for cotton, corn, and tobacco. With the twentieth century, local, state, and federal governments increased efforts to push back the water. But not without consequences. The amount of water in the valley did not decline. Efforts at leveeing and channeling the river changed the forces of silt disposition, moving what once renewed land in the valley into the sea. As population grew on the riverbank, flooding in urban areas and agricultural land became a nuisance that demanded further human efforts to keep the water at bay.

Morris’ environmental history adds another layer to the growing literature on American rivers. Unlike many environmental histories whose stories center on declension—lost Edens—Morris depicts a living river in a wrestling match with its human counterparts. The Army Corps of Engineers and local levee districts fight an unending battle against a river always threatening to burst its artificial banks. Morris looks at increasing aquaculture and wetland rice cultivation as demonstrations of human accommodation to the river valley’s wet nature. He underlines these efforts as ways Americans and the Mississippi can live together with less effort and fewer environmental consequences. One must wonder, however, if this change will decrease human interference with the river, as these industries need the river to behave in an orderly, predictable fashion. Modern agriculture and riverside industry still dominate the valley’s economy and will for decades to come.

Morris has meticulously researched his work...