Gods of the Mississippi

INTRODUCTION: Religious Life on the Mississippi

INTRODUCTION Religious Life on the Mississippi Michael Pasquier The gods on their thrones are shaken and changed, but it abides, aloof and unappeasable, with no heart except for its own task, under the unbroken and immense arch of the lighted sky where the sun, too, goes a lonely journey. As a thing used by men it has changed: the change is not in itself, but in them. —William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 1941 In 1833, at age thirteen, James Buchanan Eads moved to St. Louis, Missouri, with his family. They arrived by steamboat. Before everyone could disembark , the watercraft exploded, leaving eight people dead and the Eads family alive. As a young man, Eads worked aboard steamboats and started a riverbed salvage business. His fortune made, he spent the Civil War years designing and building ironclad gunboats for the Union. From 1867 to 1874, Eads led the construction of the first large-span bridge that supported railroad traffic across the Mississippi River in St. Louis. The following year, Congress rewarded Eads with a contract to build a jetty at the mouth of the Mississippi in order to improve navigability. Speaking before a crowd of four hundred men in St. Louis, Eads vowed “to undertake the work [of opening the river mouth] with a faith based upon the ever-constant ordinances of God himself; and . . . I will give to the Mississippi river, through His grace, and by application of His laws, a deep, open, safe, and permanent outlet to the sea.”1 He believed, like many people before and after his time, that “the improvement of the Mississippi ”—the building of levees, dams, jetties, reservoirs, and canals in order to prevent flooding and ease navigation—“involves the contemplation of one of the sublimest physical wonders of the beneficent Creator,” that “immense valley which is now justly known throughout Christendom as the ‘Garden of the World.’”2 Eads completed the jetty project in 1879, to which the New Orleans 2 | Michael Pasquier Daily Times proclaimed, “There is no parallel instance of man’s employment of the prodigious energies of nature in the realization of his aims.”3 Eads died in 1887, having engineered ways for people to cross the Mississippi by railroad from east to west and to travel unimpeded up and down “the old Father of Waters” to the Gulf of Mexico.4 Fast forward to August 2005, when Hurricane Katrina funneled a twentyfive -foot wall of water up the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet, creating what some have called a “storm surge superhighway.” Completed in 1968 and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet (also known as Mr. Go) is a canal that provides deep-draft ships with a shorter navigation route from the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. The twentieth-century construction of Mr. Go is in many ways a legacy of Eads’s nineteenth-century attempt at mastering the Mississippi. It is a testament to the persistence of people to live in the vicinity of a body of water with both creative and destructive powers. Since Katrina, in a remote location of St. Bernard Parish on the banks of Mr. Go, thousands of pilgrims have visited a marble monument that reads, “In Everlasting Memory of Katrina Victims, St. Bernard, Louisiana, August 29, 2005,” followed by 163 names, beginning with Bertha Acosta and ending with Gloria Young. Behind the monument, extending out of the waters of Mr. Go, stands a metal cross with an image of the crucified Christ’s face at its center. Standing near the shrine on the sixth anniversary of Katrina, a thirty-one-year-old resident was asked how his community had changed, to which he replied, “It’s funny to look back at where it is now and where it was before. It’s funny because it is not what it was. It’s different. But it’s home.”5 It wasn’t just a storm that changed this man’s home. It was also a river that, for centuries, confounded those who call upon deities to control its waters and attracted those who need a place to call home. There is much to be said about the history of life along the Mississippi River. It seems an obvious place to study the movement of peoples and ideas throughout American history. Mark Twain thought so, beginning his book Life on the Mississippi (1883) with the grand statement, “But the basin of the Mississippi is...