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3. A RIVER OF WOE: Reshaping the Land
- Louisiana State University Press
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60 3 A RIVER OF WOE Reshaping the Land I n the year 1900 much of the property Lee Wilson owned remained mired in swamps. He demonstrated a single-minded determination to harvest the wealth of timber on it and turn it into productive farm acreage. This required attention to two interrelated factors: building levees to protect against floods and constructing both drainage ditches and a few levees to eliminate the back swamps. Although not entirely unmindful of the environmental implications of draining the natural wetlands, he set his sights on making “Mother Nature” over to his liking, and he had plenty of company. Given the wavering commitment of the federal government, however, flood control remained unachievable during the first decades of the twentieth century , and Wilson and others along the lower Mississippi River Valley suffered the consequences. He enjoyed greater success—and endured more numerous controversies—in seeing the swamps drained. The battles that ensued over drainage, some of them involving different visions of development, reflected the tensions existing within capitalist agriculture. Plantation owners, small farmers, and potential homesteaders faced off in county court proceedings and in extra-legal activities on the watery ground of Mississippi County. As the drainage efforts progressed, another contestant entered the playing field, greatly complicating life for everyone in the county. When the U.S. secretary of the interior declared in 1908 that he intended to open the “sunk lands” to homesteaders, Mississippi County became a battleground. Homeless men hoping to homestead faced planters and lumber interests determined to secure the land for themselves. Battle also ensued in state and federal courts, and in the latter Lee Wilson quickly became one of the Interior Department’s chief opponents. Wilson operated during an unusual moment in American history. By the end of the nineteenth century, settlement had spread across the country to the Pacific Ocean, and as Frederick Jackson Turner opined, the vast American A RIVER OF WOE: RESHAPING THE LAND 61 frontier had disappeared. Those eager to make their way in the world searched for opportunities and began to settle in places previously considered too wild and unredeemable by those who came before. Many thousands settled along the Mississippi River and braved an environment made dangerous by floods and swamp-related diseases. Seasonal overflows that would have gone largely unnoticed earlier in the century later became natural disasters for this settler population. The decision to move into this dangerous ground seems foolhardy given the negative images nineteenth-century Americans held of swamps and given the mortality rates facing families, rich and poor, black and white, who dared to venture there. Only the desperate search for the American dream in one of the last pieces of frontier explains the demographic revolution occurring in northeastern Arkansas.1 The lower Mississippi Valley constituted one of the unhealthiest regions of the country in the late nineteenth century. Although assorted maladies burdened the population year-round, the summer and early fall, when mosquitoes bred in the swamps and carried their lethal cargo to human hosts, held the greatest danger to health. Lee Wilson became painfully aware of the dangers arising during this treacherous period. Five of the eight members of his family succumbed during his childhood and youth, dying between the months of June and October, the prime period for mosquito infestations. His father died on July 28, 1870, his mother on September 12, 1878, and during the 1880s, a plague of death visited his family: on August 27, 1882, his sister, Victoria, fell victim to ovarian cancer; his half sister Viola died in July 1885; and his firstborn child, Tiny, died in August 1888.2 Evidence of the health consequences of living in the area come from two sources. Statistics published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 1906 reveal that nearby Memphis, Tennessee, had the highest percentage of deaths due to malaria of any city in the survey. Only pneumonia and tuberculosis outdid malaria as a cause of death in that city. The Osceola Times confirms that between 1884 and 1900 malarial fevers plagued Mississippi County too. Indeed, as late as 1938, scientists identified the lower Mississippi River Valley from Cairo, Illinois , to Natchez, Mississippi, as one of the four worst malarial zones in the United States.3 While the disease environment spared no family from tragedy, poorer people, lacking proper nutrition and medical care, and likely suffering from greater exposure to the elements in winter and less sanitary conditions...