The Meaning of Rivers: Flow and Reflection in American Literature

Notes

Notes Introduction “plays a part” to “live on Earth”: Leopold 1. U.S. river statistics: Palmer 10. “nature and culture . . . in modern thought”: Goodwin 145. “our grim Philosophers” to “Radical Moisture”: Erasmus 112. “Embosomed for a season . . . dry bones of the past”: Emerson, Nature, Works 1: 9. Subsystems of the river in geomorphology: Charlton 10–20. Rivers of America series: See Fitzgerald. The idea for the series belonged to Constance Lindsay Skinner (1877–1939), and the works were published first by Farrar & Rinehart (later Rinehart & Co. and eventually Holt, Rinehart and Winston). Emerson references: From “The American Scholar” essay, Emerson, Works 1: 101. “have acquiesced . . . form and process”: Leopold ix. 1. Overlooking the River “Zits” comic strip: Scott and Borgman. “from its earliest” to “rivers and streams”: Thomann 99. “but little conscious” to “any day thoughtlessly”: Thoreau, Writings 317. “the preeminent city . . . great genetrix”: Heat-Moon 226. Information on the Transitional or Terminal Archaic peoples of the Delaware: Cotter, Roberts, and Parrington 9. Lenape and “Manayunk”: Cotter, Roberts, and Parrington 32. 176 | Notes to Pages 3–9 “practically all . . . they could get”: Cotter, Roberts, and Parrington 39. Brady’s Bluff: The bluffs near Trempealeau, rising to 1,160 feet above sea level at Brady’s, are composed of Jordan Sandstone with a covering in some areas of Oneonta Dolomite (Fremling 36–39). “Lay low . . . turn myself loose”: 53. Page numbers that are unaccompanied by author and title refer to Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi. Clemens had become “Mark Twain”: Lawrence Howe understands the Clemens-into-Twain remaking as the attempt to invent a representative American self through writing. Ron Powers emphasizes that the chosen name linked the writer with “dangerous water” (Dangerous 252), while Richard S. Lowry examines the making of the “Littery Man” through the Foucauldian notion of the “author-complex” (10). Life on the Mississippi: Dewey Ganzel describes the composing process of Life on the Mississippi as marked by “diligence and despair,” which Twain had tried to alleviate by revisiting the river in 1882 (55). While for Ganzel the return fizzles, a recent biographer suggests that it caused Twain to alter the original goals of his book and renewed his fierce love for the river (Powers, Mark Twain). “the Mississippi is well worth reading about”: 39. “historical history,” “physical history”: 41. “the first white man” to “paint a picture”: 41. “alter its locality” to “always moving bodily sidewise”: 40–41. “cut-offs” to “man of him”: 40. “Apparently nobody happened . . . notice of it”: 43. “La Salle the Frenchman” to “make it useful”: 43–44. “Louis the Putrid”: 48. “Apparently the river” to “apparently”: 50–51. “great barges” to “five or six more”: 50–51. “adventure” to “the marvellous science of piloting”: 63. “brings together” to “pleasant surprises and contrasts”: Twain, Autobiography 1: 328. “a man that drunk . . . if he wanted to”: 56. Mud, in fact, is one of the key traits of the Mississippi. “Every day,” according to John M. Barry, “the river deposits between several hundred thousand and several million tons of earth in the Gulf of Mexico. At least some geologists put this figure even higher historically , at an average of more than 2 million tons a day” (39). Like Twain be- Notes to Pages 9–17 | 177 fore him, Barry delights in the Mississippi’s mud, reporting that the river has deposited almost 1,300 cubic miles of sediment in the Gulf of Mexico (39) and is “the only river in the world” that has mud lumps—little volcanoes on the river bottom “spewing gasses and liquid mud” (69). “learning the river”: 72. “the great Mississippi . . . shining in the sun”: 64. “Boy after boy” to “come in glory”: 67. “desire to be a steamboatman”: 66. “comforting day-dreams of the future”: 67. “I never was great in matters of detail”: 68. “incredible adventures” to “void of art”: 70. “speechless” to “half-witted humbug”: 71. “science of piloting,” “learning the river”: 63. “cub” to “change the subject”: 73. “to fear that . . . phase of it”: 74. “I was gratified” to “‘I—I—nothing, for certain’”: 75. “‘You’re the stupidest’” to “disturb your mother with”: 76. “the gentlest way” to “just like A B C”: 76. “uneducated passenger”: 94. “fairly bristled” to “river set down”: 77. “had got to learn this troublesome river both ways”: 79. “‘I have not . . . never thought of it’”: 80–81. “note-booking” to “confusion of meaningless names”: 81. “at the end” to “it was, too”: 85. “‘My boy . . . very dark night’”: 85...