Reckoning with “the Crookedest River in the World”: The Maps of Harold Norman Fisk

“A man’s first thought, in looking at a map of the Mississippi River, naturally, is that its numerous bends are defects and it would be better without them.” But not so fast, the Congressman from Greenville, Mississippi continued. By extending its bends, only to cut them off, and then make new ones in a continuous cycle, “the river is engaged in the constant effort to find some equilibrium between its velocity and the resisting power of the banks.” For Representative Ben Humphreys, who spent two decades in the House working on the matter of flood control in the Mississippi Valley, the meanders and cutoffs were natural, even beautiful, and they needed to be protected. Disturb them, and the entire equilibrium of the river would be upset, and then valley residents would see floods like they had never seen before. Not all agreed, as Humphreys well knew. He noted that former president Rutherford Hayes, upon appointing the first Mississippi River Commission, had said “that he supposed the first thing the commission would do would be to take some of the kinks out of the river” (130). How to represent the bends in the Mississippi River was a subject of much debate among engineers and river scientists over the course of the twentieth century.

The Mississippi River, declared Mark Twain, is “the crookedest river in the world” (21). “If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section” of the river (205). This crookedest river was also fickle. It never stayed in one place, but continually shifted right or left, jumping its banks, cutting through its bends, playing havoc with the efforts of property owners and state officials to establish permanent boundaries. Twain loved to tell stories of towns buried or abandoned by the river when it abruptly altered course, and of men going to sleep on one side of the river in one state and awakening on the other side in another state.

Crooks and course changes left the land alongside the river littered with oxbow lakes, the remains of abandoned river bends. “It occasionally happens that the river cuts off a long bend by a short channel across its neck,” observed Robert Taylor, “forming deep, clear, crescent-shaped lakes. There are many such lakes in the valley, some of them now several miles from the river” (37). Full of fish and snakes, the lakes became part of the Mississippi Valley geographical and cultural riverscape. In North Toward Home, Mississippi writer Willie Morris contrasted them with the lake reservoirs of Texas, where he attended college. The oxbow lakes along the big river were “real lakes, of a piece with the raw heavy earth that enveloped them.” They were full of foreboding. Morris told an oft-repeated tale, of a water skier who falls into one murky lake and dies a most gruesome, southern death (75). In Ellen Douglas’s version of the same story, we learn that

The young girl’s lovely face is contorted with pain. Barbed wire, she gasps. I’m caught in barbed wire. But there isn’t any barbed wire. No. It’s a writhing, tangled mass of water moccasins.

(130–31)

The Mississippi River’s bends and lakes, and the levees that in the twentieth century separated river and lakes, present and past, are as iconic of the South as Spanish moss and kudzu. The meander zone, as the crookedest portion of the river is known, begins at the Indian mounds on Dog Tooth Bend in southern Illinois and ends at Jackson Square in the Crescent City. The meanders become wilder, more erratic as the river flows deeper into the former Confederacy. Or, at least, the river used to become wilder the farther south it flowed, until the Army Corps of Engineers got ahold of it. Federal authority of river navigation and flood control brought dollars and highly educated personnel into small, impoverished southern towns, transforming places such as Vicksburg, Mississippi, headquarters (Figure 1) for the Mississippi River Commission (MRC) and the Waterways...