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  • The River’s Business: A Photo Essay
  • Jianqing Zheng (bio)

Since I moved to the Delta in 1996, I have traveled and introduced the Mississippi River to many visitors and friends from China, Japan, Russia, and America. The river’s awe-inspiring majesty is seen in its movement, riverscape, and interaction with other natural forces. What is also inescapable is how the river had created various economies and the cities that flank it. For centuries, the river has imprinted its identity as a vital transportation artery. In antebellum times, steamboats played a crucial role in the river economy, with more than nine thousand steamers serving as ferries, towboats, gun-boats, or gambling vessels on the unregulated waters. But in the twentieth century, trains, which promised a faster means of transportation, replaced the steamboats. How ironic, therefore, that The Gateway to the Blues Museum in Tunica (Figure 1) was a railroad station in the 1890s.

Although the steamboat, as the river’s iconic means of transportation, has gone into history, its image has undergone a transformation through the on-water gambling casinos that attract tourists each year. The steamboat shape of the River Road Queen Welcome Center (Figure 2), which stands in a pool by Highway 82 in Greenville, Mississippi, architecturally recalls the vessel’s longstanding importance in US history. One of the top ten welcome centers in the nation, the Queen serves as a museum celebrating Greenville’s history as a pivotal river city. In the twenty-first century, other river craft also serve as a reminder of the steamboats’ function to move freight up and down river. Figure 3 shows the Ergon towboats located in Vicksburg used to push petroleum barges on the river.

Unquestionably today, the Lower Mississippi is symbolized by the waterfront casinos found in New Orleans, Natchez, Vicksburg, Greenville, Lula, Tunica, West Memphis, and St. Louis. Opening the river for the casinos [End Page 160] in 1990, the Mississippi legislature legalized dockside casino gambling but insisted that the casinos needed to be located on the river or on the lakes adjacent to it so that the gaming business would not pollute the land. Rather than polluting the environment, the casinos help the local economy of the depressed river cities that suffered from downward unemployment rates and business closings. What is ironic is that the river, which gave rise to the Mississippi gaming business, making it the third largest in the nation, also brought damage to the casinos from floods and, of course, Katrina. Harrah’s Casino Tunica (Figure 4), for instance, flooded with six-foot-deep water in 2011 and closed its doors for good in 2014.

As the steamboats did, casinos attract not only gamblers but also musicians. Blues musicians have been uprooted from Delta jook joints or clubs to become one of the main attractions the casinos offered. It may not be outlandish to suggest that someday rural blues will change into casino blues and that rural blues sites often signified by historic markers, such as in the mural in Figure 5, will be transferred to the casinos. They will conjure up the blues’ traditions with onboard art featuring legendary blues musicians, and the rustic landscapes of a Southern identity of days gone by.

Besides music, the river has long been linked to the natural disasters that it brought to the land. Historically, one of the main destructions caused by the river was the massive flood of 1927. A historic marker (Figure 6) at Mound Landing by Highway 1, paralleling the river levee, describes the historic flood in vivid detail:

After months of rainfall a swollen Mississippi River broke the levee at Mound Landing, some 2 ½ miles west, on April 21, 1927. The flood waters caused widespread destruction and loss of life in seven states. The breadth of the disaster focused attention on the Delta and helped initiate a national flood control program.

Though devastatingly destructive, the flood also made the delta land agriculturally fertile with a thick layer of rich topsoil, thus increasing the economic impact the river has. The flood marks on the floodwall in Vicksburg (Figure 7) also record the level of the major river floods.

Above all, the river is...

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