The Lives of Midwestern Rivers

These four books remind us of the great importance of rivers in human culture. Rivers are compelling, and we gravitate towards them for both physical and spiritual reasons. The ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, and the Near East arose around river valleys because they provided water for agricultural sustenance and transportation, and because they captured the human imagination. While a river helps to feed and clothe us, we also seek its beauty and need to stand silently and watch its waters flow.

The river systems of the American Midwest certainly fit this description. These include rivers draining the Gulf of Mexico via the Ohio and Mississippi trunk line, and those which drain the Great Lakes. Together, they have watered the great midwestern agricultural heartland and helped sustain its commerce, culture, and art from the time of ancient Mound Builders to the present day.

These rivers have also created an American literary subgenre—the “river book”—that traces its lineage back to Timothy Flynt and Mark Twain. From 1937 to 1974, poet Constance Lindsay Skinner’s “Rivers of America Series” produced a surprising sixty titles in total—each devoted to an important American river.¹ Many of those books centered on the rivers of the heartland, and midwestern river books continue to appear regularly. They display old motifs of travel, adventure, geography, history, character studies, economics and transportation technology, but today there is often an emphasis on the environment and threats to that environment, both real and imagined.

Dennis McCann’s This Storied River: Legend and Lore of the Upper Mississippi is modeled on the tried and true format Mark Twain used in the second half of Life on the Mississippi—a commentary based on the author’s journey north on the Mississippi River. While Twain traversed the entire length of the Big Muddy, McCann, a journalist with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, traveled the upper Mississippi from Rock Island, Illinois, to the Twin Cities with a large group of re-enactors. His trip was billed as the “Grand Excursion” (in honor of a nineteenth century steamboat flotilla) and took place in 2004 on restored and replica paddlewheel steamboats. “When the participants of Grand Excursion 2.0 assembled in the Quad Cities that summer and boarded boats for a five-day slow float upriver, I boarded with them” (4).

Like Twain, McCann organizes his narrative geographically, down-river to upriver, with river topics woven into the narrative. The topics are interdisciplinary and involve the natural world, Indians, exploration, pioneer history, folklore, community-building, economics, and more. Readers learn about Mound Builders, Julian Dubuque, lead mining, early ferries and steamboats, Zebulon Pike, the mussel shell button industry, the Civil War on the river, and even Red Wing boots and waterskiing.

McCann is a seasoned writer and a good storyteller, and the book is suitable for a bedside table. “For all the time I have spent on or along the river, I am hardly a river rat,” Dennis McCann writes in his conclusion. “But the river stories are always present, the river’s memories always pleasing, all rolling in the water of the little stream that flows from Lake Itasca and grows into the Mighty Mississippi, America’s river” (172).

Richard D. Cornell, an author and outdoorsman, travels in a canoe, not a replica paddle wheeler, on his river sojourn. And while McCann’s book surveys all the upper Mississippi, Cornell closely examines the Chippewa, one of the upper Mississippi’s major tributaries. “Rivers are as timeless as poetry, exceeding geologic definitions,” he writes in The Chippewa: Biography of a Wisconsin Waterway. “They flow past all history and into the future” (207).

A good map is an essential ingredient...