Along the River Road: Past and Present on Louisiana’s Historic Byway

The River and Settlement Along It

The River and Settlement Along It Almost half a league wide, deep, rapid and constantly rolling down trees and driftwood on its turbid waters. The current was strong. . . . If a man stood still on the opposite side of it, it could not be discerned whether he was a man or no. In places it was a league or more broad and of great depth, and the water always muddy. —Hernando de Soto River Control When European explorers came upon the Mississippi River, it was the centerpiece of an extensive natural system—what modern engineering jargon calls a “poised stream.” The term means that the river and its dynamic existed as a set of balanced forces. Although the actions and reactions within this system might vary from decade to decade—cutting off bends, adding loops, and altering the channel—the river maintained an overall equilibrium and a generally stable length from source to mouth. At low water, the river ran within a channel between natural levees created during previous floodings as heavy silt precipitated out of the overflow . These natural levees were seven to ten feet higher than the flatland plain behind them, which sloped gradually another two or three feet lower to swamps. The swamps were the lowest areas, serving as catch basins and mitigation pools by retaining floodwaters. Distributaries such as Bayous Manchac, Lafourche, and Plaquemine, as well as other, smaller waterways intersected with the river and served as natural outlets for the normally high springtime flow. When the river overflowed its banks—usually as part of the annual cycle—floodwaters covered the lower, flatland plain and the swamps. 34 The River and Settlement Along It  35 During exceptional floods, the waters deposited silt over thousands of square miles of the Mississippi River floodplain, or alluvial valley, building a vast region of rich bottomlands that, in parts of the upper valley, extended to an average width of fifty miles. The native peoples of the Mississippi River alluvial plain had adapted their lifestyle to the natural landscape and cycle of the river. The Europeans , seeking to “civilize” this new land, made more demands. When the French decided to move the capital of the Louisiana colony from Biloxi on the Gulf Coast to “the rich country bordering the Mississippi” (now New Orleans), they defined their intention to create along the river a permanent and stable community supported by a dependable economic base. This European model could only be accomplished by challenging the river’s natural , and inhospitable, cycle. Levee building, a historically proven technique documented since the ancient Egyptians’ use of it along the Nile, was the French government’s method of choice for controlling the Mississippi. Therefore, with each land grant along the river came a statutory requirement for the owner to build and maintain a levee along his water frontage. Although these documents mandated specifications for the levees, such rudimentary structures often failed to contain the river. Nevertheless, by 1731, a continuous—although hardly uniform—levee extended along both banks of the Mississippi as far as the upriver boundary of the German Coast. In 1732 the French colonial government, aware that control of the river was inadequate, demanded that levees be six feet wide with a foot-and-bridle path on the land side and a twelve-foot-tall boat-hitching post on the river side. But a flood in 1735 destroyed much of what had been erected. Recalcitrant landholders, frustrated at their constant battle with the forceful river, balked at replacing their levees, submitting only when threatened with expropriation of their property. Little changed under the Spanish colonial government, which acknowledged the need to continue aggressive river control in order to maintain a permanent foothold in the valley. Governor Carondelet’s Levee Ordinance of June 1792, offered quite specific instructions: The maintenance of the levees interests all the inhabitants where crevasses ruin in an instant the fruits of a year of labor. . . . Messrs. The syndics , will make forthwith a rigid examination of the levees of their district and will assign to each inhabitant the work that he will have to do 36  Along the River Road there as soon as the crops will be finished. All the levees will be raised in proportion to the last rise . . . all ditches actually existing on the inside of the levee on the river side will be carefully filled and replaced by a spoil bank or embankment . . . which will be...