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CHAPTER FIVE: Taming the Rivers
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He knew that the wild water on which the skiff tossed and fled flowed above no soil tamely trod by man, behind the straining and surging buttocks of a mule. That was when it occurred to him that its present condition was no phenomenon of a decade, but the intervening years during which it consented to bear upon its placid and sleepy bosom the frail mechanicals of man’s clumsy contriving was the phenomenon and this the norm and the River was now doing what it liked to do, had waited patiently the ten years in order to do, as a mule will work for you ten years for the privilege of kicking you once. —william faulkner, “Old Man,” The Wild Palms c ha p t e r f i ve Taming the Rivers t he imp ortan ce of hydrological conditions for human habitation and subsistence is hard to overestimate for a floodplain bordering a river that draws water from 42 percent of the continental United States, accommodates the runoff from the entire Coldwater-Tallahatchie-Yazoo watershed, and receives more than fifty inches of annual rainfall. Flooding posed a physical threat to human inhabitants and many of their subsistence activities in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Delta from the very beginning. In many ways, the annual flooding of the Delta bottomlands was an unpredictable process for the early settlers of European origin , resulting in heavy economic losses but simultaneously boosting the productivity of the land. The settlers soon realized that transformation of the floodplain’s hydrological system was the prerequisite for economic growth and prosperity. It was the relief from flooding—a natural phe138 Taming the Rivers 139 nomenon of the floodplain—that made the development of agriculture, infrastructure, and industry possible in the lowlands of the Delta. Similarly , improved drainage increased crop yields and allowed for the development of previously unimproved lands while freeing the settlers from many of the autochthonous diseases of the floodplain. A Hydraulic Civilization? Karl A. Wittfogel’s classic theory of “hydraulic civilizations” emphasizes the continuous socioecological dialectic of people with their natural surroundings , using the management of water in the subsistence economy of certain agrarian societies as an example. In its agriculturally most precious occurrence—such as rivers in arid regions—the availability of water defined the extent of agricultural activities. In order to cultivate waterde ficient areas, humans had to create large-scale enterprises for water management, which resulted in a new type of agrarian economy. Wittfogel calls it “hydraulic agriculture” in contrast to traditional rainfall farming and the small-scale irrigation he calls “hydroagriculture.” His main thesis is that rainfall farming and hydroagriculture encouraged the evolution of a multicentered society, whereas hydraulic agriculture required substantial and centralized works of water control, operated by a central government, and led to the monopolization of political power and societal leadership by government representatives. Wittfogel’s hydraulic civilizations are consequently characterized by a combination of hydraulic agriculture, hydraulic government, and a single-centered society.1 Wittfogel’s theory, referring most directly to ancient civilizations in China and India, has been successfully applied to modern environmental history. Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire convincingly shows that the history of reclamation (referring to large-scale irrigation of arid and semiarid areas for agricultural purposes) and hydropower in the American West, controlled by the federal government, shares common features with Wittfogel’s hydraulic civilizations. In the more humid South, reclamation as a term has had a different usage. Over much of the region, settlement and agricultural expansion similarly required major transformation of the natural hydraulic regime. The problem, however, was primarily how to keep excess water off agricultural land rather than bring water to it. [44.212.50.220] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 23:17 GMT) 140 Chapter Five This was accomplished by building flood-control works and by providing drainage. It should be noted that Wittfogel’s “hydraulic agriculture” is not limited to the emergence of big productive (referring to irrigation) water works. According to Wittfogel, the advent of big protective (referring to flood control) works frequently accompanies the former, and may even surpass it in magnitude and urgency.2 The concept of hydraulic society is worth remembering when examining the history of water control along the lower Mississippi and in the Delta. Increasing governmental involvement, both state and federal, in flood control and water resource development in the Delta evolved during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with far-reaching effects on the floodplain...