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At first, there were just tiny ridges flanking the river, barely perceptible piles of Big Muddy’s mud. Then, over millennia they grew, as the Mississippi deposited layers of soil during flood seasons. It happened like this: when the swollen river spread from its channel, the unconstrained torrent slackened. Without a current carrying it, suspended material sank. The heaviest sediment dropped closest to the river, with lighter silt falling farther away. So the Mississippi built its banks, earthen ramps descending gradually from its shores. We know these accretions as the river ’s natural levees.1 Eventually, the levees became useful for people, a consequence of local topography and continental geography. Native Americans knew the riverbanks as the highest, driest ground in the flat, damp delta. They shared their knowledge with Europeans who settled Louisiana. For these people, the Mississippi and its levee embodied the New World’s promise. The river gathered the waters of thousands of smaller streams crisscrossing its valley, an expanse stretching from the Rockies’ eastern face to the Alleghenies’ western slope. More than 15,000 miles of navigable waterways make up the Mississippi system, a funnel whose spout would, it seemed, shunt trade inexorably toward the Gulf of Mexico. For boosters, the Mississippi was God’s signature carved into the valley; they saw in the turbid river images of empire. And the levee was more evidence of a divine plan: an elevated spot on which to build an entrepôt where produce gathered from the North American interior could arrive at market near the river mouth.2 Such visions of benign nature, working in concert with imperial aspirations, prompted the French to place New Orleans on a crescent-shaped stretch of the levee in 1718. Four years later, Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix, a Jesuit Boundary Issues Clarifying New Orleans’s Murky Edges a r i K e l M a n [ 195 ] [ 196 ] c i T i e s a n d n aT u r e priest, visited. “Rome and Paris had not such considerable beginnings,” he wrote, “were not built under such happy auspices, and their founders met not with those advantages on the Seine and the Tiber, which we have found on the Mississippi, in comparison of which, these two rivers are no more than brooks.” Geography was destiny. The river would inevitably make New Orleans great. But not even faith in environmental determinism allowed Charlevoix to overlook grim features of the local scene: “Imagine to yourself two hundred persons, who have been sent out to build a city, and who have settled on the banks of a great river, thinking upon nothing but putting themselves under cover from the injuries of the weather.” So from the first, New Orleans had a strained relationship with its environs, which seemed to guarantee and cloud its future.3 Geographers sum up this tension as a disparity between “site”—the particular land a city occupies—and “situation”—a more abstract measure of a metropolitan area’s advantages relative to other places. New Orleans, in this formulation, was (and, to some extent, still is) blessed with a near-perfect situation. As Charlevoix noted, its location, when compared to other cities, is among the finest imaginable . The French built New Orleans on the east bank of the nation’s greatest river, near its outlet, in an era before technologies began circumventing the vagaries of geography. Without railroads, cars, or planes annihilating space, the rivers of the Mississippi system were the region’s principal commercial highways, leaving New Orleans in command of a vast hinterland. Just downstream from the city lay the Gulf of Mexico, which provided access to the Atlantic world of trade. River traffic was the city’s economic lifeblood. New Orleans’s site may be equally bad. The city was built on sediment, the long ramp of the Mississippi’s levee. The highest ground is found along the river frontage. From there the land slopes down—roughly fifteen feet over a distance of about one and a half miles—until it craters at the city’s rear, where much of the ground is below sea level. Through the start of the twentieth century, a cypress wetland , known locally as the backswamp, stretched from there to the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, several soggy miles away, where the terrain climbs to the peak of the lake’s levee. New Orleans, then, is a bowl ringed by bodies of water, which stare down into town like voyeurs.And...

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