Bear Grease - Ep. 126: The Mississippi River - Strong Brown God (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

On this episode, Clay Newcomb is taking us to what some Native Americans call the river beyond any age and others call the Father of Waters. He’s talking about the Mississippi river. To understand the river and its impact on America takes a diverse cast of storytellers. New York Times best selling author John M. Barry will be our guest, along with author Hank Burdine and a fellow by the name of Will Primos. We'll also be joined by two Army Corps of Engineers: David Biedenharn, a hydraulic engineer, as well as  fisheries biologist Jack Killgore. We might even hear the words of Mark Twain and T.S. Elliott.  This has been a long time coming and Clay is on a personal journey to understand the significance of this American river on this country and on his life. The current will be swift and muddy, but we really doubt that you're gonna want to miss this one... Connect with Clay and MeatEater Clay on Instagram MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. The Mississippi River is so central. Every element of American history. The entire system was key to all transportation and communication across much of the country. On this episode, we're talking about what some Native American tribes called the river beyond any age, and others called it the father of waters.

We're talking about the Mississippi River. This is a big bite, and it will take a diverse cast of storytellers for us to understand the river and its impact on America. New York Times bestselling author John Barry will be our guest along with author Hank Burdine, a hydraulic engineer. Also will be here, a fisheries biologist, and a fellow by the name of Will Primos, and will even hear the words of Mark Twain and T.S. Eliot. This has been a long time coming for me, and I'm on a person. personal journey to understand the significance of this American river on this country and on my life. The current will be swift and the water muddy, but I really doubt that you're going to want to miss this one.

You got the West Coast. You got the Gulf Coast. You got the Atlantic Coast. And you've got the Mississippi River on and right up the middle of America. That's the fourth coast. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Greece podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight in unlikely places and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built,

hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river is a strong brown God, sullen, untamed, and intractable, patient to some degree at first recognized as a frontier. Useful, untrustworthy as a conveyor of commerce. Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten by the dwellers in cities, ever, however implacable. Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder of what men choose to for

get unhonored, unpropitiated by worshipers of the machine, but watching, waiting and watching. I'm in a 23-foot flat-bottom boat. She's sturdy, but looks like she's been up the river a few times. But so does my captain, Hank. Where are we going, Hank? On the river. The Mississippi River.

I once asked Hank how old he was, and he told me he quit keeping him. and track, but he thought his daughter knew. His hair looks like a cluster of white cotton balls. His face shows the dignity of age, and his accent sounds about what you figure an alligator would sound like. We're in Lake Ferguson now. It used to be the river. In 1938, took out the Greenville Bins, created the Slackwater Harbor. Took out 38 miles to the river. Let me run it up and let's see what it does. The river is always changing. The only constant of an alluvial river is change.

Only in the last 150 years has that change been induced by man. This is the story of an ancient, untamable system and man's connection to it. That poem that you heard a few minutes ago, the one that said, I think the river is a strong brown god, this is the beginning of a poem by T.S. Eliot describing the Mississippi River. But that was the voice reading it of the author John Barry. He wrote a book in 1997 called Rising Tide, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

The book is considered by many to be one of the top works of American nonfiction in modern times. This is the opening paragraph of his book. The valley of the Mississippi River stretches north into Canada and south to the Gulf of Mexico. east from New York and North Carolina and west to Idaho and New Mexico. It is a valley 20% larger than that of China's Yellow River, double that of Africa's Nile and India's Ganges, 15 times that of Europe's Rhine. Within it lies 41% of the continental United States,

including all or part of 31 states. No river in Europe, no river in the Orient, no river in the ancient civilized world compares to it. Only the Amazon and barely the Congo have a larger drainage basin. Measured from the head of its tributary, the Missouri River, as a logical starting point as any, the Mississippi is the longest river in the world, and it pulses like the artery of the American heartland. To control the Mississippi River, not simply to find a modus Vivendi with it, But to control it, to dictate it, to make it conform is a mighty task.

It requires more than confidence. It requires hubris. This is a big river that helped define the American character. This is a big story. I've always been mesmerized and frankly fearful of big dark water. But why is this water dark like a strong brown god? The answer to this question is core to the identity of the river. Here's our boat captain and lifelong connoisseur of dark water, Hank Burdine.

To me, it's all about the dirt. It's the dirt. It's the dirt that has come from 41% of the continental United States in two provinces of Canada, all the way from the Allegheny Mountain to New York to the Rocky Mountains of Montana. It's a watershed that has brought what we call the Mississippi Delta and formed. the Mississippi Delta, which is the alluvial bottomland area of the Mississippi and the Yazoo River. We call it the Delta. And through the millenniums, the floods every year, springtime, wintertime, have brought soil from all over this country down here. If we could anthropomorphize the river and view it as a living being, this monstrous alluvial river acts with great force to do one.

thing. Move dirt. Moving dirt is its obsession, its daily bread. Stay with me for a minute for a metaphor. If the banks of the river were the skeleton of a great beast and the floodplain its flesh, the water would be its blood, and the sediment load, the dirt that the water carries would be the life in the blood. The river is furious and relentless in moving dirt. It's the one thing it can't not do. And we can't understand the story of this river until we understand the inner motivations and workings of the river. Though it is not a sentient being, it operates like one when it comes to adherence to the mission, and that mission influences man. I'm wildly interested in how natural systems impact men in ways we don't perceive. Alluvial rivers are incredibly complex. Water

turbulence of river hydraulics are mysterious. A famous physicist once said that he'd like to ask God two questions. Why relativity and why turbulence? And then he said, I think God may have the answer to the first question, insinuating that God doesn't even understand turbulence. I take umbrage at the assumption, but I get the point. It's complex. And there are people who've dedicated their lives to understanding rivers. When I first went to work with the Vicksburg District Corps of Engineers, I was in what they called the Potomology section. Potomology is not probably ringing a bell with you.

Nope. It doesn't ring a bell with most anybody. But potomology is a science of rivers. That was Dr. David Beidenharn, a research hydraulic engineer for the Corps of Engineers in Vicksburg, Mississippi. In his own words, he's a river geek. he's got an equation drawn on a whiteboard, and we're about to get a science lesson.

Actually, I've drawn it up on the board there. That's not an equation, up at the top, that's a relationship that says that the water discharge, how much water is in the river, times the slope of the river, how steep is the river, that's what we call stream power. That's the ability of the river to do work. Rivers, they can either have more water to get energy

or they can increase their slope to get more energy. And discharge Q times slope is a surrogate for stream power, the energy. And work is moving sediment. Exactly. And that's the other side of the relationship. That Q sub S, that's the sediment load. That's how much sediment is moving. So on the left-hand side of that relationship is the power and the energy that a river has.

And on the right-hand side is what is doing that. spending that power and energy to do do work and move sediment that's the way rivers behave stream power is a river's ability to do work that's the way rivers behave like a beaver building dams

the core of this river is moving dirt here's an example of how much dirt the river can move and how quickly it can be done a revetment which he's about to talk about is a concrete mattress placed on the river bank to stop erosion. It was down in the New Orleans district where the revetment was placed on the river bank in 1978, and the mattress goes, you know, from top bank all the way down to what we call

the thawag of the river. A thawag is just the lowest point in the cross section of a river. So the bottom of the river. Okay. Thalwag. Thalwag. They came back and they surveyed it. And at the bed of the river where the mattress met the bed back in 1978, they surveyed it in May of 1984, it had scoured 60 feet.

60 feet is a pretty big scour hole. Wow. Well, that got their attention, so they mobilized the troops. They're going to come back in and do some repair work to make sure that revetment is stable. And so in the process, one month later in June of 1984, they came back to get another survey to, know exactly what they had, it had filled back in 40 feet. That's an incredible amount of dirt moving around in a 60-foot deep scour filling in 40 feet in a month. That's incredible.

Here's another excerpt from John Barry's Rising Tide. The river's main current can reach nine miles an hour, while some currents can move much faster. During floods, measurable effects of an approaching flood crest can roar downriver at almost 18 miles an hour. And for the last 450 miles of the Mississippi's flow, the riverbed lies below sea level, 15 feet below sea level at Vicksburg, well over 170 feet below sea level at New Orleans. For this 450 miles, the water on the bottom has no reason to flow at all, but the water above it does. This creates a tumbling effect as water spills over itself, like an enormous ever-breaking.

internal wave. This tumbling effect can attack a riverbank or a levy like a buzzsaw. But the final complexity of the lower Mississippi is its sediment load, an understanding it was key to understanding how to control the river. Every day the river deposits between several hundred thousand and several million tons of earth into the Gulf of Mexico. At least some geologists put this figure even higher historically at an average of more than two million tons a day. By geologic standards, the lower Mississippi is a young, even infant stream and runs through what is known as the Mississippi embayment, the declivity covering approximately 35,000 miles that begins 30 miles north of Cairo to Cape Girardo, Missouri. Geologically, the true

head of the Mississippi Delta, and extends to the Gulf of Mexico. At one time, the Gulf itself reached to Cape Girardo, then sea level fell. Over thousands of years, the river and its tributaries have poured 1,2 cubic miles of sediment, the equivalent of 1,270 separate mountains of earth, each one mile high, a mile wide, and a mile long, into this declivity. Aided by the falling sea level, this sediment filled in the embayment and made land. Throughout the Mississippi's alluvial valley, this sedimentary deposit has an average thickness of 132 feet, In some areas, the deposits reach down 350 feet. Its weight is great enough that some geologists believe its downward pressure pushed up surrounding land, creating hills.

We've had a poet, T.S. Eliot, a Delta philosopher, Hank Berdine, a writer, John Barry, and a hydrologist, Dr. Biedenharne, tell us the same thing. It's all about the dirt. Where science, culture, and art meet, that's where you find the story. An alluvial river is one in which the banks are mobile and shift. It meanders and weaves through its floodplain, as opposed to a river with bedrock banks and a bed that never shifts. The floodplain is the area along the river subject to flooding. The Mississippi has been putting on a dirt moving clinic since before the first humans arrived on this continent

and when giant ground sloths walked on their knuckles on its banks. But to understand the Mississippi River today, we've got to understand the size of its drainage basin. 31 states and two Canadian provinces are drained by the river. Here's John Barry. Well, the drainage basin is the third largest drainage basin. You know, the Amazon's the biggest. And the Nile just barely edges out the Mississippi.

For square mileage of drainage base. Yeah, it's like 1.24 million square miles. Okay. So that's a lot of square miles. And, you know, in terms of flow, you know, the state of Texas is looking out 20, 30 years to its water needs. And it thinks it needs something like 10 million acre feet of water in future years to meet its needs a year. And flood, the Mississippi River is carrying, in a great flood, you know, maybe four and a half million acre feet a day. So you just think of that, you know, that a couple of days flow of the Mississippi River and a flood is, it would be enough to satisfy all the water needs for the state of Texas for a year.

You know, when I think of the Mississippi River, I actually think of the entire system. When you think of it, you may just think of essentially a straight line from Minnesota to the Gulf. But that's not how I conceive of it. In the world, only the Amazon and Nile rivers have larger drainage basins. That's an incredible amount of water. And an acre foot is a weird unit of measurement to understand, but it's the amount of water needed to flood one acre at the depth of one foot. It takes a lot of voices to tell a story about the Mississippi River.

This is Dr. Jack Kilgore with two elves, a fisheries biologist for the Corps of Engineers, telling the most unique feature of the river today. This is something to be proud of. All the other great rivers of the word, the Congo, the Nile, the Yance Sea, all of those, they have dams near the mouth of the river, whereas the Mississippi, the first dam you encounter is up in St. Louis, which is 1,200 miles up. However, a fish can take a left on the Missouri and go another 1,200 miles to the Gavin's Point Dam on the Missouri.

So, and I tell people this, that if you put all of that together, there's almost 2,400 miles of free-flowing Mississippi-Missouri River. There's nothing else like that in the world except for the Amazon. All the other great rivers have been dammed, which influences sediment transport, water quality, migratory fish. You know, it has all those negative impacts. The Missouri River is roughly 2,400 miles long, and is America's longest river. It's longer than the Mississippi. It is dammed 1,200 miles from its mouth. The Mississippi River, give or take, is about 2,350 miles in length from its headwater on Lake Ataska in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico.

The first dam of the Mississippi River is in St. Louis, 1,000 miles from its mouth at the Gulf. That's also where the Missouri runs into the Mississippi. I hope this is all adding up to you. That's a lot of numbers. Unless you've got a scratch pad, let me do the math. Combining the Missouri and Mississippi, there's almost 2,400 miles of free-flowing river, free of dams. Free-flowing means free of dams. This is major.

It's probably even tattoo-worthy. I can see it now. The number 2400 sketched over a muddy river with an American flag blue. blowing on the bank with an eagle flying through the sky. I'm kidding. Don't get that tattooed on you. But long before America had a flag and tattoos were trendy, this land had the river.

But how long has the river been here? Here's Dr. Kilgore. Really, it was formed at the end when the glaciers began to melt about 10,000 years ago. And all of that glacial and all that material started pouring down and creating this meandering river, and it became kind of more of a braided river because of that washload.

It remained unchanged for 10,000 years. And then in 1930, the Corps came in there and started their massive flood control project, and that's what locked the river in place. That was a simple answer to a very complex question, and I can't keep these guys from getting too far ahead in our story. He just jumped from 10,000 years ago to the infamous 1927 flood,

like it was a ballet step. We'll talk about that later, Doc. Basically, the river has been in its current form since the last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago. The Mississippi River Valley drainage basin, the whole thing, from the Rockies to the Appalachians,

was formed by the Laurentide Ice Sheet and carved out the valley over 70 million years ago. I think it's kind of arrogant to name an ice sheet like you'd name a pet, but whatever, I understand the pragmatism of it, but no human that our culture has had correspondence with saw this ice sheet to report about it to us. And I'm not saying that because I doubt that it was there.

The ice sheet was there. But it's just kind of wild the amount of data that we can pull from the Earth's cryptic diary about its past life. It has recording mechanisms that take the form of glacially formed valleys and lakes, mysterious piles of rock and striations on bedrock that came from a two-mile-deep capital. of ice that covered two-thirds of North America. Lord have mercy! On Blood Trails, the stories don't end

when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bag and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors.

Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under blood. and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Perhaps it is self-focused, but natural systems make more sense to us

when we understand their overlap with our story, the human story. We've truly gotten no way of knowing who or where the first humans saw the Mississippi River. And it's kind of unfair that we get. give the Spaniard, Hernando de Soto, so much fanfare for being the first European to see the river in 1541, which he was, or, you know, someone from his crew. But I'd like to take a minute and think about the first human that ever saw the river. Just slow down for a second. There was a very primitive man or woman that was the first to see it. Or maybe it was a group of travelers who saw it all about the same time. Most archaeologists believe that the first humans on this continent

came across the Bering Land Bridge about 15,000 years ago. So that story would have these people approaching the river from the west. Now this is personal speculation. I've never read this, but it seems like it would have been somewhere south of Missouri, which was the southernmost tip of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. You should name your next dog, Laurentide, or even your kid. Without getting into a geology lesson, if that assumption is true, it's unlikely they'd have traveled across the Ozarks to get to the river, but likely went down the Arkansas River Valley, traveling in a southwesternly direction, perhaps seeing this great river for the first time around where the Arkansas and Mississippi meet. This is not scientific. It's just an exercise on a mental treadmill. You know, the story of human migration coming from the west is contested by the cosmology of the Cherokee and others who say they entered this land from the south, crossing a great passage of water.

My point is this, we know a lot of stuff, but the best minds in the world will never know the answer of who saw the Mississippi River first. Hernandez-Dissota was the first to write it down in an English-based language. He had been on a great expedition from Florida to what is now Tennessee and approached from the east and likely saw it near current Memphis in 1541. He originally called it the River of the Holy Spirit, spoken in Spanish, of course. De Soto's trek through the southern U.S. is probably as wild an experience as a human has ever had for both the Spanish and the Native Americans.

This was the natives' first contact with Europeans, their first time seen, horses, war dogs, and pigs. It would have been like coming into contact with aliens. It was also their first contact with the diseases of the modern cities of Europe. De Soto crossed the river into Arkansas. He was the first European to see it and cross it. And when he got here, the Mississippi River Valley was a thriving civilization of many nations of indigenous people. Many natives believed De Soto was a god, which was good for his purposes of looking for gold and land. He didn't find gold. However, in May 1542, De Soto at age 42, would die of fever, and his men would bury him in the river. And this next part of the story is almost too wild,

but no Europeans came back for 120 years. 120 years. That's an incredible gap of time. Okay, so now I would like to introduce you to another character in our eclectic cast of Mississippi River storytellers. A big river takes a lot of voices. This man's name is Samuel Clemens. You may know him as Mark Twain. In 1883, he published a book called Life on the Mississippi, and he had something to say about DeSoto in this mysterious 120-year gap. De Soto merely glimpsed the river, died, and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by 10, the Spanish custom of the day, and thus move other adventures to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives, when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years that seems incredible in our energetic days. One may sense the interval to his mind after a fashion by dividing it up in this way.

After DeSoto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter century had elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born. Lived a trifle more than a half century, then died. And when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi. In our day, we don't allow 130 years to elapse between glimpses of a century. Marvel. For more than 150 years, there has been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians. In the south, the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving, and converting them. Necessarily then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west, and indeed they did hear of it vaguely,

so vaguely and indefinitely that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration, but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river. Nobody needed it. Nobody was curious about it. So for a century and a half, the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When DeSoto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and he had no present occasion for one.

Consequently, he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it. But at last, LaSalle, the Frenchman, conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance. Naturally, the question suggests itself. Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently, it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful, for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California

and therefore added a shortcut from Canada to China. Previously, the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic or the Sea of Virginia. Twain's prose in this book is some of America's finest literature, but he also dropped a history lesson on us describing in detail that 120-year gap between DeSoto and LaSalle. And when LaSalle arrived, he found the great civilization DeSoto described almost gone. The people were gone. The cities were ruins. It's believed that during that gap, the European diseases that DeSoto brought with him almost wiped out the Native Americans. That's almost unfathomable. Can you imagine your people dying a mysterious death over the course of several generations? Can you imagine living on the

Atlantic coast and not knowing where the Mississippi River emptied. Can you imagine the unknowns of a world like that? LaSalle and his traveling partner, De Tante, would be the first Europeans to call the river the Mississippi, which is a transliteration of a Chippewa word, Mityacea, or Great Water. Often it's referred to as the father of waters. You'll hear that a lot. An alternate story, though, arose from a chief of the chocktals, a man named Peter Pitchland, who wrote a letter about returning to the land beyond the Mityasab Kui, which meant the river beyond any age. He wrote in his letter that white man never writes Indian names correctly, but the word which we pronounce Mishasipi is spelt nearer your own river. He wrote that in a letter and said that that that now

meant the river beyond any age. Pitchland was a legit dude, and I think he was dropping some knowledge. Whatever it means, the Mississippi River has been the name of this river for a very short period of its existence, and who knows, it likely won't always be called that. Our society could be forgotten, lost, misrepresented, just as easy as his was. If you remember T.S. Eliot's poem, the river is patiently waiting and watching. To a human trapped in time, everything always seems so permanent, but it's not. Natural systems outlast humans, and rivers don't perceive time or think like men. No river has ever played a greater role in a country than the Mississippi River in America. It cuts through the heart of this country like a jugular vein. Here's John Barry.

Yeah, I was always interested in the Mississippi River. When people ask me where I ever got the idea to write that book, I always say, well, I grew up in Rhode Island, so it's perfectly natural for me to want to write about the Mississippi River. And as you just did, they almost always chuckle. But the reality is, it's true. If you care at all about American history, the Mississippi River is so central to every element of American history. it has to interest you, if not fascinate you. And growing up in Rhode Island, you know, grew up in Providence. But my grandfather, you know, it was in Newport on the ocean there every summer.

Nonetheless, it was always the Mississippi River. I love the Atlantic Ocean, too, but the Mississippi River, I just always wanted to write about it. And it was a massive, it was a very formidable, had a very formidable presence in the American frontier and American an expansion. Sure. I mean, it was, you know, at the beginning, it was everything. It was a combination of, you know, rail, boats, airplanes, you know, fiber optics, you know, telegraph, telephone, all that was the Mississippi River and its tributaries, the entire system, was key to all transportation and communication across much of the country until the development of the telegraph. His point is that the river was the lifeblood of communication and transportation on this continent

before modern technology. It acted in place of the coming railroads, airplanes, fiber optics, and telephone. It was key to America becoming America. Here's Hank. The thing to me about the The essence, the aura of the Mississippi River, is not only the third largest river in the world. If we had included the Missouri and Mississippi, it'd be the biggest one in the world more than likely. It splits right down the middle of this northern hemisphere. People say, well, we got three coasts of America. We got four coasts. You got the West Coast, you got the Gulf Coast, you got the Atlantic Coast,

and you got the Mississippi River on it right up the middle of America. that's the fourth coast. Look at the goods and produce, the products, the sand, the gravel, the timber, everything, the petroleum products that flow up and down at Mississippi River. It is not only a force to be reckoned with because of its wildness, but its economic value. It's unbelievable to what America is and what it does for America. The Mississippi River was undoubtedly a,

cornerstone in the building of the American Empire. And I really like the idea of the Mississippi being the fourth coast. The river has more sand beaches than the Gulf Coast. Here's Dr. Biedenharne. The amount of cargo and fuel and supplies that are transported every day on the river, but it's huge. And we've got the ports that, you know, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and some of the biggest ports in the world.

And, you know, the United States, I'm not going to say we're lucky, but we've got this major river system that goes right up through a bread basket, you know, of farmland. You know, not all countries have that. They may have big rivers, but they maybe flow through the Amazon. There's no real, you know, agriculture there. But we've kind of got a combination of a big river that we can navigate. Of course, we have, we had a lot of work to get that to be the dependable navigation system we wanted. but it also navigates right up through the heartland of, you know, the breadbasket of America.

Transportation is key to empire building and this river being situated in the middle is more than significant. Think about all the cropland from Minnesota to Louisiana. This is big, and it's not just any cropland. The Mississippi Delta is considered some of the most fertile land in the world. Most areas in the country topsoil is six, eight inches. Our average topsoil is about 160 to 180 feet deep here. It has been called from the richest soil in the world compared to the river now. And there's an old saying that the Lord over on Deer Creek about six miles east of here.

That the Lord could have made better dirt, but he figured he just didn't need to. Deer Creek is a tributary of the Mississippi with some of the Delta's finest soil. It's hard to get a definitive answer for how deep the soil is in the delta because its depth varies and topsoil is a colloquial term, but it's also a scientific term. But the truth is that it's just extremely deep in places. It's alluvial soil, meaning it was deposited there by a flooding river. This is important. We did a podcast on soil formation on bare grease episode 20 called From the Earth. Soil building is one of the earth's most fascinating processes.

Takes an incredible amount of time, can be squandered in a generation of mismanagement, and has caused the rise and fall of empires. You may not touch much soil or daily perceive its connection to your life, but it is the foundation of your physical body. Everything comes from the soil, and you will go back to it. In terms of where we're at in our story, Lutz Level, we're establishing a baseline of understanding the natural features of the river and man's early connection to it.

We have to view the river as a complex ancient system that will outlive you and your offspring, should the earth persist, and not just a narrow body of muddy water you cross on a bridge and honk your horn because you've passed into a new state. Let's keep heading down river. Here's John Barry.

The Mississippi River, in general, describing it's 200 feet deep and a mile wide inside the big, sections and it drops the slope of three inches per mile flows through some of the flattest land in the world generally flows about nine miles per hour and the last 450 miles of the Mississippi River is below sea level can you help me understand how that's possible well those stats are accurate but they're a little bit selected for example obviously the river's not 200 feet deep the whole way yeah you know but some of the deepest sections which are you know right in

New Orleans are probably 240, practically right at the French quarter. It's called the Crescent City because it's sharp turns here. And when you get a high water, the river on the outer bank, you know, just like on a racetrack, it's actually higher than the water on the other bank, maybe a foot higher. In terms of the bottom of the river being below sea level for several hundred miles. Okay, the bottom of the river being below sea level. level. What you have is the force of all the water draining from 31 states, pushing against the sea coming up. So there's a force behind it? Yeah. It's not gravity pulling it down. Well, it's,

well, I mean, you're right, because, you know, water flows downhill. And if it weren't, you know, you got something other factor that is, that is affecting it, that's forcing it. And it's, it's, it's not uphill. It's still going downhill. But, you know, right now, record. low water and a lot of the river the ocean is pushing salt water up river it's always been like that it's it's kind of a silly question when when i was a kid i remember there's a big mountain with inside of the town we lived in in arkansas and i asked my dad one time i said was that mountain here when you were a kid uh so this question is kind of like that is the bottom of the river always been below sea level yeah pretty much okay dumb questions

get dumb answers. It's pretty hard to wrap your head around the last 450 miles of the river being below sea level. I thought maybe this had to do with man's imprint on the river. I guess not. We're still learning about the physical attributes of the river, but the river is very different in different sections. Here's Dr. Jack Kilgore describing the sections of the Mississippi River. Well, first of all, this lay out the lower mess.

There's really five or six different reaches of the lower Mississippi. Mississippi River? A lot of people think, oh, it's just the lower mess. Well, no. So from New Orleans down the last hundred miles, that's where, of course, it runs into the Gulf of Mexico, but you have a combination of freshwater and estuarine fish, and the river just pours in to all these estuaries, and that's what, you know, sustains the lifeblood of Louisiana and Mississippi coastal wetlands. Then when you get above New Orleans, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, you don't really have a flood. and it's highly industrialized. And it's also within the deep water navigation channel. And when I say deep water, from Baton Rouge down to the Gulf, it has to be 45 feet

in order for the sea-going ships to traverse up and down the river. Above Baton Rouge, the minimum is 12 feet. And that's, of course, all you have are the barges which have a much shallower draft. On blood trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road.

I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a full of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there. But he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions,

from remote mountains to frozen backwards. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers.

Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. So from the mouth of the river to 100 miles inland, it's heavily influenced by the saltwater of the Gulf. The first section from the Gulf to New Orleans is a wide web of brackish wetlands. New Orleans sits about 40 or 50 miles inland from the Gulf proper. The second section from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. is a highly industrialized, narrow section of the river with no floodplain. Lots of big boats.

But then above Baton Rouge, from Baton Rouge to Natchez, really all the way up to Memphis, between Memphis and Baton Rouge, the core cut off 14 meander bends back in the 1920s and 30s. And to shorten the river in the name of flood control, thinking that by straightening the river, the flood pulses would evacuate the valley quicker than a meandering river. Well, it worked. I mean, it dropped the stages, but the river is still adjusting from man-made cutoffs 75 years ago. Hank talked about those cutoffs earlier in the podcast.

Baton Rouge to Memphis has that classic big, wide, wild Mississippi River Delta feel. It has an intact floodplain, meaning the river is allowed to have its natural flood patterns, and usually the levees sit a long ways off the main river. Being from the mountains, I was an adult before I learned what a levy was. It was hard for me to wrap my mind around it until I was standing there and understood it. But it's basically a dam of dirt that runs along the river protecting the surrounding areas

from floods. In a minute, we're going to learn more about levies, but here's Dr. Kilgore. And then once you get, though, above Memphis, you get out of the cutoffs and you get into A lot of gravel bars. North of Memphis. North of Memphis all the way up to the Ohio. Okay. So it's kind of a lot of secondary channels.

There's about 100 seconds. I'll talk about that in a minute. But from there up to the Ohio, you get a lot of gravel bars, but you still have an intact floodplain. So the levees are still a place further back. From Memphis to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio comes in, there are more gravel bars, but there is still an intact floodplain. Let's keep going. And then once you get in above the Ohio,

between the Ohio and St. Louis is what we call the middle miss. The river narrows. There's no floodplain. It's very high velocity, and there's just a lot of dikes. So what they do is they'll put these dikes in there to create this self-scouring channel, so the core doesn't have to dredge.

So the middle miss really doesn't have, it's kind of like the lower mist but doesn't have a floodplain. plane. And then, of course, once you get above St. Louis and Alton, you have the 27 lock and dams. From Cairo to St. Louis is the Middle Mississippi, and at St. Louis is the first dam of the river, which totally changes it. So there you go. Now you have a general understanding of the middle and lower Mississippi. But it would be helpful to officially learn what some of the man-made features of the river are. I'm serious. I was a grown man before I knew what a levy was. We've got to understand levees. And the levees, of course, are giant earthen mounds on each side of the river. But fortunately,

when they realign the levees, they put them far enough back to allow the river to have a floodplain still. Okay, so it can get over its banks. Yes. From levee to levy, it can be up to 14 miles wide. So there is a 2 million acre floodplain that this river is associated with, and that is one of the natural features of the lower mist unlike most other great rivers of the world, except for the Amazon. Leveys are the magic, the bread and butter,

the flashy mule and the pasture of the Mississippi River. They make the region outside of the levee habitable. The land between the levee and river is subject to seasonal flooding, meaning you can't farm or build cities inside the levee. However, there are a lot of hunting camps

inside the levee, usually built on stilts, or built in some way that expects flooding. See if you recognize this Mississippi voice, you know, other than my voice, because I talk some here too. Here's more on levees. You know, what's interesting to think about in terms of the way humans have manipulated the earth so that we can live in places that we maybe wouldn't have been able to. Like you think of the Middle East, there's, there are places in the Middle East that are basically would be uninhabitable by humans because of the lack of water, but now we have ways to get water there.

The Mississippi River Delta would have seasonally flooded to the point that it would have been very hard to live here year-round, grow crops. To live on the river. Yeah. Without the levees, yeah. Absolutely. That's Wilbur Primos. Yeah.

I mean, we've got civilization just right outside the levees that for the last eon of time has flooded. That's right. And that's so interesting. I mean, we just take so much for granted. And when you understand the levee system and how, you know, only in the last 170 years, I guess we've had these levees and it's just, you couldn't even live down here. No. No, you could not.

Yeah. You know, not in the fall and winter for sure. Yeah. When you ride down the Mississippi levee and you look down to the, typically on the outside of the levy, not the riverside, but the other side. You'll see a little lake. There's a hole. And the name of that hole is typically a bar pit. That is slang for borrow pit, B-O-R-R-O-W, borrow pit.

They borrowed the dirt and dug a hole and put it to make the levee. Okay. So that becomes a bar pit. So there's a big ditch and then there's a big pile of dirt. And bar pits can be great fishing holes. They lease the levee to a lot of cattle farmers because it's grass. Yeah. And they lease it for hay.

So they're cutting it. Yeah, because you've got to keep trees off of it. trees would be bad for the levee because the roots or whatever are creating avenues for water and other problems. So it's a huge project. The Mississippi River Levee System is one of the greatest engineering feats in American history. If a man or woman were to claim to understand the story of this nation but don't understand the history of the Mississippi River levees, they'd be like a wayward coon-hound slick

Trian, barking up a tree with no coon. This story is big. Here's me and John Barry. This is the kind of stuff that I would have taken for granted in terms of understanding how this nation was built and how central the Mississippi River was. But when people first started wanting to control the river, it was, you said in the book that it was more dangerous to go down the Mississippi River than it was to cross the ocean. Yeah. I mean, it was this like wild, untouched American river. Right.

And then at what point did man come in and start to want to influence that and tame that? Well, the Native Americans tended to live with the river. They built mounds. So, you know, in the Delta and so forth. So when it flooded, they would remain okay. But obviously, I guess they started building levees in New Orleans, really. almost immediately after it was settled. So that's 300 years ago.

And of course, before the Civil War, there was a pretty complete levy system on a lot of the lower Mississippi River, but the levees weren't very high. They got really, really, they thought they had a pretty good levy system by the early 1900s. They discovered that was not the case.

After the 1927 flood, which was a, you know, You know, tremendous flood in terms of percentage of gross domestic product impact. It had more impact than any other event in American history. Really, any other natural disaster in American history? Yeah, you know, considerably more than Katrina, you know, several times more than Hurricane Sandy. Right. It was enormous.

Plus, it displaced. It flooded almost 1% of the entire population of the country. So after that flood, which killed people from Virginia to Oklahoma, but really devastated Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana, you know, they built a very good levee system and some other measures to contain the river. And on the lower Mississippi, there hasn't been a flood since. I like what you said in the book that the 19th century was the perfect century for man to try to conquer something like the Mississippi River. You said it took hubris. Yeah. It was the century of the engineer.

The 1800s. Yeah. And then in the 1900s, you start getting plenty of hubris still, but a little more recognition of relativity and quantum physics and things like that. uncertainty principles and, you know, all sorts of things that scientists and engineers recognize made things more complicated. But in the 19th century, things looked a lot more linear and, you know, simpler, frankly. They thought they could control the river. They couldn't, you know, we still can. The 1927 flood was major and it changed America. Native Americans built mounds to escape floods and the French built the first primitive levees in the early 1700s in New Orleans.

And from then on, primitive, hand-built levees were along the river, often built by slaves. In 1844, crude and small levees, less than 10 feet high, a lot of them like 5 feet high, went from New Orleans up to the mouth of the Arkansas River. By 1858, small levees reached intermittently all the way to Cairo, Illinois. But it wasn't until, Until after the Civil War in 1879, the Mississippi River Levy Commission was formed giving levee building and control to the federal government. This is big. Today, the levees start near Cape Girardo, Missouri, and end at the Gulf of Mexico, and include

over 3,700 miles of levee. Today, most of them are 30 feet tall. But let's get back to our story. So inside the levees, the riverside, the flood-prone side, the river meanders and follows its natural pattern of flooding. Here's Will Primos. To pound it into you to understand, there's a place south of Vicksburg called Windsor Ruins. It was a plantation home at today's time. I have no how many tens of millions the home would have cost, but a lot of the stuff was shipped in by boat from France and up the river and built. From the home, I understand.

all that's left from Windsor Ruins is the columns is the I guess they're granite you could go and see them they're beautiful columns that are tall they're in the middle of the woods from that location which is near the town I believe it's Bruinsburg Mississippi you could see the Mississippi River you can no longer see the Mississippi River from there because the river changed courses that's why I may be on the Louisiana side of the river, but I'm actually standing on Mississippi soil. Because where the boundaries were drawn, that was Mississippi land. But the river changed courses. So the river doesn't necessarily split Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi perfectly.

There is Arkansas land that is on the Mississippi side of the river. Yeah. Because the river changed courses. The river creates the boundary line between many states. Missouri and Illinois, Arkansas and Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi, Mississippi and Louisiana. Go look at your on-ex, and you'll see the jumble of islands, oxbow lakes, and cut off meanderbends along the river, especially the lower Mississippi from Memphis to Baton Rouge, and you'll see an incredible amount of these states that are now on the other side of the river from their state.

We're still learning the man-made structures of the river. Let's talk about dikes or jetties. Here's Dr. Kilgore with double-ells. So there are about 800 dikes along the lower Mississippi River, and they're a stone structure that can extend 2,000 feet perpendicular to the shore. And their purpose is to create and maintain a self-scouring channel. So as the water is coming from upstream to downstream, they'll hit these dikes. The dikes then funnel the water out towards the main channel, and you get higher velocities, which then scours the main channel and keeps it free of sediment.

Okay. And so the whole purpose of the dikes is to minimize dredging. Okay. So if you didn't have dikes, you might have a wide, shallow channel. Exactly. In fact, pre-European, the Mississippi River was a lot more braided than it is today. It's more now, it's really just a sinuous, snaky kind of river. and it's called meander belts

and those meander belts have switched back and forth over the last two or three thousand years they've been mapped creating this 100 mile wide valley down here so you would say from the from the dead center of the Mississippi River 50 miles on either side would have been fair game to be flooded pre-European during the 1927 flood

you could take a boat from Vicksburg, Mississippi to Monroe, Louisiana, 70 miles because the levees had broken. The actual natural floodplain of the river before levees wouldn't have been as clear-cut as 50 miles on either side of the river. Sometimes it was more, sometimes it was less. But the idea of a 100-mile-wide floodplain is legit.

In summary, we've been learning about the energy of rivers and their hydraulic complexity and their drive to carry sediment. We've learned about levees and dikes or jetties and cutoffs, and we got to send us. of the sheer size of this river. We've learned some about the early human history of the river

and its importance to America. Here's Hank Bredan. Lake Ferguson is an Oxbow Lake of the Mississippi. Growing up on Lake Ferguson, Daddy had a boat. We'd go out on the lake. Didn't go out on the river much. He did.

We didn't as kids. And once I got up to where I had my own boat, It was always to you, you didn't go out on the river because that river was a bad bugger, I'm not going to say fear, you were taught to stay in the lake, stay in the slack water, because the big river had currents, you had 80s, you had whirlpools, you had upsurges, you had dropped down where a river dropped down two, three feet and come back up because of the nature of the river. it is a dangerous system out there. You got to be real careful.

Yet, as we grew up and began to nudge out in there, we learned respect for the river. You learned what to look for. You learned the intricacies of what the river is and what it does, how it does it, and why it does it. I don't say feel the river. Never feel the river, but respect the river. and respect the river for what it is and what it can do.

The river is such a dynamic system in itself. To me, the Mississippi River is one of our last wilderness areas we have, and I'd love for it to stay that way. You know, we're getting a lot of cruise boats up in there now. Coming up from all over everywhere, paddle wheel boats, tourists hear all about it, want to see it, want to get on it. but I like to hit that river when you don't see anybody for three hours other than a towboat every now and then you know that's the river

yeah that's an interesting thought to think about a river as wilderness I like it I mean I think it's real because it's it's a system even though it's been manipulated by man the system is still very natural and is it's a wild place it is especially what we call the lower miss From Cairo down, where you've got floodwater areas, where we've got levees. Other areas, and on other rivers, you've got towns here, you've got little parks here, you've got all there somewhat tame rivers. Here you've got a wily woolly river.

A good part of it down here is protected by levees. Within the, what we call the batcher between the levees, the land between the levees that flood, you can't build a house in that unless you build it 15, 16, 20 feet up off the ground. What I didn't understand until I went on the river myself is that from Memphis to Vicksburg, there are very few towns that actually touch the Mississippi River. It floods and you can't build inside the levees. So if you're traveling down the river, you see sights not much different than Mark Twain did. And it's a bit of a stretch, but not as much as you'd think.

It probably looks close to what Hernando de Soto saw, a wild woolly river, a wilderness. We've got an incredible cast of storytellers guiding us into an understanding of this mighty river. If we just heard from people from one discipline, our view would be narrow, but we've had people looking at the river from many different angles and disciplines. My whole life I've wanted to understand this river, and I knew that I didn't. This series is my personal journey to understand it. On this episode, we laid a foundation, but we're just getting started. In the next episode, we'll talk about the men who tame this river, the engineers, and the ones who told America about its soul, the writers.

I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. Please share our podcast with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes. I look forward to talking to all the folks on the Bear Grie's render next week. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over. They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping bed and there was a pool of blood. Oh my God, he doesn't have a hit.

Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors. Where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce, and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper. From cold case files to whispered suspicions. From remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness.

Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together. He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season two of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever. you get your podcasts.