Bear Grease - Ep. 134: Mississippi River - The Greatest Flood (Part 3)

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

On this episode of Bear Grease, Clay Newcomb and John Barry, author of Rising Tide discuss two Civil War veterans who pioneered the doctrine of controlling this great river, Charles Ellett and Andrew Humphries. They’ll show us how their obsession and rivalry shaped the way we manage the river and how that led to one of the most costly natural disasters in American history. We learn about Mark Twain, America's most celebrated writer, who was obsessed with being a riverboat captain on the Mississippi River. He bottled American culture in his writing and sent it to the world. We’ll also learn about the great Mississippi River flood of 1927. We're continuing down the river on the third episode of this series on the Mississippi River. Like William Faulkner, we're in pursuit of understanding the world. We really doubt 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.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. First Lights fieldware collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days and real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season.

Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. For anybody new to this channel, I want to take a minute to explain what you're seeing here. We actually have two podcasts on this bear grease feed, really almost three. We have our documentary-style bear-grease episodes like this one. And then every other week we have what we call the bear-greece render,

which is me and a group of friends discussing and giving behind-the-scenes looks into the making of the bear-greece documentary-style episodes. So that's what Bear Grease is all about. But every Friday, we also have Brent Reeves' This Country Life podcast, which is pure country gold. It's usually under 30 minutes long and just a lot of fun. So this feed isn't exactly simple, but neither are most worthwhile endeavors. I really hope that you enjoy this episode. Rivers are absolutely so uncertain.

And the more you work with them, the more you find out that the, the, the, the, data that we have is great data, but all this data that we take, it's not absolute. It's just snapshots in time. The Mississippi River's stories are big, turbulent, and touch a far-reaching swath of human life. Rivers and men have always been linked. When trying to decide the sequence of telling a story, I'll often imagine I'm telling it to my kids. What individual stories and emphasis what I tell a 10-year-old, and usually that sequence works for the world's brightest minds, like you bear Greece listeners. So I'm being confronted with where to go with this Mississippi River series, and I know exactly where I'm going. And I would definitely

tell my kids about the two Civil War vets who pioneered the doctrine of controlling this great river Charles Ellett and Andrew Humphreys and how their obsession and rivalry shaped the way we managed the river, which led to one of the most costly natural disasters in American history. It really changed America. Do you know what disaster that was? I'd also tell my kids about Mark Twain, America's most celebrated writer who was obsessed with being a riverboat captain on the Mississippi River. He bottled American culture in his writing and sent it to the world. And that natural disaster that I was talking about, it was the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, and you better believe that my kids would be on the edge of their seats when I told them about it.

And so I'm going to tell you about it, too. We're continuing down the river on this third episode of this series. And like William Faulkner, we're in pursuit of understanding the world. I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. Last three months of 1926, the average reading on every single river gauge was, the highest ever known. It didn't take much thinking to figure out that if you got any reign of any significance in 1927, you were going to get a serious flood. 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 know this is hard to understand, but I'll explain.

Just listen. That was blues singer Charles Patton singing a song called High Water, which he recorded in 1929. The recording was so rough, you have to feel the energy of what he's singing about. Some say it sounds like the surges of a flood. It's about the flood of 1927. Here's some of the lyrics. Now, looking now in Leland, Lord, the river is rising high.

Look you here, boys around Leland tell me the river is raging high. I'm going over to Greenville, bought the tickets goodbye. Looky here, the water dug out, Lordy. The levee broke. Rolled most everywhere. The water at Greenville and Leland, Lord, it done rose everywhere. I would go down to Rosdale, but they tell me there's water there. Backwater at Blitheville, backed up all around.

Backwater at Blitheville, Dunstruck Joyner Town. It was 50 families and children. Tough luck. They can drown. The water was rising up in my friend's door. The water was rising up in my friend's door. The man said his woman, folk, Lord, we better go. I want to now read you the words of John Barry, author of Rising Tide.

He has something to say about rising water. There is no sight like the Rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker, angrier, dirtier. Eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface. It thickens with trees, rooftops, the occasional body of a mule. Its currents roiled more, flow swifter, pummel its banks harder.

When a section of riverbank caves into the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping trees with the great crackling sounds of heavy artillery. On the water, the sound carries for miles. Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect. Unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness. To repel it requires an intense, nearly perfect, and sustained effort. Major John Lee, in the 1920s, the Army District engineer in Vicksburg, who would in 1944 make the cover of time as an important World War II general

observed in physical and mental strain a prolonged, high water fight on threatened levees can only be compared with real war. Rivers are perfect. They are the lawmaker judge and jury of their world, superseding any man-concocted laws we could pretend to place on a river. There is no standard to judge a river against. It is neither moral nor amoral. Good or bad, friend or foe. It simply exists and dominates. Mankind is always contended with big rivers, and there's a file in every human's brain holding an instinctual awe when you stand on a great river's bank. No data exists on how many of our ancestors died crossing big rivers, but the evolutionary evidence of the trauma of rivers has branded us. There are many

biblical references that the spiritual help granted to the righteous when crossing big water. King David's mighty men were commended for bravery for crossing the Jordan River during the in its flood stage. And the prophet Isaiah declared to those who are redeemed of the Lord that when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. River crossings in the Bible are a test of faith. And if you cross, there is a new life on the other side. In 1528, the first European inland exploration of what is now America happened in Florida and was recorded by a Spaniard named Cabezza de Vaca. In his journal, he recounted a river-corrhizabeth. In his journal, he recounted a river crossing early in their trip and he said quote that night we came to a river that was very deep and

very wide and the current very strong since we could not cross over on rafts we made a canoe for it we took a day to cross it one horseman who was called juan velasquez not wanting to wait entered the river the current which was strong swept him from the horse he kept hold of the reins and so he and the horse drowned the Indians of that lord found the horse. They told us where down the river we would find him and so they went for him. His death gave us much pain because until then we had not lost anyone. The horse made dinner for many that night. End of quote. The first recorded European death of what is now America was from a big, wild, rising, dirty brown river. If I was telling this story to my kids, I'd have told them that.

We know more about rivers than we ever have, but there's such dynamic systems. Our best science, research, and minds aren't fully able to predict their next move. This is Dr. Beidenharn, a research hydraulic engineer with the Corps of Engineers. He probably knows more about rivers than anybody in the country. If I could have had this interview 40 years ago, I'd have had much more definitive answers for you. Yeah, because it was a lot simpler then when I didn't realize how much I didn't know. Because the older I've gotten and the more I've worked with streams, the more conservative I've gotten and more cautious. Really?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because rivers are absolutely so uncertain and the more you work with them, the more you find out that the data that we have is great data. But that is just one snapshot in time of where the river was. on that date in 1915. We surveyed this river. One month later, it could be completely different. But all this data that we take is absolute.

It's not absolute. It's just snapshots in time. I kind of think about it as an inverted pyramid. The Egyptians, you know, in the mines, knew what they were doing. They started with a really solid base, and then they built their pyramid up. The tip of the pyramid is where we start

with very little knowledge, and then we build from there, you know, to get more and more precise. I'm not saying we cannot understand and make predictions and do designs on rivers, but there is always a pretty large level of uncertainty that goes into all our analysis and design that we have to recognize it. I appreciate Dr. Biden-Harn's humility. Like I said, he knows more about rivers than anybody, and he's. telling us they're unpredictable and hard to control, and that's exactly what we're talking about. The only constant between man and rivers is this uncertainty and the fact that we could be swept

away. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode. But not before we do some review from the last two episodes. The Mississippi River starts at Lake Atasca and Minnesota and flows roughly 2,300 miles through the bread basket of America to the Gulf of Mexico. You need to know this. If we were to count its tributary, the Missouri River, it would be the longest river in the world. There are approximately 2,400 miles of non-dammed, free-flowing river when you combine the Missouri and the Mississippi. If you go up the Mississippi 1,200 miles to its first dam and turn left on the Missouri and go another 1,200 miles to its first dam, that's how you get the 2,400 miles making this one of the longest free-flowing bodies of water in the world. The Mississippi River drains

parts of 31 states, roughly 41% of America and also two Canadian provinces. Only the Amazon and the Congo rivers have larger drainage basins. It drops to the slope averaging 3 inches per mile and has an average current speed of 9 miles per hour and 18 in a flood. The last 450 miles of the river are below sea level. These stats will never get old to an American and you'll need to memorize them if you plan on being the most interesting person at camp this fall, which I'd expect every bear grease listener to be.

Conversations can be boring and lack that gritty, greasy gravitas that's bigger than the weather and Ken and Barbie. We're equipping you with the stories. This is how the Mississippi River was tamed. That's what we're talking about. Or at least how they tried to tame it. Here is our friend John Barry. In the 1850s, the U.S. government commissioned two guys.

guys to go create a comprehensive report on the Mississippi River, which was kind of like a Lewis and Clark expedition of the river. And these guys were pretty unique characters. They were, but, you know, they were rivals. They weren't Lewis and Clark worked together. These guys hated each other's guts. And they wrote entirely different reports. The first engineering school in the United States was West Point, period. But the superstar of the civilians was a guy named Charles Ellett, who actually did go to school in France. And he was a wild man. You know, he built a catwalk across Niagara Falls and then rode across it in a chariot. He was kind of a daredevil. He built one of the first bridges across the Ohio, which incidentally

later collapsed. He was killed. And during the Civil War, in front of Vicksburg. He was the captain of a naval vessel and a union naval vessel. But Ellett had studied the Ohio River, and he was a champion of the civilians. The Congress divided an appropriation because of this rivalry between the Army engineers and the Corps of Engineers and the civilians. And this guy named Andrew Atkinson-Humfries was in the Corps. and again they split the appropriation and ellen and humphreys went off to do their own studies which were as i said quite different humphreys was also a bit of more than a character uh he loved to fight in the war he led a charge in fredericksburg one of the bloodiest battles of the war and he wrote afterwards

when he lost almost 20 percent of his command in about 30. minutes that he, quote, I felt like a young girl at her first ball. He just loved the glory. That's kind of what it, it almost feels like these guys had to be that way to tackle what they were trying to tackle. Maybe. I mean, they certainly had to have an ego. Ellett and Humphreys both did their independent studies of the river before the Civil War

in the 1850s following a big flood that wrecked the lower Mississippi. tackling this river was a grand feat. It was an exploration of science relatively new to mankind. Humphreys and Ellet were both eccentric, brilliant, driven, but egotistical men. Humphreys was a decorated Civil War colonel. He tasted the mud of the river, citing its grittiness and taste in his report, and helped plan the Transcontinental Railroad route. Ellet directly petitioned Abe Lincoln for funding to develop warships for the Union

Army for the sole purpose of ramming and sinking Confederate ships. His ships were significant factors in the Union Army's victories on the Mississippi River. These guys were wild. I'm not suggesting that these two were healthy patterns for manhood. I can't say for sure. I really don't know their personal lives. But when I hear about these guys, it harkens to mind the historically low testosterone levels in modern men.

It's a fact that testosterone, the chemical that makes a man's, a man has been dropping, which some studies show about 1% per year for decades. There are many culprits to this like obesity, sedentary lifestyles, mock estrogens in plastics, which is so real, but some even believe that it's tight men's underwear. Anyway, testosterone in the rearview mirror now, remember that Humphreys and Elliott were real ballers. Their stories are interesting because they were confronting the most complex. challenges of their time, and the river would end up exposing human nature.

This is the theme of rivers. That's what they do. Humphreys did some really rigorous work, made some measurements that stand up today. Ellett was more of a pure genius conceptualizing how to approach the river. He wrote a port, which called, for example, for reservoirs to contain, you know, whole water back from floods and things like that. There was a theory at the time called the levees only policy that you use levees to control floods and only levees because the theory was that the levees by containing the river would force the river to dig out its own channel,

essentially dredge its own channel so it would become deeper and deeper by concentrating the flow, you would concentrate the, you would increase the currents, like narrowing the nozzle of a garden hose. The water speeds up and you pointed it mud and it'll cut right through it. So the levee's only theory was based on that and that the river, if you narrowed it, it would speed up and cut through its soft bottom and pretty soon would be deep enough naturally that it would accommodate a flood. It was a nice theory.

It didn't work. Being a human is a weird condition in which you roll into the earth and a lot of problems have already been solved. At the time, they didn't know how to control the river. And the leading theory was called the levees-only policy. Ellet, however, hypothesized that a combination of levees and outlets into reservoirs was a key to controlling the river. But the outlets sounded radical. and dangerous and unnecessary to some. Why would you want to let this dragon out of its earthen levy cage?

Here's John. The problem was that levies are only in contact with the river for a few weeks a year during a flood. There's not a constant influence. So even though the river probably would deepen itself when the current increased, it wouldn't deepen itself enough to accommodate the enormous increase.

of water that came in a great flood. Anyway, Ellett and Humphreys agreed that this theory was nonsense and would never work. Levies only. Yeah. Yeah. Nonetheless, that became the policy of the Corps of Engineers. Even though there's one thing those two guys

agreed upon. It's truly a strange story. How a bureaucracy can get something into its head and you can't it out. It's not just a bureaucracy. People get wrong information in their heads all the time and just dig in. People get wrong information in their heads all the time and just dig in. What? How could this have happened? But Ellett's view of what went on and how to handle the rural was, you know, without a doubt in my mind, the best view. Humphrey's study was accurate,

But Ellett published much before Humphreys. And Humphreys was so competitive and needed glory so much. He called Ellett's study. And I mean, there are hundreds, you know, several centuries of engineers studying rivers. He called Ellett's study the worst ever in history. Because Ellett had made certain recommendations, you know, Humphreys wanted his work to be, as he said, the work of my life. you can't have a great work if all you do is confirm someone else's work that came first. So he ended up recommended against what his own measurements said and what Ellett had said just because he had to be first.

And he was a claim. Humphreys was acclaimed by the scientific community. As I said, Ellett couldn't rebut anything he said because Ella was dead. Humphreys was a war hero. He was one of the initial founders of the National Academy of Sciences and, you know, honorary member of half a dozen European scientific societies and so forth and so on. And after the Civil War, it became out of the Corps of Engineers. So there was nobody to dispute them. And so what's so interesting about that from a human perspective is ego totally dominated this guy's prognosis of what needed to be done that was going to affect millions.

and millions of people, and he just needed to have a theory that stood out from what his dead competitor said. Right. I mean, does that not happen all across life at all different levels? Unfortunately, yeah. Most of us, if not all of us, like to think that we make judgments rationally. I certainly like to think that. Hopefully, I have enough sense of the absurd and of my own weaknesses that, you know,

that I do, but I'm sure I have biases. I know I have biases. You just try to counter them. I mean, when I was a football coach, we used to run, I guess we call it a 4-4 today, but it was a wide tackle six. In that defense, you basically line up two defensive tackles on the guards. So they're outnumbered three to two by the center and two offensive guards. Okay.

So you know you're outnumbered, and you know that's a weakness of your defense. and every day in practice we used to work on that weakness. Everybody we play would try to exploit it. And, you know, some had some success, but I don't know that anybody actually beat us because of that, because we were so aware of that weakness. So, you know, I take the same approach to my biases. I try to be aware of my biases and adjust for them.

Humphreys didn't do that. Humphreys did not do that. Yeah. And some of the conclusions, reached. For example, Elit wanted outlets for the Mississippi River when it was near the ocean to let water out during the flood. Humphreys recommended against that and then became the Corps of Engineers policy to oppose outlets. But some of it made sense on a cost-benefit analysis at the time, but it was really pure ego. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with

Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls and building each of our own favorite turkey. diaphragms called prime cuts. Now I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers

are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with

Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. We are all aware that other people around us, friends, family members, and even enemies, have blind spots in their life. Am I right? my right, spanning from eating too loudly to complete unawareness of how they dominate conversations

or blindness of how they treat their spouse. But how much energy do we exert trying to identify the blind spots in our own lives? It's the healthy practice of normal humans across the planet and the work is never done. It should be on our eternal checklist of things we'll never stop doing. To massively simplify the current strategy of flood control that ended up working, it's a system of levees and outlets. When the water inside the levee gets too high, they open up floodways or outlets that allow massive amounts of water to escape the main channel of the river.

These planned floodways are outside the levees and are usually agricultural areas. Ellet, the Union Soldier, the one who died in the Civil War at Vicksburg, suggested a system of levies and outlets. I'd now like John Barry to introduce us to a third character of the Mississippi River, a brilliant man born in 1820, the year of Daniel Boone's death, by the name of James Buchanan Eads. James Buchanan Eads is one of the great geniuses in American history.

In the 1930s, deans of American colleges of engineering put together a list of the five greatest engineers of all time. They were talking about people like Leonardo da Vinci and Edison and so forth. And Eads was on the list. He was dropped out of school literally selling apples on the street at St. Louis when he was 11 years old. He arrived in St. Louis and his steamboat sank. He almost drowned to begin with. But he was an absolute jewell. He taught himself calculus.

There were a lot of boats and steamboats sinking. He made a fortune when he was a very, very young man, designing ways to salvage those sunken steamboat, the cargoes in those steamboats. He designed a diving bell, which he couldn't get anybody else to go down in, so he went down himself initially. So he learned what the Mississippi River was like by walking the bottom. and feeling the softness of it. And you just sink.

And it was like you couldn't see anything once you get more than a foot or two below the surface because the sediment load is so dark. But just feeling like a blizzard in front of his way. Anyway, after making a fortune building a fleet of salvage vessels, he then built a fleet of ironclads called turtles that basically conquered the Mississippi. Mississippi River for the Union. They gave Grant his first victories at Fort's Henry and Donaldson. He built them in a matter of, I think delivered them in a little over six months from the time that they were, as someone put it, you know, they were standing in the forest

until his delivery was a little over six months. And again, you know, Grant used them before the federal government even paid for him. So that was his second great triumph. After the war, St. Louis was losing out in competition to Chicago. St. Louis was by far the biggest city in the Midwest, but Chicago is gaining rapidly because of rail transport. And the problem with St. Louis was the Mississippi River. You can get trains across the Mississippi River, except by ferry, which is pretty inefficient. So Yides got together a group to build the first bridge across the real Mississippi River. There were bridges way up river.

It's a narrower parts of the river. Yeah, not necessarily narrower, but you didn't have the forts of the water. You had a different kind of bottom, a much more stable bottom and things like that. It was much easier upriver. He decided to make it out of steel. Now, number one,

this was going to be the first steel bridge anywhere in the world. Number two, it had the longest arches of any bridge in the world. Number three, it was the first bridge Eads had ever designed in his life. So he had a consulting engineer, who was the chief bridge builder for the Pennsylvania Railroad, who said he refused to attach his name to this bridge,

which was doomed to fall. So Eidz responded to the criticism by firing the guy and abolishing the position of consulting engineer. And Eads did build his bridge, and it is still standing and still in use. Really? Still standing today. Yes. Built in 1874.

Yeah. And as I say, still in use. Where is the bridge? St. Louis. They run metro trains over it. Remember all that talk of hubris that it takes to conquer a river? I'd say Eads had a lot of confidence, but he backed it up. Here's how Eads Bridge impacted America in a U.S.

unique way. Eads essentially forced Carnegie to transform steelmaking into a science. Eads didn't test random plates off a production run. He tested every single plate that went into his bridge. Okay, so the steel was unpredictable and the quality wasn't consistent. Correct. And so he came in and said, if we're going to build this bridge, it's every piece has got to be that integrity. Exactly. Right. And And Carnegie rebelled but couldn't do anything about it because otherwise they weren't going to, you know, he tried to force them to accept the custom of the trade. But instead, EADS in a way transformed American steelmaking by requiring the precision that he insisted upon. And that's why the bridge is still standing. At the time, more than 20% of all the bridges made in the United States would fall down.

You know, I guess in some ways you could look at it and say that the bigness of the river and the formidable obstacle that it was caused people to rise to a new challenge. I mean, even saying that Eads, this guy that had to build this bridge, changed the steel industry. And maybe if we didn't have a Mississippi River, we'd still have crummy steel. Well, by now it'd probably be okay. But, duh. Carnegie wanted Eads to just accept the custom of the trade, which was a crummy, inconsistent steel strength. We all know why he didn't want to raise the industry standard.

It was that mullah, the dough, that chiching. I don't know the full situation, so it's not entirely fair for me to cast this kind of judgment on Carnegie, but this kind of stuff makes me angry and makes me wonder where in today's corporate world is greed, money, stifling advancement. No doubt it's everywhere. Capitalism with all its glory and benefits which we all love

has placed the highest priority of our society on the acquisition of wealth and making money. But this is a double-edged sword that our society is and will be paying for in the future. But in defense of Carnegie, don't hate the player, hate the game. And you can't say you hate corporate America if you drive a fancy vehicle and have an iPhone and buy big box store-bought meat. Our society, including Clay Newcomb, is a circus of contradictions. But I stand by the idea the mighty Mississippi, what the Choctaw called the River Beyond any age,

spurred America to greatness, or at least greatness as far as empires, gauge it. All right, brothers and sisters, there was another man who was on the river during the same time period as Humphreys, Ellet, and Eads. He was not an engineer, but he was studying the river. It was a young man in his 20s named Samuel Clemens. He was obsessed with the Mississippi River.

In between 1857 and 1859, he spent two years as a Cub pilot in training to be a full-fledged riverboat pilot. He'd later go by the name of Mark Twain, which is a riverboat term used to describe 12 feet of water, or two Twain fathoms. His time on the river exposed him to so many different types of people. It helped him become one of America's top, if not the top, writer. People on the river were talkers.

It was almost like an exhibition of being human in the microcosm of a small ship. In 1883, later in Twain's life, he would write a book called Life on the Mississippi. It's considered by many to be the greatest prose in American literature. In the book, he idolized river pilots. He said, all pilots are tireless talkers when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river, they're always understood and always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings. I like that. He went on to describe the absolute power of the Mississippi River pilots in contrast to other perceived earthly power.

good writing is good thinking and it makes us see something from a totally different angle. I think you'll understand why he's considered the greatest when you listen to the clarity of his writing. Here's Mark Twain on pilots. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I have loved the profession far better than any I have followed since and I took measureless pride in it. The reason is plain. A pilot in those days was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of Parliament and the people. Parliament sit in chains forged by their constituency.

The editor of a newspaper cannot be independent but must work with one hand tied behind him by the party and patrons and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind. No clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth. regardless of his parish's opinions. Writers of all kinds are menacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we modify before we print.

In truth, every man and woman and child has a master in worries and frets in servitude. But in the day I ride of, the Mississippi pilot had none. The moment that boat was underway in the river, she was under the soul and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with. with her exactly as he pleased.

Runner win and whither he chose. Tire up on the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free. He consulted no one. He received commands from nobody. He promptly resisted even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the United States

forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king, without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. The absolute authority of a river pilot is a novel idea. Though certainly romanticized by Twain, it's hard not to see his point.

Perhaps the most intriguing section of his book is him describing the incredible navigation skills that a Mississippi pilot had to have. Wrecks weren't just common they were the norm. There are stretches of the river where he said shipwrecks average. one per mile. I think hearing Twain's voice about the river is important to understanding America. At the time, his writing would have been top-level entertainment for Americans. It would be more influential than the trendy Hollywood movie today.

Books and reading were everything. Radio didn't even exist until the 1900s. Here's Mark Twain's pilot describing to him how to navigate a river in the dark. You see, this has got to be learned. There isn't any getting around it. A clear starlit night throws such heavy shadows that if you don't know the shape of the shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber

because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape. And you see you would be getting scared to death every 15 minutes by the watch. You would be 50 yards from the shore all the time when you ought to be within 50 feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is and the shape of the river tells you when you're coming to it.

Then there's your pitch dark night. The river is a very different shape on a pitch dark night from what it is on the starlit night. All the shores seem to be straight lines then, and mighty dim ones too, and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You boldly drive your boat into what seems to be a solid, straight wall,

and that wall falls back and makes way for you. And then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of those grisly, drizzly gray mist, and there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then there's different kinds of moonlight that changed the shape of the river in different ways, you see. Twain interrupts his pilot. Oh, don't say anymore, please.

I've got to learn the shape of the river according to all these 500,000 different ways. If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head, it would make me stooped shoulder. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot, a man has got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know. The other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours. This river pilot dissected the different categories of night, clear starlit nights, pitch dark nights, and a night with a gray mist. I like the hyper-specific competence in this master's ability to parse out difference in what appears to be a much.

monolithic thing like the dark. Twain was enamored with the pilot's skill set. He said, I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. To know the old and New Testaments by heart, and to be able to recite them Ghibli forward and back, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake.

Is no extravagant mass of knowledge and no marvelous faculty compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous faculty in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately, and I believe I am not expanding the truth when I do. Many will think the figure too strong, but pilots will not, end of quote.

Here's Twain on reading water, and again, I think it's important that we hear old Twain's voice. The face of the water in time became a wonderful book, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Throughout the long 1,200 miles, there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one you could want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There was never so wonderful a book written by man, never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reprual. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface,

on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether. But to the pilot, it was an italicized passage. Indeed, it was more than that. It was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it, for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty

pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas the trained eye, they were not pictures at all, but the grimest and most dead earnest of reading material. When I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river As familiar as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition, but I had lost something too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river.

I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of river was turned to blood. In the middle distance, the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating black and conspicuous. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in and a speechless rapture. The world was new to me and I'd never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms

which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face. Another day came and I ceased altogether to note them. Then if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture and should have commented on it inwardly after this fashion. The sun means that we're going to have wind tomorrow. That floating log means the river is rising, small thanks to that. That slant mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights.

No, the romance and beauty of it were all gone from the river. All the value of any feature of it had for me now was to amount of its usefulness it could furnish towards compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in the beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a break that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sewn thick with what are to him signs and symbols of hidden

decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all? Or doesn't he simply view her professionally and comment upon her unwholesome condition? and doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade? What an incredible question. Did he lose or gain something by learning this trade of being a Mississippi River pilot? Naivety can carry an empty fleeting bliss, but the naive don't change the world with their literature or tame giant ancient raging rivers.

Twain went through his training to become a pilot, but the Civil War ended his career and ultimately ended a 60-year steamboat era. He said that Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812, and at the end of 30 years it had grown into mighty proportions, and in less than 30 years more, it was dead. So from 1812 to 1860 was the Mississippi River steamboating era. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps Game Calls and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut.

I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelps Game Calls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. After Humphreys Ellet and the Eid Studies, by the 1870s, government levies were changing the river, making it safer and partly taming it. Twain would lament the passing of the wild river. It's really interesting because you'd think in the late 1800s that the Mississippi River was wild,

but Twain thought it was tame. And our boy Twain actually addressed Eads in his book. Here's Twain. The military engineers of the commission had taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again. A job transcended in size, by only the original job of creating it. They're building wing dams here and there to direct the current

and dikes to confine it into narrower bounds. One who knows the Mississippi will promptly say, not allowed, but to himself, that 10,000 river commissions with the minds of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it go here or go there and make it obey, cannot save a shore which has been sentenced,

cannot bar its path with an obstruction that it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words. But the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere. They know all that can be known of their obtruth science. And so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, there's our boy Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible, so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against the like impossibilities. Otherwise, one might pipe out and say the commission might as well bully the comments in their courses and undertake to make them behave as to try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.

Wayne expressed his lack of confidence in science and man's bullying in 1883, which would have been the start of man's biggest push to manipulate the river. It's really interesting because he would be right in that lack of confidence, at least at first. Mark Twain would die in 1910, 17 years before his words would prove true in the flood of 1927. We're going to read one more section of Twain, and I think it shows his sarcasm, humor, and his thoughts, on the science of the time. From where we're going to start this passage, in the previous paragraph, he'd cited all the man-made cutoffs that had shortened the river by 242 miles. Here's Twain.

This is the last one. Now, if you want to be one of those ponderous scientific people and let on to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in the late years, What an opportunity is here. Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from, nor development of species either. That's a jab at Darwin. Glacial epics are great things, but they are vague, vague. Please observe.

In the space of 176 years, the lower Mississippi has shortened itself 242 miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person who is not blind or idiotic can see that in the old Salurian period, just a million years ago, next November, the lower Mississippi River was upward of 1,300,000 miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token, any person can see that 742 years from now, the lower Mississippi will only be a mile in three-quarter of. long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plotting comfortably

along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact. That was good and sarcastic, Mr. Mark Twain. You know, if you understand the math there, you see what he's doing. He's making fun of it. And that's wild that he was doing that in the 1880s. And he was even poking fun at Darwin and the idea of speciation. Did you hear that? I'm fascinated by science and believe in the endeavor wholeheartedly. But it's not much different than the way I'm fascinated and have pledged my allegiance to riding sure-footed mules in the backwoods.

I'm conflicted. Mules and science have a lot in common, you see. They're both incredible, functional beasts, but will kill you if mishandled. And their purpose is easily misunderstood, too. Joy ride your kids on a dead broke horse, not on a vinegar-spitting, flashy mule. Likewise, don't send science to do the work of a spiritual philosopher. That's like asking a pinball machine to make bread. And if your rational Western mind tells you that science outranks and supersedes a man's verified, bona fide spiritual belief,

backed with real life and real faith, I will submit that you have taken the bait. And the hook will shortly enter your upper lip, leading you to a stringer of human existence that is very new to the planet. Only taking into consideration the natural, without the spiritual, is very new to mankind. I'm done. I'm now stepping off this box of Irish Spring. Let's talk about the Great Flood of 1927. In March of 1927, just a month. month before the start of the Great Flood, Bessie Smith recorded the song Backwater Blues

about the floods of 1926. When it rains five or six days in the skies are dark as night, then trouble taking place in the lowlands at night, she said. She was known as the Empress of the Blues and will become the most famous female blues singer of the 1930s. Little did she know what was coming. Last three months of 1926, the average reading on every single river gauge, not only on the Mississippi itself, but on the Ohio, on the Missouri, on every other tributary, was the highest ever known. Only six times in history at Vicksburg had the gauge ever broken 30 feet in October, and it had never broken 31 feet. in October 1926, it broke 40 feet. So the whole drainage basin was saturated, and it didn't take much thinking to figure out

that if you got any rain of any significance in 1927, you were going to get a serious flood. And in fact, you just got more rain. You had five storms in the spring of 1927, each of which was greater than any single storm in the preceding 10 years. This is on top of a river basin that's already filled with water. So beginning on New Year's Day, you had floods in Pittsburgh and, you know, preceding downriver, Louisville.

You had, you know, floods on basically every tributary system in the entire river. So the net result was, I mean, you knew this was going to be a bad year. The book actually opens with a scene on what turned out to be the biggest storm of the year. And that one, the scenes in Greenville, Mississippi, but on that day in New Orleans, they got 14.96 inches of rain in 24 hours. Wow. You were going to have a problem. And indeed. And at that time, there were government-built levees, a thousand miles of government-built levees up the river.

Right. Basically the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to Illinois. Correct. And these levees were touted to the people of the river basin as unbeatable. Right. It was like the Titanic. Right. It was like these.

Yeah. In 1926 in the official report of the Corps of Engineers, it said, I think for the first time, it said, you know, we're now in a position to protect the territory from overflow. Classic cubris. Yeah. Classic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And then the big break was in Mounds, Mississippi. The single biggest break. There were plenty of big breaks.

Right. That was kind of the one that like when it happened, where people knew we're in big trouble. Well, they'd already knew they were in big trouble. That particular break, there had already been flooding. As I said, you know, people died in Virginia. They died in Oklahoma. that one break was probably the biggest single break, not only in that flood, but maybe in any flood that we know of, because close to 450,000 cubic feet a second was coming out of the river. That's an enormous... Through the levee.

Yeah, well, the levee, of course, had breached. There wasn't any levee. Yeah. But that single levy break flooded and land 70 miles to the east, to the hills of Mississippi. And for probably about 80 miles, I guess it is from there until Vicksburg, where there is. So it filled the Delta.

It flooded about 27,000 square miles on the lower Mississippi. That's not counting, you know, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Knoxville, Oklahoma City. It's not counting that land on about 27,000 square miles of the lower. Mississippi and, you know, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, so forth. Here's an excerpt from John Barry's Rising Tide. There the river had lingered for months, not leaving all the land until September. Then it finally fell back within its banks, languid once again like a snake that had swallowed its prey and lay now digesting it.

It left behind ruin and rot. At the site of each crevasse, it had dug out blue holes, pockets of deep water lakes where fishing was often best and that exists still, and deposited mountains of sand over thousands of acres. In the entire flooded region, 50% of all animals, half of all the mules, horses, cattle hogs, and chickens had drowned. Thousands of tenant farmers' shacks had simply disappeared. Hundreds of sturdy barns, cotton gins, warehouses, farmhouses had been swept away. Buildings by the tens of thousands had been damaged, and in towns, whole blocks had become heaps of splintered lumber, like the leavings of a tornado. In some places, great mounds of sand covered fields and streets. On the fields, in the forests, in the streets and yards, and homes, and businesses and barns, the water left a reeking muck.

It filled the air with stench, and then the sun lay baking and cracking like broken pottery, dung-colored, and unvarying to the horizon. The Mississippi River flood of 1927 caused the Ohio to flow backwards, covered some Delta towns with over 30 feet of water, and caused more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina. The flood displaced over 700,000 people, but disproportionately affected over 500,000 black Americans, which comprised 75% of the population of the Delta. Official reports showed 250 deaths from the flood,

but deaths resulting from the impacts of the flood, not just drowning in the initial water rise were likely in the thousands. The flood highlighted the discrepancy of treatment between blacks and whites. Much of John Barry's book is about the refugee camps and the thousands of men working 24 hours a day repairing levees during the flood. I want to read an excerpt from Rising Tide, and it's an important thing to realize that the 42-year-old William Alexander Percy, who was Leroy Percy's son,

we talked about him extensively on episode two, was appointed by Herbert Hoover to oversee the Red Cross operations in the refugee camps on the levees. So the young Percy was in charge of the levee camps. They were camping on the levees because it was the only land that wasn't underwater. The short version of that story

is that the blacks were forced by the National Guard to stay in refugee camps on the levees while most whites were allowed to leave on boats. If you remember, a lot of the issues of the South came from their desperate need for labor in agriculture. Here's John Barry. In the first hours of the flood, Black and White had risked their lives to save each other. There had been a feeling of humanity, not race. Now the disparity between life for Black and White seemed greater than in normal life. Blacks who had believed Greenville to be a special place felt betrayed. Petty insults stirred. Pettie insults

stirred more resentment. Whenever the steamer capital pulled away from the dock, its Calliope routinely played by-bye Blackbird. It was like a slap in the face of the blacks. Even many whites were bothered. The blacks also resented Will's orders, which were printed every day on the newspaper's front page. First, he required, quote, groups of Negroes outside of Greenville to get to the levy and be rationed there. Leaders of the black community complained, so did the whites. But the most serious screenings, grievance penetrated the soul. The blacks were no longer free. The National Guard patrolled the perimeter of the levy camp with rifles and fixed bayonets to enter or leave one needed to pass.

They were imprisoned. This was true in every camp in the state. Mississippi was determined to keep its workers even if it required force to do so. I told you the name of Will Percy would come up later. He was the one that made the decision with the influence of his father, Leroy, to not evacuate the blacks out of the camps, but rather make them stay. They were afraid they'd leave and never come back, which is exactly what would happen to many. That's wild stuff. Here's John Barry with how the flood of 1927 impacted America.

If you were just describing in a short version, which obviously this is what your whole book is about, is how this flood changed America. what's a version that we can understand of how this flood changed America? Well, number one, it elected Herbert Hoover President. You know, you can demonstrate that almost with mathematical certainty. Hoover was put in charge of the rescue and rehabilitation of close to a million people. And he actually did a great job.

It gained national fame from that. He was already had, was extremely well-known. from his activities in World War I. He was already had a, he was referred to as a great humanitarian. He was a logistics genius in just getting, there were 700,000 people being fed by the Red Cross and just handling the logistics of getting that done. He's in charge of that and he did a terrific job. So that's number one.

Number two, it changed the policy, the Corps of Engineers, and pretty much every engineer anywhere in the world in terms of how you deal with rivers. You recognize that you can't simply contain them within levees. You have to give them room to spread out. The end result was, you know, there's an outlet to the ocean just, well, to the Lake Pontchartrain and through Lake Pontchartrain to the Gulf of Mexico, just above New Orleans, about 15 miles above New Orleans. You know, there are other spillways, if necessary, that start above Baton Rouge. also will lead to the ocean.

There are reservoirs, you know, throughout the Mississippi River basin on both sides of the river to keep water out of the river. And, of course, they increase the levees as well. People don't realize it, but in 2011, which is probably the second biggest flood ever, there were close to 10,000 square miles of land flooded by design. This was land that was essentially set aside to allow the river room to accept. span. That's number two. Number three, it was an enormous spur to African American migration out of the Mississippi Delta and not just Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, as well, to, you know, Chicago, to Detroit, to Los Angeles.

You know, there was upwards of 800,000 people who left that region because of the flood. and it didn't start the great migration, but it was a huge spur to it. It also began the shift of African-American voters from the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln to the Democratic Party. That was because of some deals at Hoover cut to get the nomination. In those days, every African-American who voted basically voted Republican. and they didn't control any state parties except in the South because in those days, the Democratic Party controlled pretty much every southern state. And they were all white. They didn't allow any black participation.

So if you're African American, even though you couldn't vote in a state election in Alabama, you could be active in the Republican Party in the state of Alabama. And that was worth something because if you had a Republican president, you had a saying who got to be the post, you know, a post office in your town or who got nominated to a court. Even though you couldn't vote, the Republican White House might listen to you. Hoover had cut a deal to get the nomination with African American leaders, and he later betrayed them. The most important change is probably the most subtle and the hardest to prove, but it shifted the way people thought about the responsibility of federal government to help people in a disaster. I want to close with the reading of the last page of Rising Tide.

The first sentence of Will Percy's autobiography, Lanterns on the Levy, reads, My Country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. The river had created the Delta and the white man, the Persies and men like them, had brought blacks to the Delta to clear it and to tame it and to transform it into an empire. Together they had done that. They had built that empire. Will believed that he was watching that empire disintegrate. Near the end of his autobiography,

completed only months before his death in 1941. He wrote, The Old Southern Way of Life, in which I had been reared existed no more, and its values were ignored or derided. A tarnish has fallen over the bright world, dishonor and corruption triumph. My own strong people have become lotus eaters.

The feet is here again. The last, the most abhorrent. He seemed to accept that defeat. If only he accepted the absurd and finally himself. A society does not change in sudden jumps. Rather it moves in multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these steps are parallel, if not quite simultaneous. Some advance further than others and some even more in an opposite direction.

The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one part of the body extending itself outward than another, even while the main body stays back until enough the mass has shifted to move the entire body. The Great Mississippi River flood of 1927 forced many small steps.

Those are the words of John Barry. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. On the next episode, we're going to get back into the science of the river and even its danger.

We're going to talk about its fish and turtles and all that cool stuff. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes. I can't wait to talk with all the folks on the bare grease render next week. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls in building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called Prime Cuts.

Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sound. that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right?

That's who I listen to. I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out prime cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Rinella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers

who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.