American Scientist

THE GREAT RIVER: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. Boyce Upholt. 312 pp. W. W. Norton, 2024. $29.99

The Mississippi is preeminently a river of the United States—although the catchment extends slightly into Canada across the border of Montana, the river and its tributaries drain a greater proportion of the contiguous United States than any other river. Mention “Mississippi River” to anyone in the United States and the name is likely to call to mind diverse aspects of our national history: exploration of the river and its tributaries by French fur trappers; a major division between eastern and western portions of the country and a major transport pathway from north to south; Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and steamboats; enormous barges loaded with grain and the channel engineering needed to sustain barge traffic; or the "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico where the river discharges its load of excess nutrients.

Boyce Upholt takes on these topics, along with many others, in The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. There are so many stories that could be told of different portions of this huge network of tributaries that any one book is necessarily limited and selective, but Upholt does a good job of covering the high points of history along the Mississippi. The first part of the book covers prehistory and the history of the river prior to acquisition by the United States. The second part of the book addresses topics such as major floods, settlement of the river corridor, and channel engineering after the river became part of United States territory. The final portion of the book addresses contemporary environmental challenges such as coastal land loss in the delta region and toxic contamination from agriculture and industry.

The prose is accessible and engaging, although sometimes imprecise, with descriptions such as “soil boiled into nothing” during a levee failure. Upholt engages with diverse members of the community of people who live, work, and play along the Mississippi River: He visits sites designed to facilitate larval fish survival with United States Geological Survey (USGS) scientists, tours drainage districts with engineers, chats with bargemen, explores the river delta with a local councilman and a shrimper, eats frog legs with fishermen who trace their ancestry in the lower river area back many generations, and visits archeological sites with the descendants of Indigenous people who have lived in the region even longer. Describing a visit to a mound complex, Upholt writes:

Had I arrived alone, I would have noticed nothing extraordinary, just a few trees protruding from a small island of marsh grass. But Rosina Philippe, an elder from the Grand Bayou Atakapa-Ishak/Chawasha Tribe, pointed out the slight rise of the mound, its core now exposed to the assault of the waves. Her father used to stop here when he was fishing to make himself a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade, she said. Just a generation ago, that is, a citrus grove flourished atop the mound.

Human history, rather than natural history, is a primary focus of the book, and Upholt has devoted substantial time and effort to accessing original sources in archives and historical collections, as reflected in the nearly 30 pages of notes on historical sources at the end of the book. He has effectively integrated this historical information into a story about the people along the river, with numerous quotes from published historical sources. I kept wishing for more natural science, but the text touches only very briefly on aspects of the river itself, such as the non-human life forms of the floodplain and channels, or the details of water, sediment, and solutes moving downstream and altering form and process in the river corridor. He misses opportunities to explain some of the fascinating natural processes that are mentioned in passing, such as sand boils around the river’s artificial levees or soil liquefaction of the levees during large floods.

Perhaps even more disappointing to me was that, in writing this book, Upholt had an opportunity to establish a framework for understanding the severe environmental issues that now challenge the scientists and residents of the river’s catchment, from bank erosion and channel sedimentation in the upper river basin through flood damages, as well as nutrient export and coastal erosion and subsidence in the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi River’s distinctive geologic and geomorphic history have led to high freshwater biodiversity in the lower part of the Mississippi River network, and the natural dynamics of a large floodplain river are critically necessary to sustaining this biodiversity, but he never clearly explains this, or why such biodiversity matters.

For curious readers, The Great River provides a good overview of and introduction to the history of the mainstem Mississippi River. Although coverage of the natural history of the river is minimal, the coverage of environmental problems in the final section of the book does touch on aspects of natural science relevant to the river network and floodplains. Upholt describes the ongoing challenges associated with warming climate, rising sea level, the aging infrastructure of the artificial levees and other components of the water-control system, and the need to balance protecting people and infrastructure with preserving some semblance of a dynamic river ecosystem. He does not pretend to have answers to these extraordinarily difficult and important problems, but he does offer a nuanced perspective, writing, “Perhaps what people learn after thousands of years of living along one of the world’s great rivers is that change is inevitable, that chaos will come. That the only way to survive is to take care—of yourself and of everyone else, human and beyond.”

He leaves readers with a final thought that echoes long after the book is done: “It’s not just land that we’ve lost along this river, and there’s more than land that we need to restore.”