The Great River

January 1, 2024

Journalist Upholt explicates the natural history of the Mississippi River and the ways humans have long sought to control it. From Thomas Jefferson's expansionist visions to modern-day arrays of dikes and dams, humans have altered, damaged--and sought to restore--the vast waterway and its ecosystems. Prepub Alert.

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April 15, 2024
A lively survey of Old Man River, born of extensive research and travel. The Mississippi River, writes New Orleans-based journalist Upholt, is contested on many fronts. One is why the river bears the name of a continent-wide system when the Missouri is almost twice as long and the Ohio contributes more water. Another is whether to allow the river anything of its wild self. "The only longer human-made landform on the planet is China's Great Wall," writes the author about the river-taming levee that runs to "the headwaters of the Atchafalaya." Levees keep the floodplain from doing its work, and Upholt shows how before the engineers got to it, the floodplain would be frequently submerged as the river flowed and overflowed, yielding the richest of soil. Many other things have changed, including invasive species displacing river natives such as the buffalo fish. Upholt builds a natural and human history along the template established by the Rivers of America series of yore, a blend of anecdote and observation. His account is more politically charged than all that, though, with an environmental twist that soon turns to economics. In the economy of enslavement, for instance, riverine malaria felled captive workers, and only the richest of plantation owners, "able to afford the workforce needed to make this landscape work," could cultivate the river's fertile bottomlands. Naturally, it's just that class of wealthy owner that the levee system protects. Pulling back those levees, Upholt writes, could refresh the bottomlands while also enriching the river. In one example, where the river widens along its plain, "Corps of Engineers fish surveys found a record-breaking number of juvenile sturgeon." It would cost billions to do so, but for any Mississippi River aficionado--and clearly, Upholt is one--it would be worth every cent. A fluent addition to the literature of America's rivers.

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Starred review from April 22, 2024
Journalist Upholt debuts with a majestic history of the Mississippi River, beginning with how a subterranean rift and the movement of glaciers created and shaped the waterway over tens of millions of years. Exploring Native Americans’ historical relationship to the Mississippi, Upholt notes that Southeastern tribes farmed fish in the river and maintained a culture of “reciprocal obligation” that mandated they share any surplus with neighboring villages. This philosophy was challenged by European colonizers who sought to commodify the natural world and tame the river, building levees and dams to make it more reliable for commercial transport and create fertile farmlands in the floodplains. These efforts had disastrous consequences, Upholt argues, noting that the depletion of marshlands that once acted as buffers against rising waters has worsened storm-related flooding and that the erection of dams sometimes submerged Native American farmlands and burial mounds. The foregrounding of Native American history highlights alternative ways of relating to nature besides domination, and Upholt’s crystalline prose evokes the grandeur of his subject (“On some mornings, the water lifts into mist so thick you realize there is no end to the air and no beginning to the water, so your boat floats upon and within the river at once”). It’s an exceptional natural history that never loses sight of the human players involved.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
Draining American land from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the mighty Mississippi River and its tributaries sluice 140 cubic miles of water annually into the Gulf of Mexico. This massive surge is vital to the nation's history, ecology, and commerce. Nature writer Upholt relates the history of the river from a social and technological perspective. He writes lyrically and poignantly of the Indigenous civilizations that built remarkable earthworks in places like Cahokia near the river's banks. Later, Spanish and French explorers of the Mississippi set the stage for newly independent American states to initiate their push westward. At the river's mouth, New Orleans was a critical entrep�t through the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The advent of the steamboat revealed the importance of keeping the Mississippi navigable and protecting the agricultural lands bordering it. Engineering projects funded by Congress changed the river's course, but limited understanding of the wild water's power cured one problem only to create more chaos up- and downstream; twentieth-century industry and urban development threatened complex ecosystems. Upholt introduces readers to people dependent on the Mississippi. Combining their stories with the watershed's economic, political, geological, and biological underpinnings, he offers an insightful living portrait of America's heartland.

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