Old Man River

I’ve wanted to write about the Mississippi River for a while and decided April is the right time. After all, this is the month when the watershed is fed by snowmelt and Springtime rain, and people living in the River’s delta start holding their breath. The Great Flood of 1927, which displaced my paternal family, and attempts to manage the Mississippi are the subjects of this posting, along with related music.

I’m attracted to the Mississippi because it geographically connects my boyhood (Louisiana) and adult (Wisconsin) homes. The River stretches 2,300 meandering miles from its source at Lake Itasca in Minnesota to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles downriver of New Orleans. However, that is just the river. The watershed is North America’s largest drainage basin, covering 1.2 million square miles, stretching from the Rockies in the West to the Appalachians in the East. It encompasses 40% of the continental United States.

Because I drive south regularly, I’ve explored multiple routes that have allowed me to observe how the Mississippi’s three major tributaries affect its size. By the time the Mississippi empties into the Gulf, its discharge rate equals over 500,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), or 4 million gallons per second. However, when I cross from Wisconsin to Dubuque, Iowa, the discharge rate equals about 100,000 cfs. That rate has increased by almost 90% when I cross the Mississippi just south of the St. Louis Arch, after the confluence with the Missouri River 10 miles north of St. Louis. The Missouri River is the Mississippi’s longest tributary, as well as the longest river in the U.S., while the Ohio River is the Mississippi’s largest tributary by volume. It increases the River’s discharge rate 135%. In 1976, before the I-57 bridge was completed, I crossed the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, on Highway 62, just north of the confluence. The channel’s doubling in size left an indelible impression. Finally, the Arkansas River joins the Mississippi just north of Arkansas City, Arkansas, and Greenville, Mississippi, my dad’s boyhood home. Although it increases the discharge rate by only 8%, the Arkansas River’s confluence became the tipping point for the greatest inland flood in modern American history.

By 1926, most of the lower Mississippi River, from above the mouth of the Ohio River to 50 miles south of New Orleans, was bounded by levees. Further, the levees were built to improved height and grade specifications, after the Mississippi River Commission became the river’s dominant manager at the expense of local levee districts. In December 1926, it began raining over the entire Mississippi River valley – literally from the Rockies to the Appalachians - and the weather system that brought the rain stalled. The rain continued into the Spring of 1927, with total rainfall exceeding yearly averages by more than ten times. The River’s tributaries filled, and flooded, and downstream water levels rose. The first levee crevasse (breach) on the Mississippi occurred in Illinois on April 16th, followed by a second at New Madrid, Missouri on the 19th leaving a one mile wide opening. Two days later, the levee crevassed at Mounds Landing, Mississippi, just south of the Arkansas’ mouth. It left a gap one-half mile wide and resulted in water ten feet deep covering one million acres (over 1,500 square miles) of delta farmland.

Levees had been constructed to surround Greenville, so the city felt protected after the Mounds Landing crevasse. However, the backside levees were constructed to a lower height than the levees fronting the Mississippi. They proved no match for the River, and at 3 a.m. on April 22nd they were overtopped, flooding the entire city. My dad was 9 years old and evacuated Greenville shortly before the flood. He maintained that the source of the city’s flooding was railroad tracks cut through the backside levees. As the flooding coursed downriver, 27,000 square miles were flooded, and one million people were displaced. After the flooding, it took over two months for the water to subside.

 In his book Rising Tide, John M. Barry makes the case that the Great Flood of 1927 changed the course of U.S. history. It accelerated the Great Migration of African Americans to the North, Midwest, and West, both because sharecroppers were unable to work their flooded fields and because of their mistreatment during the flood. First prisoners and then sharecroppers were forced at gunpoint to man sandbagging efforts atop the levees, even as the levees were being overtopped. In addition to their geographic migration, African Americans began to migrate politically from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, due to their treatment during the delta’s recovery from the flood. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt ousted Herbert Hoover as president, marking the era of the New Deal.

There is an abundance of music about the Great Flood, but I find three songs most noteworthy. Bessie Smith’s recording of “Backwater Blues” conveys the despair of being flooded from her home like no other: Backwater blues done called me to pack my things and go. Cause my house fell down and I can’t live there no more. Mmm, I can’t move no more. There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go. Because it was recorded in 1927, the song is frequently associated with the Great Flood, but was recorded before the Mississippi flooded. Instead, the song was inspired by the Cumberland River’s flooding of Nashville at Christmas, 1926. Nonetheless, both rivers’ flooding was due to the same storm system, and the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers merge with the Ohio River just before it joins the Mississippi.

Almost 50 years after “Backwater Blues,” Randy Newman recorded “Louisiana 1927,” and whenever I hear the song, I think of my dad. Like Smith’s recording, it conveys the despair of flood victims, in this instance someone downriver from New Orleans. To save New Orleans, the levee in Plaquemines Parish was dynamited thereby increasing the River’s flow and flooding much of the downriver territory. However, the dynamiting proved unnecessary as the Mississippi overtopped its west levee above New Orleans, where the Atchafalaya River provided the floodwaters a convenient outlet to the Gulf. At 2:22 in the video, there is a photo of the dynamiting.

Although Newman’s song is my favorite, it is by no means the most popular “flood” song, at least among boomers like me. “When the Levee Breaks” was recorded in 1929 by Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy. While McCoy died in 1950, Memphis Minnie did not pass until 1973. I wonder if she ever heard the 1971 version of her song by Led Zeppelin.

Lagniappe: The Great Flood’s Aftermath. Since 1926, the height and construction standards for levees have increased, and 1,607 miles of levees try to contain the Mississippi today. Another 596 miles of levees bound its tributaries. Other flood control measures complement the levees and include 29 dams between Minneapolis and St. Louis (although their primary purpose is commercial navigation), jetties that increase river flow which scours the channel, cut-outs to straighten the channel where oxbows exist, and four floodways that divert a portion of the River’s volume.

Generally, floodways are parallel river channels that are separated from the River by a levee, some of which are equipped with gates. As the water level in the main channel rises, water is allowed to enter the parallel channel by overtopping the levee or by opening the gate. Capable of diverting 550,000 cfs, the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway is just above the confluence with the Ohio River and measures five miles wide and 65 miles long. Located about 30 miles upriver from New Orleans, the Bonnet Carre Floodway, with a capacity of 250,000 cfs, diverts water over a seven-mile course to Lake Pontchartrain. Two other floodways divert water to the Atchafalaya River near the toe in Louisiana’s boot. The Atchafalaya and its floodways will be the subject of my next posting.