by Martin Doyle
THE SOURCE
HOW RIVERS
MADE AMERICA
AND AMERICA
REMADE ITS RIVERS
Martin Doyle
FOR JORDAN, STUART, AND EVELYN—MY BOW PADDLERS.
CONTENTS
Introduction
PART ONE: FEDERALISM
CHAPTER 1: Navigating the Republic
CHAPTER 2: Life on the Mississippi
CHAPTER 3: The Rise of the Levees
CHAPTER 4: Flood Control
PART TWO: SOVEREIGNTY AND PROPERTY
CHAPTER 5: Water Wars
CHAPTER 6: A New Water Market
PART THREE: TAXATION
CHAPTER 7: Running Water
CHAPTER 8: Burning Rivers
PART FOUR: REGULATION
CHAPTER 9: Regulating Power
CHAPTER 10: The Power of a River
PART FIVE: CONSERVATION
CHAPTER 11: Channelization
CHAPTER 12: The Restoration Economy
Acknowledgments
Illustration Credits
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
America has more than 250,000 rivers—over 3 million miles—dissecting the fields, cities, and forests of the nation. These aren’t just any rivers; these are world-class rivers. The Mississippi watershed alone drains the rain and snow that falls on over a million square miles, generating 390 billion gallons of water per day, enough over the course of a year to cover the entire United States with several inches of water. The falling of these rivers over the continent’s topography generates tremendous power: the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River is the largest power plant in the United States, yet it makes up only a third of the power production of all the dams just on the Columbia. And America’s rivers span enormous climatological gradients. The Colorado most notably brings runoff from the snow-rich Rockies through thousands of miles of desert, providing the water for nearly 30 million people and more than 1.8 million acres of irrigated land and allowing the production of 15 percent of the nation’s crops in one of the driest regions on Earth. Anyone in the United States who eats a salad in the winter is enjoying lettuce grown with Colorado River water. Rivers are the defining feature of America’s landscape.
Rivers have shaped the basic facts of America. Most simply, of course, our borders themselves are typically set by rivers—the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Red, the Columbia, and the Colorado all form borders between states while the Rio Grande separates the United States from Mexico. Sixteen states were named after rivers, along with over 150 counties.
The rivers of the United States scaled by flow.
Rivers have also shaped where we live. When European colonists arrived on the Eastern Seaboard of America, they established their farms in the coastal plain, where land was flat and the sluggish rivers, streams, and sloughs were easily plied. As newly arriving settlers moved farther inland, they confronted a geologic peculiarity where the Atlantic coastal plain runs up against the Piedmont—the Fall Line. Upstream of the Fall Line, rivers are entrenched in narrow, steep-walled valleys interspersed with rapids. Downstream are the easily traveled rivers of the coastal plain. At the Fall Line lie rapids or even waterfalls. For anyone trying to move a bale of cotton or a bushel of wheat from the interior by boat, the Fall Line would mark the end of the line where canoes moving downstream would have to be unloaded, portaged, and reloaded. To move goods upstream from the Atlantic, cargo would have to be shifted from larger coastal or ocean vessels to land transportation or smaller canoes or rafts to transport upstream.
All this exchange of goods meant that both goods and money were changing hands: foreign merchants with ships interspersed with country bumpkins and their wagons. In Fall Line ports, entrepreneurs and job seekers alike smelled opportunity. And at the Fall Line ports of the eighteenth century, villages and towns began forming and growing as nascent hubs of commerce, the centers of the emerging market economy. These random places at the intersection of rivers and the Fall Line became natural places for immigrants to settle and cities to grow: Richmond on the James, Washington on the Potomac, Trenton on the Delaware, and nearly all of the other cities peppering the Eastern Seaboard. That the major cities of the eastern United States, and particularly the state capitals, are located at the Fall Line is a simple indicator of how subtle the effect of the physical landscape can be in shaping the demographic landscape.
Cities of the Midwest, the Deep South, and the West are little different. Many cities of America’s interior lie at important river confluences: Pittsburgh where the Monongahela and Allegheny join to form the Ohio, Kansas City at the Missouri and Kansas, and Sacramento at the Sacramento and American rivers. Cities of the Deep South, where rivers are plentiful, are typically situated to avoid water—or at least floods. Memphis, Vicksburg, and Natchez all sit up on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River from a safe elevation yet close enough to be a bustling port for nineteenth-century steamboats or twenty-first-century barge tows. Two of the oldest Mississippi River cities, Saint Louis and New Orleans, likewise sit on slight topographic rises—natural levees—that have kept their residents above the hydrologic fray for centuries.
Population density in the United States has traditionally been bounded by and clustered around rivers.
Other centers of America’s riverine society are often less populated but no less formative: they are hubs of energy. Where rivers are constricted to narrow valleys and canyons, or where they cascade over especially powerful waterfalls, their physical power has been harnessed against the rapidly changing backdrop of evolving technology. Settlers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century built their villages around small dams powering waterwheels; twentieth-century engineers and federal agencies built monumental concrete dams and countless turbines to generate power that would be sent through an ever-sprawling electric grid to distant cities and far-flung industries. The power of the Susquehanna River was as essential to grinding colonial grain as the Merrimack River was to spinning the fabric of New England textile mills; the Columbia River was as crucial in extracting aluminum for World War II bombers as the Tennessee River was in refining the uranium those bombers carried. The evolution of technology has allowed rivers to power the rise of America from colonial backwater to industrial juggernaut.
Demographics, technology, and the economy—all these aspects of America’s history have played out on a landscape defined by rivers. The simple geologic process of water eroding bits and pieces of sediment has resulted in physical features that have shaped, and continue to shape, the events of modern society.
But rivers have also shaped the very ideas of what America should be. Is a standing, permanent army needed, or might a loose collection of state militia be sufficient? The need for fortifications at the harbors of interstate river ports made a standing army both acceptable and necessary. Which level of government should regulate commerce? River-borne commerce on interstate rivers drove the new republic to have a single national economy rather than a collection of independent state economies. How big should the nation be? The Louisiana Purchase—the acquisition of the entire Missouri River basin—changed the basic geography of America into a vast westward empire. In so doing, it gave enough space for the quintessential frontiersmen and pioneers, along with the idea of manifest destiny. How active should the national government be? Floods of biblical proportion in the early twentieth century, when combined with a nationwide economic depression, forced the nation to accept a far larger role for the federal government than had been tolerated before. Many of the issues in American society have arisen from or been fought over the fact of our riverine republic.
Meanwhile, as its rivers have formed American society, Americans have changed their rivers. We have drained, stra
ightened, leveed, and dammed them; polluted and befouled them; cleaned up and restored them.
Tracing the history of America’s rivers thus requires disentangling the political, demographic, technological, and economic contexts that predominated in specific eras while simultaneously understanding the hydrological events constantly at work to naturally re-carve rivers. Amid these events and contexts are the people who embody the moments, the decisions, and the ideas as they evolved. Some are highly visible—like David Lilienthal, father of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Andrew Humphreys, visionary of Mississippi River flood control. Others are less known but equally transformative—the engineers, geologists, towboat captains, and textile mill workers whose lives and labor have been mixed with the flow of rivers.
Reading America’s rivers is akin to reading a palimpsest—one of those ancient manuscripts from which text was washed off or scraped away to make space for new writings, under which each previous layer was visible but not fully distinct from those that preceded it. America’s rivers are likewise a series of decisions on top of decisions, events on top of events, ideas on top of ideas. Each has its own context, but none can be completely separated or even distinguished from the layers above or below it.
This book works through these contexts and layers in five parts. Part One looks at rivers through the lens of federalism, the most important concept affecting how American governance was to be structured, and how this peculiar structure shaped river navigation and flood control. The division of water between people and groups of people in this country has been influenced by our thinking about sovereignty and property rights, the focus of Part Two. From there, Part Three focuses on our ever-evolving view of taxation—how the government will get revenue and then spend it. Along with the ability to tax comes the ability to regulate the economy, and Part Four traces the history of the changing notions of regulating a specific part of the economy—power. Finally, Part Five looks toward a hopeful future of environmental conservation by considering the nation’s evolving ideas of environmentalism.
How any society interacts with its particular environment is a product of these types of underlying ideas that shape the people in that society. These ideas are as formative in how we transform the landscape as they are in how we structure the government or regulate the economy. This book is about how our ideas have shaped the rivers of America—and how the rivers have shaped our ideas.
PART ONE
FEDERALISM
CHAPTER 1
Navigating the Republic
On September 24, 1784, George Washington was in the northwest extremes of Virginia along the west flank of the Allegheny Mountains, over two hundred miles from his home in Mount Vernon. The region was at the headwaters of the Monongahela River, which combines with the Allegheny to form the Ohio River. Throughout the previous weeks, Washington had been crisscrossing the mountainous region to check on his landholdings in the “West”—land that was to the west of the Appalachians, recently ceded to the United States as part of the Treaty of Paris. Essentially, Washington was a land speculator. Like many others in America, he had built his fortune by amassing land; and much of the land he and these other prospectors had acquired was in the western territory of the Ohio River valley. The land was enormously fertile; but without the ability to get to the land, and to get the products out easily, the land was largely worthless. Its value hinged on whether the barriers of first the Fall Line and then the more formidable Appalachians could be conquered. So Washington spent the years between his Revolutionary War victory and his presidency trying to find a way to connect the Atlantic to the Ohio River.
Washington’s motives for seeking a path through the region were not solely self-interested. He had grown increasingly concerned about the myriad complexities that the Appalachian Mountains introduced to the new republic, as had Thomas Jefferson. In 1784, Jefferson foresaw that the link to the “western country” was a key to commercial expansion of the new republic. But Jefferson was also keenly aware of the regional differences between the North and South, already present in the earliest days of the Republic. He foresaw the potential for division in the competition that would inevitably occur over which state or region would control the route through the barrier of the Appalachians, which region could capture “as large a portion as we can of this modern source of wealth and power.” Just as European powers had competed to cross the barrier of the Atlantic quickest and most efficiently to establish the hub of commerce, a geographic competition between those based along the Potomac, the Hudson, and the Mississippi was under way for access to the Ohio River. Jefferson was certain that “there would be a rivalship between the Hudson [in the North] and the Potomac [in the South] for the residue of the commerce of all the country westward of Lake Erie.”1 The race for tapping agricultural wealth to the west of the mountains was thus potentially a race between the North and the South.
Furthermore, the economic vitality of the infant United States was at stake. This economic competition was not confined to different regions of the United States; it also involved foreign powers. Commodities flowing down the Ohio to the Mississippi would pass through New Orleans, which was then under Spanish control. Those potentially being moved to the North would pass through the Great Lakes and on to the St. Lawrence River and Canada, then under British control. If the barrier of the Appalachians remained, the American Republic would be economically isolated from the burgeoning west, and European powers would claim the most fertile regions of what was then known of the continent. America would be a vast coastline with few inland opportunities, ensconced within an impenetrable mountain chain.
The peculiar geography of U.S. rivers had yet another, more subtle effect. The predominant east–west axis of rivers of the Atlantic Seaboard meant that no significant rivers passed through both Northern free states and Southern slaveholding states. Transport of goods by rivers, the predominant mode of commercial traffic at the time, was conducted within single political ideologies; in many ways, river commerce served to further divide the Republic instead of uniting it. Jefferson saw that, were a portage or canal constructed that linked the western region to New York, the North would gain commercial supremacy and the primary flow of commodities from the West would pass through only free states and on to free Britain. The unique political economy of the slaveholding South would be isolated. Binding the separate ideologies together required binding them together economically, which hinged on some north–south river navigation in addition to cross-mountain access to the West.
All of these concerns were on Washington’s mind when he made his trek out West in 1784. He traveled to the western territory in the most efficient way possible at the time: up the Potomac River as far as Cumberland, Maryland, and then by foot overland to the Ohio regions. The Potomac River crosses the Fall Line at a place called Great Falls, a description well deserved because that section of river is more like a waterfall than a rapids. Upstream of Great Falls, the Potomac is passable by boat but interspersed with rapids and difficult to navigate. Upstream of Cumberland, Washington would have had to go without boats, up and over the Appalachians, and then back into the streams and rivers of the upper Monongahela, which were no more easily passed than the upper reaches of the Potomac. It was a hard trip both on water and on land: by water meant frequently getting out and carrying the boats around the rapids; by land meant carrying all the supplies and fording the incessant rivers, streams, and creeks. Washington went by land, traveling 680 miles from September 1 to October 4, 1784.
The focus of Washington’s trip through this region was surveying, and his diary contains few impressions of the people and landscape but many cold, hard facts of geography. His record of the trip is filled with details of fording rivers and noting distances for portages:
That [portage] from the fork of Monongahela & Cheat, to the Court House at Morgan Town, is, by Water, about 11 miles, & from thence to the West fork of the former is 18 More. From thence to the carrying place between it an
d a branch of the little Kanhawa, at a place called Bullstown, is about 40 Miles, by Land—more by Water and the Navigation is good.2
At the time of this surveying trip, the 52-year-old Washington was both a rich plantation owner and a war hero. He was tall and regal—and even better, aloof. It was difficult for him to tromp around the backwoods on the edge of the Republic without drawing attention. And when he asked for opinions, he inevitably drew a crowd, as he did on a particular September night at George’s Creek on the west flank of the Appalachians. The crowd gawking at Washington was crammed into a tiny cabin—the local land agent’s office and home, it was about the size of a small college dorm room. Beyond being in awe of the general, the backwoods hunters and surveyors had gathered at Washington’s request. These were the men who knew the landscape and how to get around in it. They were at the cabin to give their opinions on the best possible routes for a portage road connecting the Potomac to the Ohio.
The group deferred to Washington, whose cold, distant demeanor and legendary reputation were well known; each man spoke only when acknowledged. The oddball of the group was a young Swiss immigrant who spoke English with a strong French accent. Like Washington himself, he was in the area to survey, searching for land that was situated where travelers must pass when—inevitably—a road was built connecting the Potomac to the Ohio. Buying such land ahead of time and in just the right place would enable him to make enormous profits. Brilliant and impetuous, the young man finally grew frustrated with both the group’s and Washington’s equivocation over possible routes. He interrupted the general to blurt out, “Oh, it is plain enough,” as he pointed to the route that would be best.
An awkward silence followed as the men in the cabin stared at the young surveyor. Washington put down his pen and, offended at being interrupted, contributed his own cold stare. But later, when discussion resumed, the general suddenly stopped and put down his pen. He turned to the Swiss immigrant and commented, simply, “You are right, sir.”3