by Martin Doyle
And make their fortune they did. They were part of a profession that was as hazardous as it was lucrative. The average life span of a steamboat in the mid-nineteenth century was typically only a few years; the combination of shoals, logs, ice, and adolescent steam power technology resulted in a constant turnover of boats and cargo. But risk and return are tightly entwined. On the particularly nasty Missouri River, it could take less than two round trips for an entrepreneur to pay off the cost of building a steamboat, so a pilot’s monthly take-home revenue was often as high as 5 to 10 percent of the total value of the boat. And a century and a half later, Howdy Duty noted that because he didn’t get a college degree, piloting a barge tow was one of the few careers that paid enough for him to afford good health care, for his wife to stay home and raise kids, and for helping their kids go to college—assuming they don’t become riverboat pilots like him or his dad.4
Likewise, any riverfront farm or plantation with a dock could count on an endless flow of steamboats passing by, all clamoring for the business of moving the goods upstream or downstream. In the alluvial empire of the Mississippi, the only investments needed were enough capital for a single steamboat for the movers and enough capital for a river dock for the buyers and sellers. The size of the rivers and the number of riverfront farms created intense competition, eliminating any potential monopoly of river commerce by a lone entrepreneur or company. And thanks to John Marshall and the Supreme Court, state governments were prohibited from sanctioning monopolies for routes along the rivers. Prices for moving goods along the rivers of the South and West were kept low by competition rather than by a canal company or a state legislature setting tolls.
America’s distinct riverine regions were differentiated not only by their technologies and economies but also by their art and literature. The art of the Hudson River School in the mid-nineteenth century was characterized by misty, pastoral, riverine landscape scenery; people appeared in corners of the paintings only to give a sense of scale or even a sense of the region’s wealth. But the art of the Mississippi region during that time was of the people, such as the paintings of flatboatmen by George Bingham. The diverse stories, phrases, and caricatures of the newly settled mid-continent were also constantly being funneled and amplified along the Mississippi River, putting young “cub” steamboat pilot Samuel Clemens in a great position to observe contemporary society.
Pilots like Clemens constantly communicated with people along the river while making their numerous stops to pick up and drop off passengers or cargo. But like Howdy Duty and Donnie Randleman 150 years later, those early pilots also learned the river and could read the boiling currents to steer clear of underwater shoals. Rather than using GPS and underwater sonar to measure depth, pilots like Clemens depended on leadsmen who poked and prodded the river with their staffs to measure depth. These leadsmen would read the river’s depth in fathoms—one fathom was called a mark. A safe depth for a steamboat, and one that a cub pilot wanted to hear the leadsmen yell out, would be two fathoms, or in the slang of 1850s rivermen, “mark twain”—an apt pen name for Samuel Clemens, an author who began his career as a steamboat pilot. Given the novelty, rambunctiousness, and enthusiastic optimism of the region, it’s no surprise that the chief satirist of the nineteenth century grew up on the banks of the Mississippi.
In the 1880s, 25 years after the real heyday of Mississippi steamboats, Mark Twain returned to the Mississippi to see the river again—and found that it had been reshaped by government, technology, and the economy. Thomas Jefferson’s Corps had begun as a slim collection of Army officers with a nebulous mission. In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton argued that the national government should be able to use the taxation mechanisms available—levies on imports, land taxes, or poll taxes5—to the degree necessary to support the functions that the national government had adopted: “A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people.” 6 Initially, the national government relied solely on taxing imports because its role was so restricted that its expenses were quite limited. Up to the 1820s, the national government had no role in river navigation.
But in 1824, the year the Erie Canal was being completed and a year after John Marshall declared the federal government the regulator in chief of interstate commerce, Congress approved a seemingly innocuous bill: “An act to improve the navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers” was the first act that inserted the federal government actively into river navigation. This bill was targeted carefully by constraining the federal government’s actions to rivers that were viewed as essential for interstate commerce. The Corps of Engineers put this legislation into action.
Following this initial toehold came a string of congressional bills, one passed every few years. Each bill gradually expanded the functions and geographic scope of the federal government over rivers, and each one was executed through the Corps of Engineers’ Mississippi River Commission.7 Twain himself was doubtful, even scornful of their ability to harness the river:
One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines 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 it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse 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.8
Despite Twain’s doubts, the Corps perpetuated its “abstruse science” to great effect. At first the Corps of Engineers followed the restraint of federal government that was envisioned in the Federalist Papers and had been typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the agency dredged an occasional bar, or straightened a meander bend here and there, but overall its work was sporadic. All the way through and after the Civil War, the federal government remained hesitant to interfere, always questioning whether a particular river project was genuinely a federal interstate issue or whether it should be left to the states.
But during the Great Depression, the nation discovered that river projects were particularly useful for absorbing labor. Any semblance of fiscal or federal government restraint, considered so essential in the era when the Federalist Papers were written, was largely abandoned. Franklin Roosevelt unleashed vast federal funds—or at least vast federal debt—in service of river navigation. Until then the federal government had gone into debt only in times of war. During the first national economic depression, triggered by the canal collapse in 1837, the federal government did nothing to bail out the economies of state governments. But a century later, during the Great Depression, the federal government inserted itself as the centerpiece of fiscal activity while states became relatively inert. Thanks to this paradigmatic shift, federal spending on rivers rose from $57 million in 1929 to over $178 million in 1937.9 River navigation projects were a preferred spending option, in part because they had long-term economic benefit and absorbed labor. The construction of Fort Peck Dam in remote Montana alone employed over 11,000 people and began a long process of harnessing the Missouri River for increased river traffic. On the Upper Mississippi River, decades of previous attempts to increase traffic had largely failed. Nevertheless, the New Deal era pumped enough funding and labor into projects that by 1940, the Upper Mississippi River had twenty-six locks and dams providing a continuous 9-foot-deep navigation channel between St. Paul and St. Louis.10
At the center of this flurry of river building was the Corps of Engineers, whose hallmark
was straightening and deepening—channelizing—rivers. Meander bends made the path for boats and barges tortuously long and increased the prevalence of hazardous sandbars and mixing currents. To increase the ease of navigation and decrease unemployment rates, channelizing rivers became a favorite project for Corps bulldozers and dredges. The agency focused much of its uniformity-loving efforts on the Lower Mississippi, which was shortened by over 150 miles; the stretch of river passing Greenville, Mississippi, alone was reduced in length from 51 to 24 miles. Nationwide, from 1936 to 1972, the Corps channelized over 11,000 miles of rivers, dramatically reshaping the riverine landscape.
The Corps didn’t stop with channelizing, and it didn’t stop when the Great Depression ended. In 1948, the Corps of Engineers was home to 200 army engineers, 9,000 civilian engineers, and 41,000 civilian employees. Half a century later, at the turn of the twenty-first century, the Corps was overseeing $62 billion worth of civil works projects and had contracted only slightly, to a workforce of 35,000—still employing more Americans than the Departments of Energy, Labor, and Education put together. And the Corps was becoming increasingly synonymous with pork barrel projects; for Corps projects authorized in 1986, at the end of the Reagan administration when funding was comparatively restrained, the greatest determinant in getting a Corps-related project funded was whether the project was located in the home state or district of a House or Senate leader. Two decades later, when the first of the twelve bills George W. Bush vetoed as president concerned funding for the Corps, both the House and Senate overrode the veto handily. They were all keen to keep federal funds flowing to their states via Corps projects.11
This history of Corps projects, and even the pork barrel elements, is not lost on Howdy Duty or Donnie Randleman. Yet each river bend removed and each upstream dam constructed to moderate downstream flows makes their task of navigating the river that much easier. Howdy has a habit of pontificating at night while piloting the Parsonage, and politics and river history are some of his favorite subjects. The themes of his monologues vary tremendously, including treatises on the efficiency of barging commodities compared to trucking them, the centrality of commercial traffic for the agricultural sector of the economy, and the political history of the United States. For his own industry, he captures a complex history concisely and accurately, if not blithely. “Congress decided a long time ago that rivers were for commerce, and that’s just the way it is. And they told the Corps to keep some of them rivers navigable for traffic like ours. And that’s the way it is. And the Corps has done a fine job on this here river. They done made this here into a fine, easy goin’ river.”
The Corps had indeed worked its hydraulic magic on the Lower Mississippi. By the twenty-first century, the Corps had mostly tamed but not conquered the Mississippi. This level of effort means the Christopher Parsonage, like other towboats, has to stop only rarely. Howdy Duty and Donnie Randleman run the river 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. As the crew often jokes, the only thing that would stop the Parsonage would be if they ran out of coffee or cigarettes. Towboat pilots spend their never-ending days and nights plying the river between the ubiquitous buoys—laid out and maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard—that mark underwater hazards, whether they are shoaling bars or the edges of infrastructure put in place by the Corps to “train” the river to be more navigable. Though largely hidden from sight, the basic federal infrastructure to keep the river navigable—rock weirs, bank protection, buoys, mile markers, dredged sandbars—is nonetheless expansive. Far upstream, in the remote reaches of the rivers that feed into the Mississippi, the Corps had decades earlier built massive reservoirs to store spring runoff and let it slowly leak out through the summer. To prevent the river from drying up in the summer, these dams release precisely calculated flows to ensure sufficient water depth for barge tows thousands of miles downstream, including those being pushed by the Parsonage.
Howdy doesn’t need to know how the weirs work or how much water the various reservoirs store. The barges pushed along by the Parsonage require 12 feet of draft, and Howdy knows that the Corps of Engineers is doing whatever it does to constantly maintain a minimum depth between the buoys. He knows that the Coast Guard is regularly measuring the river depth and moving the buoys to mark the edge of the navigable channel. The federal government is responsible not just for marking twain, but for making it less necessary for towboat pilots to do so.
Even if it goes largely unnoticed, even if it’s nearly invisible on the East Coast, with its nearly evaporated remains of the Erie Canal, river traffic is central to the national economy. Costs to move cargo by barge are shockingly low: In 2014, using the barge line of Howdy and Donnie to move a ton of grain from Minnesota to New Orleans cost just over six dollars. From Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, the cost is just over three dollars. River traffic on the primary stretches of the national waterway system has continued to increase: from 1924 to 1970, total river freight traffic grew from 34 million tons to 472 million; and by 2000, 880 million tons of freight moved over the nation’s 25,000 miles of navigable waterways. And this is not just grain moving from the Midwest to New Orleans; just as much traffic on the Lower Mississippi is carrying petroleum products. As Howdy said in one of his evening monologues aboard the Christopher Parsonage, “You can’t afford to move grain from the Midwest to New Orleans by truck, and barely by train. You gotta have rivers. And you gotta have barges.”12
Modern commercial traffic on a large river can best be seen in Natchez, Mississippi, where the character of the Mississippi changes noticeably. All along their southbound run down the Mississippi, Howdy Duty or Donnie Randleman radio to occasional oncoming towboats, coordinating how they will pass by each other. But the radio traffic aboard the Christopher Parsonage picks up in Natchez, becoming a constant background of conversation rather than an occasional call. The pilots start hearing foreign accents on the radio, and some of the first ships appear—vessels clearly not built for rivers. Along the river at Natchez, Corps of Engineers dredging barges are moored next to Coast Guard boats that are managing some of the flurry of activity. Howdy Duty becomes much less conversational in Natchez, instead focusing his attention on the constant cackle of radio negotiations to move the Parsonage around enormous oceangoing ships slowly winding their way along this deeply dredged portion of the river. By the time the Parsonage reaches New Orleans, the river is a jumbled mixture of barges, towboats, ships, grain elevators, refineries, and pipelines. Imagine a truck stop, a shopping mall parking lot, an industrial park, and a rest area all mixed together on the busiest travel day of the year; then picture everything inordinately larger and constantly in motion amid river currents, and you have an idea what New Orleans looks like from the Mississippi River.
Here, between Natchez and New Orleans, the past and present of America’s rivers started to come into focus alongside each other. As the deck crew began breaking up the Parsonage’s tow, and smaller tugs swarmed around its shrinking carcass to take the different barges upstream and downstream to various terminals or to waiting ships bound for China, Howdy Duty was already getting his paperwork in order for the trip north. Just downstream was a massive tow of empty barges, all ready and waiting to be pushed back upstream to be refilled with the products of America’s interior and then brought back to New Orleans for export.
In the 1770s, when the framers of the Constitution were interpreting its meaning and developing how it would be put into practice, ports along the Eastern Seaboard were the hubs of commerce. These rivers and ports—from Richmond on the James to Albany on the Hudson—played an essential economic role by sitting at the nexus of ocean and land and of eighteenth-century import and export. Down the rivers flowed rafts of timber or flatboats loaded with agricultural commodities of the growing farms and plantations; up the rivers moved ships carrying manufactured goods from Europe.
Howdy Duty’s mixing of barges and ships in New Orleans is likewise the mixture of land and ocean—the twenty-first-century equiva
lent of mixing colonial era river flatboats and ocean schooners. The Mississippi River in New Orleans is, as envisioned in Federalist No. 2, an integrator of America. The mixing of drawls and twangs occurs because the work of moving commerce draws together citizens in a way that is inherently necessary. It is a starting point for binding separate peoples into an imperfect, yet potentially coherent nation.
CHAPTER 3
The Rise of the Levees
You can drive the two hundred miles of the Mississippi delta from Vicksburg, Mississippi, to Memphis, Tennessee, in two ways. Highway 3 skirts the eastern edge of the delta, riding along the edge through kudzu-covered, silty-clayey rolling hills. To the west, Highway 1 dives straight into the flatness of the delta. There are no rises and falls along Highway 1 and no topography in the seventy-mile-wide delta save for a single hill running parallel to the Mississippi River. This is the levee—the only geographic feature standing between the Mississippi River and 7,000 square miles of perfectly flat, fertile farmland.
Levees are the blunt instrument of flood control. In its simplest form, a levee is just a small mound of earth piled up along a river, providing an extra foot or two of elevation that may be just enough to keep the river confined to its channel during a flood. But at their grandest, levees are carefully planned, engineered, and managed infrastructures on which entire cities, regions, and economies depend for survival. In the Mississippi delta, miles upon miles of levees run along every major and minor tributary, swamp, and slough.