Description
In 1682, a Frenchman stood knee-deep in Louisiana mud and claimed half a continent for a king who would never see it. His audience: twenty-three unwashed explorers, eighteen bewildered guides, and forty million mosquitoes. The river he claimed had been carving its path to the sea for seventy million years. It didn't notice. This episode tells the story of the Mississippi—the spine of a continent, the force that made America possible. It begins in deep time, when meltwater from mile-thick glaciers carved the valley that would become the highway of empire. We visit Cahokia, the pre-Columbian city of twenty thousand that rivaled medieval London, built on the river's abundance and abandoned centuries before Europeans arrived. We paddle downstream with Marquette and Jolliet in 1673, watching a Jesuit priest and a fur trader become the first Europeans to document the upper Mississippi. Then La Salle claims it all for France. Napoleon sells it for fifteen million dollars to fund wars that will destroy him. Jefferson doubles his country overnight without firing a shot. Steamboats transform the river into the interstate highway of the nineteenth century—and kill ten thousand passengers in boiler explosions along the way. We follow Grant's campaign to split the Confederacy by seizing Vicksburg, the fortress that controlled the river and the war. We watch Mark Twain learn to read the water as a riverboat pilot, then turn that education into the literature that defined American prose. We trace the Great Flood of 1927, when the river broke every levee from Cairo to the Gulf and displaced nearly a million people—transforming federal disaster policy forever. We stand inside Old River Control Structure, where the Army Corps of Engineers fights daily to prevent the Mississippi from abandoning New Orleans entirely by switching to the Atchafalaya. The river was here before us. It will be here long after. And the story of how it shaped a nation—its commerce, its wars, its literature, its politics—is the story of America itself, told through muddy water and geological time.