The Davenport environmental non-profit River Action held its Upper Mississippi River Conference this week (Oct. 16-17th) at Western Illinois University in Moline, overlooking the mighty river.
The two-day conference included panels, excursions to the Nahant Marsh, and keynote speakers. One of the keynote speakers is author Boyce Upholt.
Upholt's relationship with the Mississippi River began 15 years ago when he moved from the suburbs of Connecticut to Mississippi.
"And lived in Mississippi quite close to the river for a long time without thinking about it. And then for a journalism assignment went out with a canoe guide who takes people out there," Upholt said in an interview with WVIK News. "And was blown away by how beautiful the Mississippi River is down in Mississippi. And got sort of obsessed with that space and just wanted to keep going back there. So I did that. Found more and more journalism assignments as excuses to spend time on the river. And I grew over time into this account of the entire watershed."
His account of the entire watershed is cataloged in his book, "The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi," released in 2024.
Upholt, in 2017, canoed from the bottom of the Missouri River in St. Louis out into the Gulf of Mexico, taking over six weeks. An experience he noted lowered his blood pressure. His excursions continued with biologists, engineers and residents near the river.
He describes the Mississippi as a "weirdly lost river." His book summarizes thousands of years of the river changing, its relationship with Indigenous People, and later white settlers who viewed the river as something they could control.
"I think in our modern society that is, you know, heavily derived from this sort of white settler culture, you might call it. We tend to think of the river as something that we want to tame and control and get what we want out of it and remove the parts of it we don't like, get rid of its floods and things like that," Upholt said.
A part of the book delves into Indian mounds called earthworks, a term Upholt borrows from scholar Chadwick Allen. According to Upholt, these earthworks are scattered across the continent, usually near water, and have a large presence around the Mississippi River. On page 50, Upholt describes these man-made creations, "...Indigenous people carefully arranged soils into monumental constructions: pyramids and cones and hillocks, embankments and enclosures...earthworks, a juxtaposition of "'grounded earth [and] dynamic works"'...emphasizes the labor and thought required."
Founding fathers like Thomas Jefferson viewed these earthworks as mysterious, with many Americans thinking the construction was done by Egypatians, Welshmen, or anyone but the Indigenous population that called the continent home for thousands of years. Unfortunately, as America grew, most earthworks were destroyed for agriculture and town development.
Settlers, businessmen, and the American military morphed the Mississippi into what it is today. Over the decades, dredging the river, removing fallen trees, and blowing rock beds have been common. However, transportation shifted in the nineteenth century with rail expansion in America.
Upholt says the steamboat era was brief from its maturity in the 1820s into the 1850s. At the same time, trains could move more cargo quickly. In 1856, one of the first bridges expanding to the west was in Davenport, Iowa, which was hit by a steamboat. The captain went to court to receive damages and to remove the entire bridge. However, the bridge company had a young, persuasive lawyer on their side.
"And so Abraham Lincoln wound up being the lawyer who is defending the railroad company in that in the resulting lawsuit, which is an interesting thing because Lincoln himself, you know, years earlier had floated down the Mississippi River on what was called a flatboat," Upholt said. "He was taking his farm goods down to New Orleans. And so he lived through multiple eras of the Mississippi River. He actually also was part of the Illinois militia that fought against Blackhawk, who's from right around here in the Quad Cities. And so it was symbolic to me of how quickly things were changing. In that era that then, you know, Lincoln was then representing this idea of change and progress and argued, you know, we need these railroads because the country is unfurling west. And that was a really transformational moment for the river, I think, because that's when the forgetting began. People kind of abandoned the river. There were less passengers out there and we lost sight of what it really is."
The jury, 9-3, voted against the bridge company, and shortly after, Congress moved the question of dismantling the bridge to the judiciary. In 1862, in the middle of a Civil War, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to keep the bridge intact.
Over 160 years later, the Mississippi still sends cargo, corn, and soybeans down its waterways. However, the list expands to include agricultural runoff, including nutrients, PFAS chemicals, microplastics, and animal waste. All of these pollutants are threatening not only the river ecosystems but human health, too. Upholt says it is hard to predict what these ecosystems will look like.
"This idea that the river is a being like us and a being that deserves respect, that maybe deserves rights and that we need to think about the best way to live alongside a river like the Mississippi that is so big and so flood-prone is to respect it as that fellow being and say, what do you want and what do you need? And giving space for that," Upholt said. "And so I, as I think about the future of the Mississippi River, a lot is going to have to change in the coming years because of climate change, because of new flood patterns. And I think we would do well to consider that point of view, because I think, you know, people who lived alongside this river for thousands of years have probably figured some things out that those of us whose ancestors have been here for a shorter period of time might want to know."
Upholt understands that sentiment. He resides in New Orleans, Louisiana. The land beneath his feet is only four thousand years old, thanks to the Mississippi River pushing mud and sediment into the Gulf of Mexico.
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