Rivers of History: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama by Harvey H. Jackson III

Abstract

626 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE proud of their skill in the service of the public. Whether all this was wish fulfillment on the part ofmothers and other female storytellers and readers, subordinate to male power, may be questioned. These tales do remind us that writers’ responses to technology have been as varied as the technologies themselves. Alex Keller Dr. Keller teaches the history of science at the University of Leicester. He has written numerous articles on the mechanical technologies of the 16th century, and is the author of The Infancy ofAtomicPhysics: Hercules in His Cradle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). Rivers ofHistory: Life on the Coosa, Tallapoosa, Cahaba, and Alabama. By Harvey H.Jackson III. Tuscaloosa: University ofAlabama Press, 1995. Pp. xiii+300; illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (paper). In Rivers of History Harvey Jackson offers a wonderful portrait of life along the Alabama river system and how it changed over the centuries as human actions altered the rivers. While Jackson deals more directly with the consequences of those actions than with the reasons for them, Rivers ofHistory does suggest a number ofquestions in which historians of technology ought to be interested. Jackson’s narrative begins in the mid-16th century with the arrival of the Spanish in Alabama. He quickly describes how first the Span­ ish and then the French, the British, and finally the Americans in­ vaded the region and gradually toppled what had been thriving In­ dian civilizations. The War of 1812 ultimately decided the question of American ownership of the area, and following the conflict peo­ ple poured into Alabama. Settlers came mostly from neighboring Southern states, and they broughtwith them the practices and preju­ dices of the region’s burgeoning cotton economy, including slavery and the plantation system of agriculture. As in the eastern states, water transportation, especially steamboats, played the critical role in allowing cotton to find its way to market. As a result, population tended to concentrate along the rivers, but in such a way that settle­ ment remained fairly diffuse throughout the region. Most planters conducted their business with merchants in remote cities such as Mobile and New Orleans, leaving local river towns such as Montgom­ ery, Selma, and Wetumptka to struggle commercially. The coming of the railroads would eventually alter that picture, but the process was a gradual one. Jackson describes several early schemes to promote rail transportation in Alabama, but he points out that boosters usually intended such efforts to enhance the move­ ment of goods along the rivers, not to replace it. AsJackson argues, “Alabama’s rivers werejust too good” (p. 118). It was often cheaper technology and culture Book Reviews 627 to keep the river channels clear of snags than it was to finance even a small-scale railroad. But the shift away from steamboats and toward railroads contin­ ued in the decades following the Civil War, part of a larger transfor­ mation in the economic character of the region that also involved a reexamination of what Alabama’s rivers could provide local resi­ dents. Rather than seeing the rivers solely in terms oftransportation, a growing number of entrepreneurs began to view them as sources of power for manufacturing and industry and eventually as a means of generating electricity. “Where once railroads had been built to carry commerce to the rivers,” Jackson notes, “now the rivers were being improved to bring goods to the railroads” (p. 150). By the end of the 19th century, local residents were enlisting the aid of the federal government in order to construct ever larger improvements on the river, efforts which culminated in the 20th century with the construction of a series of large-scale dams. The dams provided the region with improved navigation, hydroelectricity, flood control, and recreational opportunities—in short, a substantially improved quality of life—but their construction also reduced the rivers to a series of connected pools, a transformation which affected not only the ecology of the rivers, but also the character of the region itself. Jackson’s poignant description captures both the triumph and the tragedy of this transformation, and it raises two important questions for historians of technology. First, how did the alteration of Ala...