The Big Muddy: An Environmental History of the Mississippi and Its Peoples from Hernando de Soto to Hurricane Katrina

Abstract

This is a small book about a big topic: the vast marshlands that spread out to form the Mississippi River valley in the five-hundred-year period from the time Hernando de Soto arrived to find native peoples surviving off the wetlands of the region through the fateful summer of 2005 when Hurricane Katrina momentarily returned the lower part of the valley to its more aqueous ancestral roots. Elegantly written, The Big Muddy is a sweeping environmental history of a famous river told with an eye toward the relationship between water and land—the story, that is, “of how Europeans and their American descendants dried one of the world's greatest natural wetlands” (p. 1). The French began this process in earnest with the introduction of rice cultivation, which gave the colonists a toehold in the valley. Eventually, the French built the first levees, separating water from land and transforming the marshlands in the process. The French had a very Manichaean view of the environment, boldly separating land and water in their minds. The Americans who followed felt similarly about the landscape. In the nineteenth century, the Mississippi Valley was reclaimed for agriculture with floodwalls that brought progress to the region. As the levees built with slave labor went up, however, the prospects for severe flooding increased, a point underscored in 1849 when rising water drove perhaps as many as twelve thousand New Orleans residents from their homes. As the land changed, so did the species that survived off the land. The clearing of forests and the reclamation of wetlands led to the disappearance of deer and turkey, but quail, beaver, and otters survived nicely in the newly created environment.