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30 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

Reckoning with “the Crookedest River in the

World”: The Maps of Harold Norman Fisk

CHRISTOPHER MORRIS

“A man’s first thought, in looking at a map of the Mississippi River,

naturally, is that its numerous bends are defects and it would be better with-
out them.” But not so fast, the Congressman from Greenville, Mississippi
continued. By extending its bends, only to cut them off, and then make new
ones in a continuous cycle, “the river is engaged in the constant effort to find
some equilibrium between its velocity and the resisting power of the banks.”
For Representative Ben Humphreys, who spent two decades in the House
working on the matter of flood control in the Mississippi Valley, the meanders
and cutoffs were natural, even beautiful, and they needed to be protected.
Disturb them, and the entire equilibrium of the river would be upset, and
then valley residents would see floods like they had never seen before. Not
all agreed, as Humphreys well knew. He noted that former president Ruth-
erford Hayes, upon appointing the first Mississippi River Commission, had
said “that he supposed the first thing the commission would do would be to
take some of the kinks out of the river” (130). How to represent the bends
in the Mississippi River was a subject of much debate among engineers and
river scientists over the course of the twentieth century.
The Mississippi River, declared Mark Twain, is “the crookedest river
in the world” (21). “If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your
shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section” of the river
(205). This crookedest river was also fickle. It never stayed in one place, but
continually shifted right or left, jumping its banks, cutting through its bends,
playing havoc with the efforts of property owners and state officials to es-
tablish permanent boundaries. Twain loved to tell stories of towns buried or
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 31

abandoned by the river when it abruptly altered course, and of men going to
sleep on one side of the river in one state and awakening on the other side
in another state.
Crooks and course changes left the land alongside the river littered with
oxbow lakes, the remains of abandoned river bends. “It occasionally hap-
pens that the river cuts off a long bend by a short channel across its neck,”
observed Robert Taylor, “forming deep, clear, crescent-shaped lakes. There
are many such lakes in the valley, some of them now several miles from the
river” (37). Full of fish and snakes, the lakes became part of the Mississippi
Valley geographical and cultural riverscape. In North Toward Home, Missis-
sippi writer Willie Morris contrasted them with the lake reservoirs of Texas,
where he attended college. The oxbow lakes along the big river were “real
lakes, of a piece with the raw heavy earth that enveloped them.” They were
full of foreboding. Morris told an oft-repeated tale, of a water skier who falls
into one murky lake and dies a most gruesome, southern death (75). In Ellen
Douglas’s version of the same story, we learn that

The young girl’s lovely face is contorted with pain. Barbed

wire, she gasps. I’m caught in barbed wire. But there isn’t
any barbed wire. No. It’s a writhing, tangled mass of water
moccasins. (130-31)

The Mississippi River’s bends and lakes, and the levees that in the
twentieth century separated river and lakes, present and past, are as iconic of
the South as Spanish moss and kudzu. The meander zone, as the crookedest
portion of the river is known, begins at the Indian mounds on Dog Tooth
Bend in southern Illinois and ends at Jackson Square in the Crescent City.
The meanders become wilder, more erratic as the river flows deeper into the
former Confederacy. Or, at least, the river used to become wilder the farther
south it flowed, until the Army Corps of Engineers got ahold of it. Federal
authority of river navigation and flood control brought dollars and highly
educated personnel into small, impoverished southern towns, transforming
places such as Vicksburg, Mississippi, headquarters (Figure 1) for the Mis-
sissippi River Commission (MRC) and the Waterways Experiment Station
(WES) (Fatherree). Taming the river made the Corps as iconic as the river
itself. Atop the bluff at Vicksburg, in a Gothic Revival building at 1400
Walnut Street, across from city hall, sits the Mississippi River Commission
building, home to the United States Army Corps of Engineers, Mississippi
Valley Division. Looking west through a third floor window, one can see
the Mississippi River a mile and a half away, Centennial Lake, which is a
portion of a former river bend and what remains of the river from when it
32 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

Figure 1
The Mississippi River Commission building, Vicksburg. Image courtesy of the US
Army Corps of Engineers (Engineer Research and Development Center. Coastal &
Hydraulics Laboratory).

used to flow past the city, and the Yazoo River Diversion Canal, which is
the Corps’ effort to re-attach that former crook, and Vicksburg, to the fickle
Mississippi River.
The southern portion of the Mississippi River—the South’s portion of
the river—including the lakes that recall its former self and the levees that
keep it from ever being what it was once—is a very different river from
its northern half. The South’s Mississippi moves more slowly and broadly
over a flatter slope to the sea, and it carries more sediment. Together, flow,
slope, and sediment are responsible for the meanders, cut-offs, and oxbows
that have made a unique environment of lakes, swamps, and bottomland
hardwood forests.
In 1879, Mississippi River Commission navigation charts indicated
about one hundred bends in the river between the mouth of the Ohio River
and Donaldsonville, Louisiana. In 1944, there were about 80 bends in the
same stretch of the Mississippi. Although cut-offs—some natural and some
the result, intended or not, of human engineering—had reduced the number
of meanders quite substantially, the Mississippi River remained crooked.
Over the same period, drainage efforts reduced the number of lakes, which
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 33

though enjoyed by fishers and water skiers often sat on potential farm land,
from around sixty to about forty. Many lakes still bear names that recall their
former status as bends in the Mississippi River: Crescent, Long, Horseshoe,
Cut-Off, and Old River.
The best accounting of the crookedness of the Mississippi is in the
charts drawn by or for the Mississippi River Commission, and in particular,
the illustrations completed as part of a report by Louisiana State University
geologist Harold Norman Fisk for the MRC (Figures 2-4, following). Fisk
documented not only the existing bends in the river, but every bend that ever
existed over the last several thousand years of the river’s dynamic life. In
his series of illustrations, completed in 1944 and titled Ancient Courses of
the Mississippi River, each stream, each zig and zag, each twist in the cork-
screw, appears in bright color, illustrating a river more crooked than even
Twain knew. So eye-catching are Fisk’s images that they have become web
site back grounds, computer screen savers, and dorm room posters. They
have inspired artists and informed conservationists, both of whom see in the
images an organic or natural river that transcends or defies human engineering.
Rivers, argued Fisk, are complex systems that, unless disturbed, move
over time toward a simpler state of equilibrium, the point at which the tension
between the force of the river as it runs downhill and the resistance offered
by the land over which it runs reaches a constant state. Ben Humphreys had
explained the Mississippi’s crookedness in terms of equilibrium. For Fisk,
the meanders indicated a state of equilibrium not yet obtained. The last great
disturbance to shake the Mississippi, Fisk believed, occurred at the end of
the Pleistocene Epoch, when the melting of the Wisconsin Glacier sent
torrents of water down the valley in several streams. At the same time, sea
levels began to rise, eventually over four hundred feet, which shortened the
river and reduced its grade in its southern stretch. However, over the last ten
thousand years, the river settled, more or less, into its current, crooked path
to the sea. The many meanders, which Fisk so meticulously mapped, and
which give the appearance of a river in perpetual motion, were intended to
illustrate a river winding down, as it were, the shifting streams like a clock
pendulum swinging left to right to left, more slowly and in shorter arcs with
each swing, until it hangs straight down. That was Fisk’s prediction, that bar-
ring a new disturbance, the river would eventually run, if not straight down
to the sea, then in a steady, curvilinear stream. His maps were not intended
to portray movement; they predicted stasis (Fisk, Geological Investigation
of the Alluvial Valley).
The concept of natural systems as tending toward equilibrium was widely
held by natural scientists in the early twentieth century. Frederic Clements
and other forest ecologists first developed the idea as part of their theory of
34 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

Figure 2
Ancient Courses of the Mississippi River, Plate 22, Sheet 9, Showing a section of the Green-
ville Bends region that was straightened in the 1930s with three engineered cutoffs. The
maps have yellowed over time. In this image, the paper has been digitally restored to its
original white, which has the effect of making the most recent course of the river stand out,
which was Fisk’s intention. The area bounded by the black box is enlarged on the next page.
Image courtesy of the US Army Corps of Engineers (Engineer Research and Development
Center. Engineering Geology and Geophysics branch).
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 35

Figure 3
Detail of Figure 2, showing a 1930s cutoff.

Figure 4
Map legends.
36 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

forest succession, according to which undisturbed forests passed through

successive stages of growth, eventually reaching a stable and permanent cli-
max stage. Clements played a major role in the establishment of ecology as a
distinct discipline. His own degree was in botany, whose practitioners tended
to abstract plants from their environmental context. Clements began to think
instead about the relationship of organisms to environment while studying
the causes and effects of disturbances such as drought and overgrazing on
the plains of Nebraska during the 1890s, years of dust and depression that
may have been just a great as those of the 1930s. As he formulated theories
that would help establish ecology as a science, he also began to think of
how ecology might permit better human control of nature. Clements was an
early advocate of scientific management of natural resources, ways in which
scientists could manipulate natural systems without disturbing their equilib-
rium. His influence spread into other disciplines within the natural sciences.
Concepts of equilibrium and disturbance were new to the field of geology
when Harold Fisk used them to make sense of the Mississippi River. Fisk was
a young man in 1935, when he first went to work for the Louisiana Geologi-
cal Survey. Born and raised in Oregon, with a doctorate from the University
of Cincinnati, he had up to that time devoted his work to understanding the
formation of the Cascade Range and the Columbia Plateau. What he knew
about the South he learned from his Alabama-born wife. The Survey gave
him his first opportunity to learn about the Mississippi River. His published
reports on several Louisiana Parishes near the confluence of the Mississippi,
Red, and Atchafalaya rivers soon brought him to the attention of some of the
engineers in Vicksburg.
In the 1930s, the Corps’ Mississippi Valley Division was caught up in
a heated internal debate over the wisdom and feasibility of restructuring the
river, principally by cutting off bends and straightening the channel. Since
the mid-nineteenth century, the Corps had opposed cutoffs, on the grounds
that they destabilized the river. In an influential article published in Science in
1904, Harvard student and future Yale geologist, Isaiah Bowman, discussed
the effects of the earth’s rotation on the mechanics of large, meandering rivers,
in which he referred to their habit of cutting through bends as “disturbances”
that affected stream patterns (274). In 1910, Robert S. Taylor of the Missis-
sippi River Commission claimed that many of the bends had “until recently,
maintained through their graceful curves their even flow and a good channel.
But the inevitable cycle of change has overtaken them.” The caving bends
are “a picture of what will take place in bend after bend in the Mississippi
River if that lawless stream is allowed to have its way.” Cutoffs had to be
prevented at each bend from Cairo to New Orleans, no matter the expense,
or else they “would introduce such a violent disturbance in the river that the
bends would all go one after another very quickly, and with all those bends
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 37

cut out there would be chaos in that part of the river for half a century or more
to come” (Taylor 532; Humphreys 131). For both Bowman and Taylor, large
meandering rivers such as the Lower Mississippi River inevitably reached
equilibrium, at which point they ceased to shift and change course. Cut-offs
disturbed this state of equilibrium, which might require years, half a century
or more in Taylor’s estimation, to settle. As a member of the Mississippi
River Commission, Taylor encouraged the Corps of Engineers to shore up
bends and prevent cut-off “disturbances.”
Fear of cutoffs was consistent with the Corps’ “levees only” policy of
navigation improvement and flood control, which had been in place since the
mid nineteenth century. However, the great 1927 flood called that policy into
question. In April of that year, the Mississippi River, swollen with rain water
and snow melt, broke through levees in several places. Below New Orleans,
engineers dynamited a section of levee to relieve pressure on the one at New
Orleans. By the end of the month water inundated 26,000 square miles and
displaced over one million refugees. It was, and by some measures remains,
the nation’s greatest natural disaster (Barry).
In 1928, Congress appropriated funds for the reconstruction of the
levees, including the section intentionally blown at Caernarvon, and
committed itself to a new long-term project, known as the Mississippi
River and Tributaries Project, or Project Flood, which revised the levees-
only approach. The MRC agreed to build the Bonnet Carré Spillway in
Louisiana and the Bird’s Point-New Madrid Floodway in Missouri, which
could be used to ease flood pressure on the levees and thereby facilitate
continued reliance on them. Eventually, engineers added a third spillway, at
Morganza, Louisiana. For some, spillways signaled the end of the levees-
only policy. However, while it is true that the engineers began to incorporate
more devices than just levees into their system of river control, they were
not intended to replace levees, but rather, to make them more effective.
New, bigger, stronger levees were central to Project Flood, and the levee
line was to be extended north to Cape Girardeau. It was within this context,
of reconsidering how best to structure the river so as to make levees more
secure and effective, that some engineers began to reevaluate longstanding
policy against cutoffs.
For at least a decade before the 1927 flood, engineers had been watching
Yucatan Bend, where the Big Black River entered the Mississippi River below
Vicksburg (US Army Corps of Engineers 3729). In the summer of 1928, the
bend abruptly began to erode along its upriver and downriver sides. Following
policy, engineers hastily but half-heartedly installed a revetment. When the
revetment failed that winter and the river turned across what had once been
Yucatan Plantation, engineers curiously watched to see what would happen
next. The concern was that the river’s new channel would be shallow, which
38 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

would disrupt navigation and alter flood patterns unpredictably, perhaps di-
sastrously. However, measurements soon indicated that the river had in short
order cut a channel eighteen feet deep and was still cutting, which indicated
that the new channel would be permanent.
One engineer, Colonel Harley Ferguson, took note of the Yucatan cut and
drafted a plan that called for engineered cutoffs as a method of flood control
and navigation improvement. The argument in favor of cutoffs held that a
straighter, shorter, faster-flowing river would cut a deeper channel, which
would benefit navigation, and rush floodwaters to the gulf before they could
back up and overtop embankments. Those opposed cautioned that cutoffs,
even if not catastrophic, could affect the river’s behavior in crucial ways no
one could predict, by altering embankment stability, water velocity, sediment
load and deposition, and generally upsetting the river’s equilibrium. Sandbars
could appear unexpectedly, blocking riverboats and diverting water onto
adjacent plantations. Unpredictable river behavior interfered with plans to
situate, construct, and maintain levees. The whole point of cutoffs, as with
spillways, had to be to make levees work better (Camillo 142-45; Winkley 3).
In June, 1932, Ferguson became MRC president. Two days after taking
office, he gathered his engineers before a map of a section of the Missis-
sippi River between Memphis and Vicksburg. He drew a center line down
the river, through several bends, and indicated the narrow right-of-way in
which the river could gently sway, but would not be permitted to meander.
He then instructed his team to commence work. Many of the engineers had
their doubts about their new boss’s plan. Tests completed at the Waterways
Experiment Station in Vicksburg remained inconclusive on the costs and
benefits of cutoffs. Nevertheless, Ferguson initiated a program that over the
next decade resulted in sixteen cutoffs in the Greenville Bends region be-
tween Memphis and Natchez. These were the same bends that Robert Taylor,
just twenty years earlier, had warned could if cutoff trigger a disruption so
disastrous that the river would need a half century for recovery. Ferguson’s
cutoffs caused no such disaster, and yet, questions remained and skeptics
continued to ask them. After Ferguson’s more cautious successor, Max Tyler
(Figure 5), attended a presentation given by Fisk in Vicksburg, it seemed the
engineers had found the man who could provide some answers (Winkley 15).
Like the engineers, Fisk was interested in human control of nature. His
work for the Corps was intended from the beginning to help solve the prob-
lem of flood control, principally through deep understanding of the river’s
meandering ways. The Mississippi was a “poised” stream, he concluded, by
which he meant it neither degraded nor aggraded. “The poised condition,”
he wrote, “implies that a general overall equilibrium exists between the
major factors controlling river activity.” Regarding cutoffs, Fisk concluded
that they resulted from “excessive meandering” and were the river’s means
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 39

Figure 5
Left to right: Dr. H.N. Fisk, Brigadier General Max C. Tyler, R.J. LeBlanc, R.H. Smith,
and W.J. Hendy, Jr. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1942. Image courtesy of the US Army
Corps of Engineers (Engineer Research and Development Center. Geotechnical and
Structures Laboratory).

of self-correction. “Irregularities in migration often result in the formation

of a distorted or abnormal meander and eventually lead to the cut-off of the
meander loop.” After successive cut-offs, “the river position becomes es-
tablished” between oxbow lakes, which eventually fill with clay and which
resist further meanders. Channel migration becomes “localized to a zone of
decreasing width,” until it “becomes so narrow that meander loops can no
longer develop.” The end result of the crookedest river would be a straight
river. This was good news for the engineers. “From the standpoint of flood
control and navigation,” Fisk concluded, “this channel is the best that has
existed in the history of the alluvial valley.” By best, he meant most stable,
least likely to change. Build levees and the river will not run through them.
Initiate cutoffs, and engineers would only be doing what the river would do
on its own and in its own time (Fisk, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial
Valley 44, 50, 51, 56).
For scientists, engineers, and river commissioners of the early twentieth
century, disturbances were outside intrusions upon a river system tending
toward equilibrium. The object of interest for scientists like Fisk was that
ultimate state of equilibrium. It was up to the engineers to maintain that state.
Levees and cutoffs would keep the river from disturbing the course of human
life in the Mississippi Valley. Equilibrium would be maintained by confin-
ing the river to a straight and narrow channel apart from its floodplain. “It
40 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

should be noted,” Fisk warned, “that although the river is poised, its alluvial
valley is being slowly aggraded by the deposition of fine-grained sediments
in floodwater basins” (Fisk, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley
5). Not all geological activity had reached equilibrium. The “filling of the
alluvial valley is still in progress,” and quoting from an influential study of
the Yellow River, Fisk concluded that this was yet another process “which
continues on and on until eventually a certain equilibrium is reached,” when
“the slope of the plain has become sufficiently steep to enable the river . . .
to carry all the silt as far as the sea.” (Fisk, Geological Investigation of the
Atchafalaya 94; Todd and Eliassen). Levees and cutoffs would immediately
achieve the very state of equilibrium toward which river and valley were
slowly but naturally progressing. Engineers would do now what nature would
do anyway in due course.
Engineered cutoffs seemed to work to improve navigation and flood con-
trol, even though at several places they required regular and costly dredging to
keep them open. Indeed, dredging at Yucatan began in 1938, while Ferguson’s
cutoff program was still under way (Winkley 2). Norman Fisk declared that
the cutoffs had successfully steepened the river’s grade and prevented “ex-
cessive meandering.” (Fisk, Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley
44). The Mississippi reached dangerous heights in 1944, 1945, and 1950,
but didn’t flood. Levees and cutoffs had apparently solved the problem of
flood control. Concluded one summary of twentieth-century engineering of
the Mississippi River, “Construction of long radius channels that reduce the
overall curvature of river bends, in combination with engineered cutoffs of
large meanders, have modified the channel alignment and made the river
more efficient for navigation. River cutoffs were designed to ensure that the
artificial channel shape, size, slope, and alignment were adequate to allow
the cutoff to evolve naturally with the discharge of the river. The result is
a shorter river, with higher average velocities and self-scouring channels”
(Alexander 9). Major floods in 1973 and 1993 would bring reconsideration
of a century of engineering.
There were some unforeseen consequences of cutoffs, perhaps the most
significant of which was that the increased velocity of flow in a straighter,
narrower river encouraged the development of deeper draught barges moved
by high-powered diesel towboats with screw propellers (Winkley 11). In the
early twentieth century the steam powered paddlewheel riverboats designed
to navigated shallow waters full of snags and shifting bars were beginning
to disappear from the Mississippi River, primarily from competition with
railroads. During the world wars, when demand for transportation pushed
the capacity of the nation’s railroads, steamboats began to make a return.
However, large barges pushed by towboats could better take advantage of
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 41

the river’s deeper channel and more easily power their way against a stiff
current. The success of barges in turn encouraged the Corps to begin to main-
tain a navigation channel that was twelve feet deep, further encouraging the
development and use of high-powered towboats and high-volume barges. By
1955, steam paddle-wheelers, some of which had had names that recalled
a crooked river, such as the Belle of the Bends, were gone, a few museum
pieces notwithstanding, and yet the tonnage of freight moved by tow and
barge was far greater than at any time during the steamboat era.
The Mississippi, where adventure is “Waiting round the bend,” exists in
romantic memory, which maintains its hold in large part precisely because
today’s Mississippi River is cut off from American life. Other than a few
city parks, at St. Louis, Memphis, and New Orleans, and what smaller towns
remain in between—most have disappeared with the steamboat trade—access
to the river is difficult if not impossible. Most Americans glimpse it from
the air and from interstate highway bridges. It rolls on behind levees and a
swampy tree line with a volume and force that makes it more dangerous than
ever to any but the most skilled small boaters and canoeists. It enters the
nation’s consciousness when it floods, which it still does, though not nearly
so often. The rest of the time, it remains out of sight.
Oxbow lakes are no longer made by the river’s crooked, fickle ways.
They sit, often on the dry side of the levee, where they fill with silt and ag-
ricultural chemicals, which make the fish they still hold dangerous to eat.
Before the levees, lakes slowly filled with silt, and as they did, the river made
new cutoffs and new lakes that truly were “of a piece with the raw heavy
earth that enveloped them.” Willie Morris was wrong about his lakes, which
in truth were more of a piece with the river’s engineering. By the end of the
twentieth century, conservation groups pleaded for the lives of lakes.
In 1992 the National Research Council Committee on Restoration
of Aquatic Ecosystems identified Reelfoot Lake, Tennessee, as a lake of
national significance that was, in the committee’s word, “impaired.” Agri-
cultural expansion in the vicinity of the lake had hastened sedimentation,
reducing the lake to one quarter its original size, while chemical fertilizers
in runoff caused excessive weed and algae growth, which reduced levels
of dissolved oxygen and harmed fish populations. Fewer fish meant fewer
herons and egrets. Agricultural pesticides harmed ospreys and bald eagles.
“Rough plants dominate” and “nuisance plants are proliferating,” reported
environmental scientists, who concluded that “The lake will soon become
marshland.” This was bad news for the economy of this poor, rural region,
which stood to lose ten million dollars annually spent by boaters and sport
fishers from Memphis, Nashville, and southern Illinois. Restoration of the
lake would require changes in area land management and an investment of
42 SOUTHERN QUARTERLY

tens of millions of dollars (Water Science and Technology Board 91; Duda
and Johnson 820; Tennessee State Parks).
What the authors of the study did not note was that the state to which they
sought to restore Reelfoot existed only in fantasy. Of concern to the Com-
mittee on Restoration of Aquatic Ecosystems was the silting-in of the lake.
Silting is a natural process of lakes on the Mississippi floodplain. Portions
of Reelfoot sit in an old river meander that had once been lake but which
long ago filled with silt, until the earthquakes in 1811 and 1812 dammed the
Reelfoot River to make it into lake once again. Of course, the driving force
for restoration was not concern for fish and water fowl populations, but the
local economy. Reelfoot Lake will one day be “too shallow for recreational
purposes” (Water Science and Technology Board 91).
Inspiration for restoration efforts at Reelfoot could be found at several
other riverside lakes popular with sport fishers. Moon Lake was created by
a cutoff late in the eighteenth century. At the time of the Civil War, a small
channel connected the lake to the Mississippi River, and kept the lake from
silting (Wilson 377). In the early twentieth century Moon Lake developed
into a prime fishing spot, with Mississippi paddlefish among those most
prized by fishers, both sport and commercial. However, once levees cut the
lake off from the river, it began to fill with silt, which would have happened
in any case, except that by the 1990s there was much community demand
for lake restoration, much of which has been met (Tetra Tech, Inc.). A sim-
ilar history has unfolded at Eagle Lake, near Vicksburg, formed in 1866
when the Mississippi River cut across Eagle Bend. A portion of the original
lake has filled with silt, but what remains is carefully managed. The lake
is protected by levees and controlled streams. In this manner, lake water
is kept relatively clear of silt, in the interest of sport fishing and real estate
development (Gentry).
The crookedest river is no more. Many of its meanders remain as lakes,
but they too are disappearing, except where engineering has intervened. If
they go, there will be no new lakes to replace them. All this is good or bad
depending on perspective. A controlled river is good for farmers. It is not so
good for sportsmen, unless they can engineer ways to keep agricultural run-
off from filling their favorite fishing holes. The greatest and most successful
cutoff has been the one imposed by the levees, which have severed the river
from the land and from the lakes that recall a time when river and land freely
mixed, a time that exists now only in the collective American imagination. It
turns out that the story of a water skier’s death from snakebite is apocryphal.
There is no evidence that it ever happened. The tale is part of a myth of a wild
Mississippi conjured up as the lakes and the river became a managed system,
as floods became manageament problems, and as the health of recreational
lakes became design problems.
 VOL. 52, NO. 3 (SPRING 2015) 43

When the Army Corps of Engineers recently made available through

their website all of Harold Fisk’s maps, almost immediately they began to
appear across the internet. The International Cartographic Association de-
clared the map to be

a perfect blend of neutral basemap to provide a context for

the coloured detail of the river morphology though almost
every colour has a percentage of black to allow it to tone har-
moniously with the grey background. The organic historical
stream flow patterns make an intriguing visual and despite
the fluidity of the mapped phenomena the maps appear very
structured. (Field)

A typical blog posting of the maps discussed their artistic merits: “The
different courses of the river, as they have changed over time, are blended
into one single image, forming this fantastic swirl of meandering loops and
lines” (Endt-Jones). NASA’s Earth Observatory website drew representative
responses from individuals who held firm in their minds an image of a crook-
ed river. NASA reproduced a portion of the maps alongside recent satellite
images, and viewers saw in them a lesson to be learned. “When will we learn,
don’t screw with Mother Nature?” “Change the design of the cities and don’t
try to change a river!” “Levees are a disaster. Rivers need flood plains and
no structures should ever be built in them” (Simmon). Such views may be
correct. They are clearly nostalgia for a river that is no more.
The irony is that the maps with which present-day viewers are so taken
were, in 1944, evidence that levees would work, that the river could be de-
signed, and that we could screw with Mother Nature and be better for it. The
maps remind us of the world’s crookedest river. Today, crooked is beautiful.
Not so long ago, Harold Fisk and the engineers for whom he worked saw
something different. Their eyes went not to the swirls of color, but to the more
gently curving white line that ran through the middle of the wild looping
meanders. They saw a controlled, tamed Mississippi River.

University of Texas at Arlington

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