The Mississippi Cyborg
For more than two hundred years Americans have tried to tame the Mississippi River. And, for that entire time, the river has fought back.
Journalist and author Boyce Upholt has spent dozens of nights camping along the Lower Mississippi and knows the river for what it is: both a water-moving machine and a supremely wild place. His recent book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi River tells the story of how engineers have made the Mississippi into one of the most engineered waterways in the world, and in turn have transformed it into a bit of a cyborg — half mechanical, half natural.
In this episode, host Nate Hegyi and Upholt take us from the flood ravaged town of Greenville, Mississippi, to the small office of a group of army engineers, in a tale of faulty science, big egos and a river that will ultimately do what it wants.
Featuring Boyce Upholt.
Boyce fishes along the Mississippi River. (Photo by Rory Doyle).
SUPPORT
Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member.
Subscribe to our newsletter to get occasional emails about new show swag, call-outs for listener submissions, and other announcements.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or X, or join our private discussion group on Facebook.
LINKS
One of Harold Fisk’s famed 1944 maps of the Mississippi (Public Domain).
You can find Boyce’s new book The Great River, at your local bookstore or online.
The 2018 study which attributed increased engineering of the Mississippi as a greater influence to worsening floods on the river than climate change.
Check out Harold Fisk's 1944 now famous maps of a meandering and ever-changing Mississippi watershed.
The Mississippi Department of Archives & History has a remarkable collection of digitized photos from the 1927 flood.
To get a sense of the type of work being done on the Mississippi in modern day, a US Army Corps of Engineers video detailing concrete revetment on the Lower Mississippi.
Curious about recent controversy on the Mississippi? Read up on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion – a $3 billion coastal restoration project that will divert portions of the Mississippi’s flow in hopes of rebuilding lost land via sediment deposition.
CREDITS
Our host is Nate Hegyi.
Written and mixed by Marina Henke.
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Nate Hegyi.
Our staff also includes Felix Poon and Justine Paradis.
Our executive producer is Taylor Quimby. Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Martin Landstrom, and Chris Zabriskie. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
If you’ve got a question for the Outside/Inbox hotline, give us a call! We’re always looking for rabbit holes to dive down. Leave us a voicemail at: 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837). Don’t forget to leave a number so we can call you back.
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
The town of Greenville Mississippi had been wet for months.
[Pulse-y sting]
Boyce Upholt: It had been storming in America since the fall before and the river had been rising and rising and rising
This is author and journalist Boyce Upholt. The year was 1927.
[MUX, BlueDot Delmendra]
Boyce Upholt: If you walked on top of the levee, you could feel the soil’s shaking because they were so waterlogged. For months and months, water had been pressing against this levee and pouring through these soils.
That rising river? It’s the Mississippi. And on this day in April, it looked like a scene out of a war movie.
Boyce Upholt: At that levee, it was just raucous with activity… people were up there stacking sandbags, piling them up, trying to make sure that the river as it kept rising and rising and rising, wasn't going to pour over and inundate this town.
Just north of Greenville, a worker saw what everyone had been worried about. A crack in the soil.
Boyce Upholt: We have reports from this, someone saw it coming and said, “she can’t hold it much longer!”
[MUX swells]
Boyce Upholt: And then all of a sudden the water pours through, rips through the sandbags, and then rips through the levee. And in a pretty short period of time, this giant pile of earth just becomes this massive torrent, bigger than Niagara Falls.
[SDX levee breaks]
People in the town of Greenville watched whole homes float by, dead livestock… human bodies.
Boyce Upholt: The thing that strikes me the most are the metaphors people made about the sound. People said it was like a train. It was like a snarling beast, the sound of this water roaring through that and then slipping towards all these different farms and small towns in the Delta.
[MUX swells and fades]
Like many rivers, it’s natural for the Mississippi to flood. But this was just the beginning.
By the end of that spring the levee lining the lower portion of the Mississippi had broken in 200 different places. River water covered an area the size of New England. As many as a thousand people died.
The Great Flood of 1927 wasn’t just a disaster… it was a wake-up call.
[Theme MUX fades in]
Boyce Upholt: The thing that we can best compare it to in our recent memory is Hurricane Katrina of, like, this was the natural disaster that sort of captured the attention of the nation.
After that, we turned the Mississippi into a MACHINE. A machine that... just might be starting to break down.
This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi.
Today, a conversation with Boyce Upholt, author of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi. Time and time again, Americans have tried to tame the beast that is the Mississippi River. It’s not working. Stay tuned.
PRE-ROLL
I want you to imagine it’s the year 1300.
You’re in Louisiana, and you are hundreds of feet in the air… right above the Mississippi River. If you were to look down, one thing that would immediately catch your eye…
Boyce Upholt: You would be struck by a very, very massive floodplain.
[MUX come in, Idle Ways]
This floodplain would be as wide as 100 miles in some places - that’s 10 times the average width of the Grand Canyon.
Boyce Upholt: Part of the year the river would come up, it would flood, it would put water on this ground. And that was a huge part of the ecological system.
Again, this is author and journalist Boyce Upholt.
[MUX starts slow fade]
Boyce and I started our conversation by zooming back in time…because you really can’t understand the highly-engineered Mississippi River of today without understanding where it came from.
Boyce Upholt: The other thing you would see in 1300 is big cities.
These weren’t just big cities, but some of the biggest in the world at that time. Cahokia, was a massive settlement built by indigenous tribes near modern-day St. Louis. And it had a population of just about 20,000 people. That’s more than London had at that time. These are people who learned to live with the Mississippi’s floods.
Boyce Upholt: Living next to this floodplain was actually really advantageous because every year you're sort of getting this fresh delivery of excellent, already fertilized soil from which to grow things…
It also meant getting out of the way during flood season. Indigenous communities respected the Mississippi – its intensity, its unpredictableness. But, this is not how French and Spanish explorers felt when they arrived 400 years ago.
Boyce Upholt: The first attempt to build a fort on the Mississippi River was a pretty miserable failure.
[MUX, Golden Grass]
This was in Southern Louisiana in 1700.
Boyce Upholt: When the soldiers came out of their cabins, they would have to, like, wade through the water. They couldn't grow anything, there were snakes all around, and so that little habitation lasted, I think, a decade at most, um… It was so chaotic that it was hard to wrap their heads around how they could build what they were accustomed to having in Europe here.
[MUX swell ]
Europeans still used the river for things like transporting beaver furs and timber. But they couldn’t always decide - was it prime real estate? Or a useless backwater? Either way, they fought over the lands surrounding it for decades, and in the process, wiped out the Indigenous chiefdoms that once controlled the area.
[mux fade]
By the time the first steamboat arrived on the Mississippi in 1811. … the river still looked a whole lot like it had in 1300. Messy. Meandering. Not great for big boats. And Americans wanted to change that.
Boyce Upholt: I think officials kind of looked around and there was this little tiny office called the US Army Corps of Engineers and they were in the best position to go make some surveys
[MUX, The Onyx]
The Army Corps of Engineers is one of those government groups that, to some, are a complete mystery. But trust me - they have shaped this country in ways you wouldn’t believe.
Their story starts with Thomas Jefferson. A few years into running the country, he’d gotten tired of depending on French engineers.
Boyce Upholt: And so in 1802, he said, let's, let's make a sort of wing of the army where we have engineers trained.
This by the way was actually the origin of West Point.
Boyce Upholt: We're going to send our best cadets, and they're going to go learn math and trigonometry and learn how to build stuff.
And now the federal government had tasked them with making the Mississippi easier to navigate.
[MUX FADES]
The Army Corps started tackling the problem with the energy of… well… an army. There were huge piles of driftwood to clear, portions of the river that needed to be deepened, portions that needed to be straightened. And then there was the flooding. To fix that… they started building levees.
Boyce Upholt: A levee is very simple. It's just sort of a, a wall, a wall of Earth in particular, that, that holds back floods.
Boyce moved to the South about 15 years ago. He’s been entranced by levees ever since.
Boyce Upholt: I call it a wall, and it is a wall because it's long and skinny. But, but when you stand before it, it's this like trapezoidal mound that runs for, like I said, hundreds of miles along the river. It looks very gentle in some ways, but it’s a hugely transformative object on the landscape.
The Army Corps started building miles and miles of levees along the Mississippi, and basically didn’t stop.
Boyce Upholt: For several decades, it had just been like, we'll just keep building levees higher and higher and bigger and bigger, and that will be enough to stop the floods.
And then comes 1927… it starts to rain up and down the river. And as we heard at the top of the show, those levees – they were not enough to stop the floods.
MUX INTERLUDE (Our Digital Compass)
The Army Corps wasn’t messing around anymore… it was time to make BIG changes on the river
Nate Hegyi: So I want to, I want to prompt you real quick with the Mississippi River and Tributaries project. That sounds like one of the thousands of acronyms that make engineering like, frankly, a little boring. But this one does seem important. Can you tell me about it?
Boyce Upholt: Yeah. So the Mississippi River and Tributaries project is the drab sounding name for the sort of… It's the umbrella over all of the infrastructure that's been built since the 1927 flood along the lower Mississippi River to stop future floods.
Boyce Upholt: And so the big thing, I mean, levees are a big part of it. The cutoffs are a big part of it, but there are sort of all kinds of components within there that are considered part of the MR&T, as it's often called. Um, which I think could be like one of the most ambitious engineering projects on Earth. Those are hard superlatives to to lock down. But yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah let’s kind of dive into that. Why was it? Why do you see it as one of the biggest engineering projects on earth?
Boyce Upholt: The levy is one piece of it. As I said at the beginning, the longest piece of this levy is 380 miles long and is the largest human made landform on Earth besides the Great Wall of China. The lower Mississippi River is about a thousand miles long, and the MR&T system has 3700 miles of levees contained within it. So it's both sides of that lower Mississippi River, and then levees reaching up on all these tributaries. And there are these gates all over the river where if the river hits a certain point, then the Army is allowed to and obligated to sort of crank open certain gates to move water here or move water there. And so there is this image that really paints the picture for me where the Mississippi River, rather than this sort of winding, meandering beast that it is, is rendered in these very straight lines. And those straight lines are all of the different tributaries that come in and the different spillways that come out. And their width is meant to reflect how much water they're supposed to carry… And it's just this very, very mathematical, very machine-like thinking of just like… the, the river is a machine now to move water here or there.
[Cyborg-y MUX comes in]
The scope of this project is hard to express.
The Army Corps carved the river so it would be deep enough for barges. They blasted it with DYNAMITE to straighten it out.
By 1954 they’d SHORTENED the entire Mississippi by 150 miles.
Nate Hegyi: You know, I'm trying to imagine the river around this era. There's levees, giant levees, channels, it seems like a lot of concrete. As the MR&T project starts to get put into place like how natural of a river is the Mississippi?
Boyce Upholt: It depends on what you mean by natural, right? It has lost that giant wetland floodplain that we talked about at the beginning where if you were flying over thousands of years ago, you'd see this giant forest. That forest is all gone. In this area, you're starting to have concrete lining the banks of rivers, the river in many places to keep it from eroding and kind of shifting to new channels. And up north on the upper Mississippi, you have locks and dams. And so there are all these things that are being put in place to very carefully control where does the water flow and how does the water flow?
But I think that at the same time, if I took you back to the 1950s and dropped you on a river island or dropped you on, on the batture, we call it down here, the land right along the edge of the river. Um, I could take you there now, and you'd be like, this is nature.
[MUX FADES IN, I AM RUNNING DOWN, CHRIS ZABRISKIE]
Boyce Upholt: This is a big, empty wilderness where floods come through, where there's coyotes and bears and migrating birds. [SMALL BEAT] I don't know. I love to go camping out there and it's… there aren't very many wilderness spaces anywhere in the country that are as beautiful. But, but in this part of the country in particular, it sort of stands out as a place apart.
Boyce argues that the Mississippi has become two things at once: a part of nature AND a machine. It’s a cyborg. So how that cyborg is fairing in the 21st century? That’s after the break.
MIDROLL
This is Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi. We’re back with the story of the cyborg in our backyards: the Mississippi River. And when we left, Boyce was describing the river that emerged from the 1927 flood – concrete gates, and pumps and big green walls.
Now the question – how is this concrete staircase of a river fairing in the 21st century? Well… in 2019 if you turned on the news, you might remember that stories about the Mississippi were everywhere.
[News Montage w/ Out to The World MUX behind, CLIP: Rivers across the metro are on the rise, homes and roads flooded, towns evacuated… Good morning, the situation is dire in Grafton… More rain water from the Midwest is pushing itself south… We are also keeping our eyes on the Mississippi this morning, the river is creeping into nearby communities.]
Hundred or thousand-year floods? … They’re happening almost every year!Journalist and author Boyce Upholt calls this time… the “decade of big water.”
Nate Hegyi: And so my immediate instinct is to assume that climate change is the main reason for worsening floods, stuff like that on the Mississippi. Is that true?
Boyce Upholt: No, it's actually a minority of the problem that we're facing. It is a real problem in that, you know, a wetter atmosphere. it's going to hold more water. And then we've all over the country, I think people have learned about, you know, these flash floods, these giant rain bombs and that that's becoming a real issue for a lot of communities on the Mississippi River. But, according to some of the modelers that have looked at this they looked back 500 years to try and understand how floods changed and they’ve seen this real uptick in the last century of flood frequency and flood magnitude. And they tried to look at that change and compare that to climate models and they said the climate models are 25%.
[MUX, Dowdy]
The bigger issues these modelers saw is the engineering itself. All those pieces of infrastructure that engineers started to add after the Great Flood – dykes, and levees and channels. They’re essentially acting like plaque in an artery.
Boyce Upholt: There's less space for the water. Where is the water going to go? It's going to go higher.
And that’s putting pressure on systems in a way that the Army Corps hadn’t expected.
Boyce Upholt: We think of rivers as being sort of lines of blue. But rivers are watersheds. They are interconnections. Right? More than 1,000,000mi² of the US pours into this river. And if you put down a parking lot there, that means rather than soil holding that water and releasing it back into the watershed, that's water that's running straight into whatever local creek there is. And that creek has probably been engineered to run its water straight into the bigger river. And so all those things together is turning the Mississippi into a much bigger river.
[MUX SWELL]
The Army Corp has, of course, engineered a plan for dealing with these floods.
Just north of New Orleans, for example, there’s something called the Bonnet Carre spillway – imagine a levee with big garage doors. If the Mississippi gets too high, engineers can open those doors and let water rush out onto dry land.
In the first 80 years of the spillway’s existence, engineers only had to open those doors ten times. Since 2011, they’ve already been opened 6 times – twice in one year.
But these decisions are not made lightly. When fresh river water flows into nearby salty wetlands this can cause huge oyster die-offs.
After the opening of the spillway in 2019 t he state of Mississippi had to close every beach on its coastline because of dangerous algae blooms. Hundreds of dolphins died, and shrimp populations are still recovering.
[MUX OUT, Dowdy]
Nate Hegyi: Wait so it sounds almost like hypocritical, the idea that we were trying to engineer our way out of these floods. And in fact, it seems like we've engineered our way to just having bigger floods.
Boyce Upholt: Yes. Yeah. Um… when you think in small scale and you don't think at the watershed scale, um, don't really. I mean, we didn't understand the Mississippi River's geological history when we started building all of this and so it was hard to imagine it all I think for those earlier scientists, but yeah… that’s precisely right.
Nate Hegyi: So, like, this next one is a big question, but what are the plans to fix these recent problems on the Mississippi? Like if engineering is one of the big problems, is there a case to be made to just tear down the engineering and revert back to what we used to have?
Boyce Upholt: I think there's a case to be made in that that would certainly, um, the floodings wouldn’t… flooding wouldn't be there, but the flooding wouldn't be there because it would be covering the place where people live. So there's a case to be made, but it's a callous and anti-human case right? You can't pull down... It's just… one of the struggles along the Mississippi is we've done so much, and then we've built so much that it's really hard to undo.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Boyce Upholt: Someone asked me once, is the Army Corps the villain of your book? And I was like, “No!” I see them as being the agency tasked with enacting sort of this cultural vision of what rivers are and what this river in particular is. There's some unfortunate aspects of it being so militaristic that that sort of amplified some of the notions that we already had. But, um, we all let ourselves off the hook if we say, oh, it's just because the Army Corps is in charge, right? Like, we… the culture that we live in as Americans has been predicated on sort of, um, drying out floodplains and controlling rivers.
[MUX, Cold and Hard]
Today, there are new efforts to re-engineer or maybe even “un-engineer” parts of the river.
Instead of just focusing on more dams or flood walls, new projects are trying to take advantage of “green” infrastructure – building alongside nature rather than working against it.
But a lot of these decisions are hugely controversial. Plans to “unleash” portions of the river in Louisiana could harm already struggling local communities.. and restoring wetlands to protect against growing rainstorms… takes time.
Boyce Upholt: every little piece we can accumulate, we're going to need all those pieces. But it's still going to be a really hard job.
[MUX out]
While humans continue to argue over how or whether we should control nature, the Mississippi just… keeps flowing, in all its contradictions.
Boyce lives in New Orleans – this is the home of blues and jazz. It is a deeply American place. He was there in 2019, the big year of flooding. Parts of the river in the north were hitting record highs. In the south? They were setting flood LENGTH records. For months… the river just wouldn’t go down.
Boyce Upholt: And, as the big flood crest was coming down to Baton Rouge, my good friend John Ruskey, who's sort of the famous Mississippi River canoe guide in the South, said, I've got a wild idea.
That they should surf this floodplain. Not literally surf, but Boyce, and John and another friend, they were going to put a canoe in the river just as the flood waters arrived in Baton Rouge
Boyce Upholt: So on this like miserable, cold, misty day, me and John and our friend Birney Imes launched in this canoe from Baton Rouge under a bridge quasi illegally. We're like, we're hoping that, like, authorities don't see us because they definitely don't want people canoeing on this river in these conditions
Their canoe sets out. And it doesn’t take long for them to realize… this was maybe a bad idea.
[MUX, Chris Zabriskie Reappear]
10 foot waves start hitting their canoe. This is an incredibly industrialized portion of the Mississippi, so they weren’t alone.
Boyce Upholt: Traffic is still going despite the flood so there are these ocean going freighters down here.
Those freighters start sending out radio reports about a quote “Kamikaze Canoe.”
Boyce Upholt: John was like – he’s been canoeing on the river for 25 years and he was like “I’ve never been as scared as that trip.
[MUX BEAT]
Boyce Upholt: We were going through the heart of the industrial river, but seeing how untamable water is, because there is so much water and it was so chaotic, because it was just this volume of water being pushed through this narrow chord of a river was just… incredible.
On this canoe, on one of the largest rivers in the world, and one of the most engineered, the Mississippi was two things at once: beast and machine. A perfect cyborg.
[MUX SWELLS]
Nate Hegyi: Boyce it was really great talking to you.
Boyce Upholt: Thanks, Nate. I’m so glad to be here.
[Credits MUX, Patio Martin Landstrom]
You can find Boyce’s book, The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, anywhere you get books. Check out our show notes to see pictures of the 1927 flood, diagrams from the Mississippi River and Tributaries Project, and some videos of the Army Corps of Engineers at work.
This episode was written and mixed by Marina Henke – she grew up along the Mississippi in St. Louis.
It was edited by our showrunner Taylor Quimby and me, your host, Nate Hegyi. I also grew up kinda close to the Mississippi in Wisconsin. I remember it gave me swimmer’s itch once, so thank you Mississippi.
Our team also includes Felix Poon and Justine Paradis. Rebecca Lavoie is head of on-demand audio.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Martin Landstrom (Land-strum), and Chris Zabriskie. Our theme music is by Brakemaster Cylinder.
Outside/In is a production of NHPR.