00:00:00 Speaker 1: For anybody new to this channel, I want to take a minute to explain what you're seeing here. We actually have two podcasts on this bear Grease feed, and really almost three. We have our documentary style bear Grease episodes like this one, and then every other week we have what we call the bear Grease Render, which is me and a group of friends discussing and given behind the scenes looks into the making of the bear Grease documentary style episodes. So that's what bear Grease is all about. But every Friday we also have Brent Reeves this country life podcast, which is pure country goal. It's usually under thirty minutes long and just a lot of fun. So this feed isn't exactly simple, but neither are most worthwhile endeavors. 00:00:46 Speaker 2: I really hope that you enjoy this episode. 00:00:57 Speaker 3: Rivers are absolutely so uncertain, and the more you work with them, the more you find out that the data that we have is great data. But all this data that we take, it's not absolute. It's just snapshawns in time. 00:01:14 Speaker 1: The Mississippi Rivers stories are big, turbulent, and touch a far reaching swath of human life. Rivers and men have always been linked when trying to decide the sequence of telling a story. I'll often imagine I'm telling it to my kids, what individual stories and emphasis would I tell a ten year old, And usually that sequence works for the world's brightest minds like you bear grease listeners. So I'm being confronted with where to go with this Mississippi River series, and I know exactly where I'm going, And I would definitely tell my kids about the two Civil War vets who pioneered the doctrine of controlling this great river, Charles Ellett and Andrew Humphreys, and how they're obsession and rivalry shaped the way we managed the river, which led to one of the most costly natural disasters in American history. It really changed America, you know what disaster that was. I'd also tell my kids about Mark Twain, America's most celebrated writer who was obsessed with being a riverboat captain on the Mississippi River. He bottled American culture in his writing and sent it to the world. And that natural disaster that I was talking about, it was the Great Mississippi River Flood of nineteen twenty seven. And you better believe that my kids would be on the edge of their seats when I told them about it, and so I'm going to tell you about it too. We're continuing down the river on this third episode of this series, and like William Faulkner were in pursuit of understanding the world, I really doubt you're going to want to miss this one. 00:02:55 Speaker 4: Last three months of nineteen twenty six, the average reading on every single river gauge was the highest ever known. It didn't take much thinking to figure out that if you got any rain of any significance in nineteen twenty seven, you were going to get a serious flood. 00:03:21 Speaker 1: My name is Klay Nukem, and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as the place as we explore. 00:04:02 Speaker 5: Oh me down. 00:04:05 Speaker 1: I know this is hard to understand, but I'll explain. Just listen. 00:04:11 Speaker 5: It down down de water WATERJ do down gown. 00:04:31 Speaker 1: That was blues singer Charles Patten singing a song called high Water which he recorded in nineteen twenty nine. The recording was so rough you have to feel the energy of what he's singing about. Some say it sounds like the surges of a flood. It's about the flood of nineteen twenty seven. Here's some of the lyrics. Now looking now in leland Lord, the river is rising high. Looky here, boys around Lee tell me the river is raging high. I'm going over to Greenville. Bought the tickets. Goodbye, Look you here. The water dugout, Lordie. The levee broke rolled most everywhere. The water at Greenville and leland Lord, it done rose everywhere. I would go down to Rosedale, but they tell me there's water there. Backwater at Blitheville backed up all around. Backwater at Blitheville don struck Joiner Town. It was fifty families and children. Tough luck. They can drown. The water was rising up in my friend's door. The water was rising up in my friend's door. The man said his woman, folk, Lord, we better go, won't be no more. I want to now read you the words of John Barry, author of Rising Tide. He has something to say about rising water. There is no sight like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker, angrier, dirtier. Eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface. It thickens with trees, rooftops the occasional body of a mule. Its currents royal, more flow, swifter, pummel, its banks harder. When a section of riverbank caves into the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping trees with the great crackling sounds of heavy artillery on the water, the sound carries for miles. Unlike a human enemy, the river has no weakness, makes no mistakes, is perfect. Unlike a human enemy, it will find and exploit any weakness. To repel it requires an intense, nearly perfect, and sustained effort. Major John Lee in the nineteen twenties, the Army District engineer in Vicksburg, who in nineteen forty four make the Cover of Time as an important World War two general observed in physical and mental strain a prolonged high water fight on threatened levees can only be compared with real war. Rivers are perfect. They are the lawmaker, judge, and jury of their world, superseding any man concocted laws we could pretend to place. On a river, there is no standard to judge a river against. It is neither moral nor amoral, good or bad, friend or foe. It simply exists and dominates. Mankind is always contended with big rivers, and there's a file in every human's brain holding an instinctual awe when you stand on a great river's bank. No data exists on how many of our ancestors died crossing big rivers, but the evolutionary evidence of the trauma of rivers has branded us. There are many biblical references that the spiritual help granted to the righteous one crossing big water. King David's mighty men were commended for bravery for crossing the Jordan River during its flood stage, and the prophet Isaiah declared to those who are redeemed of the Lord that when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. River crossings in the Bible are a test of faith, and if you cross, there is a new life on the other side. In fifteen twenty eight, the first European inland exploration of what is now America. Happened in Florida and was recorded by a Spaniard named Kebeza de Vaka. In his journal, he recounted a river crossing early in their trip, and he said, quote, that night we came to a river that was very deep and very wide, in the current very strong. Since we could not cross over on rafts, we made a canoe for it. We took a day to cross it on horseman who was called wan Velasquez, not wanting to wait, entered the river. The current, which was strong, swepting from the horse. He kept hold of the reins, and so he and the horse drowned. The Indians of that lord found the horse. They told us where down the river we would find him, and so they went for him. His death gave us much pain, because until then we had not lost anyone. The horse made dinner for many that night. End of quote. The first recorded European death of what is now America was from a big, wild, rising, dirty brown river. If I was telling this story to my kids, I'd have told him that we know more about rivers than we ever have. But there's such dynamic systems. Our best science research and minds aren't fully able to predict their next move. This is doctor Bedenharn, a research hydraulic engineer with the core of engineers. He probably knows more about rivers than anybody in the country. 00:10:06 Speaker 3: If I could have had this interview forty years ago, I'd have had much more definitive answers for you. Yeah, because it was a lot simpler than when I didn't realize how much I didn't know. Because the older I've gotten and the more I've worked with streams, the more conservative I've gotten and more cautious really, because oh yeah, absolutely, because rivers are absolutely so uncertain, and the more you work with them, the more you find out that the data that we have is great data. But that is just one snapshot in time of where the river was on that date in nineteen fifteen. We surveyed this river. One month later, it could be completely different. But all this data that we take is absolute. It's not absolute, it's just snapshots in time. I kind of think about it as an inverted pyramid. The Egyptians, you know, and the minds knew what they were doing. They started with a really solid base and then they built their pyramid up. The tip of the pyramid is where we start with very little knowledge and then we build from there. You know, we get more and more precise. I'm not saying we cannot understand and make predictions and do designs on rivers, but there is always a pretty large level of uncertainty that goes into all our analysis and design that we have to recognize it. 00:11:34 Speaker 1: I appreciate doctor Bidenharn's humility. Like I said, he knows more about rivers than anybody, and he's telling us they're unpredictable and hard to control. And that's exactly what we're talking about. The only constant between man and rivers is this uncertainty and the fact that we could be swept away. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode, but not before we'd do some review from the last two episodes. The Mississippi River starts at Lake of Tasca in Minnesota and flows roughly twenty three hundred miles through the bread Basket of America to the Gulf of Mexico. You need to know this. If we were to count its tributary, the Missouri River, it would be the longest river in the world. There are approximately twenty four hundred miles of non dammed free flowing river. When you combine the Missouri and the Mississippi. If you go up the Mississippi twelve hundred miles to its first dam and turn left on the Missouri and go another twelve hundred miles to its first dam, that's how you get the twenty four hundred miles, making this one of the longest free flowing bodies of water in the world. The Mississippi River drains parts of thirty one states, roughly forty one percent of America, and also two Canadian provinces. Only the Amazon and the Congo Rivers have larger drainage basins. It drops to the slope, averaging three inches per mile, and has an average current speed of nine miles per hour and eighteen in a flood. The last four hundred and fifty miles of the river are below sea level. These stats will never get old to an American, and you'll need to memorize them if you plan on being the most interesting person at camp. This fault, which I'd expect every bear grease listener to beat. Conversations can be boring and lack that gritty, greasy gravitass that's bigger than the weather and cannon, Barbie, we're equipping you with the stories. This is how the Mississippi River was tamed. That's what we're talking about, or at least how they tried to tame it. Here is our friend John Berry. In the eighteen fifties, the US government commissioned two guys to go create a comprehensive report on the Mississippi River, right, which was kind of like a Lewis and Clark expedition of the river. And these guys were pretty unique characters. 00:13:55 Speaker 4: They were, but you know, they were rivals. They weren't Lewis and Clark worked together. These guys hated each other's guts and they wrote entirely different reports. The first engineering school in the United States was West Point period. But the superstar of the civilians was a guy named Charles Ellett who actually did go to school in France. And he was a wild man. You know. He built a catwalk across Niagara Falls and then rode across it in a chariot. 00:14:31 Speaker 1: That was he was kind of a daredevil. 00:14:33 Speaker 6: Oh. 00:14:33 Speaker 4: He built one of the first bridges across the Ohio, which incidentally later collapsed. He was killed and during the Civil War in front of Vicksburg. He was the captain of naval vessel and Union Naval vessel. But Ellett had studied the Ohio River, and he was a champion of the civilians. The Congress divided in appropriation because of this rivalry between the Army engineers and the Corps of Engineers and the civilians. And this guy named Andrew Adkinson Humphries was in the corps, and again they split the appropriation and Ellen and Humphries went off to do their own studies, which were, as I said, quite different. Humphries was also a bit of more than a character. He loved to fight in the war. He led a charge in Fredericksburg, one of the bloodiest battles of the war, and he wrote afterwards when he lost almost twenty percent of his command in about thirty minutes, that he quote, I felt like a young girl at her first ball. He just loved the glory. 00:15:48 Speaker 1: That's kind of what it. It almost feels like these guys had to be that way to tackle what they were trying to tackle. 00:15:55 Speaker 4: Maybe, I mean, they certainly had to have an ego. 00:15:59 Speaker 1: Ellet and Humphries both did their independent studies of the river before the Civil War. In the eighteen fifties, following a big flood that wrecked the lower Mississippi. Tackling this river was a grand feat. It was an exploration of science relatively new to mankind. Humphries and Elot were both eccentric, brilliant, driven, but egotistical men. Humphries was a decorated Civil War colonel. He tasted the mud of the river, citing its grittiness and taste in his report, and helped plan the trans Continental Railroad route. Ellot directly petitioned Abe Lincoln for funding to develop warships for the Union Army for the sole purpose of ramming and sinking Confederate ships. His ships were significant factors in the Union Army's victories on the Mississippi River. These guys were wild. I'm not suggesting that these two were healthy patterns for manhood. I can't say for sure. I really don't know their personal lives. But when I hear about these guys, it hearkened to mine the historically low testosterone levels and modern men. It's a fact that testosterone, the chemical that makes a man a man, has been dropping, which some studies show about one percent per year for decades. There are many culprits to this, like obesity, sedentary lifestyles, mock estrogens in plastics, which is so real, but some even believe that it's tight men's underwear anyway, testosterone in the rear view mirror. Now, remember that Humphries and Elliott were real ballers. Their stories are interesting because they were confronting the most complex challenges of their time, and the river would end up exposing human nature. This is the theme of rivers, that's what they do. 00:17:49 Speaker 4: Humphries did some really rigorous work, made some measurements that stand up today. Ellott was more of a pure genius conceptualize saying how to approach the river. He wrote a port which called, for example, for reservoirs to contain, you know, hold water back from floods and things like that. There was a theory at the time called the levees only policy, that you use levees to control floods and only level levees, because the theory was that the levees, by containing the river, would force the river to dig out its own channel, essentially dredge its own channels, so it would become deeper and deeper. By concentrating the flow, you would concentrate this, you would increase the currents. Like narrowing the nozzle of a garden hose, the water speeds up, and that you point it at mud and they'll cut right through it. So the levees only theory was based on that, and that the river, if you narrowed it, it would speed up and cut through it soft bottom, and pretty soon would be deep enough naturally that it would accommodate a flood. It was a nice theory. It didn't work. 00:19:13 Speaker 1: Being a human is a weird condition in which you roll into the earth, and a lot of problems have already been solved. At the time, they didn't know how to control the river, and the leading theory was called the levees only policy. Ellett, however, hypothesized that a combination of levees and outlets into reservoirs was a key to controlling the river. But the outlets sounded radical and dangerous and unnecessary to some. Why would you want to let this dragon out of its earthen levee cage, Here's John. 00:19:47 Speaker 4: The problem was that levees are only in contact with the river for a few weeks a year during a flood. That's there's not a constant influence. So even though the river probably would deepen itself when the current increased, it wouldn't deepen itself enough to comminate the enormous increase of water that came in a great flood. Anyway, Ellett and Humphries agreed that this sery was nonsense. It would never work. Yeah, yeah, Nonetheless, that became the policy of the corp of Engineers. Even though there's one thing those two guys agreed upon. It's, you know, truly a strange story. How a bureaucracy can get something into its head and you can't get it out. It's not just a bureaucracy. People get wrong information in their heads all the time, and just dig in. 00:20:45 Speaker 1: People get wrong information in their heads all the time, and just dig in. What how could this have happened? 00:20:53 Speaker 4: But Ellett's view of what went on and how to handle the river was, you know, without a doubt, in my mind, the best view. Humphrey's study was accurate, but Elliott, published much before Humphreys, and Humphreys was so competitive and needed glories so much. He called Ellot's study and I mean there are hundreds, you know, several centuries of engineers studying rivers. He called Eli's study the worst ever in history, because Elliott had made certain recommendations. You know, Humphreys wanted his work to be, as he said, the work of my life. You can't have a great work if all you do is confirm someone else's work that came first. So he ended up recommended against what his own measurements said and what Elliot had said, just because he had to be first, and he was a claim. Humphreys was acclaimed by the scientific community. As I said, Elliot couldn't rebut anything he said because Ellen was dead. Humphries was a war hero. He was one of the initial founders of the National Academy of Sciences, and you know, honorary member of half a dozen European scientific societies and so forth and so on. And after the Civil War it became out of the corp of engineers, so there was nobody to dispute them. 00:22:18 Speaker 1: And so what's so interesting about that from a human perspective is ego totally dominated. This guy's definitely a prognosis of what needed to be done that was going to affect millions and millions of people, and he just needed to have a theory that stood out from what his dead competitor said, right, I mean, does that not happen all across life, at all different levels. 00:22:45 Speaker 4: Unfortunately. Yeah, most of us, if not all of us, like to think that we make judgments rationally. I certainly like to think that hopefully I have enough sense of the absurd and of my own weaknesses that I do. But I'm sure I have biases. I know I have biases. You just try to count for them. I mean, when I was a football coach, we used to run I guess we'd call it a four or four today, but it was a wide tackle six. In that defense, you basically line up two defensive tackles on the guards, so they're out numbered three to two by the center and two offensive guards. So you know you're outnumbered, and you know that's a weakness of your defense. And every day in practice we used to work on that weakness. Everybody we play would try to exploit it, and you know, some had some success, but I don't know that anybody actually beat us because of that, because we were so aware of that weakness. So, you know, I take the same approach to my biases. I try to be aware of my biases and adjust for them. Humphries didn't do that. Humphries did not do that, and some of the conclusions sea reach. For example, Ellett wanted outlets for the Mississippi River when it was near the ocean to let water out during the flood. Humphreys recommended against that and then became the core of engineer's policy to oppose outlets. But some of it made sense on a cost benefit analysis at the time, but it was really pure ego. 00:24:24 Speaker 1: We are all aware that other people around us, friends, family members, and even enemies have blind spots in their life. Am I right or am I right? Spanning from eating too loudly to complete unawareness of how they dominate conversations, or blindness of how they treat their spouse. But how much energy do we exert trying to identify the blind spots in our own lives. It's the healthy practice of normal humans across the planet, and the work is never done. It should be on our eternal checklist of things will never stop doing. Massively simplify the current strategy of flood control that ended up working. It's a system of levees and outlets. When the water inside the levee gets too high, they open up floodways or outlets that allow massive amounts of water to escape the main channel of the river. These planned floodways are outside the levees and are usually agricultural areas. Ellett, the Union soldier, the one who died in the Civil War at Vicksburg, suggested a system of levees and outlets. I'd now like John Berry to introduce us to a third character of the Mississippi River. A brilliant man born in eighteen twenty, the year of Daniel Boone's death, by the name of James Buchanan Eads. 00:25:44 Speaker 4: James Buchanan Aids is one of the great geniuses in American history. In the nineteen thirties, deans of American colleges of engineering put together a list of the five greatest engineers of all time, talking about people like Leonardo da Vinci in Edison and so forth, and he was on the list. He was dropped out of school, literally selling apples on the street at Saint Louis when he was eleven years old. He arrived in Saint Louis and his steamboat sank. He almost around to begin with, but he was an absolute genius. He taught himself calculus, there were a lot of boats and steamboats sinking. He made a fortune when he was a very very young man designing ways to salvage those sunken steamboat the cargoes in those steamboats. He designed a diving bell which he couldn't get anybody else to go down in, so he went down himself initially, so he learned what the Mississippi River was like by walking the bottom and feeling the softness of it, and you just sink and it was like you couldn't see anything once you get more than a foot or two below the surface because of the sediment load is so dark. But just feeling like a lizard in front of his anyway, after making fortune building a fleet of salvage vessels, he then built a fleet of ironclads called turtles that basically conquered the Mississippi River for the Union. They gave Grant his first victories at Forts Henry and Donaldson. He built them in a matter of a boy, I think delivered them in a little over six months from the time that they were as someone put it, you know, they were standing in the forest until his delivery was a little over six months. And again, you know, Grant used them before the federal government even paid for him. So that was his second great triumph. After the war, Saint Louis was losing out in competition to Chicago. Saint Louis was by far the biggest city in the Midwest, which Chicago was gaining rapidly because of rail transport. And the problem with Saint Louis was the Mississippi River. You can get trains across the Mississippi River except by ferry, which is pretty inefficient. So Yads got together a group to build the first bridge across the real Mississippi River. There were bridges way up river at the narrows of the river, yeah, both not necessarily narrow or but not. You didn't have the forts of the water. You had a different kind of bottom and much more stable bottom and things like that. Was much easier upriver. He decided to make it out of steel. Now. Number one, this was going to be the first steel bridge anywhere in the world. Number two, it had the longest arches of any bridge in the world. Number three, it was the first bridge Eads had ever designed in his life. So he had a consulting engineer who was a chief bridge builder for the Pennsylvania railroad who said he refused to attach his name to this bridge which was doomed to fall. So he's responded to the criticism by firing the guy and abolishing the position of consulting engineer. And EIDs did build his bridge, and it is still standing and still in. 00:29:19 Speaker 1: Use, really still standing today, Yes, built in eighteen seventy four. 00:29:24 Speaker 4: Yeah, And as I say, he's still in use. Where is the bridge St. Louis? They run metro trains over it. 00:29:34 Speaker 1: Remember all that talk of hubris that it takes to conquer a river. I'd say Eid's had a lot of confidence, but he backed it up. Here's how EIDs Bridge impacted America in a unique way. 00:29:48 Speaker 4: Aids essentially forced Carnegie to transform steel making into a science. EIDs didn't test random plates off a production run. He tested every single plate that went into his bridge. 00:30:02 Speaker 1: Okay, so the steel was unpredictable and the quality wasn't consistent correct, And so he came in and said, if we're gonna build this bridge, it's every piece has got to be exactly right. 00:30:13 Speaker 4: And Carnegie rebelled, but couldn't do anything about it because otherwise they weren't gonna you know, he tried to force them to accept the custom of the trade, but instead Aids in a way, transformed American steelmaking by requiring the precision that he insisted upon. And that's why the bridge is still standing. At the time, more than twenty percent of all the bridges made in the United States would fall down. You know. 00:30:43 Speaker 1: I guess in some ways you could look at it and say that the bigness of the river and the formidable obstacle that it was caused people to rise to a new challenge. I mean even saying that Ads, this guy that had to build this bridge, change the steel industry and maybe if we didn't have a Mississippi River we'd still have crummy steel. Well by now it'd probably be okay. But Carnegie wanted Ads to just accept the custom of the trade, which was a crummy, inconsistent steel strength. And we all know why he didn't want to raise the industry standard. It was that moo law, the dough that's chin. I don't know the full situation, so it's not entirely fair for me to cast this kind of judgment on Carnegie. But this kind of stuff makes me angry. It makes me wonder where in today's corporate world is greed, money, stifling advancement, no doubt, it's everywhere. Capitalism, with all its glory and benefits, which we all love, has placed the highest priority of our society on the acquisition of wealth and making money. But this is a double edged sword that our society is and will be paying for in the future. But in defense of Carnegie, don't hate the player, hate the game, And you can't say you hate corporate America if you drive a fancy vehicle and have an iPhone and buy Big Box store bot meat. Our society, including Klay Nukem, is a circus of contradictions. But I stand by the idea. The mighty Mississippi, what a chalk tawk called the river beyond any age, spurred America to greatness, or at least greatness as far as empires gauge it. All right, brothers and sisters, There was another man who was on the river during the same time period as Humphreys, Ellot and EAD's. He was not an engineer, but he was studying the river. It was a young man in his twenties named Samuel Clemens. He was obsessed with the Mississippi River in between eighteen fifty seven and eighteen fifty nine, he spent two years as a cub pilot in training to be a full fledged riverboat pilot. He'd later go by the name of Mark Twain, which is a riverboat term used to describe twelve feet of water or two twain fathoms. His time on the river exposed him to so many different types of people. It helped him become one of America's top, if not the top writer. People on the river were talkers. It was almost like an exhibition of being human in the microcosm of a small ship. In eighteen eighty three, later in Twain's life, he would write a book called Life on the Mississippi. It's considered by many to be the greatest prose in American literature. In the book, he idolized river pilots. He said, all pilots are tireless talkers when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river, they are always understood and always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings. I like that. He went on to describe the absolute power of the Mississippi River pilots in contras when as to other perceived earthly power. Good writing is good thinking, and it makes us see something from a totally different angle. I think you'll understand why he's considered the greatest when you listen to the clarity of his writing. Here's Mark Twain on pilots. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I have loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took measureless pride in it. The reason is plain. A pilot in those days was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament, and the people Parliament sit in chains forged by their constituency. The editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by the party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two thirds of his mind. No clergyman as a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish's opinion. Writers of all kinds are monacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly. But then we modify before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude. But in the day I write of the Mississippi pilot had none. The moment that boat was under way in the river, she was under the soul and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her win, and withther he chose, and tire her up on the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free. He consulted no one, He received commands from nobody. He promptly resisted even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly, considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth, and not by a fiction of words. The absolute authority of a river pilot is a novel idea. Though certainly romanticized by Twain, it's hard not to see his point. Perhaps The most intriguing section of his book is him describing the incredible navigation skills that a Mississippi pilot had to have. Rex weren't just common, they were the norm. There are stretches of the river where he said shipwrecks averaged one per mile. I think here in Twain's voice about the river is important to understanding America. At the time, his writing would have been top level entertainment for Americans. It would be more influential than the trendy Hollywood movie Today. Books and reading were everything. Radio didn't even exist until the nineteen hundreds. Here's Mark Twain's pilot describing to him how to navigate a river in the dark. You see, this has got to be learned. It isn't any getting around it. A clear starlet knight throws such heavy shadows that if you don't know the shape of the shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape. And you see, you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes. By the watch. You would be fifty yards from the shore all the time, when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you're coming to it. Then there's your pitch dark knight. The river is a very different shape on a pitch dark knight from what it is on the starlet night. All the shore seemed to be straight lines then, and mighty dim ones too, and you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You boldly drive your boat into what seems to be a solid straight wall, and that wall falls back and makes way for you. And then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of those grizzly, drizzly gray mist and there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray miss would tangle ahead of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then there's different kinds of moonlight that changed the shape of the river in different ways. You see, Twain interrupts this pilot. Oh, don't say anymore, please, I've got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways. If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head, it would make me stoop shoulder. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seem pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot, a man has got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know. The other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty four hours. This River pilot dissected the different categories of night clear, starlet nights, pitch dark knights, and a night with a gray mist. I like the hyper specific competence in this master's ability to parse out difference in what appears to be a monolithic thing. The dark Twain was enamored with the pilot's skill set. He said, I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and to be able to recite them ghibli forward and back, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake. Is no extravagant, massive knowledge and no marvelous faculty compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous faculty in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately, and I believe I am not expanding the truth. When I do, many will think the figure too strong, but pilots will not. End of quote. Here's Twain on reading water, and again I think it's important that we hear Old Twain's voice. The face of the water in time became a wonderful book, a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a news story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles, there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one you could want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There was never so wonderful a book written by man, never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reprousal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface. On the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether. But to the pilot it was an italicized passage. Indeed, it was more than that. It was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it. For it meant that a wrecker or rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simple expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas the trained eye they were not pictures at all, but the grimest and most dead earnest of reading material. When I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiar as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me. While I lived all the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river, I still kept in mind a certain wonderful sunset, which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad, expansive river was turned to blood. In the middle distance, the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came, floating black and conspicuous, like one bewitched. I drank it in in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I'd never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face. Another day came and I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented on it inwardly after this fashion. The sun means that we're gonna have wind tomorrow. That floating log means the river is rising small thanks to that. That slant mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is gonna kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights. No, the romance and beauty of it were all gone from the river. All the value of any feature of it had for me now was to amount of its usefulness it could furnish towards compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush and the beauty's cheek mean to a doctor? But a break that ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms? So thick with what are to him signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all? Or doesn't he simply view her professionally in comment upon her unwholesome condition? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade? What an incredible question? Did he lose or gain something by learning this trade of being a Mississippi River pilot. Naivety can carry an empty, fleeting bliss, But the naive don't change the world with their literature or tame giant ancient raging rivers. Twain went through as training to become a pilot, but the Civil War ended his career and ultimately ended a sixty year steamboat era. He said that Mississis be steamboating was born about eighteen twelve, and at the end of thirty years it had grown into mighty proportions, and in less than thirty years more it was dead. So from eighteen twelve to eighteen sixty was the Mississippi River steamboating era. After Humphreys, Elliott and the aid studies. By the eighteen seventies, government levies were changing the river, making it safer and partly taming it. Twain would lament the passing of the wild river. It's really interesting because you'd think in the late eighteen hundreds that the Mississippi River was wild, but Twain thought it was tamed. And our boy Twain actually addressed ads in his book. Here's Twain. The military engineers of the commission had taken up on their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again, a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it. They are building wing dams here and there to direct the current, and dykes to confine it into narrower bounds. One who knows the Mississippi will promptly say, not aloud but to himself, that ten thousand river commissions, with the minds of the world that they're back. Cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it go here or go there and make it obey. Cannot save a shore which has been sentenced, cannot bar it's path with an obstruction that it will not tear down, dance over and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words. But the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere. They know all that can be known of their obstruse science. And so since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and bossom, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low and wait till they do it. Captain eads, there's our boys, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible. So we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against the like impossibilities. Otherwise one might pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comments in their courses and undertake to make them behave as to try to bully the Mississippi into right in reasonable conduct, Twain expressed his lack of confidence in science and man's bullying in eighteen eighty three, which would have been the start of man's biggest push to manipulate the river. It's really interesting because he would be right in that lack of confidence, at least at first. Mark Twain would die in nineteen ten, seventeen years before his words would prove true in the flood of nineteen twenty seven. We're going to read one more section of Twain, and I think it shows his sarcasm, humor, and his thoughts on the science of the time. And where we're going to start this passage. In the previous paragraph he'd cited all the man made cutoffs that had shortened the river by two hundred and forty two miles. Here's Twain, this is the last one. Now, if you want to be one of those ponderous scientific people and let on to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in the late years. What an opportunity is here. Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from, nor development of species either. That's a jab at Darwin. Glacial epics are great things, but they are vague. 00:47:43 Speaker 4: Vague. 00:47:44 Speaker 1: Please observe, in the space of one hundred and seventy six years, the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person who is not blind or idiotic can see that in the Old Silurian period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million, three hundred thousand miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token, any person can see that seven hundred and forty two years from now, the Lower Mississippi will only be a mile and three quarters long, and kro and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plotting comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact. That was good and sarcastic. Mister Mark Twain, you know if you understand the math. There, you see what he's doing. He's making fun of it, and that's wild that he was doing that in the eighteen eighties. And he was even poking fun at are one and the idea of speciation. Did you hear that. I'm fascinated by science and believe in the endeavor wholeheartedly. But it's not much different than the way I'm fascinated and have pledged my allegiance to writing sheerfooted mules in the backwoods. I'm conflicted. Mules and science have a lot in common. You see. They're both incredible functional beasts, but will kill you if mishandled, and their purpose is easily misunderstood too. Joy ride your kids on a dead broke horse, not on a vinegar spit and flashy mule. Likewise, don't send science to do the work of a spiritual philosopher. That's like asking a pinball machine to make bread. And if your rational Western mind tells you that science outranks and supersedes a man's verified, bonafide spiritual belief backed with real life and real faith, I will submit that you have taken the bait, and the hook will shortly enter your upper lift, leading you to a stringer of human existence that is very new to the planet. Only taking into consideration the natural without the spiritual is very new to mankind. Woom, I'm done. I'm now stepping off this box of Irish spring. Let's talk about the Great Flood of nineteen twenty seven. 00:50:32 Speaker 6: When it rain five days and the sky the dog as night. When it rained five days and the sky the dog as night. 00:50:49 Speaker 1: In March of nineteen twenty seven, just a month before the start of the Great Flood, Bessie Smith recorded the song Backwater Blues about the floods of nineteen twenty six, When it rains five or six days and the skies are dark as night, Then trouble taken place in the lowlands at night. 00:51:07 Speaker 4: She said. 00:51:08 Speaker 1: She was known as the Impress of the Blues and would become the most famous female blues singer of the nineteen thirties. Little did she know what was coming. 00:51:19 Speaker 4: Last three months of nineteen twenty six, the average reading on every single river gauge, not only on the Mississippi itself, but on the Ohio, on the Missouri, on every other tributary was the highest ever known only six times in history. At Vicksburg, had the gauge ever broken thirty feet in October, and it had never broken thirty one feet. In October nineteen twenty six, it broke forty feet. So the whole drainage basin was saturated. And it didn't take much thinking to figure out that if you got any rain of any significance in nineteen twenty seven, you were going to get a serious flood. And in fact, you just got more rain. You had five storms in the spring of nineteen twenty seven, each of which was greater than any single storm in the preceding ten years. This is on top of a river basin that's already filled with water. So beginning on New Year's Day, you had floods in Pittsburgh, and you know, proceeding Downriver Louisville, you had, you know, floods on basically every tributary system in the entire river. So the net result was, I mean, you knew this was going to be a bad year. The book actually opens with a scene on what turned out to be the biggest storm of the year, and that one the scenes in Greenville, Mississippi. But on that day in New Orleans they got fourteen point ninety six inches of rain in twenty four hours. Wow, you were going to have a problem. 00:53:05 Speaker 1: And indeed, at that time there were government built levees, one thousand miles of government built levees up the river right basically the Gulf of Mexico all the way up to Illinois. 00:53:17 Speaker 4: Correct. 00:53:18 Speaker 1: And these these levees were touted to the people of the river basin as unbeatable. 00:53:24 Speaker 4: Right. 00:53:24 Speaker 1: It was like the Titanic, Right, it was like. 00:53:27 Speaker 4: Yeah, in nineteen twenty six and the official report of the Corps of Engineers it said, I think for the first time it said, you know, we're now in a position to protect the territory from overflow. 00:53:40 Speaker 1: Classic Cubris, yeah, classic, yeah. 00:53:43 Speaker 4: Yeah. 00:53:45 Speaker 1: And then the big break was in Mounds, Mississippi. 00:53:49 Speaker 4: The single biggest break. There were plenty of big. 00:53:51 Speaker 1: Breaks, right, that was kind of the one that like when it happened that people knew we're in big trouble. 00:53:58 Speaker 4: Well, they'd already knew they were in big trouble. That particular break. There had already been flooding. As I said, you know, people died in Virginia, they died in Oklahoma. That one break was probably the biggest single break, not only in that flood but maybe in any flood that we know of, because you know, close to four hundred and fifty thousand cubic feet a second was coming out of the river. That's an army rouge. Yeah. Well, the levee, of course had breached. There wasn't any levee. Yeah, but that single levee break flooded and land seventy miles to the east to the hills of Mississippi, and for probably about eighty miles I guess it is from there until Vicksburg where her so it filled the delta. It flooded about twenty seven thousand square miles on the lower Mississippi. That's not counting you know, Louisville, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Knoxville, Oklahoma City. It's not counting that land about twenty seven thou square miles of the lower Mississippi and Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana so forth. 00:55:19 Speaker 1: Here's an excerpt from John Berry's Rising Type. There the river had lingered for months, not leaving all the land until September. Then it finally fell back within its banks, languid once again, like a snake that had swallowed its prey and lay now digesting it, it left behind ruin and rotted at the site of each crevasse. It had dug out blue holes, pockets of deep water lakes where fishing was often best and that exists still, and deposited mountains of sand. Over thousands of acres and the entire flooded region, fifty percent of all animals, half of all the mules, horses, cattle, hogs, and chickens had drowned. Thousands of tenant farmer shacks had simply disappeared, Hundreds of sturdy barns, cotton gins, warehouses, farmhouses had been swept away. Buildings by the tens of thousands had been damaged, and in towns whole blocks had become heaps of splintered lumber, like the leavings of a tornado. In some places, great mounds of sand covered fields and streets. On the fields, in the forests, in the streets and yards and homes and businesses and barns, the water left a reeking muck. It filled the air with stench, and then the sun lay baking and cracking like broken pottery dung, colored and unvarying to the horizon. The Mississippi River flood of nineteen twenty seven, caused the Ohio to flow backwards, covered some Delta towns with over thirty feet of water, and caused more economic damage than Hurricane Katrina. The flood displaced over seven hundred thousand people, but disproportionately affected over five hundred thousand Black Americans, which comprised seventy five percent of the population of the Delta. Official reports showed two hundred and fifty deaths from the flood, but deaths resulting from the impacts of the flood, not just drowning in the initial water rise, were likely in the thousands. The flood highlighted the discrepancy of treatment between Blacks and whites. Much of John Berry's book is about the refugee camps and the thousands of men working twenty four hours a day repairing levees during the flood. I want to read an excerpt from Rising Tide, and it's an important thing to realize that the forty two year old William Alexander Percy, who was Leroy Percy's son. We talked about him extensively on episode two, was appointed by Herbert Hoover to oversee the Red Cross operations in the refugee camps on the levees, So the young Percy was in charge of the levee camps. They were camping on the levees because it was the only land that wasn't underwater. The short version of that story is that the Blacks were forced by the National Guard to stay in refugee camps on the levees, while most whites were allowed to leave on boats. If you remember, a lot of the issues of the South came from their desperate need for labor in agriculture. Here's John Barry. In the first hours of the flood, black and white had risked their lives to save each other. There had been a feeling of humanity, not race. Now the disparity between life for black and white seemed greater than in normal life. Blacks, who had believed Greenville to be a special place felt betrayed. Petty insults stirred more resentment. Whenever the steamer Capital pulled away from the dock, its calliope routinely played by by Blackbird. It was like a slap in the face of the blacks. Even many whites were bothered. The blacks also resented Will's orders, which were printed every day on the newspaper's front page. First, he required quote groups of negroes outside of Greenville to get to the levee and be rationed there. Leaders of the black community complained, so did the whites, but the most serious grievance penetrated the soul. The Blacks were no longer free. The National Guard patrolled the perimeter of the levee camp with the rifles and fixed bayonets. To enter or leave, one needed to pass. They were imprisoned. This was true in every camp in the state. Mississippi was determined to keep its workers, even if it required force to do so. I told you the name of will Percy would come up later. He was the one that made the decision, with the influence of his father Leroy, to not evacuate the Blacks out of the camps, but rather make them stay. They were afraid they'd leave and never come back, which is exactly what would happen to many. That's wild stuff. Here's John Berry with how the flood of nineteen twenty seven impacted America. If you were just describing in a in a in a short version, which obviously this is what your whole book is about. Is how this flood changed America. What's what's a version that we can understand of how this flood changed America? 01:00:16 Speaker 4: Well, they're you know, number one, it elected Herbert Hoover president. You know, you can demonstrate that almost with mathematical certainty. Hoover was put in charge of the rescue and rehabilitation of close to a million people, and he actually did a great job. 01:00:33 Speaker 1: It create gained a national fame from you. 01:00:36 Speaker 4: He was already had, you know, it was extremely well known from his activities in World War One. He was already had a He was referred to as a great humanitarian. He was a logistics genius and just getting there were there were seven hundred thousand people being fed by the Red Cross and just handling the logistics of getting that done. He's in charge of that, and he did a terrific job. So that's number one. Number Two, it changed the policy the corp of Engineers and pretty much every engineer anywhere in the world in terms of how you deal with rivers. You recognize that you can't simply contain them within the levees. You have to give them room to spread out. The end result was, you know, just an outlet to the ocean. Just well, to the Lake Parncha train and through Lake Poncha Train to the Gulf of Mexico just above New Orleans, about fifteen miles above New Orleans. You know, there are other spill ways if necessary, that start above Baton Rouge. It also will lead to the ocean. There are reservoirs, you know, throughout the Mississippi River basin on both sides of the river to keep water out of the river, and of course they increase the levees as well. People don't realize it, but in twenty eleven, which is probably the second biggest flood ever, they were close to ten thousand square miles of land flooded by design. This was land that was essentially set aside to allow the river room to expand. That's number two. Number three. It was an enormous spur to African American migration out of the Mississippi Delta, and not just Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana as well to you know, Chicago to Detroit to Los Angeles. You know, there was upwards of eight hundred thousand people who left that region because of the flood, and that it didn't start the Great Migration, but it was a huge spur to it. It also began the shift of African American voters from the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, to the Democratic Party. That was because of some deals at Hoover cut to get the nomination. You know, in those days, every African American who voted basically voted Republican, and they didn't control any state parties except in the South, because in those days, the Democratic Party controlled pretty much every Southern state and they were all white. They didn't allow any black participation. So you're African American. Even though you couldn't vote in a state election in Alabama, you could be active in the Republican Party in the state of Alabama. And that was worth something because if you had a Republican president, you had a saying who got to be the post you run a post office in your town, or who got nominated to a court. Even though you couldn't vote, the Republican White House might listen to you. Hoover had cut a deal to get the nomination with African American leaders, and he later betrayed them. The most important change is probably the most subtle and the hardest to prove, but it shifted the way people thought of about the responsibility of federal government to help people in a disaster. 01:04:05 Speaker 1: I want to close with the reading of the last page of Rising Tide. The first sentence of Will Percy's autobiography, Leonards on the Levee reads, My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country. The river had created the Delta, and the white man, the Percys and men liked them, had brought blacks to the Delta to clear it entertainment and to transform it into an empire. Together they had done that, They had built that empire. Will believed that he was watching that empire disintegrate. Near the end of his autobiography, completed only months before his death in nineteen forty one, he wrote, the old Southern way of life in which I had been reared existed no more, and its values were ignored or derided. A tarnish has fallen over the bright world, dishonor and corruption triumph. My own strong people have become lotus eaters. The feet is here again, the last most abhorrent. He seemed to accept that defeat, if only he accepted the absurd and finally himself. A society does not change in sudden jumps, whether it moves in multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these steps are parallel, if not quite simultaneous. Some advance further than others, and some even more in an opposite direction. The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one part of the body extending itself outward than another, even while the main body stays back until enough of the mass has shifted to move the entire body. The Great Mississippi River flood of nineteen twenty seven forced many small steps. Those are the words of John Barry. I can't thank you enough for listening to Bear Grease. On the next episode, we're going to get back into the science of the river and even its danger. We're going to talk about it's fish and turtles and all that cool stuff. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes. I can't wait to talk with all the folks on the Bear Grease Render next week.