Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [13]
At the southern edge of the prairie was the confluence with the Missouri. The Missouri was a furious torrent bright red with the clays of the Great Plains. Its water was sour and gritty, “too thick for soup but too thin to plow”; its current was so strong that for miles south of the junction it flowed beside the Mississippi in the same bed without mingling, a swift, narrow plume of reddish cream next to a wider swath of greeny murk. Gradually they churned together into an odd pale broth that looked like yellow ash stirred into dark oil. The forests closed in again on either bank. These were some of the densest and lushest woodlands in America. The marshes and canebrakes were tangles of starflower, bloodroot, jack-in-the-pulpit, wild ginger, and mayapple; there were matted beds of maygrass, wild bean, sumac, arrowhead, knotweed, little barley, hickory, and goosefoot. The trees were scrub willow and cottonwood, pin oak and green ash, hackberry and persimmon, black willow and sycamore and honey locust and box elder and pawpaw. They towered up in countless pillars more than a hundred feet tall; the leaf canopy was a remote web of green and black reaching almost to the clouds.
Then the Ohio glided in from the east. It was wide and placid, and its blue water was so rich with topsoil that in some lights it looked black. Its taste was velvety; it was said that if you drank enough of it your sweat would be as sweet as dew. It, too, held aloof from the main current for many miles. But gradually it blended in, and the result was a rich, murky, chocolaty gold. This was the characteristic color that travelers came to associate with the Mississippi. It wasn’t very appetizing to drink; the fastidious travelers in the lower valley made a habit of letting the water stand for at least a half an hour to allow the grit and filth a chance to settle out. The hard-core river people didn’t bother. They’d just scroop a bucket into the current and guzzle it down straight. They liked to claim the river silt was good for you. They called it “the true Mississippi relish.”
Meanwhile, the forests were growing more tropical. Water oaks and water maples were interspersed with catalpas and wild cherries and tupelo gums; there were palmettos unfolding their green spearlike fans and vast stands of gloomy cypresses. Along the water’s edge were endless tessellations of Chinese lotus, and the marshlands were radiant with orchids and passionflowers and hibiscuses. Beavers and otters splashed in the sloughs and creeks, the woods were haunted by wolves and panthers, and the air was a deafening riot of millions of songbirds.
The river unfolded into the delta, as the sloughs and bayous and marshes and swamps thickened. It became at times a pale luminous green like lime soda water. Its taste was reminiscent of bitter mildew. On either side the banks were green-shadowed and marshy. Water moccasins and alligators slithered through the mud; the green was spangled with cross vine and trumpet vine, cinnamon fern and Cherokee rose, silver bell and blue lobelia, lily and hyacinth and hydrangea and yellow jasmine. The river glided on past endless receding processions of cypress trees shrouded in Spanish moss; here and there were silent lagoons in perpetual gloom. The river meandered among orange groves and stands of magnolia so pungent the smell made some travelers sick.
Then the great swamp forests began to dwindle. The banks on either side melted away into indeterminate ooze that deepened and widened into borders of reeds and cattails more than a mile wide. The last solid land broke up into a maze of little peninsulas and islets and isthmuses dense with rustles of sea grass and sedge, swarmed by pelicans. The water shone from thousands of brackish ponds and lagoons and lakes. There was no firm line between the river delta and the salt estuaries. But in