Wicked River_ The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild - Lee Sandlin [20]
The most dramatic erasures and remakings of the river course happened in the floods. The floods were annual events. The upper Mississippi would freeze over during the winter; in early spring, the ice would break up and come grinding and tumbling downstream in thunderous cascades; and then in the following weeks, as the meltwater of the North Country came pouring down through thousands of tributaries, the river would rise. Since there was no quick way of getting news downriver, until the advent of the telegraph in midcentury, there were never any warnings about how high the river was running in the upper valley or how bad a flood season the lower valley could expect. The news from upriver arrived at the same speed as the flood itself. People could only wait it out and hope for the best; they’d simply have to watch each day as the waters inexorably crept up over the banks and drowned out their land.
Some of the Indians in the lower valley liked to say that the river was a snake that woke from a doze every seven years and lashed out at anyone foolish enough to live alongside it. As an average for the catastrophic floods—the floods that swept away whole towns and inundated the land for thousands of square miles along either side of the banks—seven years was about right. Sometimes these floods came more often. There were five catastrophic floods on the Mississippi between 1809 and 1816. There were four in the 1820s. There were only two in the 1840s—but the flood of 1844, one of the first for which there is any kind of hard data, is still the greatest volume of water ever recorded descending the river.
The floods were the great given of river life. Everyone who lived on or near the river had to learn to coexist with them somehow. Houses were built on stilts all through the swamps and marshlands; at St. Louis, the warehouses of the dock district had to be set so far back from the riverbank to protect them from the rises that there was a separate hauling fee to get goods carried off the boats into storage. Farmers working the bottomlands and transient river islets—unbelievably fertile lands, because of the topsoil that the floods dumped on them—would spend their winters building colossal rafts, so that when the river began to rise in the spring, they could herd their cattle and pigs and horses into pens, and load their grain and gear into makeshift barns, and then tie a rope to the tallest tree branch they could find and ride out the next weeks or months till the river dwindled again. They could only hope that their land was still there when the waters retreated. Often their homesteads ended up on the river bottom.
The highest water usually came in June. Everywhere along the river, people waited for the June rise the way they might await the results of a horse race. Some years the river rose only a few feet and swamped the fields adjacent to its banks; other years it rose ten feet or more and drowned the countryside. In 1844 it rose fifty feet and spread out more than ten miles wide and more than thirty feet deep in the central valley all summer long. At its height, the citizens of St. Louis gathered at the levee, as though at a regatta, and watched as Illinoistown on the far bank was wholly engulfed and its pieces carried off by the flood.
On June 5, 1805, at around one in the afternoon, a tornado came out of the hill country south of St. Louis and crossed the Mississippi. It was, according to one nineteenth-century writer, “the most violent tempest that ever visited Illinois.” That area of the Illinois shore was still only thinly populated and there were no reported fatalities, but the tornado brought down countless trees as it crashed through the old-growth forests of southern Illinois. The track