Two cities, one river

—by Ilse Genovese

One dubbed the gateway to the American West, the other to the wide and open Midwest, and connecting them a river that has few equals. The Hopewell Native Americans used it for trade and travel, becoming the most advanced culture in early North America. The French sent trappers down its banks after coveted beaver fur. At one time it was the western boundary of the U.S., daring pioneers to explore beyond its western shores. In nineteenth-century America, “the Father of all Rivers” was a major transportation artery, carrying goods and people set on exploring and settling the unknown West. But, were it not for a hot-spot roller coaster billions of years ago, the river would have been flowing north rather than south. Along its course there would have been other great cities, but not St. Louis and New Orleans.

St. Louis
Perched on a high bluff west of the Mississippi River is St. Louis, once a starting point of the westward expansion of the U.S. Today, the city claims both banks of the river, and, true to its founder’s aspirations, it has become “one of the finest cities in America.”
The history of St. Louis is inextricably tied to its role as a busy frontier passage for people and products from the East to the West, across the Great Plains and all the way to the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of California.
Among the first Europeans who came through were fur trappers, who passed by the Missouri–Mississippi confluence to the north of St. Louis as early as 1673. The village of St. Louis was established a hundred years later, offering respite and goods for restocking to fur trappers and explorers alike.
When the steamship was invented, the city’s central location multiplied its fortunes. Its proximity to where the upper and lower Mississippi meet, and just north of the Ohio River, also helped. By the time the first steamer, Zebulon M Pike, chugged up to the St. Louis wharf in 1817, the city was a major trading hub providing connections from the northern Rockies to Pittsburgh, and from Minnesota to New Orleans. Furs and ores traveled East, while people and manufactured goods went West. Two decades later, St. Louis and New Orleans were the busiest river ports in the United States.
The railway came in 1852. But with so few points for trains to cross the “Big Muddy,” bridges needed to be built. The Eads Bridge opened in 1874, and when the Cupples Station opened, St. Louis was on its way to becoming a major link between the East and the West. At the turn of the century, Union Station in Washington, D.C., was the largest passenger station in the world when it opened in 1894, but St. Louis was one of the busiest rail hubs in the country.
In the twentieth century, road transportation also found the city’s central location conducive to development. Route 66, the road that became legend in popular culture, passed trough downtown St. Louis. Interstates 44, 55, 64, and 70 also converge on the city, reinforcing its tradition as a gateway to the West.
Location played a role in two other events involving St. Louis. One was the Lewis and Clark expedition which opened the door to mapping the U.S. expansion westward; the other, an attempt by St. Louis “city boosters” to bring the world to St. Louis in 1945.
The expedition that set off from Camp Wood, a camp on the Mississippi across from the mouth of Missouri, in the late spring of 1804 to find a northwestern passage to the Pacific Ocean, will go down in history as one of the most poignant and scientifically highly successful endeavours of the Young Republic.
The 1945 effort, while not without merit, is just one of the interesting tidbits about St. Louis. Having learned about a request for proposals from qualified U.S. cities to host the soon-to-be-created United Nations, the city submitted a handsomely bound and illustrated proposal extolling its safe location. St. Louis, so read the proposal, “is safely located, surrounded by much of the United States, and, about half-way between the two trouble spots of the world, Berlin and Tokyo.” The city, read the document, “is a major rail center, offering good telegraph and train facilities and, best of all, the land at Weldon Springs is available for immediate occupancy.”
The strong case for safety made St. Louis an obvious choice. But, it was not to be, of course. The U.N. moved to New York, on land provided by the Rockefellers, trading midwestern calm for the Big Apple’s windblown urgency.
Easily accessible by road, rail, and air, St. Louis has since been the host of many international and national “leagues” of a professional and political nature. This March, it has welcomed the ACSM spring convention which has been organized in conjunction with the Illinois Professional Land Surveyors Association and the Missouri Society of Professional Surveyors. It’s awesome to be in St. Louis; thank you for inviting us.
On a personal level, it is the city’s immigration experience that holds fascination for me. To this day, the “peopling” of St. Louis” weaves a rich and colorful tapestry of peoples and nations.
Some 40,000 Cahokia people used to live in the area in the prehistoric times. No one knows why and when exactly the Cahokia’s culture died out, but they left behind remnants of their society in Illinois, and some two dozen mounds in present-day northern St. Louis. The mounds were raised to the ground in the nineteenth century to give way to new streets, but for a while, St. Louis was the trappers’ “Mound City” on the Mississippi.
The Cahokia were not the only Native Americans who called the Byway area between the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers their home; the Osage, the Missouri, the Kansas, the Oto, the Iowa, and the Omaha tribes all moved to the area at one point or the other. Some were there when Lewis and Clark were getting ready to set off on their famous expedition and hiring guides and linguists to help them communicate with the native population.
St. Louis at that time was largely comprised of French colonists, so when the rule of Louisiana passed from Napoleon to Jefferson in 1803, the American and English groups immigrating to St. Louis were considered “foreign.” The Americans came from the Carolinas and Tennessee and there were Yankees among them from New England, Ohio, and Indiana. They came to St. Louis with an adventurous spirt and often widely different value systems. The foreign immigrants brought their own to the mix.
The first immigrants to the area from overseas were the Irish and the Germans. Irish immigrants worked in the local clay mines and provided labor for the clay and fire brick industry. The first wave of Germans came in the mid-1830s, lured to Missouri by the Giessen Emigration Society which described it as the “American Rhineland”—a potent carrot for any wine maker and agriculturalist in search of rich land.
The “great migration” however began in the mid-1870s, in response to rising demand for factory workers in the “New World” and growing dissatisfaction in the “Old.” This time they came from southeastern Europe, they lived in crowded tenements, worked long hours in factories or sweatshops, and clustered in large cities such as St. Louis. German and Czech immigrants, the two groups I have an affinity to, lived in tenements on the near south side of St. Louis and had jobs in nearby foundries, cotton factories, and breweries.
The last of the “great migration” wave were the Italians. They arrived in St. Louis in the 1890s, mainly to work in the clay mines in the Fairmount area. Many of them came via the Illinois coal fields, replacing German and African-American clay miners. The Italian migrants settled on what is known today as “The Hill,” developing a strong and cohesive neighborhood whose Improvement Association fought City Hall on several so-called “improvements” and convinced the U. S. government to route its planned Interstate 44 around the neighborhood, rather than dissect it.
Immigration to St. Louis has not stopped; but it now draws people from different parts of the world. According to the International Institute of St. Louis there are currently some 100 ethnic groups living in the greater St. Louis area. People from southeastern Asia, Haiti and the Caribbean, and Latin America are now calling St. Louis their home, along with those of European extraction.

New Orleans
New Orleans has in common with St. Louis its French and Spanish antecedents. Like St. Louis up river, New Orleans has been a flourishing trading hub on the Mississippi for most of its existence. But where St. Louis is a gateway to the American West, New Orleans, in many respects, has been the country’s gateway to the world. Because of its location on the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans has had its share of moments great and not so great.
“Nouvelle-Orléans” was founded by the French in 1718, in honor of the Duke of Orleans, the then Regent of France. The site selected for the settlement was a rare bit of natural high ground along the flood-prone banks of the lower Mississippi. From one account at least, it was not a very healthy place to live in—“a hundred wretched hovels in a malarious wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos, infested by serpents and alligators.“ Nevertheless, within four years of its establishment, New Orleans became the capital of French Louisiana, replacing Biloxi.
New Orleans was soon tested by the elements; in September 1722, a powerful hurricane blew most of its structures down. The city was rebuilt, but after the hurricane it was mandated that its streets must follow a grid pattern—a requirement previously largely ignored. Two big fire scourges some decades later convinced the colonists to use brick instead of wood as their building material. The St. Louis Cathedral, the Cabildo, and the Presbytere—the three most impressive buildings in New Orleans—date from this period.
New Orleans’ political rule changed in 1763, when France ceded Louisiana to Spain, and again in 1800, after Napoleon Bonaparte demanded and received the colony back. Thomas Jefferson, planning for the day when the U.S. would move its boundary across the Mississippi, considered this development worrisome. He sent emissaries to France to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans; instead, thanks to some clever diplomatic maneuvering and a defeat of Napoleon’s advance army in the Caribbean Islands, the delegation returned in 1803 with a bigger prize—ownership of “all the land drained by the Mississippi all the way to the Rocky Mountains.”
The purchase of Louisiana removed the last obstacle to Jefferson’s dream to explore the land west of the Mississippi and to find a northwestern passage to the Pacific Ocean. He wrote the brief for the Corps of Discovery and in 1804 sent them on their fact-finding journey.
For New Orleans, the Louisiana purchase brought an intensification of commerce along the Mississippi River and in the Gulf of Mexico. Several events contributed to this growth. Within the city, the Carondelet Canal was opened in 1794, connecting the back of the city with Bayou St. John along the river levee with Lake Pontchartrain. Around the same time, the sugar industry was put on a firmer keel.
After Louisiana was admitted to the Union in 1812, the former French colony became an indispensable part of the economy in the south. Natural gas exploration began in about 1830, the Pontchartrain Railroad was completed in 1831, and the first steam cotton press was set to work in 1832. The New Orleans Mint, a branch of the U.S. Mint, was established in 1838, boosting the city’s standing within the Union.
By 1840, New Orleans was the fourth largest city of the U.S., with a population counting 102,000. Travellers in those days left behind pictures of a city congested with river boats and steamers and ocean-sailing craft. It was a city where the institution of slavery lived alongside quadroon balls; where English was drowned by a medley of Latin tongues; and where the carousals of the rivermen and adventurers infused the city with the wildness of a frontier town.
The “pursuit of the joys of life” may have coined one of New Orleans’ nick names—the Big Easy. But it was the city’s strategic location on the map that held the promise of access to boundless prosperity. England, buoyed by their victory over Napoleon in Europe, was bent on wrenching New Orleans from the United States. By capturing New Orleans, the English had hoped to block commerce along the Mississippi, and eventually split the Union in two.
The English devised an extraordinary scheme to achieve this feat. At its center were the “pirates of Barataria,” a band of privateers based in the remote Barataria Bay of Grand Terre Island, some 40 miles south of New Orleans. The privateers, who had been pursuing economic “opportunities” along the Gulf of Mexico by preying on merchant shipping were a thorn in the city’s side that the authorities had resolved to expunge militarily.
The Baratarians were led by Jean Laffite, a French “gentleman-smuggler,” who, using a blacksmith’ shop in New Orleans as a front, ran a phenomenal smuggling business for the grateful citizens of New Orleans. But Laffite was more than a pirate and a smuggler; he had the instincts of a military comander. Sensing trouble, he and his Baratarians had squirrelled away large stores of munitions, which would prove critically important when the battle of New Orleans broke out in the autumn of 1814.
The English, hoping to exploit the strained relationship between the authorities and the pirates, attempted to enlist their services by offering Laffite a bribe of 30,000 pounds (more than 2 million today). Laffite watched the English sail away and then promptly proceeded to double-cross them. His letter to the U.S. authorities in New Orleans revealed that a huge fleet of the English army was gathering for an attack on New Orleans.
But, if Laffite thought that the authorities were going to forgive him for smuggling, he was mistaken. His overtures to fight on the side of the U.S. were rebuffed, the Baratarian’s stores in New Orleans were confiscated, and Gen. Andrew Jackson, the legendary Indian fighter who was ordered to take charge of New Orleans defenses, rebuffed the Baratarians as “hellish Banditti.”
What happened next in the fight for New Orleans, and, indeed the U.S., is part of another chapter in American history better described by Winston Groom in his book, Patriotic Fire. But it is curious, and in keeping with the life and people of New Orleans in early nineteenth century, that the unlikely hero of this chapter would be a personage of Laffite’s makeup. Gen. Jackson’s Tennesseeans and the Creole fighters of Louisiana fought bravely to repel the onslaught of the English artillery, yet, it was Laffite’s knowledge of the Mississippi delta and his Baratarians manning powerful 24-pounders who helped the American patriots clinch a hard-fought victory.
In our story, we now jump to the late nineteenth century, a period of economic reconstruction in New Orleans, world trade fairs, increase in tourism, and civil strife. The World Cotton Centennial held in the city in 1884. A century later, New Orleans hosted another World’s Fair, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition. By then, tourism boomed in this bustling city living in precarious symbiosis with its waters.
Because much of New Orleans lies below sea level between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, the city has always had to rely on levees—natural and man-made. Until the early 20th century, levee construction was largely limited to the slightly higher ground along old natural river levees and bayous. This gave the nineteenth-century city a crescent-like shape along a bend of the Mississippi, and one of its nicknames, “The Crescent City.” Today’s city has outgrown this shape, thanks to inventor A. Baldwin Wood and the large pumps he had designed to drain the city. The pumps are still used when heavy rains hit the city.
As more land was wrestled from the muddy clutches of the Mississippi delta, the New Orleans suburbs grew, and new canals were built to encourage commerce between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi. The Mississippi River – Gulf Outlet Canal built in 1965 was expected to bring an economic boon to New Orleans’ metro area and eventually replace the Mississippi Riverfront as the main commercial harbor, but the project failed to live up to its expectations and from its early days was blamed for environmental degradation that increased the area’s risk of hurricane storm surge.
The city has suffered from hurricanes and flooding on and off, with increasing severity. On August 29, 2005, the levee and flood wall system protecting New Orleans failed. Four of the city’s canals were breached by storm surge funneled in via the breached Mississippi Gulf outlet. As much as eighty percent of the city was flooded with water up to 25 feet deep. Water levels were similar to those of the comparable 1909 hurricane flood surge, but because many areas which were swamp or farmland in 1909 had become heavily settled, the effects of Katrina were dramatically worse.
A year-and-half after hurricane Katrina landed in the Gulf region near New Orleans, its people remain displaced and the return to normalcy in the city is slow. Investigations conducted in the aftermath of the disaster by the Corps of Engineers and others have found several problems leading to what has by some been dubbed as “largest civil engineering disaster in the history of the United States.”
Averting any future recurrence of the disaster is number one priority of New Orleans and the country. This calls for a fresh look at the levee system itself, the geography and geologic history of the Mississippi River, and human development along the river.

The Mississippi River
The Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico about 100 miles downstream from New Orleans. Flowing for 2,348 miles from its source in Minnesota’s Lake Itasca to the Head-of-Passes in the Gulf, the Mississippi is the second longest river, after the Missouri, in the U.S. It drains 40 percent of the country, which covers all or part of 31 states, Missouri and Illinois included. Drainage-wise, the Mississippi is the third largest river in the world.
The Mississippi, whose name in Chippewa language means “great river” or ‘gathering of waters,” did not always drain the vast continental interior of the U.S. toward the south. Millions of years ago, the river flowed north or west. Why did the river change its course? And what made it to do so? The answers lie in the geology of the continents surrounding the Atlantic Ocean.
Several hundred million years ago, these continents fit neatly together like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. West Africa lay smug up against the East Coast of the U.S., and the northern end of South America was where the Gulf Coast is today. Plate tectonic movements created this huge landmass, the “Pangea,” leaving telltale marks in the process.
In the eastern U.S., the collision with Africa raised the Appalachian Mountains to heights that probably once rivaled the Rockies. Similarly, the impact of South America created the Ouachita Mountains, which run west to east across Oklahoma and Arkansas, and formerly blended smoothly into the southern Appalachians. Then something happened to cleave the once continuous Ouachita-Appalachian range in two, leaving room for the Mississippi River to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
The break that now separates the Ouachita Mountains from the Appalachians is a huge tongue-shaped lowland known as the Mississippi Embayment. Its existence touches on many other mysteries of North American geology—such as why one can find diamonds in Arkansas and why the largest earthquake that was ever recorded in the contiguous U.S. occurred not in California or Washington but in Missouri, of all places.
Van Arsdale and Cox believe the reason for all these geological “mysteries” is a hot-spot-cum-magnum roller coaster. About 95 million years ago, the central and eastern U.S. passed over the Bermuda hot spot; a review of plate motion models for North America revealed that this movement occurred during the time that the Mississippi Embayment was rising upward.
The uplift extended from southern Louisiana north into southeastern Missouri, and from the present-day Tennessee River west to Little Rock, Arkansas, cresting along a line that approximately follows where the Mississippi River is today. Within 10 million years, weathering caused the highlands to erode down to sea level or thereabouts, Then, as the Mississippi Embayment drifted off the Bermuda hot spot, the crust there cooled, contracted, and subsided to about 2.6 kilometers below sea level.
After the crust cooled and subsided, it did not return to its original configuration because it was missing between two and three kilometers’ worth of rock at the top. A trough formed and was inundated with water from the Gulf of Mexico, into which rivers draining the continent could flow. This change, Van Arsdale and Cox claim, was sufficient to reverse the drainage of the continental interior, sending waters south instead of north.
Further support for this theory comes from a geologic event of much younger vintage—the killer earthquake that struck the Missouri town of New Madrid on February 7, 1812. The temblor, which seismologists estimate would have measured 8.0 on the Richter scale, was powerful enough even to change the course of the Mississippi in one spot.
Why would an earthquake strike in a typically quiet center of the continent. You guessed it; New Madrid sits above an ancient fractured structure called the Mississippi Valley (or “Reelfoot”) rift system. This system was created when the interior of the U.S. passed over the Bermuda hot spot, and the Earth’s crust in the area did its up-and-down moves. The Arkansas diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes formed in a similar manner.
That such different things as an earthquake in Missouri and diamonds in Arkansas fit well with Van Arsdale’s and Cox’s explanation for the formation of the Mississippi Embayment is quite remarkable. And it is quite interesting to think that the course of the mighty Mississippi was fundamentally controlled by goings-on a full 2,900 kilometers away—straight downward, at the boundary between the Earth’s core and mantle. This surprising conclusion provides a close-to-home reminder of the connectedness of the different parts of our fascinating country.
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[Sources of facts and images: Lewis and Clark: Voyage of Discovery, edited by Gweneth Reed DenDooven; Winston Groom’s article “New Orleans: Saved by a Pirate and Glimpsed through a Pinhole” published in the Smithsonian in August 2006; History of New Orleans on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_Orleans); The Mississippi River (http://www.gatewayno.com/Mississippi/; http://biology.usgs.gov); and Roy B. Van Arsdale and Randel T. Cox’s article in the January 2007 Scientific American on “The Mississippi’s Curious Origins.” ]