Searching Out the Headwaters by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6531156
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2013-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

THE MISSOURI: RIVER OF SACRIFICE

The Missouri was a devil of a river . . . it was no river at all but a great loose water that leaped from the mountains and tore through the plains, wild to get to the sea.

A. B. GUTHRIE, JR. : The Big Sky

It’s a river with wanderlust. It’s an erratic river. It’s a river that has been developed—often for not much more than the sake of development—at the expense of societies that had been living on its banks for centuries, and thus it is a river of sacrifice.

Asked to identify the longest river in the United States, most people would name the Mississippi, which runs 2,340 miles from headwaters to the Gulf of Mexico. But they would be wrong. The Missouri River—the massive tributary to the Mississippi that runs from the Rockies to St. Louis—is even longer, at 2,540 miles. The single waterway formed by the confluence of these two rivers is the longest in the world.

On its long journey toward the sea, the river flows over ice age debris—plains of “high loess,” a loose conglomerate of packed dust left behind as the glaciers moved through. Running uncontrolled across this dusty floor for centuries, the river easily shifted from side to side, rather than carving deeply into the earth in the mode of other western rivers. The big Missouri regularly shot its banks, cutting and swerving all over its broad valley. The river’s twists and turns confounded settlers hoping to farm on its banks; they would suddenly find their land washing toward St. Louis, the river having changed course by as much as a half mile in a single day.

The restless river literally carried the farms downstream. Mud was its primary cargo. The river gained its nickname of “Big Muddy” from the naturally heavy loads of sediment it washed down from the ancient plains, well over two hundred million tons per year. When the rains were heavy enough, the river uprooted trees and shrubs and carried them many miles away. An early non-Indian visitor to the Missouri River basin, Jesuit missionary Father Jacques Marquette, was awed by the sight of uprooted trees washing downstream at the mouth of the Missouri; he wrote in his journal, “I have seen nothing more frightful . . . we could not, without great danger, expose ourselves to pass across.”

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