Big River: Can the Mississippi build America again?

By Ry Rivard, Garrett Downs, Photographs by Julia Rendleman for POLITICO | 07/03/2024 07:07 PM EDT

Biden hopes the same waterways that spurred westward expansion can cut greenhouse gas emissions. Environmentalists aren’t so sure.

Deckhands work to recouple barges at Lock and Dam 25 on the upper Mississippi River.

Deckhands work to recouple barges at Lock and Dam 25 on the upper Mississippi River near Winfield, Missouri. Photos by Julia Rendleman for POLITICO

WINFIELD, Missouri — In the story of America, the Mississippi River is a character unto itself, a rough-hewn founding father of the West: restless, implacable, more powerful than law or nature.

Its biographer, Mark Twain, ridiculed the idea that it could ever be tamed: “Ten thousand River Commissions,” he vowed, “cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey.”

And yet, after the river had propelled the country’s westward expansion, the government did just that. Hoping to make the nation’s largest river more predictable and commercial, engineers dotted it with dams and locks. The dams control water levels, the locks let through barges carrying the spoils of the nation’s farmland — corn, soybeans and grain.

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The first of these structures — walls of concrete that can stretch a third of a mile from bank to bank — went up just before Twain died in 1910.

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