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.
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.
