I used to live north of St. Louis in Quincy, IL (just across the river from Mark Twain's Hannibal). While it's no Yellow or Nile or Yangtze, it is still truly impressive in its width and power at that point. We used to picnic in a park beside one of the locks. It was so cool to see.
When I've had the chance to teach Huckleberry Finn, I tell my students that the river unites the country as few topographical features do: it drains 21 of the 48 contiguous states. And the fact that it flows south is a crucial element in the novel's plot, as well.
William Least Heat Moon's River Horse uses the tributary system of the Mississippi as the heart of their Atlantic to Pacific trip across the US by water. Lovely book.
William Least Heat Moon is great, the late Maureen Kincaid Speller introduced me to Prairyerth years ago. I think I've read most of his work. River Horse is one of those books that makes you want to go there, do that.
Are you familiar with the late Tim Robinson's work on Connemara and the Aran Islands? They are some of the most remarkable books I've read on any topic.
I started with the pair Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (around the coast of Inis Mor) and Labyrinth (the interior of the island) which he wrote based on his walks creating his hand drawn map of Aran. He covers geology, botany, linguistics, folklore and history down to a field by field level.
And a glance at water shipping costs relative to other options, considering natural resource locations, together with all that easily-irrigated farmland/flood plains, plus the intracoastal waterways offshore, and you see why the US would have to work to *not* be a world power.
Work harder, anyway.
About half a mile from my apartment, there’s a little plaque in the sidewalk that marks the continental divide between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes basin, although it’s a bit of a fuzzy distinction: I grew up four miles south of here in the drained basin of a lake which would
empty into the west fork of the south branch of the Chicago river most of the time, but after a heavy rain would instead empty into the Des Plaines river and thus the Mississippi basin.
