Jim Bradshaw
River went from pretty posies to torrent
Spring always brings a rise in the Mississippi River, and that almost always brings a rise in the debate over if, or when, the Atchafalaya will capture most of the Mississippi’s water.
It would be a really bad thing if that happened. Ships could no longer get to Baton Rouge and only small ones to New Orleans. Salty water creeping up the river from the Gulf would corrode pipes and taint drinking water. A score of industries depending on fresh water would shut down. And that’s not even half of what could happen.
It wasn’t a problem when the Mississippi changed its course centuries ago and began to send water into a tiny Atchafalaya that was a far cry from the deep river we know today. The Mississippi also carried tons of debris that created a natural dam at the Atchafalaya’s mouth that held it to a trickle.
Geographer William Darby described that dam in 1817 as a miles-long “mass of timber that rises and falls with the water in the river.” But, he said, tales that the logs were jammed so close together that horses could be ridden across them were “entirely void of truth.”
Darby found the raft downright pretty. “When waters are low,” he wrote, “the surface of the raft is covered by the most beautiful flora … and [it and] the hum of honey bees, seen in thousands, compensate the traveler for the deep silence and lonely appearance of nature at this remote spot.” The smooth water behind the raft supported “many species of papilionaceous [butterfly-like] flowers.” Darby wrote. “Even the alligators, otherwise the most loathsome and disgusting of animated beings, serve to increase the impressive solemnity of the scene.”
Steamboat captains and people who used their boats were less lyrical when they began trying to use the river. “Snag boats,” essentially floating battering rams, began to break up the jam in the 1830s. That made the Atchafalaya navigable but also let more water flow into it. The stronger current widened the Atchafalaya, dug it deeper, made it treacherous.
A writer for Harper’s Weekly noted in the Spring of 1883: “Thirty-eight years since the farmers walked across the present sources of the Atchafalaya, and cattle browsed on the reeds growing in its bed … we found it [near its mouth] … 122 feet deep … with the wildest kind of primitive forests on either side.
“At many places the water whirls in great circles, [dipping] down like a saucer two feet beneath the surrounding current. Here and there it boils up like a huge cauldron, bringing with it various colored earths, showing the nature of the soil its deep channel is tearing away. … Our gallant little steamer sometimes surged along sideways; [or] had to back against and then race with the river current. A powerful river boat upward bound had to work back and forth across the river current. … Her progress resembled the crawl of a turtle.”
Even then people wondered if a course change was coming. The question asked, “by all along our route,” according to Harper’s, was, “Do you think the Atchafalaya will absorb the Mississippi current?”
A Major Whitney, supposedly an expert on such things, thought that “unless immediate attention is paid to this work … the Mississippi will flow … to the Gulf through this new-found [outlet],” and that “such an event will ruin … Baton Rouge, New Orleans and all … cities depending on the river for support, for it will not only leave them high and dry, but necessitate the changing of the entire established [river] transport system.”
The shorter Atchafalaya route would cut the trip to the Gulf by 200 miles, but the Major thought, “it is still a question whether … [this] narrow and more turbulent channel, would not so increase the dangers of travel … as to take away all advantages from the shorter route.”
That remained the question into the late 1940s, when the Atchafalaya was drawing away one-third of the Mississippi’s water; and the question became a cause for alarm by the 1950s, when it became apparent that, unchecked, it would capture practically all of the Mississippi’s flow.
The Army Engineers’ solution was a control structure at Simmesport to regulate how much water can get into the Atchafalaya. It has done its job since it was completed in 1963, but there have been scares. During a historic flood in 1973, for example, Mississippi water began to undermine the controls. Tons of broken concrete poured into the breaches averted disaster, but worries persist that, even though more permanent repairs have been made, the structure will not hold forever.
The Army Engineers maintain, as always, that all is under control and will stay that way. But lots of people agree with a skeptic’s view that “the river has a long memory, and … it longs for freedom.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
