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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
The Mississippi River Basin is the Backbone of the United States by William B. Stickle is a wide-ranging account of how the river system helped build America and continues to shape life across the country. Covering thirty-two states and two Canadian provinces, the basin brings together water from the Ohio River and sediment from the Missouri before flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico. Stickle traces its origins to melting continental glaciers, showing how geography made the waterway essential to settlements and eventually to the movement of American exports. That national dependence has also meant reshaping the river to accommodate shipping, with dams and levees altering the sediment reaching Louisiana’s coastal marshes. As the coastline recedes, the question of how to protect that land becomes inseparable from the river’s continuing importance to the country.
I found William B. Stickle’s The Mississippi River Basin is the Backbone of the United States fascinating, and his easy-going writing made me rethink a river I thought I already knew. He has a knack for making its enormous influence on American life seem wonderfully tangible. I had no idea engineers shortened the Mississippi by 150 miles in the 1930s and 1940s, so floodwater could move downstream faster, while the photographs of barges piled high with freight helped me appreciate the river’s role in American commerce. That same sense of discovery carries into Stickle’s account of the wildlife living across the basin. I was blown away when I learned that Louisiana’s rice fields hosted an estimated 1.6 million migrating shorebirds in 1998. Well written and as interesting as it is educational, readers who enjoy American history that still shapes how we operate today will adore this.
