Old Man River , Paul Schneider's exploration of America's great waterway―taking the reader from the Mississippi River's origins to its polluted present and tracing its prehistory, geology, and cultural and literary histories―is as vast as its subject. The fascinating cast of characters includes the French and Spanish explorers de Soto, Marquette and Joliet, and the incomparable La Salle; George Washington fighting his first battle in an effort to secure the watershed; the birth of jazz and blues; and literary greats like Melville, Dickens, Trollope, and, of course, Mark Twain. Pirates and riverbats, gamblers and slaves, hustlers and landscape painters, loggers and catfishers, tourists and missionaries: The Mississippi is a river of stories and myth. It's Paul Robeson sitting on a cotton bale, Daniel Boone floating on a flatboat, and Paul Bunyan cutting trees in the neighborhood of Little House in the Big Woods . Half-devastated product of American ingenuity, half-magnificent natural wonder, it is impossible to imagine America without the Mississippi. “[A] vivid history.” ― The New Yorker “He's a fantastic writer.” ― Wes Craven, The Boston Globe “Stunning...With such an expert hand on the tiller, Old Man River is an astonishing journey.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) “The territory Schneider studies is what some dismiss as ‘flyover country,' but what fascinating stories ‘flyover country' has to tell!” ― Booklist “Another chockablock, environmentally focused, ambitious volume from Schneider...A wild ride well worth taking.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Reminiscent of a Ken Burns documentary...this historical book becomes surprisingly moving and meditative.” ― The Cedar Rapids Gazette “Schneider's book stands out....It's another reminder of how we took the river's heritage for granted for far too long, and why it's worth scrambling today to reclaim and maintain as much of it as we can.” ― Minneapolis Star Tribune Paul Schneider is the acclaimed author of Bonnie and Clyde , Brutal Journey , The Enduring Shore , and The Adirondacks , a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. He and his family live in West Tisbury, Massachusetts. Old Man River The Mississippi River in North American History By Paul Schneider Picador Copyright © 2014 Paul Schneider All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-250-05310-7 1   ICE ON THE ROCKS The Mississippi River was old long before the first giant sloth faced down a dire wolf or the last short-faced bear stood up to her full thirteen feet and bared her teeth to an eight-foot-long beaver. It was old before the first woman to see it got her feet muddy. The river is older than the entire fabulous menagerie of strange and outsized mammals that roamed the watershed during the two-and-a-half-million-year Pleistocene epoch, which ended about twelve thousand years ago with the most recent retreat of the glaciers. It was that most recent ice, however, that sculpted the northern features of the Mississippi River watershed into their current forms. All across the top of the continent, the ice dammed up the northward progress of prehistoric rivers and sent them south, into the Mississippi watershed. The melting ice sheets didn’t drain into the Gulf of Mexico in any kind of measured or consistent pattern but rather in fits and starts, and floods of diluvian scope. For several thousand years, when the ice had retreated into Canada, but not far enough to allow the northern rivers to flow into Hudson Bay and the Arctic Ocean, a gigantic lake covered northern Minnesota, western South Dakota, and most of central Canada. This prehistoric Lake Agassiz, named for the nineteenth-century Swiss-born geographer who pioneered the radical idea of prehistoric ice ages, was larger than all of the Great Lakes combined, larger than the Caspian Sea. When at last it broke through the moraine of glacial rubble that was its southern boundary and drained for a time through Minnesota and Wisconsin, it carved the outsized gorge between those states through which the upper Mississippi River now flows. The Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio, and Wisconsin Rivers all flow through valleys that are far broader than the present water levels could have carved. None of this is to say that the last ice age created either the Mississippi River or the land across which it meanders. The northern boundary of the watershed was shaped by glacial ice, which measures its workday in tens of thousands of years. The eastern and western walls, however, were caused by the drift of continents, which operates over hundreds of millions of years. Beneath all the lists of clay, most of the basin rests on top of some of the oldest rocks on earth. This shield of granite and gneiss known as the North American Craton, or Laurentia, has been drifting around smashing into, and breaking away from, other ancient pieces of the earth’s crust for more than two billion years. During that span Laurentia has been a component of more t