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Boundary Issues: Clarifying New Orleans's Murky Edges
Ari Kelman
| At first there were just tiny ridges flanking the river, barely perceptible piles of Big Muddy's mud. Then, over millennia, they grew as the Mississippi River deposited layers of soil during flood seasons. It happened like this: Before the advent of modern flood control technologies, when the swollen river spread from its channel each spring, the unconstrained torrent slackened. Without a current carrying it, suspended material sank. The heaviest sediment dropped closest to the river, with lighter silt falling farther away. So the Mississippi built its banks, earthen ramps descending gradually from its shores. We know these accretions as the river's natural levees.1 |
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Eventually, the levees became useful for people, because of both local topography and continental geography. Native Americans knew the riverbanks as the highest, driest ground in the flat, damp delta. They shared their knowledge with the Europeans who settled Louisiana. For the latter, the Mississippi and its levee embodied the New World's promise. The river gathered the waters of thousands of smaller streams crisscrossing its valley, an expanse stretching from the Rockies' eastern face to the Alleghenies' western slope. More than fifteen thousand miles of navigable waterways make up the Mississippi system, a funnel whose spout would, it seemed, shunt trade inexorably toward the Gulf of Mexico. For boosters the Mississippi was God's signature carved into the valley; they saw in the turbid river images of empire. And the levee was more evidence of a divine plan: an elevated spot on which to build an entrepôt where produce gathered from the North American interior could arrive at market near the river mouth.2 |
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Such visions of benign nature, working in concert with imperial aspirations, prompted the French to place New Orleans on a crescent-shaped stretch of the levee in 1718. Four years later, François Xavier Charlevoix, a Jesuit priest, visited. "Rome and Paris had not such considerable beginnings," he wrote, "were not built under such happy auspices, and their founders met not with those advantages on the Seine and the Tiber, which we have found on the Mississippi, in comparison of which, these two rivers are no more than brooks." Geography was destiny. The river would inevitably make New Orleans great. But not even faith in environmental determinism allowed Charlevoix to overlook grim features of the local scene: "Imagine to yourself two hundred persons, who have been sent out to build a city, and who have settled on the banks of a great river, thinking upon nothing but putting themselves under cover from the injuries of the weather." So from the first, New Orleans had a strained relationship with its environs, which seemed at once to guarantee and to cloud its future.3 |
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