The Mississippi River
Some interesting thigns involving it
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The Works of the Lower Mississippi
In the Darkest Blue is the main course of the Mississippi, running down the old Atchafalaya River, sometimes called the “New Course”
In Dark Blue is the Old Course of the Mississippi, also called the Plaquemines River
In Lighter Blue are the *main* tributaries and distributaries of the Mississippi
In the Lightest Blue are other *major* rivers
In Red are the Great Raft Locks along the Red River
In Yellow is the Bah’hatteno Dam
In Orange are the Dunes of Louisiana
In Lime is the Morganza Way
In Purple are the Northern and Southern Channels of the Big Easy
The Mississippi River, besides being the second longest-river in North America (possessing its second-largest watershed) and the heart and spine of the USSA, is known for the
many massive works of infrastructure present across the river and its tributaries, most of them built over the past century or so. Of those various projects, probably the most famous are those found on the lower reaches of the Mississippi, along the River Delta on the Gulf of the Mexico and the Red River.
The first of those are the
Great Raft Locks, built during the 1870s by the US Army Engineering Corps. Although the corps originally planned on getting rid entirely of the Great Raft, the millennia-old jam of logs along the Red Rivers, setbacks one after the other and continuous problems and hurdles resulted on the defunct Corps, in something unheard of for their kind[1], deciding to just give-up on actually clearing the raft, and instead build a series of locks going around the Raft to permit navigation along the Red River.
Nowadays the Corps’ decision is generally considered to have been correct by most people, if for the simple fact that, if they
had cleared the Great Raft (which is also a component of the mythology of the local Caddo people), the sheer drop in water levels above it would completely ruin the economy of many of the towns and cities around its shores as the lakes and waterways would become too shallow for navigation. This factor, in fact, has resulted on the building of various minor dams and dykes along the Great Raft Lakes, most noticeable the Bah’hatteno Dam[2], which helps sustain Caddo Lake at a suitable size, and through that maintains the water levels of the ports of Jefferson, Texas’ third largest city.
The second is the
Morganza Way, built by Commissioner Elias LaBouff in 1931. Born from the uncertainty that came with the change of the Mississippi’s course in the infamous Floods of 1927, the Morganza is a large channel linking the Plaquemines to the New Course, built with the single function of giving the Baton Rouge Docks access to the main course of the Mississippi and through that the Sea.
Together with the Way, LaBouff also built the
Big Easy, the waterways responsible for keeping the Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans alive even as the Plaquemines became unnavigable by large ships. Starting with the Northern Channel at Lake Palourde, the Easy brings in much needed waterflow from the New Course to the Old, maintaining the course river down from it wide and deep enough for seafaring ships to come and go. This situation continues down to New Orleans, where the Southern Channel connects it to Lake Salvador, and from there the flow goes back, going through a series of widened tributaries and short canals until opening into the Atchafalaya, and from there into the Gulf of Mexico. Although most people only remember the Northern and Southern, and sometimes the various canals and reworked tributaries, most people forget the multitude of dams, dykes and flow-management systems placed along the Big Easy that serve to make the entire thing keep working, such as the Waterworks of Belle Chasse, which guarantee the flow won’t go the wrong way down the Old Course.
And the final one are the
Dunes of Louisiana, the great legacy of Commissioner Huey Long. Built in response to the infamous Hurricane Rosamund of 1940, which devastated the Southern USSA, the Dunes: Marsh, Fourchon, Venice, Plaquemines and Chandeleur[3]; were primarily built as seawalls to protect the coastlines of the Mississippi River Delta against the tides of the Gulf, which had already started to erode parts of the “Old Delta” over the years, and against future storms and their surges. Designed by Dutch engineers in a similar manner to works on the Netherlands, even soon after the Dunes were completed in 1945 they started gaining a new function, serving as the stepping-stones for the land-reclamation and land-building developments that have marked Louisiana’s recent history.
[1] them being known for endeavoring to fight a never-ending war against Mother Nature
[2] originally called Ferry Lake Dam, it was renamed to Bah’hatteno in 1985, after the Caddo name for the Red River
[3] the name coming from the fact that the dune was built along the eponymous Chandeleur Islands
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The Evolution of the Mississippi River Delta
In Pink are mostly lands built by the Mississippi’s sediments
In Lime are lands mostly reclaimed through direct Human action
In Orange are the Dunes of Louisiana
In Darker Blue are Fresh bodies of water
In Lighter Blue are Brackish bodies of water
Much like most river deltas, the Mississippi’s has, over its
long existence, changed dramatically many times, but almost none of those changes can be compared in magnitude to the ones that have occurred over the course of the two centuries or so; in great part due to addition of human action and intervention into the processes of the delta.
Although starting small, the first human actions with dramatic consequences to the river start all the way back to 1831, when inventor and steamboat captain Henry Miller Shreve cut a channel through the neck of Turnbull’s bend, a large curve along the river that connected the Mississippi to the Red River. Although made simply to shorten travel times, as the bend took several hours to travel by steamboat while progressing very little up the Mississippi, the canal had the unplanned consequence of gradually altering the course of the Mississippi over the decades, with the Atchafalaya gaining more and more of the its flow.
Around the same time, the original clearance of the Great Raft up the Red River was also happening, being led by the same Henry Miller Shreve as above and with a similar objective of easing navigation. Although the Raft reformed soon after the project’s completion in 1838 – as it hadn’t cleared the entirety of the behemoth of wood and silt, but simply opened a pathway through it in some parts – the way said reforming occurred (and the slightly smaller size of the jam) resulted on the effects of the clearance remaining; that is, an increased flow of water down the Red River, which only helped the increase of water flowing down the Atchafalaya.
Over then following decades of the 19th century this process of the Atchafalaya catching a greater flow of water only continued and increased, with the river’s channel being worn deeper and wider as waters from the Mississippi went more and more down it, with the Atchafalaya receiving about 30% of the Old Man River ‘s flow by the dawn of the 20th century.
As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, another factor in the development of the Delta came into play, flood control in the form of levees and canalization of waterways, or, to better specify it, the
lack of said infrastructure. While in modern times we understand that to be a good thing[1], at the time the only reason why the Mississippi wasn’t canalized or filled with levees along its embankments was due to the simple factor of human shortsightedness. In the waning days of the 19th century, and during the 1900s, a main focus of the Americans was in defending the Lower Mississippi against naval and amphibious attacks, due to fears of a visit by the Royal Navy should Albion and the US come to war; because of that, many funds which would have originally been used in infrastructure projects such as flood management instead went into fortifications and forts, and much of the remaining money being diverted into the pockets of politicians.
This turn of events, although for a long while a major problem for the local population[2], would prove a boon a few decades later.
During the First War, things went mostly as it was during the previous decades, with few to none projects on the Lower Mississippi that weren’t military-oriented; and, after that, basically none at all as the Second Civil War raged in the region, in fact destroying parts of the local infrastructure at times.
This lack or destruction of infrastructure came to play in 1927, when the Great Flood came around. An event so dramatic and devastating that for a few months a third of Louisiana was a
de-facto lake, the flood carved a canal deep and wide enough that it reorganized the Mississippi, deepening and widening the Atchafalaya enough for it to draw over half of the river’s flow and become its main branch. In the aftermath, a project to build the world’s longest system of levees around the river was planned, but lack of funding, coming from the fact that the USSA were still recovering from nearly 2 decades of constant war, resulted on it never coming to be.
Among its various immediate effects, the turning of the Atchafalaya into the New Course of the Mississippi resulted on the river bursting from its previous banks due to the increased volume of water flowing through it, drowning most of Old Brashear City[3] and flooding many of the small lakes shortly above the river’s mouth, combining them into a single, if at times narrow and extremely twisted, lake[4].
In the 1930s, the main developments in the region were the canals built under Commissioner LaBouff, which among other things resulted on Lake Santiago – one of the various estuary lakes of the region – turning from a body of brackish to fresh water, and both the start of a delta on the mouth of the Atchafalaya, as the alluvium started accumulating, and the early stages of erosion along the eastern side of the Delta, as the ground stopped being replenished by as much sediments.
The latter erosion came into play in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Hurricane Rosamund came around and had its fun with Louisiana, washing away large chunks of the coastline, in special along the eastern parts of the Delta[5]. In the aftermath of the hurricane’s devastation, LaBouff’s successor, Commissioner Long, entered the last project of his career[6], the building of the Dunes of Louisiana.
Made in partnership with the Dutch, who provided the people necessary to design the Dunes – in the USSA’s last major project in cooperation with another country –, and funded by a mix of diverted government assets and donations[7], the dunes were at the time (and in part to this day) a marvel of modern engineering, an feat of human ingenuity and dedication. Built through seafloor dredging and the liberal adding of cement, stone, and steel, the Dunes are impressive not simply due to their size (which nonetheless is), but the simple fact that they weren’t made simply as a set of seawalls meant to break the waves of the Gulf, but instead were built to hold strong against storm surges just as terrible as Rosamund’s if not greater, and resist against erosion by the tides even with minimal human maintenance[8].
Over the following decades the Dunes did their job, holding back the sea and storms, but also served in a function that was unexpected to those who designed them: enhancing dramatically sedimentation by the Mississippi.
To make a complicated story simpler, over the nearly 80 years since the building of the Dunes they have served to catch most of the alluvium brought by the Mississippi even with leveed and canalized courses, blocking the stream of sediments coming out of them from shooting out into the Atlantic and forcing them to settle down either along the dunes or spread across the lagoons created by them. This has, by 2020, resulted on the dramatic expansion of the lands along the delta, in special on its eastern side[9], which has nearly doubled in area.
This build-up of land has also had unplanned consequences in relation to the bodies of water along the delta; as sediment accumulates and forms new ground, it not only diminishes the connection between the various lagoons, bays and estuaries of the area from the Ocean, but at times cuts-them off completely, as enough new land is formed to connect the dune to the mainland – which has happened to Marsh and Fourchon –. These facts have, over the years, resulted on quite a few parts of the delta becoming fresh-water lakes, with the past Terrebonne Bay being so since the 1970s, while Lake Pontchartrain lost its brackish or saline parts by 1983[10].
Besides the land grown with the advent of the dunes, there is also the delta formed on the Atchafalaya as well, who, due to the river’s remarkable lack of considerable levees, has seen a dramatic growth over the years, going from being
de facto open water as late as the 1950s to solid ground.
Besides natural processes, some land has also been gained through the creation of polders, most noticeably the Balize Islands, the only part of the delta located outside the enclosure of the Dunes. Built over the 1970s and 1980s out of the Bird’s Foot Delta[11] and the Plaquemines Dune, the islands are a mix of man-made and natural, the difference between the two being often if they are below or at sea-level. Although originally planned for human settlement, the islands are mostly a bird sanctuary and natural park, with their only settlement being the eponymous village of La Balize[12] at the Passes[13].
In recent years, ironically, there has been an effort to focus the main stream of sediments down the Old Course and out through the strait between Venice and Plaquemines Dune, with the objective of promoting sedimentation in the area outside the Dunes’ enclosure[14]; this has been a complicated and at times contentious project, in part due to needing to balance controlling the flow of sediments with permitting the replenishing of the soil through the Mississippi’s floods.
[1] as the building of levees and the canalization of rivers forces the water to flow in a faster manner and not deposit any alluvium along its wetlands, resulting on any sediment brought with it being shot out into the ocean instead of deposition along the delta and replenishing it
[2] the periodic flooding of the river into its wetlands was a constant hassle and danger for the inhabitants of the Delta, damaging infrastructure and buildings across the region, it was only with the addition of flood control measurements and the introduction of “flood-resistant” buildings and infrastructure during the later 20th century that it became less so
[3] OTL Morgan City, much like IOTL it was named Tiger Island in the 1840s by John Calhoun, but by the time it was incorporated in 1860 it was named “Brashear City” after a local sugar-mill owner named Walter Brashear. Unlike OTL the city wasn’t renamed in tribute to Charles Morgan (who had dredged the Atchafalaya in 1876) and instead a reorganization of the St. Mary and St. Martin parishes resulted on the city becoming the center of the newly established Morgan Parish
[4] the shape of the lake even makes its sections be sometimes considered separate lakes, mostly named after the individual bodies of water they were before, such as Lake Fausse Pointe, Lake Palourde, and Lake Verret
[5] Rosamund, in a basic sense, made the Louisiana coastline look in TTL 1940 look like it was in OTL 2001
[6] Commissioner Long died in 1947 from a burst appendix
[7] donations from both within the USSA and outside it, both through foreign relief and private individuals (including many American exiles), accounted for over a third of the project’s total funding
[8] the Dunes were built to be sturdy, with foundations reinforced by concrete and metal, and wide, with a gradual slope that rises until being meters above the water in the side facing the Gulf (ending in a much steeper incline reinforced by rocks and metal); to combat erosion by the sea, the Dunes were in actuality more like islands from the beginning, being seeded with often deep/wide-rooted and sturdy vegetation to help hold the soil together (this is most seen in the Chandeleur Dune, since its location resulted on parts of it not being as reinforced as others, the solution decided by the engineers was covering large chunks of the dune’s sea-facing side in mangroves, resulting in a tangled mangrove forest similar to those found in Brazil)
[9] as somewhat mentioned in the text, over the years, additional works and reforms to the Big Easy were made specifically so that a good chunk of the sediments flowing down the Mississippi would discharge into the Dunes’ lagoons, and in special Chandeleur due to its size
[10] an interesting case is the old Vermillion Bay, which was first isolated from the sea by the transformation of Marsh Island into a peninsula and then was made into a fresh-water reservoir in 1964 when a dyke was built closing its remaining opening
[11] although somewhat insanely the Plaquemines’ flow still ends on it, the Bird’s Foot Delta became physically an island in the 1950s
[12] also called Pilotsville, La Balize was originally a French fort built in the late 17th or early 18th century, and was rebuilt after being destroyed by storms or hurricanes some four times over the centuries
[13] an alternative name for the Birds Foot Delta, referring to its various channels, it is used here in reference to the fact that La Balize has been rebuilt in various locations along the Delta over the years, most recently just above the “Head of the Passes” the delta’s junction
[14] the project started due to fears of what would happen if the sediments continuously deposited themselves on Chandeleur Lagoon and the other lakes and lagoons created by the Dunes, which would silt them up until they became dry land, ruining many of the waterside communities that exist along their shores
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The Range of the American Hippopotamus
The range of the American Lake Cow is, much like that of the African cousins, comprised by a large area of their home continent, extending across the Southern USSA and along the Mississippi River, and with confirmed sightings of the species even far outside of that[1]. Even more impressively, this entire expansion has occurred over only the course of a little over a century, with the first hippopotamus being brought to North America only in 1891.
A large and domineering animal, the Lake Cow is known for existing in a complicated but surprisingly sustainable relationship with its environment, in great part due to the checks placed on it by said environment, in the form of food and predation.
The former comes in the form of the water hyacinth (in special in its original environment), as the species has luckily followed with the original human plan and gorges itself upon the invasive species; and in that both contains the expansion of a pest and, more importantly, does not encroach into the niches of other local herbivores to the point of outcompeting them.
And the latter comes in the form of predation, as while in Africa most large carnivores shy away from adult hippos, who
de facto lack natural predators, in North America de species seems to have almost the opposite relationship, as the main native predators of their environment seem lack the fear of anything and anyone, in special along the eastern reaches of their range. Because of that, the sheer numbers of the Wacco are held back by their many “enemies”, most noticeably the Florida Wolf, the Gator, who in Florida in special seems to go out of its way to hunt for adult hippos, the Floridian Short-Faced Bears[2], who already often hunt for animals twice their own size, Bull Sharks, who often swim on fresh and brackish environments where the Wacco can be found, and Humans.
The last one of those comes in the form of hunting, as the many eras of famine and harsh times that befell the Southern USSA have resulted on hunting on Lake Cows for subsistence being a common feature of the region’s countryside, with human predation being estimated to kill about the same quantity of individuals as their four most common predators combined. In some parts of the region, Wacco meat has actually become a feature of local traditional cuisine, a famous case of it being on Caddo Country[3] in Eastern Texas.
Map Legends
In Dark Blue is the area where the Lake Cows were first brought in to Louisiana
In Blue is their Main Range, areas where the presence of Lake Cows is considerable
In Light Blue is their Expanded Range, areas where Lake Cow herds are present but they aren’t numerous
In Greyish-Blue are USSA states with known Lake Cow sightings/attacks
In extremely Light Blue is the range of the Woolly Hippo, the wild offshoot of the Lake Cow
In Light Greyish-Blue is *areas* outside the USSA with known Lake Cow sightings/attacks
In Grey is the capital territory of the USSA, where wild Lake Cows are prohibited
[1] with, even without counting the Domesticated Hippo, wild american hippopotamus being sighted as far as in Western California, meaning that at least one member of the species managed to cross, by itself, not only the Great Plains but go across the Rockies and the Sonora Desert
[2] normally the more carnivorous
Tremarctos floridanus , also called the Floridian Spectacled Bear
[3] centered around Caddo County, the region ITTL saw the local native inhabitants (which had come in the 1830s after a treaty with the US) never forced to relocate to Oklahoma due to a highly improbable treaty managing be kept by the Americans, which saw their territory converted into a county and its inhabitants losing their theoretical sovereignty and independence in exchange for keeping their land as US citizens (this also involved them having a radically changed ITTL relationship with white settlers) – although called Caddo County (or Caddo Country), the native peoples that formed it included both two tribes of the Caddo, the Hasinai and the Kadohadacho, and remnants of allied Delaware (Lenape) and Yowani
