The American Bottom Gazette Vol. 2 (2019)

The American Bottom Gazette The American Bottom Gazette vol. 02 2019 >>> 1

Episodic but not accidental The American Bottom is a dynamic landscape—more than may first appear and more than is commonly assumed. As a floodplain, its bottomland lakes, tributaries, and canals rise and fall with the river and localized precipitation; as an industrial landscape, the movement of materials creates ever-changing rhythms and textures of matter and machinery; as a social landscape, its patterns of growth, belonging, and conflict chart continental historical processes that reach back centuries and millennia; as an economic landscape, it is connected with hinterlands and centers that reach across the river, up the bluff, and beyond to the centers of capital that have driven a century of expansion and change. Yet, throughout, its patterns and geographies outline a recognizable, coherent interval—historically, culturally, and topographically—one that has been marked by human inhabitation and transformation since before recorded time.

Here these transformations are more legible than in many places. Some might call this an Anthropocenic era—one defined by the irreversible interactions and tensions between humans and their environment. What this region provides, though, is a much longer-term view of these interactions—the deep

The American Bottom Gazette

time of Mississippian-era settlement and society, the moment of encounter between Native American and French colonial life-worlds, the collision of settler agriculture and bottomland ecologies, and the forced transformations of industry and social/ spatial production. All of these processes, and more, sit side-by-side in this narrow strip of land adjacent to the ever-dynamic Mississippi River.

Of this low-lying strip, an anonymous settler commented on the American Bottom in 1817: “A more congenial soil for general cultivation I believe no where exists, it may be called the Elysium of America.” Charles Dickens, during his 1842 journey across North America, saw the in the same landscape “A dismal swamp….a place without one single quality, in earth, air, or water, to commend it.” To be clear, these words describe the same place—and take from it radically different interpretations. They highlight not so much matters of historical change, rather of values and meaning.

This aspect of radically competing perspectives, of incommensurable descriptions, is itself a symptom of this place. It is written in the episodic textures of the landscape and is fueled by the dynamic forces that continue to give it shape.

This issue of The American Bottom Gazette focuses on these larger forces by which the meeting of humans and the landscape are brought into stark relief. We see this in the ways that community and industry have grown together (Sauget; Company Towns); the ways that ecologies and extraction map geological time (Sand Extraction); the co-presence of Native American Mounds and industrial piles (Significant and Insignificant Mounds); and the many ways that the irrepressible river continues to make and remake social bonds, economies, and the relationship between human and non-human nature (A View on the River; River Memory; Canal, Lock + Dam). As always, it is an incomplete and partial view of the many transformations that we can still read in the landscape today—if we can just tune our perception to recognize the continuities and discontinuities across time.

—The Editors

St. Louis Aeronautical Chart US Air Force, 1950 scale 1:250,000 Courtesy of Office of Coast Survey’s Historical Map & Chart Collection

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Pump Pipe Collinsville, IL 2019 Alisa Blatter

SAND EXTRACTION Alisa Blatter

Eastward almost so far as the bluff line, within the furthest depositional reach of the great looping meanders that left Horseshoe Lake in the American Bottom floodplain several thousand years ago, a sand and gravel industry flourishes. Nearby, the pitted limestone bluffs coarsely crumble material along their flanks, below the now-defunct Sugar Loaf and Bluff coal mines nestled alongside Collinsville and the limestone quarries perched above Dupo.

But here in the bottoms, sand accrued since the last age of glacial melt in every conceivable wash of the Mississippi River in meander and flood across the landscape. It is overlaid by the sometimes clayey silt loams of the loess soils that are farmed throughout the floodplain. Ask anyone who works the land: there beneath the surface, ten feet down and counting, lies a forty-foot-deep seam of graduated sand and gravel running fine to coarse, top to bottom: the horizontal record of flooding on the land.

Most of the aggregate pulled out of the bottoms goes into local road construction, but sand from the American Bottom is everywhere in St. Louis and Metro East: from Lambert’s 1950s expansion, to the recently restored Central Fields in Forest Park, to the technical soil specced for over the underground garage on Washington University in St. Louis’s new east end of campus. Sand dredged from the Mississippi gives bulk and solidity to the new Stan Musial Bridge towers bookending the span over the river.

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Sand plant operators run barge-borne pumps to continuously raise sand and gravel, conveying sand slurry issued from the bottom to the horizontal wet tanks on the barge that settle out first the gravel and larger particles, then the smaller. An algorithm remixes the screened particles to meet various standards—American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) specs for construction sand, US Golf Association (USGA) for golf courses and even other grass athletic fields. A ¼” sand has particles with 100% passage through ½” mesh, 60% through ¼” mesh, 10% through No. 4 mesh, and 0.5% through a No. 200 mesh screen—the size of dust.

The sand is screened clean to this middle range, from which silt and stone are both excluded and flushed out the bottom back into the water. Once sorted, sand has been physically transformed at the particle level for the market and is then classed as an aggregate. Conveyors transfer the aggregate to hoppers, from which it is stockpiled in separate mounds. From there the aggregate may be shipped on trucks to concrete and asphalt mixing sites, and to project sites like soccer fields and golf greens.

To the sand extractor, sand is business. It is screening, tonnage, transportation. It is also heft, wear on machinery, grit and grind. It is the sliding stockpiles that cover every bit of ground, the slashing at your eyes downwind from a pile on a gusty day.

Aggregates Oldcastle Lawn and Garden 2013 Jesse Vogler

Sand is surficial, and not merely superficial: it is found in discrete seams and bedrock folds, and in the water and on the air. Its presence and visibility in sites of accrual both natural and built are there to be read. Still, comments Blake Heischmidt, who has managed sand operations for the past seven years, “More than anything, people are surprised that sand is not made. It is just there.”

Sand is also found in the topmost horizon of soil: sand and silt and clay, recombinant as the USDA’s twelve soil types, give technical abridgment to what are really intersecting spectra of particle sizes and proportions. This layer once bore finer strata before the plow. Since European settlement, tilling has created a mixture of its own, exhausting the organic matter of river sedimentation that is now constrained from washing across the fields, and incorporating synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

But still the rich soil gives root to crops like corn, soybeans—and horseradish, or Armoracia rusticana, which constitutes by far the largest such crop grown nationally.

To the farmer, sand is mineral, inorganic; it signifies drainage; it is a proportion of a soil’s composition, and either a medium of growth or its deterrent. Whether deposited by current, or stirred by tillage, sand is in mixture, a ratio.

Sand goes deeper than the seam, too—below lakebeds and into sand and gravel lenses pocketed by bedrock. Evident even to early practitioners of geological analysis in the area, these geologic cores demonstrate the same earlier period of glaciation evidenced in other parts of Illinois by the huge amount of rock debris that was washed and sorted into sand and gravel deposits. In the American Bottom, early study of the cores demonstrated that this era was followed by the alluvial sedimentation that describes the accessible topmost layers of the floodplain today.

The parent material from which the sand of the Bottoms was sloughed, scraped, abraded, and dissolved, dislodged for movement, comes from upriver, from which it still runs. The Mississippi is drawn from an immense and complex set of drainage basins, with emphasis on the Ohio and Illinois Rivers, and especially, the Missouri River. The Missouri, joining the Mississippi as it does just above St. Louis, impacts the bottoms by its location and force of flow.

‘More than anything, people are surprised that sand is not made.

It is just there.’

To the geologist, sand is expressive of parent matter, of mineral content. It is parts silica; it is extractive and has economic value. Its layers are free or bound, compacted by cementation. Its strata leave sub-soil narratives, a chronological record of deep time.

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Movement is nothing new to sand, but it is more visible river-borne than through the air. The Mississippi carries 436,000 tons of sediment in a given day, more in flood. In providing medium to what Brett Milligan has called the migratory properties of landscape, the river is less a cool drink of water than a slurry of sand.

For the operators of any of the several sand and gravel extraction businesses in the bottoms, the business itself can be a migratory one: once a dredging operation has tapped out its natural resource of sand, it must move on or close out. Some operations last for decades. Madison County Sand, formerly Madison Quality Sand Co, began dredging sand to supply material for nearby Interstate 255 in the 1980s. Open pit extraction is not done in the Bottoms; the water table is so high that as the shovel goes in, water moves to fill the gap. The natural wetland condition of the site made it even easier to get below the high water table by dredging. First the ten foot overload of clay—otherwise a significant and even prohibitive storage issue—went into berming and bedding the new interstate. Then the sand itself.

The company still works the same location today.

In a natural stream or riverbed, sand and gravel are in alternating states of deposit and transfer in their halting movement downstream. NM Fenneman wrote in 1909, in contributing “The Physiography of the St. Louis Area” to the State Geological Survey Bulletin: “It is in a transitory state of rest; it is the ‘potential’ load of the present stream.” Sand and gravel, once accumulated, are in only a temporary state in a riverbed. Cut off from the river by the levee system, sand loses its latency.

Yet the riverbottom of the Mississippi, flushed continually in slippery current, is itself a site of dredging. Running from Black Hills granite toward the Gulf Delta, the sand accumulation in some places is predictable, recurrent. Outside of its contracted dredging program to fulfill a congressional mandate to keep the waterway open, the US Army Corps of Engineers permits strategic commercial dredging of such areas where sand impedes river navigation. The operations of Bluff City Minerals, a subsidiary of Fred Weber and the largest supplier in the region, are permitted to dredge sand to keep the nine-foot, shallow-draft clearance of the channel

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navigable to barge traffic. “We dredge in the same areas, where the sand tends to settle,” explains Jack Branz of Bluff City Minerals. “The Missouri’s a big part of that. It’s currents that dictate that, as well as depressions in the river bottom.”

Those particles of sand that are diverted locally by dredging are reissued in ways that express the material concerns and energy uses of our age. In concrete or without, there is a sort of plastic potentiality and expressibility to sand, manifest both in sand castles and in more rigid forms of construction. It is no coincidence that the sand industry has been a fixture since the 1950s—the era of the automobile and expansion of the national transportation system: sand and gravel have deeply pervasive applications in the built environment. Sand makes up 60 to 80 percent of the bulk of asphalt and concrete paving and building materials. It is embedded in road beds, in Portland cement and concrete for paving, bridges, buildings, and precast products; in glass bottles, sandpaper, sandblasting, and mixed with salt and spread on winter roads for traction; into septic filtration systems, golf course greens and grass playing fields to decrease thatch (the matted layer of decomposed grass organic matter) and encourage moisture and nutrient penetration for deeper, healthier roots. Its repurposing in construction material has enabled us to fix sediment in a remaking of the earth’s crust, facilitating our plans for communication, speed, distribution, and re-distribution.

Aggregates, which tend to be generally described as course or fine depending on which side they fall from a ⅜” (or No. 4) sieve, lend particular properties to their role in concrete. It is not just for its bulk or volume, its ability to flexibly adopt shape due to its relatively small particle size. The coarse gravel aggregates lend volume that creates strength through displacing air, and the fine aggregates of sand give a uniformity of strength to construction material. The “local” aggregate—a contradiction by nature of its multivarious origin—may or may not naturally come by the mix required to meet state standards. Mix adjustments and perhaps even non-local additions are necessary should the mix be too fine—leading to a sticky mix—or too coarse, in which case a concrete mix will be more difficult to form and smooth. Individual gradations are selected and maintained on a project basis for consistency.

Local aggregate will have a history of performance that will either ensure its continued use or not.

The qualities of the individual particles of sand lend further description to the material. The durability of particles is significant, and sand made from granite is particularly hard. It might be sourced for applications in more highly abrasive situations to maintain the surface over time. Sand—comprised as it is of mineral content—in general is stronger than the material it is embedded in, so it is not a factor in limiting the overall strength of the material.

Like the rounded riverstone applied to innumerable fireplaces, river sand is smooth. It is more compact, with fewer voids, and requires less water to create ideal ratios than a jagged, crushed material. Sand that is massed always bears a relationship to water, and used in commercial applications, the moisture level of aggregates is critical both for performance and for reasonable determination of weight. If in a saturated surface dry (SSD) condition in concrete mixture, the moisture absorption of aggregate is equalized and neither takes from nor gives to the mix; otherwise, it might deprive or give excessively to the mix, resulting in the need for a variation to the addition of water to avoid decreasing material strength.

Stockpiled sand is grounded, inert. Its expression of latency is limited to potential movement by gravity—and by wind. These movements may be gradual accruals of a most subtle kind, but water seems to be its most graceful medium—of its dissolution, and graduated settling. Sand has a natural affinity to holding and being held by water, which so mightily enables its natural distribution. For as something that can be suspended and swept along as a particle in water, mounded sand is heavy. A cubic yard of sand weighs about 4,000 pounds. Each of us is heavily implicated in its weighty and fossil fueldriven distribution: constructing an average-size home requires over 400 tons; for each mile of a twolane concrete highway, over 7,200 tons; for one mile of a four-lane interstate, about 38,000 tons.

The transformation of landscape through the redistribution of sand in both pervious (permeable, grassed, naturally porous) and impermeable (paved, or non-porous) surfaces gives preference to compac-

An Ecological Cross Section of the Mississippi River in the Region of St. Louis, Missouri 1908 Henri Hus from Missouri Botanical Garden Annual Report

tion, to binding, and to form—but most generally, to putting sand resources into immediate reach for human use.

flatbed of a truck as medium—and then the flush of transport again, this time in volume, along lines of asphalt, to nearby roads and construction sites.

Sand extraction enacts a simple resurfacing—bringing the particles up, sorting and washing them in mass, mounding them for sale by particle range and weight— that is a scalar reversal of their initial deposit. The immediate, reliable force of the pump.

A screen because there is no time for gravity. The

One and a half billion tons of aggregates are in place in and under interstate highways. The dredged wetland grows a little deeper each time, the sand not to be replaced on our timeline. Instead, a new depositional construct, a re-sedimentation—a revised stratum within and beneath the pavement.

Mound [4393] Venice, IL 2019 Jennifer Colten

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“Big Muddy” Mike State Line 2019 Derek Hoeferlin

A VIEW ON THE RIVER Derek Hoeferlin with “Big Muddy” Mike Clark Stretching along the northernmost edge of

Derek: You want some sunscreen?

St. Louis, there is a 17-mile geologic pecu-

Muddy Mike: No, it literally won’t stay on me, it just

liarity known as the “Chain of Rocks”—a series of rock ledges and shelves. During low water, the rocks make navigation impossible, and during high water, make navigation highly treacherous. So for barge traffic to safely make its way up- and down-river, the US Army Corps of Engineers opened what is known as the “Chain of Rocks Canal” in 1953 to bypass the rocks. The result is a singular barge-free zone— basically the only section of the River un-managed for barge traffic other than the free-flowing segments north of Minneapolis. So, perhaps with a little encouragement from river-rats like “Big Muddy” Mike, we can cultivate a new generation of river citizens.

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comes right off. I’m in and out of the water and the silt load in the sand takes it right off. I apply in the morning and by now I can feel I can’t even apply again. I just get greasy is all I do. And then it get worse. The sand adheres. And then sand flys are attracted…all these things.

Derek: So here we are with “Big Muddy” Mike

Clark. My thought was that this would be an umbrella conversation about the intersection of river management, recreation, and industry. Since we’re sitting here on Mosenthein Island, with our canoes, in the middle of the Mississippi River, just north of the Arch, let’s start with recreation.

Muddy Mike: So as far as what we’re doing with Big

Muddy Adventures, we kind of have a mission to reintroduce people, especially people from the St. Louis region, to the river. It is a kind of interesting thing that a collective civic mentality has grown, over say the last hundred years or so, that this river should not be a place to go and recreate. Because it’s dirty, and it’s dangerous, and so on. But to me, this is a bit of a myth. The way we are travelling now, by paddling, this danger element seems to be far less at play because we’re not going very fast. We’re going about the same speed as the river. So we have this opportunity to read the water pretty easily because we’re going slow enough to see. And things that can be dangerous like submerged snags, floating logs, or even infrastructure—like those wing dykes and

things—we’re not going fast enough to really put ourselves in danger.

So we are making a business out of recreation and education. After teaching for 30 years, I honestly don’t really think there’s much difference. I think it’s better said that if we’re kind of enjoying ourselves, then our learning is accentuated. We are freer to enjoy what we’re studying and learning. So, that’s what this job is.

And this place where we’re sitting, this remarkable place basically within the city limits of St. Louis, is the classroom. And yet this is a totally remote place.

If we were to walk a hundred feet away from the edge of this Island, we would have absolutely no sense of being in a major metropolitan area. This sandbar is like a beach, camping is wonderful here.

Hiking and exploring on the interior of the island is extraordinary. If you like birds and things like that, you can’t find many places better than this to do that. The problem of course is accessing the island.

You have to come by boat. And that is where most people find their discomfort. So we’re trying to promote that you can come out here.

And yet we’re also very vigilant about what we say, about people coming out here on their own without a guide, such as myself or our crew. We strongly think that you should be a skilled paddler to cross this river, to go downstream on the river. It’s just so big and the volume of water is great enough that it’s not the place to learn how to canoe. It’s the place that you come after you are very comfortable

canoeing. Once that is settled—good paddlers, good boat, good gear—then this place should have a lot of people coming to it.

I think that if we were in Portland or Seattle or Colorado, then on a day like today there would have been a hundred kayaks out here. But St. Louis is not tuned in like that. As a company, and as a kind of a whole group of outdoor groups and enthusiast, we’re talking about creating an outdoor culture. It’s good for us psychologically and otherwise. So that’s what we’re all about. And this place makes it pretty easy for us to do it. The access to the river is an issue. But otherwise I think that over the coming years you’ll see more and more people out here coming on their own without a guided tour or something.

But this brings up a kind of moral dilemma for us.

I love introducing people to this place, but I am also very wary because I know that we are putting pressure on a natural system. The more we promote this place as a place to recreate, the more we are putting human pressure on a very natural place. And so when we come and we build camps and we run around and make noise and all of that, I feel like: Oh, how long before there’ll be enough pressure to alter this system? Will the American Bald Eagles that have a nest within 500 yards of here stay? Or will they just leave because humans have entered into their world in a way they can’t control and maintain?

So that’s the flip side of this.

Derek: Interesting. Because I think my own initial reaction is that the river is so controlled by humans already, this whole area. Especially when we get to river management and industry, it’s in your face. It’s ugly to most people. It’s dangerous; it’s scary. So why would I recreate there? But you’re talking about this place being so natural or part of some other time, which is something I never really thought about. So you’ve got a stark difference right there. Instead of just saying it’s all altered, you’re talking about something where, even though it is altered, it carries traces of its past.

Muddy Mike: With my very dearest river friend, and

kind of original partner in doing all this, we did some writing. He published and wrote a good majority of a thing called River Gator: Paddlers Guide to the Middle and Lower Mississippi. In doing that, we had to travel at three different stages of the river—low, middle and high water—so that we could describe the river, mile by mile, from Alton to the Gulf. In doing that, we identified something we call “wild miles.” What we found is that over 60% of the mileage of this river is what we called wild miles. Meaning you cannot see any human markers except for wing dykes, and things like that. No buildings, no bridges, nothing in sight. Two thirds of the river is without the immediate signs of humans. It’s very different than that.

Derek: Does that include things that you would think

are wild and natural but are actually results of river management—like channels or islands built by the Corps of Engineers?

Muddy Mike: That includes those, yes. There’s

absolutely a distinction. On the navigation charts of the Mississippi River, they name all the islands south to New Orleans by giving them a number. So you’d be on Island Number 10 or Island number whatever. Well, there are also a lot of these things called towheads, which are actually islands but are not numbered on the charts. They were formed because a steamboat sunk there and the sand and the silt has built up around them and eventually became huge islands over 150 years. There are a lot of those.

Those would be the result of humans for sure, and yet they’re as natural feeling and looking as this here.

Derek: So what do you think? What are the challenges? Can this system sustain itself ?

Muddy Mike: The natural systems? Well, I think per-

be in some state or dynamic like this. I don’t think there’s anything we can do, no amount of infrastructure, to change this one way or another. I don’t think there’s too much to worry about here. The river just won’t allow it. You realize it is really that resilient.

This set of willows was very happy two years ago and it didn’t survive this latest flood. Guess what? If it doesn’t flood for nine more months, this will be a growth of willows again with no problem at all.

Derek: Yeah, but if we look beyond the natural systems, what about the economic and industrial systems? When I talked to Dustin Whited, the operations manager at Continental Cement Company just down river, I asked him about these frequest floods now almost every year. They drastically affect barge traffic continuity, and with this last 2019 flood, the floods shut the river down for several weeks. He told me they might have to start ponying up much more money and logistics support to rail. So I’m like: “At some point are we nearing a tipping point where the barge industry may not be able to sustain itself ?”

From that point of view, as we think forward about these issues, can ecology and industry coexist together? Or more radically, could we imagine a new system altogether?

Muddy Mike: My thoughts on towboats and the barge

industry are that they’re diesel-powered behemoths that have created huge efficiency for moving certain kinds of things—like grain, and sand, and coal, and petroleum, for that matter. These barges tows, literally one holds the equivalent of a hundred rail cars. So there’s this huge efficiency for that. But diesel fuel is very expensive and not getting cheaper, and I think we’re seeing the horizon on burning carbon for automobiles and trucks and so on. So I can see a time when it is going to be more cost effective to do it in a different way.

But if the barge industry starts to go away all of the mandates that the Army Corps of Engineers has regarding this river essentially go away as well. Without the barges and navigation, there is no need to maintain this river in the way they do. There literally won’t be any reason. They are bound by congres- sional act to maintain a nine-foot channel, and that’s the system that’s in place. So if the barge industry decreases or moves to some other method, then the need to do that goes away.

The Missouri River is a good example: there is very little commercial navigation on that river. And so there’s less and less maintenance of that river going on right now. And if you’re not actively maintaining the river really aggressively, then the barges can’t get in and out.

As a sidebar, eight years ago, I saw the Army Corps of Engineers’ main towboat pushing rocks to build wing dykes and rip-rap. They were going up and down the Missouri to maintain a navigation channel.

They were the only barge operating on the river. They were going up and down, building the infrastructure, so that they could go up and down to build the infrastructure. What?

Right? Literally, that was happening. Now there’s only a small amount of long distance shipping, and yet the

Corps is still having to maintain that river despite the real cost to do it.

There was a time, the 1920s and 30s, that right here at the bottom of the island, just around the corner up on the other side, there was a ferry—the Humboldt Street Ferry—that came from St. Louis to this island on the weekends. And it was promoted as a “go away to the beach” kind of holiday. They would take a street car to Humboldt Street, walk down the street with their umbrellas and their swimming gear, get on the ferry, and come out here and spend the day. They’d lay up in the willows, it was cool. The city was so filled with coal smog at that time, it was hard to even live in. So you’d come out here and it was wonderful. So in the 20s and 30s they were promoting this place as a place of recreation and enjoyment.

Derek: Interesting. Like I was telling you earlier, my

family grew up here. They water skied through here.

My dad talks about getting stuck in the willows all the way down to where the Arch would be. And there was a yacht club, too—somewhere right around here.

And they would come down on the weekends, music venues and all that, and that’s what you did. But that was also a time when the river was really getting toxic and nasty. That’s when it would catch on fire. And people would look out on the river and in between the fire there would be boats out here pulling water skis. Different times. But I wonder if the river itself has changed that much.

Muddy Mike: In this stretch, no, not much I’d say.

Again, the structures that are on this reach—from the confluence of the two rivers, to down here, three miles—have no real need for maintenance because there is no commercial navigation since the opening of the Chain of Rocks Canal in the 1950s. And it’s essentially treated as such. So all of those wing dykes are not being repaired. And as they breech and disintegrate, it’s changing the contours on the other side of it. So there’s this natural reaction to kind of the degradation of the infrastructure. And it’s creating all sorts of new opportunities.

One of my favorite things on the river is a blue hole.

A blue hole is this captured water in the middle of a sandbar where the river used to be flowing, but then the river recedes and so it’s all sand. But there would be these pools. And the pools are deep enough that they’ve tapped the underground water. And so it’s refilling into that pool, but it’s going through sand— so it’s being filtered. That water: the turbidity changes, the texture changes, everything about that water is different than the Mississippi River. And what a wonderful place to go swim and hang out. It’s just fantastic. But it only occurs at a particular point in time. And the only reason they’re there is because it was infrastructure that has degraded and allowed it to scour out and create these holes. And it turns out to be one of the coolest things about being out here.

Derek: That’s amazing. So are people ready to go swimming? Who’s swimming?

Muddy Mike: I’m in!

Willows, Mosenthein Island Monroe County, IL 2019 Derek Hoeferlin

sonally that this river is the perfect case of misguided human certainty about the amount of control over this system. When the river actually proves us wrong so easily. I think that the island itself and the river and the way they’re working, interacting, will always

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Just a five-minute drive across the Poplar Street bridge from St. Louis, the Village of Sauget is one of the communities observable from the tram at the top of the St. Louis Arch—a landscape of factories, distant fields, and a small grid of homes that stand in distinction to the urban landscape to the west. However, the connection between Sauget’s river banks and those on the Missouri side may be deeper than many contemporary St. Louisans realize. The town was established initially as the Village of Monsanto by the St. Louis-based chemical company

SAUGET Jennifer Colten + Matthew Fluharty

in 1926, thus creating a municipality with regulatory and tax structures attractive to business.

Though the Village’s name changed to Sauget in 1967, in honor of the founding mayor Leo Sauget, and though Monsanto largely divested those industrial holdings in the 1990s, the corporation’s legacy continues to shape the community—through the remediation of toxic sites, and the presence of new industries and businesses that have found Sauget at the center of an ever-evolving transportation hub in the Metro East. A further frame through which to look anew at this community across the river has been provided in recent years—as Bayer has acquired Monsanto and begun to phase out the corporation’s name—offering an opportunity to understand the Village of Sauget as a community connected to Monsanto, but also continuing well beyond it.

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Aerial photograph of Krummrich Plant Monsanto, IL [date unknown] Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

Aerial photograph of Krummrich Plant Monsanto, IL [date unknown] Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

Map of Plant B - North Area Monsanto, IL [date unknown] Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

AB.4489 Sauget, IL 2018 Jennifer Colten

For Leo Sauget’s grandson Rich Sauget, Sr., an entrepreneur and community leader at work on a history of the Village, this legacy undergirds both the past challenges and new opportunities the Village has experienced. “You got to be careful, because these companies come in, and they do their business, and they leave you with issues…

But, overall, a lot of [the story of Sauget] is about relationships—relationships to your neighbors and relationships to the business entity.” This spirit of relationships across individuals and enterprises is embedded in the community’s creation, through a friendship between John Queeny, the founder of Monsanto Chemical, and Leo Sauget, a farmer in the Goose Lake region with family ties that extend all the way back to Francois Trottier, appointed the first Commandant of Cahokia in 1779. Queeny began hunting with Leo Sauget at Goose Lake in the early 1920s, establishing a tradition of hunting parties for dove, quail, pheasant, duck, and geese that would later involve Adolphus A. Busch, co-founder of Anheuser-Busch Company and Budweiser Beer.

During this time, as Rich Sauget, Sr. reports in his writing on the history of the community, these gatherings likely included talk of the impending 500-year levee which the Army Corps of Engineers was set to build from Alton down to the Columbia Bottoms—and thoughts on how the stability of

such a levee would transform the landscape and economy of the region.

The result of these conversations was shared in the October 1926 issue of Monsanto Current Events, with the announcement of the incorporation of the Village of Monsanto, complete with a founding population of 230, some of whom resided in new homes constructed for employees and family. Their labor powered the Heavy Chemical and Intermediate Plant, which manufactured materials such as sulfuric and nitric acid, zinc chloride, and intermediates such as monochlorbenzene. At that initial point, a series of other industries also called the Village home, including the new Cahokia plant of the Union Electric Company—at the time the largest power station in the Mississippi Valley, its iconic 265-foot stacks extending from the river banks. When complete, the plant would consume a ton of coal every 30 seconds, powering St. Louis via underwater cables.

By the next year, the Village of Monsanto was also home to various steel and metal manufacturers, as well as Darling and Company, which created soaps and fertilizers from by-products of the nearby National Stock Yards. These kinds of inter-regional industrial activities branched out, as river barge

commerce joined trucking and train options, to position Monsanto at a crucial nexus point in the flow of goods throughout the entire country, a locating point that the company communicated in advertisements in industry journals from this period: To enterprising manufacturers, using basic chemicals and power, Monsanto, Illinois is an opportunity unduplicated in the United States. Today, problems of competition, production and distribution have focused the attention of manufacturers, more clearly than ever before, on the vital importance of proper plant location.

Here at Monsanto are tremendous advantages for better manufacturing conditions and greater manufacturing profits. Geographically and economically, the situation of Monsanto presents a rare combination of industrial factors that make it an ideal factory site, completely designed to meet every manufacturing requirement. Investigate this industrial acreage. These splendid sites are offered at attractive prices.

Industrial activity in the second half of the twentieth century created wealth for these enterprises, but in some cases left a public health legacy that is still being addressed. Two Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund sites are located in

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Baseball Team Monsanto, IL [date unknown] Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

Lunch Break Monsanto, IL c. 1930s Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

Sauget, the first, a series of past landfills and sludge ponds along the Mississippi River that housed hazardous waste from a Monsanto (and, later, Solutia) plant that manufactured various organic chemicals derived from benzene, including PCBs. Until they were banned in 1979, Monsanto was the primary American producer of PCBs, creating roughly 45 percent of the global supply. A containment structure is currently in place to prevent the PCB contamination of groundwater, and work to further remediate the site continues. In 1999, a second Superfund site attributed to Solutia was identified along Dead Creek, a waterway that contained discharged toxic chemicals from nearby industries and landfills, with the EPA completing its cleanup in 2010.

Today if one stands at the intersection of State Route 3 and Monsanto Avenue, elements of Sauget’s contemporary industry can be seen: the former Big River Zinc (at one time the third-largest zinc smelter in the country), Center Ethanol Plant, the American Bottom Wastewater Treatment Plant (servicing nearly the entire Metro-East region), and the Sauget Chemical Treatment Plant (one of only three such municipal plants in the country). At a slight remove from this active crossroad, one can also find a collection of adult entertainment clubs and Pop’s nightclub, a popular venue for nationally touring acts and party-goers escaping earlier last calls across the river. With the Sauget Diner and a combination Phillips 66 gas station/off-track betting facility just across the parking lot from Pop’s, the acreage around these businesses may be the most continually

active in the entire region, a series of blocks that never sleep.

While many basic associations with Sauget—the nightclubs, superfund sites, industrial stacks—are born at this intersection, these blocks connect together with the rest of Sauget’s business and cultural life to tether its founding connection with Monsanto to an ever-changing industrial sector and a tight-knit community base. For those interested in tracing this trajectory of industrial change in the Village, and indeed the entire St. Louis region, that process can begin at the National Building Arts Center (NBAC). This fifteen-acre campus on the grounds of the former Sterling Steel Casting Company foundry stands as the embodiment of the vision of Larry Giles, who has been recovering and preserving significant architectural artifacts from St. Louis buildings since the 1970s. The NBAC’s collections are contained here within thirteen buildings, a vast archive of machinery, clay and stone architectural details, signage, and lighting—to name but a few categories collected within these thousands of objects. The on-site Research Library holds over 300,000 items pertaining to this history, the range of which includes industry periodicals, primary documents, and the extensive company records of United Railway.

While at the apex of its industrial chemical production close to 8,000 employees worked in the Village of Monsanto, Sauget is now home to a range of businesses not only along the river corridor and State Route 3, but also within the formerly-rural

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Strike Surveillance Records Monsanto, IL [date unknown] Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

areas to the east that are adjacent to Interstate 255.

It is nearer to this highway where one would find Branding Iron, currently Sauget’s largest employer.

Over 250,000 hamburger patties are produced and later transported from this facility each day. For companies like Branding Iron, Fedex Ground, or the ContainerPort trucking and intermodal services group, the proximity to three interstates and four railroad ramps (Norfolk Southern, CSX, BNSF, and Union Pacific) is a significant draw, an attribute that has positioned the Village of Sauget as a transportation, distribution, and support services hub, as well as a node in a larger economic development initiative in southwestern Illinois to create a “Green Energy Corridor.”

These cross-sector regional efforts are supported by the presence of the Downtown St. Louis Airport, whose facilities extend across Sauget and Cahokia.

Originally opened as the Curtiss-Steinberg Airport in 1929, aviation classes, helicopter tours, chartered flights, and The St. Louis Air and Space Museum are all housed in these facilities. From this airfield, Charles Lindbergh conducted route research for TWA Airlines and surveyed the St. Louis region to select ground for the subsequent Lambert International Airport. Today, a highlight located on Vector Drive includes a modified Boeing 727, donated

by Fedex and used to train firefighters, emergency response personnel, and law enforcement SWAT teams who conduct counter-terrorism simulations with live pyrotechnics inside the cabin.

Diorama c. 1935 Monsanto, IL Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

Unidentified Men [date unknown] Monsanto, IL Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis Archives

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Sauget Family Scrapbook 1929-2007 Courtesy of Richard Sauget, Sr.

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AB.4036 Sauget Village Hall, IL 2018 Jennifer Colten

Sauget Family Scrapbook Items 1929-2007 Courtesy of Richard Sauget, Sr.

Though much of this activity may be out of sight of the I-255 interchange, the presence of the Village’s GCS Ballpark is unmistakable. “Baseball is the common denominator,” says Rich Sauget, Sr., owner of the Gateway Grizzlies, “it’s the one thing everybody can talk about.” Established in 2000, the Grizzlies built upon the rich baseball history in Monsanto/Sauget, with its inter-industry league emerging as early as the 1920’s and running parallel to other such amateur and semi-professional leagues that continue to thrive in the American Bottom. The sport runs in the Sauget family, as both Rich Sr. and Rich Jr. (the current Mayor) played both collegiate and professional baseball. While playing in the Atlanta Braves organization, Rich Sr. wrote a master’s thesis on the regional economic impact of the 1967 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox. GCS Ballpark has produced similar results, while adding a new facet to the culture of Sauget through providing a familyoriented experience to visitors across the region.

With a current Village population of just below 160, the Grizzlies also have the distinction of playing in the smallest community in all of professional baseball.

The year 2000 marked the expansion of an emergent film industry in Sauget, with Zin-Graff Motion Pictures’ baseball-themed short film “America’s Pastime.” Judee Sauget, wife of Rich Sauget, Sr., has catalyzed an opportunity for over a dozen film and media projects to be undertaken in the Village. The productions can employ upwards of 60 people to work on a feature-length film such as the psychological drama 23 Minutes to Sunrise—which takes place

almost entirely within one of the community’s social centers: The Sauget Diner. Starring Academy Award nominee Eric Roberts as a modern-day Grim Reaper who bestows a gift of immortality, at a price, to a young woman he meets, 23 Minutes to Sunrise brings an ensemble cast into the drama, with tension extending to the roof of the Diner and the Phillips 66 across Monsanto Avenue. In a cinematic twist on the founding hunting parties of the Village of Monsanto, the young woman making the dea with the Grim Reaper is played by Haley Busch, great-granddaughter of Adolphus A. Busch.

The scale of Sauget’s industrial production over the last 90 years at times can mask the essential truth that Sauget is itself a small town, or as Mayor Rich Sauget, Jr. would suggest, a neighborhood. “I usually drive through the Village…about eight times a day,” he reports, “going in and going out, and half of the time at least I am waving at somebody and saying hi. You know everybody, and they know you.”

Part of this community fabric can be found in the blocks around Sauget Park, which hosts a baseball field complex, a pavilion for picnics and the annual Halloween party, and the East West K-9 Training Grounds and its cemetery honoring law enforcement K-9’s. The continuing spirit of these relationships can also be found in Sauget Village Hall, which houses the Police and Fire Department and is the site of Village Board meetings as well as birthday and anniversary parties. Each Christmas season since 1936, the Mayor holds a party here, complete with Santa and his helpers bringing presents for the children. Everyone in the community gets an invitation.

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Tower [1491] The American Bottom Archive 2019 Jennifer Colten

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COMPANY TOWNS Jesse Vogler + Jennifer Colten What is the horizon of town-ness? Is it a social bond between people? Is it a territorial demarcation of incorporation? Is it a common set of values shared by citizens and government alike?

The company towns of the American Bottom challenge many of the longstanding assumptions that we bring to our understanding of what constitutes community, as 19th- and early 20thcentury town development in the East Side followed patterns that brought municipal incorporation and corporate incorporation ever closer.

Here, we look to tell an urban, political, and social history of the American Bottom through the seven company towns that were chartered here in its industrial height. In the incorporation, dis-incorporation, and afterlife of company towns in the American Bottom, we can read narrative of civic and social responsibility that is often at odds with the industrial imperatives of the time. If there was a shared attitude toward extraction, production, and capital accumulation, then the sharp discontinuities and spatial fragmentation speak to the limitations of industrial production to address civic and social concerns. This article attempts to develop a synthetic language through which we can begin to interpret this episodic landscape.

Marking one of the densest clustering of company towns in the country, the portion of the American Bottom lying directly east of St. Louis is home to seven distinct pairings of industry and municipality.

Chronologically, these pairings are as follows: Granite City/National Enameling and Stamping Company (NESCO); National City/St. Louis National Stockyards Corporation; Hartford/International Shoe; Wood River/ Standard Oil; Roxana/Shell Oil; Monsanto Town (now Sauget)/Monsanto; Alorton/ Aluminum Corporation of American (ALCOA).

Across these pairings emerge patterns of industrial land ownership, concerted real estate practices involving land disposal or lease, and the provisioning for employee housing. While this is already a dense collection for such a small geography, if we were to simplify the definition of company town to those incorporated entities whose economic and social existence is dominated by a single industry, the list could be expanded to include East Alton/Olin Brass, Madison/Commonwealth Steel, Fairmont City/American Zinc, and perhaps Dupo/Missouri Pacific.

While this article focuses on these company towns in the period of 19th- and early 20th-century industrial expansion, it bears noting that in the long history of the Illinois Country we can find a singular epi-

sode of corporate land speculation that inaugurated the company town in the region and which brought about what many consider to be the first speculative land bubble in the globalization of capital.

In 1717, Scottish financier John Law and the regent of France, the duc d’Orleans, founded the Company of the West, later the Royal Indies Company, with the explicit intention of developing the economic resources of the upper Mississippi River valley. In an episode of economic and political hubris, Law enthusiastically sold shares in this interest, known more popularly as the Mississippi Company, back on the European Continent with promises of nearly unbounded capitalization to be gained from exploiting the natural resources of the region. When this did not occur, public confidence in the Company and Law plummeted and the unfulfilled debts and obligations combined to burst what was then the first land bubble—known to historians as the Great Mississippi Bubble.

Undeterred, the reorganized company sent an emissary of three persons to serve as a Provincial Council, with a speculative miner, Philip Renault, to manage extractive operations in the field. This provisional council founded Fort de Chartres (in present day Randolph County) to signal French military and

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governmental presence in the far-flung interior, and also to serve as an entrepot for the Company’s mining transactions. Renault, for his efforts, was granted one of the largest concessions in the Bottoms, on which he founded the town of St. Phillipe as an agricultural provisioning community for his mining operations across the river in the Ozark Plateau. At St. Phillipe, he settled a few dozen farmers and equally as many slaves, in what was the first instance of slavery in the Illinois Country that continued, and continues, to haunt this region well after the state was declared free. The resulting territorial diagram was one that explicitly linked hinterland extraction in the Ozarks with an agricultural base in the Bottoms, all organized around a company town. In these two enclaves, then, we might locate a nascent company- town typology that can be seen as a defining settlement type of the American Bottom that continued up to the 20th century.

If we can read in the garrison of Chartres and the agricultural lots of St. Phillipe a symptom of colonial empire on the eve of large-scale European settlement, then in the slaughterhouses of National City and the industrial planning of Granite City we can read the surplus or externalization of the growth of St. Louis in its years of industrial development.

Wood River Refinery [6306] South Roxana, IL 2018 Jennifer Colten

Centers of Production n.d. [~1920] from Gonterman Realty and Development Co flyer Courtesy of Wood River History Museum Library

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Shell Refinery Wood River Refinery Museum South Roxana, IL 2017 Jennifer Colten

US Steel Granite City and Madison, IL 2014 Jesse Vogler

“The East Side has rapidly become,” writes Graham Taylor in his seminal 1915 study on Satellite Cities, “the section of the St. Louis industrial district into which heavy industrial processes, usually the dirtiest and dingiest, have been shunted.” This landscape of industrial suburbs is marked by extreme spatial fragmentation—with each town structured around its own industrial core and in many ways closed off and even antagonistic with its neighbors. Rail lines and infrastructure recapitulate the invisible boundaries of municipal incorporation, objectifying and rendering durable these already strong urban divides.

The social consequences of this are equally stark, with Taylor writing that the “special dividing lines across which industry jumped to secure unusual economic gains have meant unusual civic isolation.”

Within these enclosed industrial fiefdoms, it was simply left to the prerogatives of industry as to the social horizon of their associated towns—and it may be one of the defining characteristics of company towns that civic aspirations tended to be hemmed in by the immediate industrial interests of the parent company.

And this is perhaps where a study of American Bottom company towns is most instructive: in a new understanding of this urban form as a defining condition of the territory. Lying at the heart of this division are the latent territorial rules of the region—the creative, if ignoble, convergence of natural and administrative constraints that give rise to specific social and spatial patterns. Which is to say, rules that produce certain territorial effects while restricting others. Here, I would like to foreground three of the defining constraints and conditions that have overdetermined the spatial and social history of the American Bottom during the crucial years of industrial expansion. Each of these constraints is framed as a particular coupling of so-called natural determinants and a related set of administrative/ cultural practices. While individually these constraints have long been identified in the growth of East Side industry, the mutually affirming relation between them has not been properly clarified or framed.

First, the abundant presence of cheap coal in the Illinois coalfields coupled with lax nuisance laws produced a receptive environment to the defining smokestack industries of the time. Coal gave rise to both the nature of specific industries as well as the

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means of transportation to bring it to market—with the very first railroad in the region constructed from the coalfields near Belleville across the floodplain to the riverside ports of Illinoistown. But it was only by defining an administrative garrison from the more strict nuisance and smoke laws of St. Louis that this resource was able to achieve the scale it did.

In an era prior to comprehensive zoning, nuisance laws were a crude way for municipalities and civic leaders to steer development and incentivize (or de-incentivize) the location of factories. Many of the East side industries incorporated as their own towns in order to be able to steer this particular instrument in a manner more forgiving to industry.

Second, the availability of large parcels of relatively cheap bottomland coupled with the large-scale drainage and flood prevention infrastructures that thoroughly transformed the ecology of the floodplain. By reframing the floodplain as a speculative real-estate opportunity, the American Bottom was naturalized as a site for the large-scale industrial footprints that have come to define the land use of the region. Once this speculative framework had taken hold, it was a short step to argue for the massive investment in levee and drainage districts that further facilitated and capitalized the already productive landholdings of industrialist. While early on this infrastructure was industry or municipality specific, in the early years of the 20th century an inter-city, regional group was incorporated to effect this management on a comprehensive, regional scale. So while early towns and industries tended to locate on high ground above the historic floodline, the East Side Levee and Sanitation District effectively rendered the entire American Bottom of the Metro East as an accessible extractive and productive tract for industry and real-estate.

Third is a sort of triple coupling that relies on the twin boundaries of the Mississippi River as a physical boundary and the state line as an administrative boundary, coupled with a financial instrument uniquely manufactured to capitalize on both these divisions: the aptly named Bridge Arbitrary.

This Arbitrary was an overarching tariff on all goods crossing the Mississippi River and State Line on the Terminal Railroad Association bridges— with, for example, a nearly 20 cent ‘flat tax’ added to every ton of coal that crossed this divide, regardless of distance traveled. We might be more prone to believe the contemporaneous arguments by the TRRA as to the infrastructural imperatives of the Arbitrary if its board was not made up of East Side industrialists and landholders whose manufacturing interests and real-estate were to receive the greatest benefit from this tax.

Driving through the American Bottom, one can chart a narrative through this regulatory framework of municipal incorporation, the architectural coupling of industry and worker housing, and the social aspirations (or lack thereof) of the companies that founded these towns. But one can also witness the continuities of community that have grown-up in spite of the industrial imperatives that gave rise to these towns. In the ongoing civic investment of Granite City we can read a still vital industrial community navigating significant geo-political change, while in the Sears mail order homes of Wood River we find a unique cultural landscape that exceeds its industrial origins. Harder to interpret are the towns, such as National City, whose municipal mandate has been dissolved. Here, in the loosening of administrative bonds, we can see an analog to the ongoing dynamic of change that lies at the heart of the American Bottom.

Sears Mail-Order Homes Wood River, IL from Rosemary Thornton’s The Houses that Sears Built Gentle Beam Publications, Alton, IL. 2002

Granite City Town Plat from Granite City Realty Co flyer n.d. [~1904] Courtesy of Granite City Library

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CHAIN OF ROCKS CANAL + LOCK AND DAM No. 27

Locks No. 27 Under Construction Madison County, IL 1948 Courtesy of Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), National Park Service

The Editors The hydraulic engineering of the American Bottom follows a recog-

a geological feature, the Chain of Rocks is formed by an anticline—a

nizable pattern, whereby certain naturally-occurring topographic

folding upward of the geological layers—whose apex reaches the

features are subject to the abstracting logic of the engineer’s rule.

surface and would often cause shipping blockages during low water.

Intrinsic low points are connected and straightened, sloughs and

The 8.4-mile canal was dug in the late 1940s by the US Army Corps

meanders are excavated and discharged, and wetland habitats are tiled

of Engineers to bypass this length of the main passage of the river.

and drained. In the process, the American Bottom has become one

Up until then, it was the final stretch of the 2,000-mile navigable por-

of the most heavily engineered landscapes in the nation.

tion of the Mississippi River that was not universally passable by the Corp’s 9-foot channel mandate.

Such was the engineering logic that produced the Chain of Rocks Canal. Charting a straight course that roughly follows the former lines

At the south end of the Chain of Rocks Canal is Lock No. 27, the

of the Chouteau and Gabaret Sloughs, construction of the canal

last (or first, depending on which way one is counting) of the lock

began in 1947, with the canal and associated locks put into service in

complexes on the Mississippi River. South of here, the river is com-

February 1953. The canal permitted river traffic to bypass the shal-

pletely free-flowing all the way down to the mouth of the river in

lows around the Chain of Rocks Reach—the geological

New Orleans. On the Mississippi, locks start their numbering in the

feature that it both negates physically and embraces by its name. As

north and increase going south, with Lock No. 1 located on the river

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Chain of Rocks Canal Madison County, IL 2015 Jesse Vogler

between Minneapolis and St. Paul. In an inverse of this numbering system, the river’s length is charted in ‘river miles’ measured from the south to the north—with the river being broken into an upper and lower half. The Upper Mississippi River is measured northward from the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers at Cairo, Illinois, and Lock No. 27 is situated at river mile 185.5 of this northerly system. The zero-marker for the lower portion is measured from the Head of Passes—a point where the main stem of the Mississippi splits into three branches at the Gulf of Mexico. River miles are a measure of the historic thalweg—the lowest lineal points in elevation along a river’s watercourse. Additionally, this final/first lock is situated just below the confluence with the Missouri River, and as such Lock No. 27 moves more cargo than any other navigation structure on the Mississippi River—with an average of about 10,000 lockages a year.

Chain of Rocks Low Water Dam No. 27 Madison County, IL 1960 Courtesy of Historic American Engineering Record (HAER), National Park Service

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Mississippi River and Ingram Barge Co. East Carondelet, IL 2013 Jesse Vogler

RIVER MEMORY Treasure Shields Redmond with Paul Perkins Crossing the Mississippi at 60 mph on one of the regions many bridges is as close as most of us get to the river on any given day—observing the barge tows as they slowly crawl through the industrialized corridors of the banks like small units of an abstract commerce. But what is it like to work on the river? To spend days and days working with its deceivingly quick currents? This interview with Paul Perkins, a former barge deckhand, gives us a view into the textures of life on a tow. Departing from the quantities and volumes that we have come to know as the calculus of the river, this series looks to bring us down to water-level—to feel the rhythms of labor, the social dynamics of proximity, and the spray of the wake as it breaks across the sides of the hull plate.

Treasure: I was looking up current job listings for

those same companies that you mentioned that you worked for. Those jobs on the river are hard! They ask people to work 12 hours, four nights in a row, then have four nights off.

Paul: It was different when I worked. I was on the

boat for 30 days, and then I was off for 30 days.

And while I was on the boat, I worked six-hour shifts—they have what they call a forward watch and an aft watch. The forward watch is six in the morning til noon, then six in the evening til midnight.

And the aft watch is noon to six in the evening, then midnight to six in the morning.

So a towboat consists of 11 crew. You had four deckhands, and that’s what I did, I was a deckhand.

Our job duties were to take care of the boat, and whenever we would have to pick up a barge, we would maintain the tow and all the rigging. On the upper Mississippi, a tow is 15 barges: three barges wide, five long. You bring them together with the lock line. You get your lock line on there but that’s just temporary, that’s the line before you actually get the wiring, the rigging to hold it on permanently.

But you use the lines to pull the barges up against the boat. To get things squared up before you actually wire them together. And you’ve got the towboat in the back, pushing the barges either upstream or downstream.

It’s amazing how you can sit along the riverbank and hear the animals and things seem so serene, but then when you ride the boat you see how hard it is.

The river, it’s harsh. It goes from one extreme to the other; the summer and the sweltering heat to the frigid winter.

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In the wintertime, when the ice started flowing, there were times we had to actually unhook the tow from the barges, because you couldn’t push those barges through the ice. It would get so bad that we would actually unhook the tow to break the ice ahead of it, and then we would single file the barges through the break. We called it mule training. So you imagine being out there in frigid wind, you’re out there and it’s just so cold. It’s harsh. I was a young guy; I couldn’t do it now. There ain’t no way. With the way the climate has changed, I don’t think the river freezes as solid as it did back then in the 80s.

And the summer time, when it got to 100 degrees, all that steel always made me think of standing in a hot kitchen. All the ladies in our family always cooked with heavy cast iron. And being on the barge was like standing in a large cast iron skillet when you were out there working. And there was no shade. So yeah, it was harsh.

Treasure: So when did you take your first job on the

river? And how did you find out about the job?

Paul: Oh, I guess it was around August of 1979. So

I was just 18, getting ready to turn 19. A teenager.

Living.

Paul: Around the river, I seen towboats as kid. You

see those boats going up and down the river and as a kid, I was always curious. Man, they look so neat out there. I worked for two companies. I worked for Ohio River Company for a little over three years, and for American Commercial Barge Line for, well, not very long.

But it’s interesting, my very first trip on the river— well, you always heard about the wild river men, how

Paul: No, we had ... well, yeah, actually, for the most

part I guess that was true. I only remember a few non-white guys actually. I don’t remember seeing any Asian or African American other than, let’s see, I remember Richard, one deckhand. But for the most part it was all white, yeah. Maybe the black folks were smarter than that, realized that it’s a rough job.

Now, I think when you get down towards in the south, you see more people of color than you did up in the upper part.

Treasure: And what about any outstanding injuries?

Did you ever see anyone pulled over, did anyone drown?

Paul: Now Ray Dill, he was a preacher from

Arkansas, and a lock line snapped….

Treasure: Wait a minute, he was a crewman? And

a preacher? He was like Jesus on the boat—he was going make you fishermen of men!

Paul: That’s exactly what Ray did too, man. He

USACE Riverlands Interpretive Barge West Alton, MO 2013 Jesse Vogler

wild and rough they are. Well, my very first trip on the towboat, I got on Alton, Illinois, the old Lock and Dam 26. It’s gone now. I get on that boat, and we were headed for Chicago. I got on the boat, I had no idea what I was doing. By the time we got to Beardstown, the boat was being boarded by federal marshals! And here this is my very first trip!

We got up there and they had lawmen on the bank with guns pointed at the boat. The federal marshals, they were after our first mate. There was an old tavern down here in Alton called the Buccaneer.

Apparently he had got off the boat for some time off while we were parked there at the lock and got into some trouble. I don’t know what the whole story was. I just remember standing there and these lawmen pulled up and they don’t have to acknowledge, they can just board a boat on the waterway...So that was my very first trip on the river!

Treasure: So is it fair to say it was all men?

Paul: Well, we were predominantly men. We did

have a few lady cooks. But yeah, I don’t think I ever seen a female deckhand. Never seen a female engineer or a pilot or a captain. Or mates. We did have a couple lady cooks, but that was it. I’m sure women could do it. But it would take a special kind of gal to cohabitate if she was on a boat with 10 other men.

Treasure: Because it operates like a barracks. It’s

Mississippi River Above Monroe County, IL 2014 Jesse Vogler

Treasure: Most definitely. That time was so different

than now. For a high school senior now, that’s an uncertain time. When you were a high school senior, it was like the world was open to you. And it was the same even in black communities at the time. When I talk to family in East St. Louis, they came to the city because of jobs. You would not believe that today.

But the reason my family came up from Mississippi to East St. Louis was because of the Alorton Company, meatpacking, second in the nation in railway transportation, just booming. Just a booming place.

Paul: But when you talk about all that industry and

work, a lot of it was tied to the river, too. If you go along the riverbanks you see a lot of businesses that are now just broken down buildings but at one time the river was a transportation hub.

Treasure: But tell me about the food. You said

that there were cooks and that piqued my interest.

I thought: “Who are these women cooking for all these long-haired fools on the river?”

Paul: Actually the best cooks come from the south.

Down in Arkansas and Tennessee and Georgia.

Treasure: Would it be white women?

Paul: No, these were mostly men. White men.

Treasure: Was the whole crew white?

tried to preach to all of us hooligans, he was always a preacher to us. Great guy though. But a lock line broke and hit him. I mean, these lines, I don’t know if they’re two and a quarter inch in diameter, something like that. But it snapped and when those lines break it actually sounds like a shotgun. Oh, man, it broke his leg in two places. But he’s lucky because if it would have hit him in the head or the neck or the back, it could have very easily killed him.

Treasure: Well, sometimes places like the Mer-

chant Marines or the military are recommended to young boys who are kind of unfinished and they need something that has a boot camp element to it.

Would you say that working on the boat might be an option for young men because of that 30-day span?

Will it help a person get some of that wild out?

Paul: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think the towboat

life would help. If you’re wild, there’s nothing out there that’s going to tame you down. When you’re young and you get on that boat, when you get off a month later you got a bunch of money in the bank from getting paid for all that time on the river. So unless you’re ready for a change, there’s nobody out there that’s going to make it happen for you.

Treasure: Unless the preacher comes in there!

Paul: Right! It might slow you down for that month.

And if you’re really looking for it, it would be a good opportunity if you want to get out there and make some money and maybe just get away, take yourself out of the wildness. But unless you’re ready for change, they can talk until they’re blue in the face.

your home for those 30 days.

Paul: Oh, it is. So you have two rooms for the deck-

hands. You only got two different bunks. So when you’re on, when you’re working, the other deckhand is in there trying to sleep. Yeah, it’s really confining.

So it would be challenging for, I mean, it’d be a pretty tough woman. You’re dragging around wires and ratchets and straps and lock lines, and it’s very demanding physically.

Treasure: So what made you choose working life

over college life?

Paul: That’s a really good question. Well, probably

the biggest thing was the money aspect. It took a lot of money and it seemed like my family, they made just enough where you really couldn’t get the grants or anything, but they didn’t make enough where they could pay the full college tuition.

In my era, there were factories. You could go to Alton. Matter of fact, at 18 years-old I had three other jobs offered to me at the same time. At Winchester, the Olin Corporation, National Marine on the river, and then the deckhand. It was that easy to get a job.

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SIGNIFICANT AND INSIGNIFICANT MOUNDS Jennifer Colten + Jesse Vogler Driving east across the Mississippi River, as you leave the city of St. Louis and its Arch behind you, the next landmark to appear on the skyline is a hulking mass of earth rising out of the floodplain. If you are on the lookout for the Cahokia Mounds, you would be forgiven for mistaking this artificial mount for the great Monk’s Mound, as I once did. This hill is in fact the newly capped Milam Landfill—a regional waste disposal site that accepts material from as far away as Iowa. But this misrecognition is perhaps more urgent and interesting than may initially appear—as it is here, in the landscape type of the mound, that the American Bottom most clearly enters the field of legibility.

This region is rightly celebrated as the center of a vast civilization that had as its central architectural and urban expression the construction of mounds.

Mound complexes from the well-known Cahokia Mounds to the lesser-known Pulcher and Grassy Lake sites remain the defining signifiers of a long and advanced era of North American settlement.

Yet the construction of mounds continues. Mound building has, if anything, even increased. While the civic and cosmic ordering that animated so much of the Mississippian era mound builders has, in this new era of mound building, been sidelined for the logistical and the proximate, our contemporary mounds index a way-of-being no less profoundly than the artifacts of the mound builders of prehistory. Slag heap, salt dome, aggregate piles, landfill, mulch mound—these are the forms of our contemporary cosmologies.

Which is to say, in landscape, it all matters. It all has meaning.

The value judgments suggested in our title do not cut along easy lines. For in the end, each of these mounds is, on its own terms, both significant and insignificant. They are all markers to a way of being, a way of seeing the world. Our interest in the pairing of so-called meaning-filled and meaning-less objects is to bring the process of appraisal itself to

the surface, in order to complicate received value judgments that so often attend landscape interpretation.

The American Bottom is a particularly talkative landscape—with an archive of written description that stands in marked contrast to its relatively un-remarked-upon status today. From the early notebooks of Jolliet and Father Marquette, to the French Jesuit monks who set up parishes in the region, through the Early Republic notebooks of both William and George Rogers Clark, and forward through the 19th-century expeditions—this is a landscape that has been cast in the net of language for centuries. Yet we are keenly aware that it is only since European settlement that this landscape has been made to “speak.” And it is here where the mounds put forward an argument for artifacts as evidence—artifacts that index a way of being and which carry meaning and value across time and discursive registers.

Among the many voices coaxing this irreducible landscape into the order of language, we might look to Edmund Flagg for one of the earliest and most comprehensive descriptions. Writing from the edge of Monk’s Mound in 1837, Flagg gives voice to the mingling of cultural and natural landscapes that define the American Bottom:

Mound [0814] Sauget, IL 2015 Jennifer Colten

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Map of St. Louis Mound Group redrawn from original by T.R. Peale 1819 Courtesy of Missouri History Museum

The view from the southern extremity of the mound, which is free from trees and underbrush, is extremely beautiful. Away to the south sweeps off the broad river-bottom, at this place about seven miles in width, its waving surface variegated by all the magnificent hues of the summer flora of the prairies. At intervals, from the deep herbage is flung back the flashing sheen of a silvery lake to the oblique sunlight; while dense groves of the crab-apple and other indigenous wild fruits are sprinkled about like islets in the verdant sea. To the left, at a distance of three or four miles, stretches away the long line of bluffs, now presenting a surface marked and rounded by groups of mounds, and now wooded to their summits, while a glimpse at times may be caught of the humble farmhouses at their base. On the right meanders the Cantine Creek, which gives the name to the group of mounds, betraying at intervals its bright surface through the belt of forest by which it is margined. In this direction, far away in blue distance, rising through the mist and forest, may be caught a glimpse of the spires and cupolas of the city, glancing gayly in the rich summer sun. The base of the mound is circled upon every side by lesser elevations of every form and at various distances. Of these, some lie in the heart of the extensive maize-fields, which constitute the farm of the proprietor of the principal mound, presenting a beautiful exhibition of light and shade, shrouded as they are in the dark, twinkling leaves. The most remarkable are two standing directly opposite the southern extremity of the principal one, at a distance some hundred yards, in close proximity to each other and which never fail to arrest the eye. There are also several large square mounds covered with forests along the margin of the creek to the right, and groups are caught rising from the declivities of the distant bluffs.

Big Mound, un-building North Riverfront (present-day St. Louis, MO) 1870 from Easterly Daguerreotype Collection Courtesy of Missouri History Museum

Today, standing atop the visitor-worn surface of Monk’s Mound, we might be more likely to take note of the hulking mass of Milam Landfill directly to the west, or the brown smoke-filled horizon of US Steel to the north, or, until very recently, the twin stacks of the former Armour Plant of National City.

Look hard enough, and we might be able to re-train our eye to see the meander scars and lowland forests that still define the creek margins of Flagg’s description. Even though those creeks no longer flow and have been channelized by canals and ditches over the past century, the floodplain of the American Bottom retains traces of its river past, just as the array of mounds, now sharply delimited by the lawn-mowing regime of the State Park maintenance staff, remind us that, despite the destruction of a large number of mounds in the period of industrial and infrastructural growth, markers to prior inhabitation remain numerous.

Yet the provenance of pre-contact mounds has not always been so unambiguous. Up until the early 20th century, it was common enough to find, in scholarly reviews and articles, suggestions and arguments as to the natural origin of the mounds. It was as if the ideological barriers to accepting the creative and constructive capacity of pre-contact Native Americans was too great an intellectual burden for anthropologists to bear. As only one example, we might cite the paper titled “Origin of Monks Mound,” presented at the 1914 Geological Society of America meeting by Dr. A. R. Crook, in which he writes: “It may be well to inquire if all so-called mounds in the Mississippi Valley are not natural topographic forms.” And where, eight years later in the journal Science, he recapitulates the false position that a recent study “establishes, beyond doubt, that [Monks Mound] is not of artificial origin, as has been so generally held but that it is a remnant remaining after the erosion of the alluvial deposits, which at one time filled the valley of the Mississippi, in the locality known as the “Great American Bottoms.”

Wind-blown piles of loess; aggregated sediment

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from eddying currents of the river; or simply the remainder of even-larger hills eroded by the regular flooding of the Mississippi—the theories of the mound origins more easily imagine a natural world full of creative agency than native peoples summoning of order and meaning.

Alongside these geological underminings, a parallel narrative emerged further divesting the agency of contemporaneous Native American predecessors— the mound-builder myth. Noah Webster—the socalled “Father of American Scholarship and Education” described, in 1788, the Ohio River mounds as the work of “Carthaginians or other Mediterranean nations.” With this, archeologist John Kelly writes, “the beginnings of the “Mound-builder” myth were carefully being sown in the fertile minds of the American Public.” This broader attitude can perhaps be understood as a symptom of the so-called Theory of Two Civilizations—the theory that, prior to exploration and inhabitation by Europeans in historic time, there must have been two distinct epochs of human habitation of the continent. The inability of a European settler consciousness to imagine and accept the mounds as a product of the indigenous peoples or their immediate forbears led many to posit an “Extinct Race” of people that inhabited the territory and left these material traces of their civilization.

And yet then there are still others who simply disregard the mound complexes as too simple and rudimentary for serious attention. Lucien Carr, a significant figure in turn of the century archeology, somewhat apologetically writes: “as a matter of fact, the ant hills of Africa, in point of relative size, and in the architectural knowledge and engineering skill displayed in their construction, are quite equal to any earth-work in the Ohio Valley.”

So where, then, is the threshold for mound-ness to be found? As an early geologist of the mound groups of the American Bottom noted in 1922: “Practically all of the mounds which are large enough to attract attention have a distinct artificiality

in their regularity of form and steepness of slope.”

Which is to say, in the eye’s catalog of forms, it is a particular angle of repose, a distinct figuration, which enters a mound into the field of the remark-able. But when compared to the complexes that enliven a kind of global pyramid consciousness, what distinguish the Cahokian mound group are its blunt, earthen edges. Rather than the sharp stonework of the pyramid complexes of central Mexico, Monk’s Mound is constructed entirely of dirt and is currently covered in a wooly sheet of grass and weeds. The mounds surrounding the main ceremonial center are likewise carpeted in turf and most distinctly enter the field of legibility immediately following their bi-weekly lawn mowing. It is in this bright line of demarcation, in the contour and mowing decision of the maintenance crew, that Cahokia reaches its architectural apotheosis.

But what do we get by following the piles? By attending to this base ordering of matter? It is my belief that there is a counter historiography that can be written that traces the mound as the original architectural gesture. A mark with meaning. An alternate tectonic myth grounded in the recognition of earth out-of-place. Adolph Loos, an important 20th-century architect and theorists, recognized the unadorned, psychological power of the mound: “When walking through a wood, you find a rise in the ground, six foot long and three foot wide, heaped up in a rough pyramid shape, then you turn serious, and something inside you says: someone lies buried here. That is architecture.” Architecture as a recognition of matter out-of-place; of matter in particular arrangement; of an affective register of arrangement.

But for every pile, there is a pit. And we would do well to not let the formal legibility of the mound distract us from the fundamental transactional economy in this (dis)ordering of matter. Lewis Mumford reminds us that the quarry pit is characteristic of the process of Abbau, or un-building: “What is taken out of the quarry or pithead cannot be replaced.”

And so, with the borrow pits that ring Cahokia

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Mound [7056] Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site Collinsville, IL 2016 Jennifer Colten

Mound [3297] Collinsville, IL 2017 Jennifer Colten

Mounds State Park, the regular, rectangular water bodies that lie adjacent to highway construction, and the hundreds of mines and quarries that lie out of eyeshot, we must be attentive to the reordering of earth that gives us all of our mounds. In this, we can read the mound as a transitional object.

As the becoming-city. For it is in the hundreds of unremarked piles of limestone, earth, mulch, and sand, and their parallel constellation of pits, that our roads, buildings, sidewalks, and parks are aggregated and extracted.

But perhaps the mounds of our era are no less enigmatic. After all, who, really, can account for the otherworldly, colorful mound sitting adjacent to Cahokia Power Plant, just south and across the river of the Gateway Arch? That it is a heap of residue left after the cleaning of coal only goes so far to explain the range of reds, browns, blues, and yellows that marble its surface. I have revisited this mound dozens of times, and each visit reveals a new silhouette, a new stratum, a new cleft carved by the most recent rain or flood. I know all the constituent parts of this mound—the iron, schist, limestone, and slag—but it retains an irreducible quality that communicates across time. It, like all the mounds of the American Bottom, overwhelm with their significance.

Located at 900 South Central Avenue in Roxana, the Wood River Refinery History Museum offers the public a unique opportunity to understand the 101-year history of oil refining in the region. This story is told through a remarkably wide range of objects in their collection, such as cans of paint used to distinguish the exterior of Shell stations across the country (known at midcentury as “Shell Yellow, Ditzler PPG #80004”), spark-proof wooden shoes used to clean the storage tanks, and correspondence related to a strange goat herd problem in the refinery grounds. Through exhibits that incorporate photography, video, memorabilia, and even a 1924 Chevrolet Roadster, the Museum traces the site’s history as a Shell Oil refinery through to ConocoPhillips and EnCana’s use of this facility as a transcontinental connection point for refining oil, via pipeline, from destinations as distant as the Alberta tar sands.

Mound [9182] Venice, IL 2018 Jennifer Colten

AB.9982 Wood River, IL 2017 Jennifer Colten

Butane Cavern, Last Underground View Wood River, IL 1960 Courtesy WRRHM

The Museum opened in 1986, the product of a group of retired employees who worked with Shell’s assistance for many years to gather and preserve this material. The results of this expansive archive Shell Review, Picnic Issue Wood River, IL 1937 Courtesy WRRHM

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Project Design Flood Lower Mississippi, USA 1958 US Army Corps of Engineers

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

Alisa Blatter <<< Alisa is a landscape designer, mapmaker, and writer living in St. Louis. Struck by the tallgrass prairie landscape since her childhood in Minnesota, she seeks to cohere its remains among the forms of the urban spatial environment and across private, public, and nonprofit realms. Her writing, cast from first-person research, considers the phenomenology of this and other, more aqueous landscapes. Alisa holds a masters degree in landscape architecture from the Sam Fox School of Washington University in St. Louis.

Jennifer Colten <<< Jennifer Colten’s work focuses on ambiguous landscapes and histories of cultural and geographic space. Her photographic practice commits to an exploration of sites at the margins the urban environment addressing social, cultural and environmental implications of land use. Colten has received funding from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, the Ferguson Academic Seed Fund, and grants from Regional Arts Commission in St Louis. Colten’s photographs have been collected in institutions nationally and internationally. She currently teaches photography at Washington University in St Louis.

Matthew Fluharty <<< Matthew Fluharty is a writer, artist, and curator interested in the convergence of landscape and the vernacular with contemporary art. He is the Founder and Executive Director of Art of the Rural, a member of M12 Studio, and he serves on the Board of Directors of Common Field. Matthew is co-curating High Visibility: On Location in Rural America, opening at the Plains Art Museum in November of 2020. Colorfield, a book of poems, archives, and fieldwork will be published by Last Chance Press in 2020.

Derek Hoeferlin <<< Derek Hoeferlin is principal of [dhd] derek hoeferlin design, an award-winning architecture, landscape, and urban design practice based in St. Louis. He is an associate professor and chair of the landscape architecture and urban design programs at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches undergraduate- and graduate-level multidisciplinary approaches to architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and urbanism. He collaboratively researches integrated water-based design strategies across the Mississippi, Mekong, and Rhine river basins through his design-research project Way Beyond Bigness: A Need for a Watershed Architecture, which is the focus of his forthcoming book (2020).

Treasure Shields Redmond <<< A Mississippi native, Treasure Shields Redmond is a published poet, master educator, community arts organizer, and successful entrepreneur. Treasure was raised in the federal housing projects, and went on to be signed to M.C. Hammer’s label as a hip hop artist, and writer. She is the author of chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer (2015). Her doctoral research focuses on the recorded performances of foundational Black Women poets, and the ways they deployed sound to impact the canon and justice movements. Treasure centers collaboration in her personal arts practice and as an organizing principle. As such, she has co-founded a funding collective for Black artists called The Black Skillet, and a podcast that centers voices of color called Who Raised You? Treasure is the founder of Feminine Pronoun Consultants, LLC, and Get The Acceptance Letter Academy.

Jesse Vogler <<< Jesse Vogler is an artist and architect whose work sits at the intersection of landscape, politics, and performance. His writing and projects address the entanglements between landscape and law, and take on themes of work, property, expertise, and perfectibility. Jesse is a MacDowell Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and in addition to his art and design practice, is a land surveyor, is co-director of The American Bottom project, co-directs the Institute of Marking and Measuring, and teaches across landscape, architecture, art, and urbanism at Washington University in St. Louis.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to extend a special thanks to all the individuals and institutions that have made work on this publication so inspiring, and who have contributed time and stories to this issue: John Conrad of Conrad Press; Jonathan Hanahan of Milieu; The Luminary; Charlie Giedeman; Blake Heischmidt of Madison County Sand; Jack Branz of Bluff City Minerals; Mike Clark of Big Muddy Adventures; Larry Giles of National Building Arts Center; Richard Sauget, Sr.; Monsanto Archive, Washington University in St. Louis Archive; Paul Perkins; Missouri History Museum, St. Louis; Lynn Peemoeller of Food Systems Planning; and Saundi Kloeckener of Native Women’s Care Circle.

The Gazette is a collaborative publication of The American Bottom Project, Art of the Rural, The Institute of Marking and Measuring, and artists, communities, and collaborators up and down the Mississippi River. We gratefully thank and acknowledge the Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project of HKW; Illinois Humanities; and the Divided City Initiative of Washington University in St. Louis for their financial support in making this publication possible.

Mississippi. An Anthropocene River is a project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, in collaboration with numerous international partners, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the initiative #WunderbarTogether Was well as by the Max Planck Society.

RECIPE

Jewel Weed Compress I’m asking the jewel weed right now to come to my house. I’m making a salve.

Jewel weed grows near poison ivy, and negates the oil that people are allergic to. When my kid was four he would just look at poison ivy and get a rash. The doctor kept giving us steroids for it and my kid didn’t need to be on steroids. It wasn’t good for him. So, I asked my mom, and she said: ‘Grandma used bleach solution to dry up poison ivy, but to rinse the oil off we use jewel weed.’ We had this dog who would run through poison ivy. You take jewel weed and crush the plant and rub the juice on the fur and the leash. Jewel weed works for stinging nettle, bug bites, and bee stings.

Jewel weed has a texture that when you put in running water, it sparkles, that’s why it’s called jewel weed. But the easiest way to recognize it is because this time of year it’s flowering and it’s got an orange or yellow flower, which attracts you to it and then you see the patch and then you know it’s there year after year.

Watercolor by Margaret Stones Courtesy LSU Libraries Special Collections

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—Native Women’s Care Circle, on traditional medicine.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 >>>

Episodic but not Accidental

4 >>>

Sand Extraction

8 >>>

A View on the River

10 >>> Sauget 16 >>> 18 >>>

The American Bottom Archive Company Towns

22 >>> Canal, Lock + Dam 24 >>> River Memory

EDITORIAL Issue Editors <<< Jesse Vogler Matthew Fluharty Jennifer Colten Alisa Blatter

Additional Contributors <<< Derek Hoeferlin Treasure Shields Redmond

Contacts <<<

Jesse Vogler + Matthew Fluharty, info@theamericanbottom.org cover image

26 >>> Significant + Insignificant Mounds theamericanbottom.org

30 >>> Acknowledgments

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WITH THE SUPPORT OF

Copyright 2019 The American Bottom Project

Mound [2399] Sauget, IL 2018 Jennifer Colten