The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable.
– Mark Twain
Before the Mississippi River became Joan Stemler’s life’s work, it was the geography of a child’s curiosity.
She was raised on a farm in Columbia, Illinois, behind a levee, in a place where the Mississippi River was not so much scenery as a force of nature – a force that explained why earth needed to be piled against water, why fields of grain needed protection, and why adults paid so much attention to rain, seepage, and the look of the sky.
Why We Wrote This
The Mississippi River still captures the imagination, though it is today meticulously managed to ensure the flow of a nation’s commerce. Changing conditions make that a constant effort, reflecting America’s economic growth and transformation.
Her father farmed grain along the bottomlands near Columbia, in the broad flood plain the Mississippi River spent millennia claiming and reclaiming as its own. When the river rose, the Army Corps of Engineers would come and push back the levees, and she would go with her father to watch.
“I really didn’t know what it meant until I got older,” says Ms. Stemler, now the chief of water control for the Corps’ St. Louis District, just miles from where she grew up.
Today, few know the ebbs and flows of the Mississippi more than she does, from its headwaters near Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the great deltas of Louisiana. “Water management, it’s like, in your blood. That’s what you do. That’s the way you know.”
Her way of knowing, however, moves beyond the great river’s lore.
To follow Route 66 west is to travel one of America’s great remembered corridors of motion – the Mother Road, built for cars, migration, reinvention. But here in St. Louis, that highway meets a river that is much more central to the American story.
Crossing the Mississippi still feels like an event. Travelers who have done it a hundred times will tell you: The moment the bridge clears the banks and the river opens up below, something shifts.
There is a reason the Gateway Arch stands on its western shore. There is a reason Mark Twain could never let it go. The Mississippi is not just a river. It is the highway before highways, the supply chain before anyone used that phrase.
The Mississippi divided empires, helped decide a civil war, and nurtured a distinct culture of river towns and port cities. It fed the steamboat age, carried the Delta blues north, and gave American literature one of its central landscapes.
Yet the river Americans see in their minds is not quite the river Ms. Stemler manages. Her river is the nation’s primary logistical corridor for exporting hundreds of millions of dollars of American goods to the rest of the world. Her team’s job is, essentially: Keep it moving as efficiently as possible.
Under a congressional mandate, the Corps must maintain a corridor to accommodate the unceasing tows of barges that bring American exports to the Gulf of Mexico.
But in recent years, the Mississippi has been critically low, again and again, forcing the Corps into a more constant effort to keep America’s oldest freight corridor open.
That effort, Ms. Stemler says, has ushered in “a new world” in managing the Mississippi. “The last few years we’ve done everything in our power to keep enough water in the river.”
The stakes are enormous. Today, some 655 million tons of American products, including roughly 60% of American grain exports, move through the Mississippi system via long tows of barges every year. All said, the river generates over $500 billion for the United States economy, according to federal data, and supports more than 1.5 million jobs across the country.
When the river is critically low, towboat operators, grain exporters, and a range of American industries need to know what she knows. Low water means they need to load lighter – and that costs millions. High water can make it dangerously difficult to navigate.
“When I call them … they know there’s something up,” Ms. Stemler says from the water control room in the St. Louis office. “During low water, it’s a lot more work because we go to 24-hour ops and stuff to constantly monitor and make changes as needed.”
But this is the Mississippi. The waters of a continent – west from the Rockies and east from the Appalachians – pour into it, sometimes violently, sometimes placidly. So the work never ends.
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Since the 1930s, the Army Corps of Engineers has maintained what some call a “staircase of water” above St. Louis: a series of locks and dams that help hold the upper Mississippi deep enough for commercial navigation.
The mandate is deceptively simple. In the St. Louis District, the Corps must maintain a navigation channel 300 feet wide and 9 feet deep along roughly 300 miles of the Mississippi, from Saverton, Missouri, to Cairo, Illinois.
When the water is too low, the Corps dredges. When a pool is too high or too low, operators adjust gates. When drought tightens the channel, water managers, dredge crews, and lock operators must communicate with towboat companies and shippers nearly every moment.
In an average year, the St. Louis District might dredge 3 million to 4 million cubic yards of river bottom. During the 2022-23 drought, it moved about 9 million cubic yards from 70 locations – a record-setting effort to keep the channel open.
For Andy Schimpf, chief of operations for the Corps’ St. Louis District, the stakes are measured in both water depth and freight economics. A standard tow on the upper Mississippi, he says, is a line boat pushing 15 barges, typically about 1,200 feet long. One tow can carry the equivalent of roughly 1,100 semitrucks.
“When they know they’re going to have enough water, they can load these barges – you’re talking about 20 or 30% more commodity for the same crew,” Mr. Schimpf says.
That is one reason Jennifer Carpenter, president and CEO of American Waterways Operators, calls the Mississippi “the maritime Main Street of America.”
Ms. Carpenter grew up in St. Louis but says she had to move to Washington to understand the industry that had been operating in the background of her childhood. Most Americans, she says, experience trucks, trains, and planes directly. Barges move beyond ordinary view.
“People don’t have the kinds of everyday experiences with the marine mode of transportation as they do with say, trucking or aviation or even rail,” she says. “Nobody ever got tailgated by a barge.”
Yet the very system Ms. Carpenter defends is also the subject of deep criticism.
Robert Criss, professor emeritus of earth, environmental, and planetary sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, has spent decades studying rivers and flood risk. He does not dispute the Mississippi’s historic importance.
But to Mr. Criss, the modern navigation system is less a marvel than a distortion – an old river economy kept alive by public engineering and public money.
“River transport is the most highly subsidized form of transport there is,” he says. Barges pay a 29-cent-per-gallon fuel tax into the Inland Waterways Trust Fund for major capital improvements. But ordinary operations and maintenance of the navigation channel are federally funded.
Mr. Criss’ complaint is blunt: Railroads must own their right of way, maintain their tracks, and pay property taxes, while barge companies move on a river the government has engineered for them. “The toll is zero,” he says. “Zero.” American taxpayers pay for it all.
His critique is ecological as well as economic. The river, he argues, has been narrowed, dredged, and simplified for navigation. Islands and shallow-water habitat have disappeared. What many Americans imagine as a wild river is, in places, something more controlled. “You just got a channel,” he says. “It’s like a canal.”
The Corps and the maritime industry see the system differently: as a fuel-efficient, economically essential corridor that keeps enormous volumes of freight off highways and supports thousands of American workers.
And it’s true: The Mississippi River that moves modern commerce is not simply a natural phenomenon or an iconic American waterway. It is managed, it is maintained, it is argued about. And it is worked every day.
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It is a quiet morning at the largest – and last – lock facility on the upper Mississippi. After the Melvin Price, the river flows south without another lock all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
During harvest season, long tows enter its 1,200-foot chamber carrying grain toward New Orleans. Other barges move fertilizer, coal, petroleum, cement, and steel. But today, the great lock is being used for something much smaller.
A single kayak is trying to get downstream.
Mike Maedge, the lockmaster, is on the phone with Matt Dunham, the shift chief in the control tower. Out on the wall, a lockkeeper is trying to guide the kayaker into position.
“That guy is just paddling in circles out there,” Mr. Maedge says. “He needs to come in, ’cuz if something else calls, now we gotta hold him up.”
From the tower, Mr. Dunham opens the 250-ton chamber gate. The kayaker – small as a thumb from the dam wall – eases inside. The gate closes behind him. Then Mr. Dunham opens the valves, just as he would for a 1,200-foot tow, and 15 feet of Mississippi River begins to drain from the chamber by gravity alone.
Later, Mr. Dunham laughs about the range of craft that pass through the lock. “We process everything you can imagine, including a single canoe,” he says. “We’ve seen homemade crafts, last fall there were two pirate ships, or depictions of Christopher Columbus’s ships.”
A military veteran, Mr. Dunham has worked as a lock and dam operator for nearly 20 years. He started as a lockkeeper working the walls. Now, as shift chief, he is part of the two-person crew that keeps Melvin Price operating.
“Nights, days, Christmas, there’s always two of us here,” he says.
Mr. Maedge has been lockmaster for about a year and a half. Before that, he spent about six years on a Corps service crew doing large-scale maintenance across the lock-and-dam system. As the kayaker drops slowly toward the lower river, Mr. Maedge explains the Tainter gates that help regulate the pool above the dam. Operators can adjust them by small increments, he says, sometimes after a call or text from water control.
“We can go as little as half a foot,” he says. “We just raise and lower these as we need to let out X amount of water. We’ll get a phone call from water control, or they’ll text us and say, ‘We need to open five feet.’”
A few weeks earlier, he says, the river was “open river” – all the gates lifted out of the water, holding nothing back.
“That’s, of course, to keep everything from flooding up. You’d be surprised at how little a change on one of these gates can affect that pool.”
Mr. Maedge grew up in Staunton, Illinois, a major stop on old Route 66. Now, he works on an older corridor of American movement, one where national commerce depends on half-foot gate changes, midnight shifts, dredging forecasts, and people most Americans will never see.
He says he feels lucky to be part of it.
“There’s definitely a sense of pride that we get to be a part of this much bigger enterprise,” Mr. Maedge says. “Just the part of the American economy that comes through here is pretty important.”
“We are working for the country, literally.”