The Decades-Long Effort to Tame the Wild Mississippi River: How Engineers Reshaped America's Greatest River

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, I talk with Dr. David Beadenharn, a river engineer who has spent over 45 years studying the lower Mississippi River. David grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, stumbled into river work after leaving the Air Force, and never really managed to leave. Our conversation starts with a picture of what the Mississippi looked like a couple hundred years ago, when the river was wide, shallow, full of sandbars, islands, and massive logjams. Back then, the river was consta...