River Songs – Mid Valley Times

Recently a sentence surprised me and since then I have been singing river songs. “Over the wide Missouri” was the sentence that captured me, the final line of the American folk song “Shenandoah”. It made me homesick, even though I have never seen this river or lived in its valley.

“Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you,” the song begins, the melody rising like hope, like sadness searching for a way out. I’ve known the song since I was a young boy, when my father brought home a record of sea shanties by the Coast Guard Men’s Chorus. “Shenandoah” was the first song on the album, and we listened to it over and over again.

The phrase that sparked the song was in Donald Worster’s book, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1985). He used fragments of the song, which he said was “the most beautiful ever written in America,” to open his story of irrigation development in the West, beginning with the migration of emigrants from the East who crossed the Missouri and many other rivers, then settled nearby and began diverting them.

I turned to this book last week, which I had avoided for decades, after immersing myself in Miller & Lux’s Industrial Cowboys the week before. I was looking for a better explanation of the irrigation movement that opposed the monopolization of water by the big guys in our valley. Worster’s book provides an even broader context, detailing the struggles over water monopolization throughout the West.

“Away, away we go, across the wide Missouri.” That is the voice of the emigrants on their way west, across the wide Missouri River, which is part of the Mississippi river system, the true continental divide, a winding strip along the 100th meridian where the amount of precipitation changes slowly at first, then drastically, and in many places becomes so dry that they are called deserts.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is Wallace Stegner’s wonderful book about John Wesley Powell, his exploration of the Colorado River, and his subsequent deeper study of American government to see if it could be organized to respect and use the West’s limited water resources wisely. Powell’s efforts are described in Worster’s book, in which he brings reason to the mythical voices that portray America’s open spaces as an opportunity for poor people to build our country into an empire. Powell lost.

In the introductory section, “The Poor Man’s Paradise,” Worster describes in detail the people and problems that irrigation was intended to serve. Powell supported these people as well, and had he taken into account his concerns about the actual limits of the amount of water available to irrigate a limited area of ​​land, he would have protected both them and the land.

Yet irrigation advocates rejected the notion of borders, claiming there was “room for everyone” and that irrigation would restore to democracy what the industrialized East had already undermined. They viewed the emigrants as “surplus people,” people for whom industrialized urban areas had no use. Surplus people, they said, could claim this empty land (which it was not), and even if it led to the kind of submission to central control that irrigation supposedly required, it would make America an empire powerful enough to extend its influence across the globe. Irrigation, they claimed, would make America both more democratic and a more powerful empire. We have lived with this divided mentality ever since.

It’s not hard to imagine how people who grew up in wetter areas and cross the broad Missouri into the western half of the country, where it gets drier with every mile west, long to hear their river. I feel it myself here in Lindsay, where even the irrigation system is underground, not above ground, in canals. To see a river, I have to cross the Friant-Kern Canal, where the San Joaquin is currently in flood, but the concrete banks say “Stay alive by staying out.”

Maybe we can right our lurching ship, caught in the current of the big boys fighting to keep the water all to themselves, by starting to sing some river songs. I have one I wrote for the Kaweah, to the tune of “Shall We Gather at the River”…

Trudy Wischemann is a failed hydrology student who writes. You can send her your river songs to PO Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but represents the opinion of the author and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.