In my mail appears a thoughtful gift, a book, inscribed to me by one of the authors: The Missouri: America’s Longest River, edited by Jon K. Lauck and published by the Center for Western Studies, Augustana University. The chapters are various, from native forests to Indian-White conflict to big dams and their consequences, so let me focus on some pieces, then try to say something about the whole. If that’s possible, because the more you read, the more you become conscious of our failure to comprehend, historically, the Missouri River as a whole.
Jon Lauck makes a noble effort in the introduction, which is a road trip: Lauck begins at the beginning, the Three Forks in Montana, and weaves his way, physically, downriver to the end, at St. Louis. He’s looking for something, for the hope of a larger whole, and his narrative is chock-full with local color, but before the end, after listening long to the river, “trying to hear its faint or fading regionalist voices,” he despairs and declaims, “Our ability to see places is slipping. Taking I-29 down past Sioux City is a vortex of placelessness.” And he despairs that the Kansas City Art Institute appears to have forgotten who Thomas Hart Benton was.
Twas not always so. The volume in the landmark Rivers of America series devoted to the Missouri, a book published in 1945, carries the author credit of Stanley Vestal, which was the pen name for Walter Campbell. Campbell taught nonfiction writing at the University of Oklahoma for a full generation. He was one of the few literary or academic lights not from the northern plains who actually knew something about the region; he had published his acclaimed biography of Sitting Bull in 1932. Campbell was a titan in the tribe of writers devoted to literary nonfiction, that is, the writing of true and significant works that carry authority, but not footnotes. His was the most salient volume in the Rivers of America Series.
Campbell was a westerner. When he traveled to Oxford for his Rhodes scholarship in 1908, he packed a six-shooter in his bag. He declared the story of the Missouri River to be “an heroic poem, an epic.” In the chapter about Campbell and his book written for the current anthology, Robert Dorman notices that Campbell approaches the Missouri, and finds his epic, from east to west. Makes you wonder if Jon Lauck’s view might have been more cheery if he had done the same.
While Campbell was making the Missouri a warm line in literature, making a place of it, it proved impossible to sell that sense of it in the political arena. At the close of the Second World War, government planners wanted to do in the Missouri River valley what they had done with the Tennessee Valley Authority: make of it a prosperous, developing region, federally created, focused on public power generation. The Corps of Engineers told this story assiduously: the Missouri River unites us, let’s get together for the common good. This region exists, let’s give it a name, and a reality!
That was not as cynical as it may sound. As Bryce Tellman, who discusses this development in the new book, points out, although they cannot be “invented out of nothing,” nevertheless, “Regions, to put it bluntly, are made up.” In this case, it didn’t stick. The states of the would-be region, and in particular their governors, had their own interests. So instead of the lofty Missouri Valley Authority, we got the patchwork Pick-Sloan Plan.
Dr. Carole Butcher was the friend who sent me the thick new collection on America’s longest river. She wrote a fine chapter about the legendary steamboat captain, Grant Marsh, who they said could pilot a steamboat over a heavy dew. She reminds me I need to visit Captain Grant’s grave in St. Mary’s Cemetery of Bismarck. And give a listen.
