The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast

Dean Klinkenberg
  • 5.0 (10)
  • Places & Travel
  • Updated Biweekly

The Mississippi River has cut a deep path through the heart of America for thousands of years, but how well do we really know the river beyond Huck Finn and headline-grabbing floods? In this podcast, Dean Klinkenberg wades into stories about the characters and places from the big river’s past and present.

  1. 2d ago

    From Colonial Kitchens to Concretes: Two Centuries of St. Louis Food with Suzanne Corbett

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we dig into St. Louis culinary history with food historian Suzanne Corbett. We look back at the foodways of indigenous cultures and early French settlers, which leads us to a discussion about portable soup. We talk about truck gardens and Corbett’s experience growing up on one. We then tour the various styles of food in St. Louis today, including the Italian specialties in the neighborhood known as The Hill. We touch on a few St. Louis specialties, including St. Louis-style pizza and provel cheese, gooey butter cake, the St. Paul sandwich, and the Gerber sandwich. We end with a short discussion of three local landmarks: Crown Candy Kitchen, Al’s Restaurant, and Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. This is a fun conversation about feeding our curiosity, literally and figurately, and discovering how food connects us with the past and present and tells us something about who we are.

    From Colonial Kitchens to Concretes: Two Centuries of St. Louis Food with Suzanne Corbett

  2. Sep 18

    The Riverboat Gambler: Myth, Reality, and the Making of an American Icon with Thomas Ruys Smith

    Send us Fan Mail Stories about riverboat gambling and gamblers persist to this day. Why? In this episode, I talk with historian and author Thomas Ruys Smith about the pre-Civil War gambling scene on the Mississippi River. We peel off the patina of romanticism and go deep into the realities of gambling on the Mississippi River. We talk about the presence of gambling on the river before steamboats plied the Mississippi and how the destruction of the red-light district in Vicksburg reorganized gambling activities. We then go deeper into the world of riverboat gambling, touching on which games of chance were common, the background of gamblers, the role of the ship’s crew in supporting or tolerating gamblers, the consequences of getting caught cheating, some common myths about gamblers. We wrap up with a discussion about the eventual decline of riverboat gambling, how and when the image of riverboat gamblers got a makeover into mythic heroes, and the thread in American history of turning outlaws and rule breakers into heroes.

    The Riverboat Gambler: Myth, Reality, and the Making of an American Icon with Thomas Ruys Smith

  3. Sep 2

    The First People of the Mississippi Valley, Part 2: A Big Bang and First Contact

    Send us Fan Mail A thousand years ago, the largest city north of Mexico rose from the floodplain across the river from present-day St. Louis. In part two of our look at Native America along the Mississippi, we trace Cahokia's explosive birth around 1050 CE — a planned metropolis of mounds, plazas, and processional roads aligned to the movements of the sun and moon. We'll piece together what we know about Monk's Mound, chunkey matches, the pilgrims' acropolis, and consider what the shell-bead burials of Mound 72 reveal about power and sacrifice. We'll also ask why a city of twenty thousand quietly emptied out by 1400, and follow the Mississippian world downriver as it carried on without its old capital. Then, in 1541, Hernando de Soto's army reaches the river. What the Spanish army found was a densely settled valley of thriving communities — some at odds with each other — and what they left behind was starvation, disease, and shattered lives. We'll follow the invasion from Casqui and Pacaha to de Soto's death at Guachoya, his body sunk in the river he had claimed to command, and the stunning painted canoe fleets of Quigualtam that chased the survivors toward the Gulf.

    The First People of the Mississippi Valley, Part 2: A Big Bang and First Contact

  4. Aug 19

    The First People of the Mississippi Valley, Part 1: Creation, Mounds, and the Path of Souls

    Send us Fan Mail In this episode (part one of a two-part series), we trace the first ten thousand years of human life along the Mississippi Valley: who came here, what they built, and what we think they believed about the world they were living in. We start with ice. Glacial Lake Agassiz breaks its bank, Glacial River Warren tears a valley through Minnesota, and a waterfall the size of Niagara begins a slow retreat upriver to the spot we now call St. Anthony Falls. The first Minnesotans arrive to a landscape still reawakening, sharing it with mammoths and mastodons and this massive river.  From there we follow people down the length of the valley as they learn to live off big rivers and floodplains, domesticate their first plants, and build monuments out of soil. At Watson Brake in Louisiana, hunter-gatherers raised eleven mounds a thousand years before the first Egyptian pyramid. At Poverty Point, thousands of people assembled a massive earthwork in about ninety days — apparently without a ruler telling them to.  We also look up. The three-tiered cosmos of Upper World, Below World, and This World; the Earth Diver stories; and the Path of Souls, the star road the dead traveled — and which Hopewell builders in Ohio aligned their roads and mounds to meet.  In the next episode, we’ll go deep into Cahokia and the invasion led by Hernando de Soto.

    The First People of the Mississippi Valley, Part 1: Creation, Mounds, and the Path of Souls

  5. Aug 5

    The American Bottom In Focus, with Photographer Jennifer Colten

    Send us Fan Mail The area we call the American Bottom is a widening in the Mississippi River floodplain that runs some 70 miles in Illinois from Alton to the mouth of the Kaskaskia River just north of Chester. Just across the river from St. Louis, the area has a deep history. For thousands of years, Native Americans lived in and around the rich bottomland forests and wetlands. About a thousand years ago, one of the largest Native American cities sprung up practically overnight, the place we call Cahokia today. French colonists built communities at the southern end of the American Bottom, and Lewis and Clark based in the area before venturing west on the Missouri River. Before the Civil War, a small group of African Americans – some free, some who had recently escaped from enslavement – founded a little enclave called Freedom Village that later became Brooklyn (also known as Lovejoy). Brooklyn offered a sanctuary for generations of African Americans in an area defined by segregation and prejudice. By the twentieth century, companies eager to avoid the taxes and regulations of St. Louis bought land and founded municipalities they could dominate, then built large factories there: East St. Louis, Sauget, National City, East Alton. In the mid-1950s, organized crime got a foothold in and around Venice. As the American industrial economy declined, so did the communities in the American Bottom.  All that deep history, much of it long forgotten, caught the attention and lens of photographer Jennifer Colten. In this episode, I talk with her about her work photographing this area layered in sediment and history. After she describes her path to professional photography, we talk about the first project that pulled her into the American Bottom. We then talk about some of the history that is too easily overlooked, what catches her attention as she driving around, what remains of the original floodplain forest, how it feels to explore places many people are too afraid to visit, and some of the stories she’s telling with her photography. It was fascinating to learn about the American Bottom from the perspective of someone who has spent so much time documenting it in photographs.

    The American Bottom In Focus, with Photographer Jennifer Colten

  6. Jul 22

    From Great Sewer to Great River: How the Twin Cities Brought a Dead Mississippi River Back to Life

    Send us Fan Mail A hundred years ago, the Mississippi River that ran through Minneapolis and Saint Paul was basically a dead river. Factories, people, and local governments dumped sewage and industrial waste into the river until it was a slimy, fetid mess incapable of supporting life. But by the 1930s, attitudes started to shift and the first steps were taken to reduce the flow of pollution into the river. In this episode, Abby Moore and Cassie Champion, two of the people involved with a campaign called Sacred Water, Shared Future, describe how the Great River became the Great Sewer, then how local folks gradually cleaned it up and restored the river’s ability to support life and its status as something worthy of admiration.  They describe the goals behind Sacred Water, Shared Future and who is involved, then we talk about the importance of sharing success stories, especially the ones that unfold across time. They share a few thoughts about how we can continue to build and maintain support for clean water initiatives and what other cities might be able to learn from the success of the Twin Cities. This is a fundamentally a good-news story, one that shows that regardless of how bad something might seem, a better future isn’t just a hope but something that can be achieved, even if it takes a while.

    From Great Sewer to Great River: How the Twin Cities Brought a Dead Mississippi River Back to Life

  7. Jul 8

    Deep Time on the Mississippi: The River's Geologic Origins and Future with Roy Van Arsdale

    Send us Fan Mail How do you tell the story of a river that's tens of millions of years in the making? In Episode 79, I sit down with Dr. Roy Van Arsdale, Professor Emeritus at the University of Memphis, to trace the deep geologic history of the Mississippi River—and it's a more dynamic ride than you might expect. We go back 100 million years, to a time when rivers in North America generally flowed north and west, then follow the dramatic forces that reversed the continent's plumbing, including a drifting hot spot that lifted part of a mountain range nearly two miles, which then eroded and sank, creating a trough for the river we call the Mississippi. Roy talks about the pre-Ice Age river that was much bigger than today’s Mississippi (and why it carried more water) and explains how glaciers rerouted the river's course. He also describes one of his first studies where he learned how bald cypress tree rings in Reelfoot Lake still bear witness to the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12. We even peer into the river's future, describing how uplift that is still in progress will likely change the future Mississippi River, as well as ongoing seismic risks. If you've ever wondered how America's greatest river came to be, this conversation is for you. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or find show notes at MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast.

    Deep Time on the Mississippi: The River's Geologic Origins and Future with Roy Van Arsdale

  8. Jun 10

    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 constantly on the move, eating away at its banks and shifting course. That erosion was producing an almost unimaginable amount of sediment — around 600 million tons a year. In comparison, the river today carries somewhere around 120 to 150 million tons.  Then we transition to the engineering projects. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent decades trying to get the river under control — first for navigation, then for flood control after the catastrophic 1927 flood. They built levees, tried to stop the river from naturally shortening itself, and eventually decided to deliberately cut off some of those big sweeping bends. The immediate effect was dramatic — water levels at some spots dropped 10 to 15 feet almost overnight. But shortening the river made it faster and more powerful, and the Mississippi started scouring its own bed looking for more sediment to carry. That process is still rippling through the system today, decades later, slowly working its way upstream toward Cairo, Illinois. On top of the cutoffs, the Corps locked the riverbanks in place with concrete mattresses in the 1950s and 60s, essentially freezing the river's shape. That stopped the bank erosion — but it also cut off the river's natural sediment supply almost entirely. David's big takeaway after all these years? You can't just fix one spot on a river and call it a day. Every change you make sends ripples — upstream, downstream, decades into the future. The Mississippi has a long memory, and it's still responding to decisions made 80 or 90 years ago. Understanding that complexity, he says, is what keeps him coming back to the river year after year.

    The Decades-Long Effort to Tame the Wild Mississippi River: How Engineers Reshaped America's Greatest River
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The Mississippi River has cut a deep path through the heart of America for thousands of years, but how well do we really know the river beyond Huck Finn and headline-grabbing floods? In this podcast, Dean Klinkenberg wades into stories about the characters and places from the big river’s past and present.

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