The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast

Dean Klinkenberg
  • 5.0 (10)
  • Places & Travel
  • 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. 5d ago

    Changing Course: Daniel McCool on Dams, Water, and Our River Future

    Send us Fan Mail Author and professor Daniel McCool grew up exploring the rivers, creeks, and streams near his Indiana home. When his career took him to the West, his fascination with flowing water continued to grow. In 2012, he wrote about the value of rivers and the troubles with modern river management in his book, River Republic: The Fall and Rise of America’s Rivers. In this podcast, McCool and I take a deep dive into the world of rivers and talk about the past, present, and future of our relationship with them. We cover topics including the history of dam construction and the limitations of dam-building for addressing our water problems and how our river management policies have typically ignored environmental and social costs. We talk about water policy and the challenges of managing limited water resources in the West, then meander into a discussion about the far-fetched proposals to build giant pipelines to move water from the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers to the West. We also discuss the cascading consequences of engineering the Mississippi River, and the challenges of changing policies that benefit a small number of people but that don’t have much impact on anyone else. Thousands of dams in the US are well past their expected lifespan now, so we talk about the difficult decisions ahead about what to do with those obsolete structures. We touch on a couple of high-profile examples of dam removal and the emerging science of river restoration, then finish with a few thoughts about how we can get more people involved in making decisions about river management. If you’re a fan of rivers, like I am, this episode is for you.

    Changing Course: Daniel McCool on Dams, Water, and Our River Future

  2. Oct 16

    Down Colombia’s Magdalena River with Jordan Salama

    Send us Fan Mail The Magdalena River slices a thousand miles through the heart of Colombia. Jordan Salama spent four weeks one summer following the course of that river to learn more Colombians and the importance of the Magdalena to them, a trip that inspired his book, Every Day the River Changes. In this episode, I talk with Jordan about that trip and the river that inspired it. We talk about how the Magdalena got on his radar and the experience of traveling along it. He shares stories about some of the people he met and the importance of the Magdalena in their lives. He discusses some of the threats facing the river, including an unusually large one – hippos that have become established in part of the Magdalena. We finish with a story about how the trip and reaching the end of the Magdalena impacted him personally.

    Down Colombia’s Magdalena River with Jordan Salama

  3. Sep 30

    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

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  8. 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
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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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