Among the thousands of encounters settlers had with the Mississippi River in the nineteenth century, two types of experiences predominated. Either the river was a physical presence, an environment on or near which one lived, and to which one integrated the rhythms, strategies, and patterns of one's life, or it was an economic channel of trade that by its use influenced life far beyond its banks. As the focal point of certain economies, its environmental rhythms, its topography, and its geography have indirectly or directly defined the patterns of regional social and economic life. To the former, the river was, and to many remains, a predominantly local presence. To the latter, it became a regional economic force. But to both it provided the context from which to understand the land as a place and perceive the region around one as an organized system in space.

The water's edge: the river bottoms

To live by the river was to live by the pressure points of the region's hydrography, where floods and freshets actively reshaped the land, damaging and destroying on the one hand, reforming and enriching on the other. In The history and geography of the Mississippi Valley, Timothy Flint vividly described what it was like to be near the Mississippi below the mouth of the Missouri at flood tide: