The Arkansas River is born from melting snow on Mt. Arkansas at 13,795 feet above sea level in the state of Colorado. Rushing down through cataracts and gorges, it gathers strength from a multitude of rivulets and creeks to burst free from the mountains laden with silt. Across the Great Plains of eastern Colorado and almost the length of Kansas it meanders through a land where the wind seems eternal, freezing in winter and parching in summer, a land subject to storms that in spring bring tornadoes, hail, and rain, where the “northers” of winter bring sleet and blinding snowstorms, and where in the summer the winds blow hot from the south and, up into the mountains to melt the snows and bring yet more water rushing down to feed a thirsty land, livestock, and people.
Once into Oklahoma and Arkansas, the channel of this river becomes narrower and better defined, for the land is more resistant to erosion. Moving through the Gross Timbers, a region of blackjack and post oak intermingled with mesquite and smaller shrubbery, the Arkansas supports tall cottonwoods that give way to pine, giant live and white oaks, and finally to stately Cyprus and pecan groves. From snow buttercups to delta rice fields, the Arkansas is home to myriad plants and animals, but none has changed the river like man.
The Arkansas has long since ceased to be a wild river. It, like the land along its banks, was regarded by the pioneer settlers as a resource meant by a generous Creator to help man, something to be put to productive use as rapidly as possible. So many irrigation ditches were run out from its banks in southeastern Colorado and western Kansas that from the air they appeared like bones running away from the spine of a fish stripped of its flesh.
Then, as the technology of drilling was improved by the petroleum industry, wells were dug into the water sands along the Arkansas to pump millions of gallons of water to nearby fields. In fact, so many ditches and wells were dug that in years of scant snow and rainfall the Arkansas dried up in Kansas.
And as technology progressed, giant dams were built in Oklahoma and Arkansas to impound the waters of the Arkansas and release them in steady flow to support barge traffic on the McClellan-Kerr Waterway, a project of the Army Corps of Engineers. Billions of federal dollars were spent on this project, which the Corps of Engineers assured us would be cost effective, returning more than dollar for dollar above cost in benefits. Unfortunately, the Corps of Engineers has never met a federal project that it did not like. Every proposal can be guaranteed to be cost effective—and then, once built, produce only excuses for the continual failure to generate the benefits estimated to flow from it.
This volume, The Arkansas: An American River, is a highly personal view of a waterway of vital importance along its 1,460 miles. It supports agriculture and wildlife; it gives aesthetic pleasure to those who view it at Royal Gorge and at other scenic places along its course; it sustains myriad forms of wildlife; it bears trade and commerce on it for hundreds of miles where it has been channelized and marked by the Corps of Engineers; and it is a source of recreational pleasure to boaters and fishermen.
William Mills notes all these things, all of which are illustrated by photographs of stunning composition, breathtaking color, and excellent reproduction on enamel paper in a book of generous dimensions (9 x 10 Vz inches). The photographs alone make the book worth the price.
And Mills writes in rhapsodic terms about this river, his descriptive words flowing more like poetry than prose and containing quotes from earlier travelers such as Zebulon Montgomery Pike, John Charles Fremont, and Thomas Nuttall. He consulted the works of archeologists and historians, and he met numerous local characters whose stories are interesting in the retelling.
I firmly believe that an author should be judged on how well he accomplishes the goals he sets for himself Mills’ stated goals were to travel the river from west to east and try to “extend our awareness of what a national treasure the Arkansas River is and, as a result, help us to care for it more deeply.” He has done what he set out to do, and he has done it well.
Unfortunately he has done more, for this is a book filled with most of the cliches now common to the preservationist-conservationist mentality—the concept that we are headed for doom and damnation because of the technological and rapacious sins of man. In his article in the February issue of Chronicles, Mills commented about agriculture in the Arkansas River Valley: “Farming the grasslands will have to be rethought as an art, rather than as running a factory.” So also he tells us in this volume.
Should the day of the preservationists and the environmentalists arrive when everything is done “naturally,” I hope Mr. Mills is here to tell not only starving Americans but those around the world whom the farm-factories of the Midwest now feed why they should be grateful because the land and water are being “respected.” In his article in Chronicles, he wrote, “Nowadays nature is something to push against, to move around, get out of the way, get on top of” For this we can be thankful each time we sit down to a good meal.
I have additional problems with Mills. In that portion of the book where his journey on the Arkansas takes him to Muskogee, Oklahoma, he notes that one of his reasons for stopping there is the art of Jerome Tiger.” Tiger was a tragic young man who killed himself while in his 20’s, leaving behind art of unquestioned value. But one need not go to Muskogee to see it. It is widely displayed in museums, and the University of Oklahoma Press did a magnificent book filled with Tiger’s art. Moreover, there are other Indian artists of great skill living in proximity to the Arkansas who could have been praised rather than Tiger.
Mills takes the patronizing view that all Native Americans respected nature and lived in harmony with it, as when he describes an Osage dance. “Observing the dancers dressed in the old way being watched by other Osage dressed like any contemporary Oklahoman is an image of tension,” he writes. Then he editorializes, “The river reflects the same tension between a time when it went its own way, the old way, and the present, with our current attempts to manage it, to dam it. The new god, ‘technology,’ is in full sway.”
He makes it obvious to any reader that the old way is better, but in case any of us misses the point he adds, “Like many others who consider such matters, though, I am uncertain about the new god of ‘technology’ or, more precisely, Man as the new god, with technology his very powerful slave. With this slave we have poisoned the river and even dried it up in places.” Still afraid his reader may not get it. Mills drives it home in a three-word non-sentence, “Rather poor gods.”
The Indians were as human as the rest of us, defiling nature to the extent of their technology. When they ran buffalo over a cliff to get meat, they did not turn the herd and stop the slaughter when they had enough for the tribe’s needs. And archeologists dig in their trash dumps. To say the Indians respected nature, because they did not dam the river or dump industrial waste in it, is like saying they also-were pro-life because they did not have abortion clinics or that they were antinuclear because they did not use atomic generating plants to make electricity.
Mills has a masterful pen, and his photographs are works of art. Unfortunately, as he traveled down the Arkansas, he was too much like Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient mariner who,
Like one that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread.
And having once turned round, walks on.
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
In this case Mills’ frightful fiend is modern civilization, which has produced a standard of living that enables society to support those who would be artist/poet/philosopher/photographer rather than hunter/gatherer.
[The Arkansas: An American River, by William Mills (Fayetteville and London: The University of Arkansas Press) 250 pp., $30.00]
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