Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995.

Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995. By Martin Reuss. Gulf Coast Studies. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi, 474. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 1-58544-375-1.)

First published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1998, Martin Reuss's Designing the Bayous: The Control of Water in the Atchafalaya Basin, 1800-1995 was reprinted by Texas A&M University Press in 2004. A senior historian for the Corps of Engineers, Martin Reuss has written an evenhanded account of events in which the Corps played a major and sometimes dominant role. His book covers 195 years of environmental and political history along Louisiana's Atchafalaya River, a major distributary of the Mississippi River. The Atchafalaya Basin, a roughly twenty-mile-wide swath of forests, farms, swamps, and coastal wetlands, runs south from the Baton Rouge area to the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past two centuries this diverse region has been dammed and dredged into a micromanaged mix of technology and nature, "a monument to human contrivance and ingenuity" (p. 355).

Designing the Bayous tells the story of flood control in Cajun country. In 1831 Henry Shreve's imprudent cutoff designed to straighten a Mississippi River meander left the Atchafalaya River positioned to capture an increasing share of the Big Muddy's water. By 1950 the Atchafalaya was taking approximately 25 percent of the Mississippi's flow, and a complete course change for the larger river became likely. Faced with a choice between sealing off the Atchafalaya to save New Orleans from a no-river future and keeping the Atchafalaya open as a safeguard against Mississippi flooding, the Corps of Engineers chose to do both. The hybrid result, an adjustable dam called the Old River Control Structure, was built to maintain the 25 percent flow in perpetuity. The consequences of this bold and probably doomed effort to "freeze the basin in time" included decades of silting, dredging, and channel restructuring in the Atchafalaya Basin as the Corps made the watershed the centerpiece of its Louisiana flood control plans (p. 358). The great 1973 Mississippi River flood nearly washed the Old River Control Structure away, but the engineers and politicians held fast, reinforced the dam, and continued their juggling of economic interests, social concerns, the vagaries of nature, the laws of physics, and that late-twentieth-century complication, environmental regulations.

This book is a significant contribution to environmental history and is recommended reading for anyone seeking a better grasp of Louisiana's endless rivers-and-wetlands difficulties. But Designing the Bayous can be tiresome. Bureaucratic and congressional maneuvering cannot be described without some risk of tedium, and the author aggravates matters by providing details better documented elsewhere. Few readers of Designing the Bayous will learn much from Reuss's paragraph that explains sharecropping. Time-challenged individuals who find this 474-page volume too daunting should read Reuss's excellent essay entitled "Along the Atchafalaya: The Challenge of a Vital Resource," (Environment, 30 [May 1988], 6-11 and 36-44).

GARY GARRETT

Harris County Flood Control District, Texas