Speech On Atchafalaya River

ATCHAFALAYA

Have you ever heard about an Atchafalaya River? Well I haven’t until my teacher told me to read and write about it. I learned a lot of things about it. I hope you learn a lot too!

The Atchafalaya River is 137 mile Long River. It is attached to the Mississippi river and the Red River in South Louisiana. It is the fifth largest River in North America. The name “Atchafalaya” comes from Choctaw for “Long River.” The Atchafalaya River is navigable and provides a shipping channel for the state of Louisiana. The maintenance of the river as a navigable channel of the Mississippi River has been an important project for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for over a century.

The Atchafalaya Basin and swamp is the largest wetland and swamp in the United States. It is located in South Central Louisiana. It’s a combination of River Delta and wetlands. It is an area where the Atchafalaya River and the Gulf of Mexico meet. The river stretches from near Simmesport in the North through parts of eight parishes to the Morgan City area in the South.

The Atchafalaya is a unique River among Louisiana Basins because it has a growing Delta system with stable wetlands. It is best known for its swamps, at 260,000 acres, this block of forest represents the largest remaining tract of Coastal Cypress in the United States. The Atchafalaya Basin, it surrounds

the plain of the River. The River is filled with bayous, bald swamps, and marshes that give way to more conditions and end in the Spartina grass marshes, where it meets the Gulf of Mexico.

The Basin, which is long periods of deep flooding, is inhabited. The Basin is about 150 in length and 20 miles in width from East to West. It is also the largest existing wetland in the United States with an area of 1,400,000 acres, including the surrounding swamps outside of the levees that historically were connected to the Basin. There are a few roads that cross the Basin, like interstate 10. It is a continuous straight stretch for about 18.2 miles on a bridge.
The Atchafalaya National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1984 to improve plant communities for endangered and decreasing species of wildlife, waterfowl, migratory birds and alligators. The Atchafalaya basin has an extended relationship with the Mississippi River. The Atchafalaya Basin contains lacustrine and Coastal Delta landscape. During the early 20th century, the Atchafalaya River Basin was designated as a spillway for floods of the Mississippi River. So, in order to facilitate this emergency plan without flooding agriculture and towns, they built protective levees that divided the Atchafalaya Basin Floodway from large portions of the historic swamp boundaries.
The Red River of the south is a major part of the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers in the southern United States of America.

This river was named for the red-bed country of its watershed. It is one of several rivers with that name. The Mexicans and Indians on the borders of Mexico have a habit of calling any river, the waters that have a red appearance. The Red River formed part of the United States to the Mexico border. The Red River is the 2nd biggest river Basin in the Southern Great Plains. It rises in 2 branches, in the Texas Panhandle and flows east, where it acts as the border in between the states, Texas and

Oklahoma.
It forms a short border between Texas and Arkansas before entering Arkansas, turning south near Fulton, Arkansas is flowing into Louisiana, where then it flows into the Atchafalaya. The entire length of the river is 1,360 miles, with a mean flow of over 57,000 cubic feet per second at the mouth. Near Denison, the River exits the Eastern end of Lake Texoma, formed by the Denison Dam. The lake also was fed by the Washita River from the north. After the river flows out of the Southeastern end of the lake, it runs generally east towards Arkansas and gets Muddy Boggy Creek before turning Southward near Texarkana. After, the river crosses south into Louisiana, the close cities of Shreveport and Bossier City were developed on either bank of the river, as the downriver cities of Alexandria and Pineville.
The river later broadens into a complex network of marshlands covered by the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, where it is joined by the Ouachita River. Its water eventually goes into the Atchafalaya River and flows eastward or southward into the Gulf of Mexico. In 1946, the Red River flood covered over into Pineville because of insufficient height and strength. The taller and stronger levee held in Alexandria. Willie E. Kees Jr. The youngest newest elected mayor of Pineville, set forth to bring the levee on the eastern part of the river on par with that in Alexandria.
Tributaries include the Little Red River, Prairie Dog Town Fork Red River, Salt Fork Red River, North Fork Red River, Pease River, Washita River, Kiamichi River, Little Wichita River, Little River, Sulphur River, Loggy Bayou, as well as the Ouachita River not far from the mouth.
The Red River's watershed covers about 65,590 square miles and it is the southernmost major tributary of the Mississippi, and the southernmost major river system in the Great Plains. Its drainage basin is mainly in the states, Texas and Oklahoma, but also covers parts of Arkansas and Louisiana. The basin is characterized by flat, fertile agricultural land. The drainage basin of the Red River receives little precipitation. Until the river is past its bend South in Arkansas, the flow grows widely. Most of the agriculture in the basin is sustained by groundwater, which is recharged with rainfall and river flow. The lower part of the river goes through a bunch of swamps and marches, where its flow is moderated.
The history of Native American cultures along the red River were diverse, developing specialized adaptations to the many different environments. By the time of the European contact, the Eastern Piney Woods were taken control by a bunch of historic tribes of the Caddoan Confederacy. They found game and fish, and also had great land for cultivating crops. The mid part of the Red River was taken control by Tonkawa and Wichita.
This place was like grasslands, where the Native American’s built moveable and short term tepees for housing facilities. They practiced farming and followed game in seasonal, nomadic hunting sequence. The Plains breakup of the Lipan Apache had control of the western Red River area until the 18th century.
President Jefferson authorized the Red River Expedition to explore parts of the newest lands in the Louisiana Purchase by traveling the Red River in 1806. He said it was "in truth, next to the Missouri, the most interesting water of the Mississippi", in a letter to William Dunbar. Having threaded the maze of bayous at the river's confluence, and the "Great Raft" of lodged driftwood, the expedition, was stopped by the Spanish near New Boston, Texas.
Lieutenant Z. Pike, went to the Arkansas River, and then made his way downstream on what turned out to be the Rio Grande, and then was sent home by the Spanish people in 1806.
On April 1815, Captain Henry Miller Shreve was the first person to bring a steamboat up the Red River. When John A. became Secretary of State, one of his highest priorities was to negotiate the boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase with Spain in 1817. He negotiated with the Spanish Minister to the United States, and finally concluded Adams-Onis Treaty. The treaty defined the south bank of the river as the boundary between the US and Spain. That boundary continued to be recognized when Mexico gained its independence from Spain, then again when Texas became independent from Mexico.
In Louisiana, the area of present-day was settled by French Creole and mixed-race Louisiana Creole people. The Cane River National Heritage Area marks this area with plantations and churches. Some of the sites are designated as destinations on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail. For nearly 100 years after the American Civil War, some of the plantations were the center of a large African American and Creole community life, whose people lived and worked in this area for a very long time. The area along the lower Red River of Grant Parish, Louisiana, were a mixture of hill country and cotton plantations, with white planters and subsistence farmers, and African American slaves working the plantations.
In 1873, Grant Parish was the site of the Colfax massacre. White people, organized from parishes, killed more than 100 freedmen, some of them had surrendered as prisoners. In 1874, militias organized as the White League in Grant Parish. The Coushatta Massacre was attributed to the White League. The paramilitary group’s intimidated and terrorized freedmen to keep them from the polls. Then by the late 1870s, Democrats had retaken political control of the state.
In the early 19th century, settlers found that much of the river's length in Louisiana was unnavigable because of a collection of fallen trees that formed a "Great Raft" over 160 miles long. Captain Henry Miller Shreve, in 1839, began clearing the log jam. The log jam was not completely cleared until the 1870s, when dynamite became available. The river was then navigable, it was restricted to small craft. Removal of the raft further connected the Red River and the Atchafalaya River. In 1943, Denison Dam was built on the Red River to form Lake Texoma, a large reservoir of 89,000 acres, and then some 70 miles north of Dallas.
The Mississippi River is a very nice place to go if you want to have a romantic date. It is very nice and the sun rises perfectly there. To Mark Twain the river is an adventurous place that everyone would come to enjoy. The Corps of Engineers built levees, constructed cutoffs, provided floodways, built reservoirs, improved and stabilized the channel and banks. This river goes on and on and tries to split. The corps are very successful. The Atchafalaya River is the main distributary for the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is a good source of transportation for people that have boats instead of cars. It helps you go places and get to other sides of the country. The total traffic population between Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Gulf of Mexico was 413,065,660 tons in 1978. There was a little bit of conflict over who was the first white man to discover the Mississippi River. Some people claim it was discovered by Columbus, but most historians say that Hernando De Soto was the first white man.
There was many bloody battles that were fought. The Mississippi River had flooded quite a bit. The steamboat made its way on to the Mississippi River in 1811. But it did not travel very well upstream. In 1816 a paddle wheeler made a round trip from Louisville to New Orleans and returned in 41 days. As years passed the number of steamboats that were on the river increased and travel times between cities decreased. There were only 21 steamboats arrived in New Orleans in 1814.
Then in 1819 there were 191 and in 1833 there were over 1,200 that were unloaded. Before the invention of steamboats, it took up to four months to travel from Louisville to New Orleans. The steamboat could make the trip in about 20 days in 1820 but then by 1838 the time was cut into 6 days. Steamboats were really helpful to some people but they were also sometimes very hazardous and unreliable. The river was at times very hazardous. The river needed improvements on somethings.
The Mississippi river was major for inland transportation in the young nation. In 1820 congress appropriated $5,000 for the engineer corps to prepare surveys, maps, and charts on the Ohio and the Mississippi river. The steamboat captain was Captain Shreve, he proposed an artificial cut off in 1831. Cut offs are nothing new on the river. Between 1776 and 1884, 16 natural cutoffs happened on the river. Shreve constructed a cut off that shortened the river by 15 miles. The federal government didn’t begin to address the problem of flood control on the Mississippi until the floods in 1849 – 1850. The Swamp Acts in 1849 and 1850 were aimed at relieving the flood problem. The swamp acts were a series of federal congressional acts that granted all unsold swamp lands and overflow areas to the states. Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri created their own commissions to oversee the sale of lands and the construction of levees.
These states except Missouri, alone received approximately 31,890 square miles. The swamp acts are evidence of the federal government’s interests in flood control, but they are not taking responsibility for providing the measures. The United States Congress used these Acts as an instrument so the states could gain the means so they could protect themselves. The floods of 1849 and 1850 were responsible for congress initiating two studies investigating the most practical of providing the flood control and navigation improvement in the lower Mississippi.
The Ellet Report was good. In his report, Ellet observed that as cultivation increased in the valley and as the levees were extended, this would result in an increased frequency of flooding.
During the Civil War the entire levee and navigation system fell into disrepair. Severe floods during the 1860’s caused much damage to the system. Dredging was again undertaken at the river’s mouth in order that some navigation would be resumed in 1867. Then it wasn’t until 1874 that when the Levee Commission was formed that the federal government started to show any real conviction to the idea of flood control and navigation on the river. Then the levee commission made up chiefly of corps personnel it was to investigate plans for establishing a system of levees and to also submit a plan for reclamation on the lower valley. It advocated a system of levees to be constructed and maintained under the general supervision of a board of commissioners.
Then because of the severe navigation difficulties at the mouth of the river and the corps inability to maintain navigable depths congress authorized Mr. Eads to construct jetties at south pass.
Then by funneling the flow through a narrow opening, including scour, Eads maintained that his plan would keep the pass open without dredging. His plan then came a big reality in 1875 and with a little bit of modifications it is still in use to this day in time. Then finally in 1879 a board of engineers all corps personnel submitted a report to congress addressing one time more the problem of flooding and navigation on the lower Mississippi part. This then brought an end to federal involvement prior to the creation of the Mississippi river commission.
As a result of growing concern over navigation and flood control on the lower Mississippi in 1879, a bill was introduced in congress calling for the creation of the Mississippi river commission. This bill provided a 7 member commission. Each member appointed by the president of the United States. This bill was not without opposition. Those opposed to the bill argued that flood protection of the lands was not the responsibility of the Federal Government. The bi11 passed on June 28, 1879. On February 17, 1880 the Commission submitted their first report to the Secretary of War. This report was a summary of the river from the Head of Passes to Cairo, Illinois. The report was basically an updated version of the 1879 Corps report. In the mid-1890s, the hydraulic dredge started to make its appearance on the river. During the 1890s and early 1900s the main responsibilities of the MRC were to oversee levee maintenance, bank protection and channel dredging.
There is a lot of cool and interesting thing about the Atchafalaya River that I didn’t know about. I didn’t even know it existed. It is a very long river. I just always thought there was a bunch of rivers that nobody really cared about but apparently these rivers are there for a reason. These rivers are there for people to travel places they can’t get to unless they cross this river. Some people like to fish in this river or just go out on a boat to get away for a while. I would really like to go and look at this river and learn some more cool things about it. There is tons and tons of information about this river and there is other parts of this river that breaks off.
If you have never read about the Atchafalaya River then I would highly recommend you to read about it. You will learn a lot of new things. I hope nobody throws debris or any trash in there because that can pollute our earth and make it look very trashy or some of the creatures in the water could eat this trash and get sick and die from it. This is also a place for sharks, fish, snakes, whales, and other little creatures to live.
The pictures of the river are very cool and very pretty. It would be a good pace to have a romantic date at and stargaze or have a little picnic at. I’m sure there is like a little look off somewhere around this river because if not then how does the boats get into this river. So there has to be a spot somewhere around there. I would love to go see it. I actually learned a lot of good and cool things about this river. The article I read had also said that it can flood a lot and get very dangerous when it storms. They also have flood controls around the river. They are always constantly checking on this river and making sure everything is good in and around it. There is also a lot of good history about these rivers.