Whenever the river overtopped its banks—something it used to do virtually every spring—it cast its sediment across the plain. Season after season, layer after layer, clay and sand and silt built up. In this way, the “strong brown god” assembled the Louisiana coast out of bits and pieces of Illinois and Iowa and Minnesota and Missouri and Arkansas and Kentucky. Because the Mississippi is always dropping sediment, it’s always on the move. As the sediment builds up, it impedes the flow, and so the river goes in search of faster routes to the sea.
