At the start of the twentieth century, a diverse group of Americans relied on rivers for their autonomy. Fifty years later, most of these communities had either disappeared or had their relationship with their waterway dramatically reshaped. River people obtained some subsistence and distance from a state that rarely represented their interests. Across the South, formerly enslaved people and their descendants squatted, sharecropped, or owned land in the bottomlands of rivers where fish and game supplemented their livelihoods. In northern New England, members of the Penobscot Nation lived on Indian Island, fished in the Penobscot River, and worked in jobs such as guiding, basketmaking, or the canoe industry. In the arid Southwest, the Cocopas, “River People,” moved and farmed across national borders on the Colorado River. And in the upper Midwest, the mostly white poor riverboat families who preferred to be called “the river people” to “river rats,” followed the weather and seasons along the Mississippi and its tributaries.Footnote ¹ No one has captured the exact number of river people living in the United States, partly because for many of these communities, avoiding the government (whether federal, state, or local) served as a core rationale for their location on or along a river. The existence of river people fueled many state efforts to remake rivers, but their persistence and protest continue to shape ecological, political, and cultural life in the modern United States.Footnote ²

Historians have long noted the ruptures between communities and rivers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which common resources were consolidated by a more powerful elite. This ran along three main lines of overfishing, dam building, and pollution. In 1788, for example, the residents of Brunswick, in what was then the District of Maine, petitioned the Massachusetts Senate and House of Representatives due to the use of large nets out of season. They argued, “the Law as it now stands gives one part of the Community a privelidg [sic] over the rest.”Footnote ³ Their claims went unheeded by the legislature, and by the early nineteenth century, lawyers and entrepreneurs had entrenched rivers as engines of industry and outlets for waste over any other consideration of rivers as a common good.Footnote ⁴ Despite declining fish runs and no shelter from market relations, rivers remained an important source of income and subsistence for many Americans into the early twentieth century.

River people endured in part because a shifting and flood-prone river held little value to an industrializing economy, outside of prime plantation land that had been leveed at great expense, or mill sites at key falls. This changed for ecological and political reasons. As larger dams went up and more waste entered rivers, the resiliency of rivers was tested to the point that in many locations few fish could survive. On northern New England’s Androscoggin River, pollution from pulp and paper mills became so intense by the start of the Great Depression that residents became nauseous in their homes. In the South, erosion linked to the region’s unique geology and history of agriculture filled many rivers with sediment, altering both fish habitats and the severity of floods.Footnote ⁵ Meanwhile, following the great burst of railroad building in the second half of the nineteenth century, federal, state, and local governments turned their attention to rivers, not primarily as routes of commerce, but as impediments to orderly development and as a resource of water and energy. Reaching new heights during the Great Depression, an ambitious federal government planned to make these riverlands more valuable to the national economy and address the longer history of degradation, resulting in the displacement of many river people. Historians have long described how federal programs transformed society and the environment. On rivers, the existence of river people meant that this transformation intertwined most intensely and furthered the rationale for these state-building projects.

The vast scale of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) coordinated plan for development, in which over a hundred thousand people were permanently flooded out, highlights the federal government’s key role in funding and supporting the end of free-flowing river communities. Rivers heightened the environmental dramas playing out across landscapes: erosion from worn-out farmland and waste from growing cities and industries all clogged rivers and killed many of the animals that lived there, contributing to the basis for government intervention. Pare Lorenz’s 1937 film The River presented the TVA and its large dams as the antidote to environmental degradation and flooding rivers. The River’s narrator argues, “The old river can be controlled. We had the power to take the Valley apart. We have the power to put it together again.” In the case of The River, the argument for remaking the region also relied on the recent national memories of flooding rivers, especially the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, during which over 600,000 people were temporarily displaced.Footnote ⁶ Residents in the path of the TVA resisted its land takings. They challenged the TVA’s narrative of uplift by pointing to their dependence on rivers for their livelihoods. As J.W. Davis testified in 1938: “We have been shoved back off of the fertile river lands.” He told the congressional committee, “We feel that we are being done a wrong.”Footnote ⁷

The great moments of displacement from the dam building projects of the TVA are well documented, but these large-scale projects were part of a broader trend that included many smaller government projects such as levee building and repairs along with new technology. Across the nation, the Civil Works Administration paid for 2,000 miles of levee development. As with other New Deal programs, the greatest benefits went to the wealthiest and most powerful landowners whose levee projects led to the taking or flooding of adjacent landowners’ land. In Texas, in order to receive federal relief funding from these agencies, levee districts first had to apply to the Texas Civil Works Administration. Access to federal capital depended on local power brokers’ access to state officials who controlled its distribution. Most districts on the lower half of Texas’s Trinity River included no more than ten landowners, a handful of whom owned the majority of the land. Thus, when the districts justified thousands of dollars in federal assistance, the funds primarily aided only a small fraction of county residents. Moreover, the application process ignored how levee construction worsened flooding downstream or even across the river—that is to say, in other adjacent areas whose needs were not addressed in the grant request—and so contributed to pushing those families who lacked political capital off their lands.Footnote ⁸

In the Southwest, reclamation projects such as the 1936 completion of the Hoover Dam stabilized the Colorado River downstream and limited the Cocopa People’s ability to travel across the US–Mexico border as they had with a shifting river. Alongside immigration and citizenship laws passed in the 1920s, the Hoover Dam made the river into a fixed border while reducing the water flows that the Cocopas needed to grow their crops. As Daniel Grant writes, “Dams, first managed by private capitalists backed by the US and Mexican governments, and then by state agencies directly, proved nearly as consequential in minimizing the power of cross-border Native migration as passports or tribal identification did.”Footnote ⁹ The Cocopas’ history shows how river people’s relationship to a river could itself be a challenge to national borders and the smooth functioning of the federal government. In some cases, displacement was an intentional goal of these New Deal projects, whereas in others cases they simply accelerated it alongside other factors such as environmental degradation.Footnote ¹⁰ Historians of the New Deal have long described this era as the final chapter of small farms and the widespread displacement of rural people with “no life-sustaining place left on the land.”Footnote ¹¹ More so than on any farmland, this displacement happened for rural, river people.

River people were not limited to census-defined rural areas. Water blurred the distinction between urban and rural. Levees first constructed in the late 1800s attempted to isolate cities from their waterways. On or beyond the other side of these massive earthen mounds, shantyboats and shacks housed communities of river people who catfished and gardened, while also working in more industrial pursuits as roustabouts on the remaining steamboats or mussel harvesters for the button market. In St. Louis, these communities had faced evictions and negotiations with sheriffs and city officials since the previous century, but the federal government proved decisive for this local issue as funding from the Public Works Administration and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) paid the salaries for the workers who cleared the levees of its residents.Footnote ¹²

Urban levees and development played a role in displacing river people. Interior cities that paved streets or built levees funneled water downstream, leading to more variability and intense flooding that reshaped these ecosystems and made them less hospitable to wildlife and humans.Footnote ¹³ Many displaced river people moved into cities, often on the same stream from which they had been displaced. The WPA recorded this fact through the slave narratives project. In Texas, for example, these interviews reveal how people who had been enslaved or later free along the lower Trinity ended up living upstream on the same river in Dallas. And several times the interviewees referred to the previous abundance of fish and game along the lower river.Footnote ¹⁴ Rivers’ role in supporting poor white people, African Americans, and Indigenous people shaped both the neglect and pollution that industries and cities dumped into waterways, as well as the rationales governments used to reshape and control waterways. Racism and contempt for poor people exacerbated all of the processes pushing them off the waterlands.

This history of displacement of river people is a story of apparent nationwide progress and injustice for most river communities that runs from the colonial era to the 1990s. Any narrative of the twentieth century must recognize the wide range of people who have called American rivers home and the persistent claims they have made on behalf of their rivers. Since the turn of this century, a new era of American river history has begun. Today, the federal government plays a vital role in providing funding and expertise for the restoration of the United States’ rivers. The key factor in how these decisions are made is now because of the advocacy of those who call rivers home, and who depend on them for the survival of their culture. Large dams have been removed in places such as Maine’s Penobscot River and Washington’s Elwha River, and in 2024, on the Klamath River in Oregon and California, four major dams came down—the largest of such projects thus far. The common thread that ties these projects together is the persistence of a river people: the Penobscot Nation, the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, and the Yurok Tribe, respectively. Their long-standing relationships with these rivers formed the basis for the arguments and partnerships that are bringing the big dams down.Footnote ¹⁵

The loss of a substantial population of river people in the first half of the 1900s had dramatic consequences for how rivers changed and their potential for recovery, but the resilience of river people has mapped out a brighter future for the nation’s waterways that is grounded in history. Many scholars, such as the late James Scott, have highlighted the unintended costs and problems associated with large-scale development projects.Footnote ¹⁶ Now, with the twin challenges of climate change and aging dams, major federal investments will be needed to create resiliency and restore communities’ relationships with their rivers. The lesson for historians and policymakers alike is not to criticize ambition. Instead, listen to river people.