If a river runs through it, where is the river?

We had a wonderful presentation for our students today by Jim Akerman, curator of maps at the Newberry. I’m currently working on an article on the representation of the great eastern rivers (Nile, Ganges, etc.) in early modern English poetry, so I’ll admit I’m hyperalert to rivers. Oddly enough, I noticed something in the American atlases that made me think about rivers in a new way. The rational grid system is the hallmark of the development of the American interior in the 19th century, and you can see evidence of it everywhere, including in state boundaries. The only thing really interfering with this (lovely? sinister? disturbingly Cartesian?) platting are the rivers, particularly the big ones like the Missouri and Mississippi, which actually become state boundaries. The planners could ignore many terrain features but apparently not rivers. I think the reason for this is probably economic. For a variety of reasons, rivers complicate the idea of ownership. It’s easier in many ways to treat them as boundaries and separators, a process which avoids the awkward question of where a river “is” or where person is when he or she is on a river. But this process runs counter to an older approach in which the river itself defines the region— the watershed it drains (as it does in the case of the Congo). The result is that rivers are sites of intensified conflict over ownership and control. I’ve seen this to be true back in 16th and 17th century England, but I had not given it the proper notice.