Mississippi River

Bass pros get a shot at the largest purse ever offered in the sport this week when the $450,000 Wal-Mart FLW Tour Championship gets under way on the Mississippi River near Moline, Ill.The winner of the competition, which includes the top 50 pros and top 50 amateurs from the six events on the tour leading to the championship, will receive $250,000 cash.The first seed in the pro side of the competition is Denny Brauer of Camdenton, Mo., who won the Kmart Bassmaster Top 150 tournament on the Potomac River recently.

C GRAFTON, Ill. -- It seems the most unlikely place to witness any marvel of nature -- the dull olive-brown-gray flatlands of the Missouri-Illinois border. And the months before spring are the worst: The trees are nothing but scrubby sticks, the limestone bluffs ragged and uninspiring, the yellow strip down the middle of Old River Road the only vibrant color.But over the last decade, in the worst part of winter, growing numbers of tourists are trekking to these muddy shores of the frigid Mississippi River.

She was a direct descendant of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the signer of the Declaration of Independence. Her father, Thomas King Carroll, was elected governor of Maryland in 1829.She was known as "Lincoln's Joan of Arc" and "the great, unrecognized member of Lincoln's Cabinet.""This Anna Carroll," Lincoln is reported as saying, "is the head of the Carroll race. When the history of the war is written, she will stand a good bit taller than old Charles Carroll did."Today, the remains of Anna Ella Carroll, who was largely responsible for keeping Maryland in the Union at the beginning of the Civil War, rest in the Old Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery in Cambridge, her deeds obscured by the passage of time.

Their hands blistered and their arms bumpy with bug bites, two brothers from Arbutus have come ashore safely after a 48-day, 2,000-mile kayak trip down the steamy Mississippi River.The brothers had a couple of close calls, a brush with tropical storm Erin, and some uncomfortably hot nights spent with mosquitoes as tent mates, but they said their high expectations for the trip were fully met."I was just blown away by the treatment we received from people along the way," Alex Gupman, 22, said after landing Sunday in New Orleans.

I told a friend I was going to Memphis."Memphis?" he said. "Isn't that where the ducks march?"It certainly is. Twice a day, in fact. But there's more to Memphis than the Peabody ducks marching down a red carpet in the venerable hotel's lobby -- although that is a most charming feature of this Tennessee town.Perched on a bluff with the Mississippi River as its front yard, this city of nearly 700,000 is a kick-back place where friendliness oozes out of its citizens like honey from a comb, and where you can spend several days discovering its curiosities.

Even though contemporary interior design may sometimes seem entirely free-form, closer examination reveals that it often does follow a certain logic, if not a firm set of rules.For example, some of today's strongest trends are clearly derived from a century-old style: the American arts and crafts movement.To some of the snobbier connoisseurs, the arts and crafts movement never qualified as "beautiful."It lacks graceful lines, these critics complained, and its color combinations can be jarring.

The first paddle-wheeler to ply its trade in the Inner Harbor in 60 years was formally introduced to Baltimore yesterday.Although the Harbor Belle, a 64-foot, 10-inch steel-hulled replica of an 1890s Mississippi River side-wheeler, is still enjoying better weather in Miami, it will soon finish its contracts there and head north for a March arrival in the Inner Harbor.J. Leonard Schleider, owner of the Belle and Schleider Caterers and Cameo Caterers here, announced details of the Belle's arrival in the Maryland Room of the World Trade Center.

Maybe there's still a lesson or two to learn from long-dead Greeks.At least a group of Annapolis fourth-graders think so.They recently used a scene from Homer's epic, "Iliad," to solve a modern problem -- flooding on the Mississippi River -- and ended up with top awards at the Odyssey of the Mind competition.The Georgetown East Elementary School pupils chose the scene in which Achilles defeats the raging river Xanthus with the help of the god Hephaestus, who sends fire to evaporate the water.

One of Baltimore's two remaining grain elevators closed yesterday, further eroding what little is left of the grain business that once accounted for nearly a fifth of the port's exports.The shutdown came as Mississippi River Grain Inc. in Canton, formerly known as Central Soya Co. Inc., was sold to ConAgra Inc., an Omaha, Neb.-based food and agriculture conglomerate.ConAgra, which received the local operation as part of its purchase of Mississippi River's five grain elevators nationwide, is not expected to reopen the huge grain elevator here.

The powerful floods that tore apart the Midwest last summerTC have helped, in the aftermath, to forge continuing bonds between those devastated farm towns and dozens of small Maryland communities. Relief efforts continue by many Marylanders who have adopted flooded sister towns along the Mississippi River, a testament to their enduring, helping spirit and generosity.Communities in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri continue to benefit from the flood-relief activities coming from this state. About two dozen Maryland municipalities maintain their ties with flooded communities that are still faced with immense obstacles to recovery.

Deadly floods devastated Iowa and other sections of the Midwest last week, despite heroic efforts to hold back the rising waters with sandbags. Heavy rains sent rivers surging over their banks, killing 24 people and displacing an estimated 35,000. From Des Moines and Cedar Rapids to small towns such as Oakville (population 439), residents were left assessing the damage to homes and businesses. Officials described the disaster as the biggest that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has handled since Hurricane Katrina.

WINFIELD, Mo. - Water from the swollen Mississippi River surged over more than 10 levees yesterday, flooding huge swaths of Missouri farmland as thousands of volunteers continued to pile up sandbags in a desperate bid to protect their communities. The river blasted a 150-foot breach Wednesday night in a levee east of Winfield, a rural and commuter city of 1,200 about an hour north of St. Louis. Volunteers from as far away as Utah gathered in the small Missouri town yesterday to shovel sand into bags, but another levee breached and then another.

FORT MADISON, Iowa - If roads, rivers and railroad tracks are the arteries of commerce, then the flooding in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin add up to a heart attack to the nation's midsection. The closure of bridges along a 300-mile stretch of the Mississippi River yesterday was just the latest blow in a weeklong run of road closures, bridge shutdowns, levee breaks and washouts that are scrambling traffic, disrupting distribution plans, forcing businesses to close operations and hurting the farm economy.

The path of America's first federal highway runs more than 824 miles from Baltimore's Inner Harbor to the Mississippi River - including a 170-mile section in Maryland freshly dotted with interpretive markers and outlined in an accompanying guide. Now tourism officials are urging drivers to discover the inns, churches, parks, bridges and scenic overlooks along the Historic National Road, which follows parts of Route 144, U.S. 40 and Interstate 68 across seven Maryland counties. At a promotional kickoff in Ellicott City yesterday, supporters of the Historic National Road unveiled one of 66 new site markers and a map developed with the help of state agencies, local officials and volunteers.

NEW ORLEANS -- At almost any time of day, vehicles on this city's grandest avenue, St. Charles, crawl along at 7 mph. The French Quarter is packed with cars and delivery trucks, not to mention horse-drawn carriages. Side streets in the Garden District and Uptown are blocked, offering no escape. More than half the city's 450 traffic signals are nonfunctioning or nonexistent, blown away by Hurricane Katrina or corroded by the floodwaters that followed. Nearly five months after the storm, traffic in New Orleans is, in a word, terrible.

THE BUSH administration is ignoring reports from its own agencies that say every coastal city in America - from New York to Los Angeles - could become a New Orleans within a generation or two. The flooding, storm damage, death toll and economic ruin we are seeing in the Crescent City could become an annual occurrence in some other U.S. city spread across some other American coastline. Why? Because of the phenomenon known as the "law of unintended consequences." In Louisiana, we built huge levees that for centuries kept the lower Mississippi River from flooding.

Jay Feldman, author of the recently published When The Mississippi Ran Backwards, is thinking a lot these days about the devastation left in the Mississippi River Valley by Hurricane Katrina and that from the New Madrid, Mo., earthquakes nearly 200 years ago. "The New Madrid was the nation's first recorded major disaster, and it was felt in such a wide area from Boston to New Orleans, and from Detroit to New York City," Feldman said in a telephone interview...

PORT SULPHUR, La. - Paula Landry returned to her home yesterday to find a pile of wood scraps, an enormous tree snapped in half across her front lawn and a car buried in rubble. She also found an album filled with photos of her children, some of their baby clothes and a few pieces of her grandmother's crystal. It was enough. "I'm not coming back," said Landry, 58, a paramedic. She meant that she would leave the cleanup to others. Her eyes were red and her arms had goose bumps. She hadn't known it would be this hard.

Hurricane Katrina might have started as a natural disaster, but the subsequent flooding of New Orleans was a human failure, brought on by people who set the stage for destruction and by leaders who, despite ample warning, did not act to prevent it. The timeline of responsibility extends back nearly three centuries, from the decision to site the city in a strategic but geologically vulnerable spot, to the generations-long effort to bend the flow of...

PUT YOUR own troubles aside and extend a hand to help a needy neighbor. That's life in the agriculture community. In that spirit, a top official with the state Department of Agriculture has called his counterparts in hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama and said: "What can we do to help?" Lewis R. Riley, head of the Agriculture Department in Maryland, said Deputy Secretary John R. Brooks has been busy doing the phone work. "He left messages on their machines," Riley said.