Early settlers in America clung to rivers to find safe ports, sustain settlements and then open up the continental heartland. Rivers have provided lifelines for trade and agriculture and power for industry. With deindustrialization, they have opened vast opportunities for recreation in post-industrial cities and suburbs. Villages, cities and regions are bound to the identities of their waterways. Rivers also demarcate state and international boundaries, like the wandering Rio Grande between the Southwest and Mexico.

Early Northeast colonies depended on multiple exploitations of rivers—the Charles in Boston, the Hudson and the East River in New York City, the Delaware and Schuylkill in Philadelphia, PA and the Savannah in Savannah, GA. Some rivers are connected to fertile watersheds, while others became impassable as the land rose inland, producing fall-line divisions in the societies of the South.

Further inland, twenty-two states are united by the Mississippi-Missouri system, roughly 4,000 miles (6,400 km) in length. Tributaries like the Ohio and the Red River linked cities and markets from Pittsburgh, PA to St. Louis to New Orleans. The “mighty” Mississippi also influenced art, literature and other media, from Mark Twain to the musical Showboat or Pare Lorentz’s 1938 documentary The River.

In the dry West, the 1,400 mile (2,240 km) Colorado, which carved the Grand Canyon, also sustained many Native American groups. Yet this river has been tamed for both energy and the population demands of Sunbelt cities like Phoenix, AZ and Los Angeles, CA. The Colorado now operates under a contentious seven-state compact representing those who claim its water and hydroelectric power. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles River has been reduced to concrete channels. The Columbia in Washington and the Sacramento in Northern California also represent important Western watersheds.

The relationship of human and river has been transformed throughout the growth of industrial America. Dams on the Niagara, above its majestic falls, and Hoover Dam on the Colorado have powered regions; other dams have been used to control the devastating floods of the MississippiMissouri system or to recreate the upper South through the Tennessee Valley Authority. Industrial pollution also killed off the aquatic life before stricter pollution controls began to revitalize rivers as centers for boating, fishing and even swimming. Hence, rivers have become landscapes for post-industrial development from the Charles to Savannah. This has also led to movements to remove century-old dams and to reconstitute nature.

Human versus the river—running the rapids in Georgia in Deliverance (1972) or fighting the floods of the Missouri in The River (1984)—has become an American emblem of strength and endurance, while Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It (1992) nostalgically explores family and love through fly-fishing in Montana. Rivers figure in generations of popular songs (“Sewanee,” “Ol’ Man River,” Ike and Tina Turner’s “Proud Mary”), reflective journals about nature and Sunday family outings.

Reflecting the bright lights of Manhattan, the red walls of the Grand Canyon, or the ivory tranquillity of Washington, DC, rivers frame the image of American lives as well.