
The Great Raft on the Red River - curtis
https://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/GreatRaft/History.aspx
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ngoldbaum
This article, linked from Wikipedia's page on the Great Raft, offers a much
more detailed and informative discussion of European and Native American
interaction with the raft:
[https://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/GreatRaft/History.aspx](https://www.invasiveswatch.org/site/GreatRaft/History.aspx)

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curtis
That is a better article. I'd have submitted it instead if I'd found it last
night.

One interesting fact that neither article mentions but which is mentioned at
the end of the Wikipedia article is the impact that the break-up of the Great
Raft had on the Mississippi river.

From:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft#Consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Raft#Consequences)

 _The removal of the log jams hastened the capture of the Mississippi River 's
waters by the Atchafalaya River and forced the US Army Corps of Engineers to
build the multibillion dollar Old River Control Structure._

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stuaxo
Is there a chance it could ever reform naturally ?

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ZanyProgrammer
How can they know how old it was? A 500 year old log jam on the face of it
seems implausible.

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lordnacho
No idea if they knew about this at the time, but you could take the tree ring
widths and correlate them with historical records from nearby forests.

