Baton Rouge, French for Red Stick, is the capital of Louisiana and the seat of East Baton Rouge Parish. It is located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, a waterway that has molded much of Louisiana’s culture and history. Every thousand years or so, the Mississippi River shifts its course in a natural process known as delta-lobe switching, where the path of the river is constantly changing as it is drawn to the most efficient path to the Gulf of Mexico. Today the Mississippi River is bound by levees as it winds its way past Baton Rouge, but throughout history many low-lying areas throughout East Baton Rouge Parish provided storage for millions of gallons of water during wet periods of the year. As European settlers began living in the Mississippi River valley, they began building levees to protect themselves—both their farmland and their cities—from the river’s floods. By 1812, the levees on the east bank of the river extended 135 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, and the levees on the west extended 210 miles north to the Red River. Due to the poor quality and design of these levee systems combined with impacts from the Civil War, these areas continued to be frequently flooded. Over time many of these levees were rebuilt, reinforced, and extended to form a more contiguous system, but also important was an emerging approach to flood control which consisted of building floodways to divert river water. It was around this time in the early 1940s that a team of geographers and geologists led by Harold N. Fisk realized that the Mississippi River would soon alternate its route to the shorter course of the Atchafalaya River, bypassing Baton Rouge and New Orleans. This was a cause of major concern because the Atchafalaya Basin could not accept the flow of the Mississippi River without massive flooding, extensive relocations, and upheaval of the social and economic patterns of southern Louisiana. Since that time, man has constructed diversion floodways, levees, and other armament structures to maintain the existing route of the Mississippi River. The limits of the flood control designs have been tested multiple times by the waters of Mississippi River Valley; however, only time will tell if the efforts of man to tame the route of the Mississippi.