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A young mother from Oklahoma was found dead on a barge in the Mississippi River after being arrested a few days earlier for making multiple 911 calls pleading for help. Hailey Silas' body was found around 7 a.m. on a Saturday as the crew of the barge was performing an inspection while navigating the Mississippi River near Shelby Forest in Tennessee, WREG reported. A week earlier, Silas was arrested for making multiple 911 calls from a gas station, requesting cops to provide her with a ride out of the city due to her fear of something. When the police arrived,...

PLAQUEMINE - A series of explosions at the Dow chemical plant along the Mississippi River triggered panic in parts of the capital area late Friday night. Iberville Parish Sheriff Brett Stassi told WBRZ that six explosions were detected at the facility around 9:30 p.m.. Witnesses living nearby caught video of massive flames and said the shockwave was felt from miles away, including in parts of Baton Rouge. All plant personnel has since been accounted for, and the firefighters appeared to have the flames under control as of around 11 p.m.

BAGLEY, Wis. -- Road closures are are becoming more prevalent across parts of southwestern Wisconsin as floodwaters continue to rise on the Mississippi River. Major flooding is occurring or in the forecast for the river along the Wisconsin border, with water levels expected to reach their highest in more than two decades. In Cassville, portions of several streets, including Jack Oak Road, Iowa Street, Front Street and Wyota Street, are closed due to high waters, according to the village's Facebook page. Cassville has also been bypassing wastewater into the Mississippi River since Sunday. Volunteers in the village spent Monday filling...

Citizens of Louisiana and Mississippi south of the Old River Control Structure don’t need all that water. All it does is cause flooding and massive tax expenditures to repair and strengthen dikes. The best solution would be for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build an aqueduct from the Old River Control Structure on the Mississippi to Lake Powell, fill it, and then send more water from there down the Colorado to fill lake Mead. About 4.5 million/gals a second flow past that structure on the Mississippi. As mentioned, New Orleans has a problem with that much water anyway,...

In another sign, the megadrought is wreaking havoc across the Western half of the US. There are multiple portions of the Mississippi River that are nearing record low water levels that may inhibit commercial or private vessels from traversing the critical waterway. The stretch of the Mississippi River at St. Paul, Minnesota, is around 3.2 feet Wednesday. That’s about six inches from the record low of 2.6 feet set in 1976. A camera on the Wabasha Street Bridge that spans the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul shows the receding waterline.Downstream, the Mississippi River at Red Wing is also near...

Excavations at the city, famous for its pre-Columbian mounds, challenge the idea that residents destroyed the city through wood clearing. A thousand years ago, a city rose on the banks of the Mississippi River, near what eventually became the city of St. Louis. Sprawling over miles of rich farms, public plazas and earthen mounds, the city — known today as Cahokia — was a thriving hub of immigrants, lavish feasting and religious ceremony. At its peak in the 1100s, Cahokia housed 20,000 people, greater than contemporaneous Paris. By 1350, Cahokia had largely been abandoned, and why people left the city...

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) – The Tennessee Department of Transportation has “respectfully denied” the Metro Council’s request to block the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue on Interstate 65. The council approved a resolution to ask TDOT to plant trees blocking its view to the public on July 8. The statue, which is surrounded by Confederate flags, sits on private property near the Harding Place exit. Monday, the department sent the following statement to News 2: TDOT does not plant foliage on its right-of-way with the sole intention of blocking items on private property based on what might be offensive to some and...

Just south of Nashville, Tennessee, along Interstate 65, there sits a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest riding on horseback, surrounded by Confederate battle flags. For those with little more than a passing interest in American history, Forrest may be only known to you as the person after whom Forrest Gump was named in the movie. Others will know that he was a Confederate general and the first Grand Wizard of the KKK. It’s been sitting there on private land since 1998, but given recent events you can imagine that it’s become the target of renewed political interest. The Metro...

A bid by Tennessee’s governor to remove a bust of Confederate cavalry general, slave trader and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state Capitol building was rejected Friday. The State Capitol Commission voted 7-5 against issuing a petition to moving the bust from the Capitol to the new state museum being built nearby. It would have been the first step in a lengthy process laid out by Tennessee’s “Heritage Protection Act” that limits the removal or changing of historical memorials on public property. Republican Gov. Bill Haslam called for the removal after last month’s deadly white...

The Memphis City Council has ordered the removal of the NB Forrest Statue that sits on top of the graves of General and Mrs. NB Forrest. This action breaks several laws and the order of the State for Memphis to not make any action toward the historical monument and grave site.

(CNN) The remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife will be removed from a Memphis park where a monument of him once stood. The decision to move their remains came after the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a non-profit organization of male descendants of Confederate veterans, agreed to drop a pending lawsuit against park owners

In 2020’s version of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost any statue or monument that predates or doesn’t explicitly honor the Civil Rights era is a potential target for being defaced, damaged, or toppled entirely, Taliban-style. The woke social justice warriors who have somehow managed to seize the culture don’t seem to concern themselves much with whether these monuments honor Jefferson Davis, George Washington, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, or even famous abolitionist Matthias Baldwin. To them, these are just dead old white dudes who belong in the dustbin of history because, well, they were probably evil, engaged...

The quotes below appear towards the end of the linked article about Gen Forrest's complicated life. I found them to be so remarkable that if you don't read anything else about the self-described "most maligned" Southerner, you should read these words. For hidden in them is a remarkable story redemption and change. It brought tears to my eyes.

LA CROSSE, Wis. (FOX 9) - So many mayflies hatched at once near the Mississippi River Sunday night it was picked up on the National Weather Service’s radar. The National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wisconsin shared an image of the radar, showing a mass appear over the Mississippi River on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border around 10 p.m.

Subtitle: The Matter of the Mississippi River. A not inconsequential percentage of Article V opponents, like those in the John Birch Society, identify as Anti-Federalists. They question the 1780s need for the vigorous government of our Constitution. Those familiar with the era know of Shays’ Rebellion. According to modern Anti-Federalists, Shays’ was the pretext for nationalists like George Washington and James Madison to justify the 1787 Philadelphia Convention. There were other problems facing the infant United States to which the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate. For instance, most of the great European and New World ports were closed to American...

Toll revenue would pay for only 17 percent of a new bridge across the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge, a top state official said Tuesday. Eric Kalivoda, deputy secretary for the state Department of Transportation and Development, made the comment during the first meeting of a panel seeking ways to finance a new bridge, which would cost about $1 billion. The seven-member panel features leaders of five parishes in the Baton Rouge area, including East Baton Rouge Parish Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome. Kalivoda's comments reinforced what officials knew coming in — paying for a new bridge is a huge financial...

"Louisiana loses a football field of land every 100 minutes." While that phrase has helped bring awareness to the ongoing problem of coastal wetland loss, it's not the state of Louisiana that is really losing land. It is private landowners, companies and individuals, that have lost more than 2,000 square miles of coastal marsh over the past century. That process is financially benefiting the state under an old law that grants the state government the rights to oil and gas deep below navigable waters, including coastlines where erosion has converted land to water. The more land private landowners lose to...

The Coast Guard closed four miles of the Mississippi River on Saturday (March 17) after a towboat overturned near Donaldsonville. The crew of the Vincent J. Eymard escaped with no reported injuries onto another towing vessel, the Ellysa. Watchstanders at Coast Guard Sector New Orleans learned of the capsizing Friday at 9:30 p.m. near river mile 175.

A search for a 14-year-old who authorities said jumped into the Mississippi River was called off over the weekend, leaving his family and others who knew him desperate to recover his body and questioning how a chase of a stolen vehicle ended in a boy's death. Ja'sean Williams was identified by family members as the teen who they presume has died after he went into the river early Thursday (March 8). The St. Bernard Sheriff's Office said Ja'sean jumped into the river near the Chalmette Ferry Landing, after police chased him and another boy in a stolen car. "Something went...

The French and Indian War ended in 1763 with the French losing Canada and all their land east of the Mississippi River. King George III decided to leave troops in the American colonies in case of future French incursions or native uprisings. British troops were to be paid with taxes collected from the colonies: the Sugar Tax of 1764 the Stamp Tax of 1765 the Townshend Acts of 1767, taxing glass, paint and paper As the Colonies had no representative in Parliament, the cry arose, “No taxation without representation.” The king imposed Writs of Assistance in 1765 allowing British authorities...