This is a view of wingdams on the Mississippi River at Nininger, Minn., in 1891. In his 1883 book “Life on the Mississippi,” Samuel Clemens wrote, “The military engineers of the Commission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again… They are building wing-dams here and there to deflect the current; and dikes to confine it to narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it stay there.”