The Atchafalaya River and associated Atchafalaya Basin are an integral part of the delta landscape of southern Louisiana. Although the Atchafalaya is not the most well-known part of the Mississippi River landscape internationally, it is inextricably linked to the Mississippi Delta region and, as a product of anthropogenic river development, it is an extremely illustrative example of the relationship between people and landscape. This article examines this relationship from a neopragmatic view employing a combination of the three main theoretical perspectives of geographical landscape studies: Essentialism, Positivism, and Social Constructivism. From the essentialist perspective, the inherent nature of the landscape around the Atchafalaya is examined in more detail, initially. The relationship with humans and culture, as well as the resulting attributes of the Atchafalaya’s essence, play a significant role here. For this reason, we used an assignment given to students on a geographical excursion to examine the Atchafalaya Basin, in which, based on their observations, ‘dating profiles’ as a form of personification of the river were created. Following on from this, the connections of the physical geography characteristics of the landscape with the anthropogenic shaping of the river system are presented in a positivist framework (empirically and quantitatively). Finally, the social constructivist perspective is examined. Thematically relevant newspaper articles are analyzed and categorized in response to the overriding question of the relationships between society, the individual, and the physical space as well as the landscape’s symbolic meanings.