Removing anchor points, but not changing the shape of object

Hello,

Above is a illustration of a river for a map. The artwork has an over abundant of anchor points as you can see.

Is there a way of deleting the anchor points, but still keep the river line work the same? Can it be made into artwork w/o anchor's?

I tried using the direct select tool - object - path - remove anchor points, but it deletes the entire river.

Thank you for your help and time with this.

-Chris