Mississippi River
Misi-ziibi. In the Anishinaabe tongue of the Ojibwe, the words mean Great River, and the French heard them as Messipi. That is where the name of the Mississippi River begins. It runs 2,340 miles from a Minnesota lake to the Gulf of Mexico, and it drains all or part of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. By discharge it ranks as the world's tenth-largest river and the largest in North America. Yet the simplest facts about it hide deeper puzzles. Why does a river measured at 2,340 miles also have a claim to being the fourth-longest on Earth? Why have engineers spent a fortune to stop it from going where gravity wants to take it? Why did a Slovenian swimmer spend 68 days inside it, and why did water skiing begin on one of its lakes? The river has been a border, a battlefield, a trade route, and a literary subject. It has also been quietly trying, for centuries, to abandon New Orleans.
Lake Itasca sits 1,475 feet above sea level in Clearwater County, Minnesota, and the name itself is a riddle. It was coined from the Latin words for truth and head, veritas and caput, stitched together to mark the true head of the river. From that lake the Mississippi splits, by convention, into three distinct rivers. The Upper Mississippi runs from the headwaters to the Missouri River at St. Louis. Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis is the only true waterfall on the entire river, now preserved under an apron of concrete beside a lock. Above the dam there the water sits at 799 feet, and below it at 750 feet, a 49-foot drop that is the largest of all the river's locks and dams. The Middle Mississippi covers just 190 miles, running relatively free from the Missouri to the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois. The Lower Mississippi, about 1,000 miles, carries the most curious fact of all. At Cairo the Ohio actually delivers more water than the Mississippi above it. By volume, the main branch below that point could be considered the Ohio River reaching back to the Allegheny in Pennsylvania.
Roughly every thousand years the lower Mississippi abandons its path to the sea. Through a process called avulsion, or delta switching, silt clogs the channel, the water rises, and the river hunts for a steeper, more direct route to the Gulf of Mexico. The abandoned channels shrink into bayous. Over the past 5,000 years this has pushed the Louisiana coastline 15 to 50 miles toward the Gulf. By the 1950s government scientists realized the river was preparing to switch again, this time into the Atchafalaya River, whose path to the Gulf is far steeper. Left alone, the Atchafalaya would capture the Mississippi and strand New Orleans on a side channel. So Congress authorized the Old River Control Structure, completed in 1963 and reinforced with a $300 million auxiliary station finished in 1986. It ordinarily diverts 30 percent of the flow into the Atchafalaya while keeping the main channel past Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The structure was nearly lost in the 1973 flood. A Corps of Engineers geologist named Fred Smith put it bluntly: "The Mississippi wants to go west. 1973 was a forty-year flood. The big one lies out there somewhere."
The 1927 flood broke the old thinking. Before it, the Corps of Engineers tried to close off side channels so the faster main current would scour the bottom deeper and lower flood risk. In the spring of 1927 the river broke its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet. Threatened communities began cutting their own levee breaks to relieve the pressure. The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1930 then authorized a navigation channel 9 feet deep and 400 feet wide, built through a chain of locks and dams. From Lake Itasca to St. Louis the river's flow is now moderated by 43 dams. Twenty-three new locks and dams went up on the upper river in the 1930s, joining three already standing. The scale of the levees lining either bank has been compared to the Great Wall of China. On the lower river the Corps maintains spillways and floodways such as the Birds Point-New Madrid Floodway, the Morganza Spillway, and the Bonnet Carré Spillway, which routes excess water into Lake Pontchartrain. During the 2011 floods the Corps opened the Morganza Spillway to a quarter of its capacity, letting 150,000 cubic feet per second pour toward the Gulf.
The 4th millennium BC offers the river's earliest farming evidence: cultivated sunflower, goosefoot, a marsh elder, and an indigenous squash. The Mississippi basin is counted among the few independent centers of plant domestication in human history. After about 800 AD the Mississippian culture rose, a society of stratified chiefdoms and large population centers. The most prominent, now called Cahokia, was occupied between roughly 600 and 1400 AD. At its peak it held between 8,000 and 40,000 people, larger than the London of that era. The Cheyenne, among the earliest inhabitants of the upper river, called it Maxe-eometaae, the Big Greasy River. Europeans then arrived to map and rename it. Spanish explorer Alonso Alvarez de Pineda reached it in 1519. Hernando de Soto came to the river on the 8th of May 1541 and called it the River of the Holy Spirit. In 1682 Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, claimed the entire valley for France and named the river Colbert. New Orleans followed in 1718, founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville. Five years later, in 1727, Etienne Perier began the first levees using enslaved African laborers.
Article 8 of the 1783 Treaty of Paris declared that navigation of the river "shall forever remain free and open" to both British subjects and American citizens. The treaty ended the American Revolution and made the river the young nation's western edge. The United States gained firm control by buying the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803, then secured the lower reaches when an American army under General Andrew Jackson repulsed a British attack on New Orleans, fought 15 days after the Treaty of Ghent was signed. The river became a strategic objective again in the American Civil War, where its capture formed part of the Union's Anaconda Plan. In 1862 Union forces cleared Confederate defenses at Island Number 10 and Memphis, while naval forces took New Orleans from the Gulf. The last great stronghold sat on the heights at Vicksburg, Mississippi. The Vicksburg Campaign ran from December 1862 to July 1863, and the siege ended on the 4th of July 1863. Combined with the fall of Port Hudson, that victory handed the Union the entire lower river and proved pivotal to the war's outcome.
December 1811 saw the first steamboat travel the full length of the Lower Mississippi from the Ohio River to New Orleans, a vessel named the New Orleans. Its maiden voyage happened during the New Madrid earthquakes, four great shocks in 1811 and 1812 estimated at 8 on the Richter scale, powerful enough to create Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee. Mark Twain later chronicled the steamboat trade in Life on the Mississippi, which covered the commerce from 1830 to 1870. It first appeared as a seven-part serial in 1875, and the full version, published in 1885, included a passage from the then unfinished Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Among the steamboat lines was the Anchor Line, which ran a fleet of luxurious steamers between St. Louis and New Orleans from 1859 to 1898. The Italian explorer Giacomo Beltrami rode the Virginia, the first steamboat to reach Fort St. Anthony in Minnesota, and described his voyage as a promenade. Steamboat transport stayed viable until the end of the first decade of the 20th century, when more modern ships replaced the steamer.
Salt water now creeps upstream when the river runs low. Denser water from the Gulf forms a wedge along the river bottom, and in the drought of 2022 it traveled 64 miles inland, threatening drinking water and forcing desalination. The Corps of Engineers has built underwater levees of sand to hold it back, in 1988, 1999-2012, and again in 2022. Agricultural runoff sends elevated nutrient and chemical levels downstream, the primary contributor to the Gulf of Mexico dead zone. The basin remains the mother fauna of North American freshwater, with about 375 fish species known from it, a count exceeded among temperate river basins only by the Yangtze. The river still draws people to its water. The sport of water skiing was invented on the stretch known as Lake Pepin, where Ralph Samuelson of Lake City, Minnesota, refined his technique in late June and early July 1922, then performed the first ski jump in 1925. In 2002 Slovenian swimmer Martin Strel swam the entire length from Minnesota to Louisiana over 68 days, tracing by hand a river that engineers still work daily to keep in place.
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Common questions
How long is the Mississippi River and where does it start?
The Mississippi River runs 2,340 miles from its traditional source at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Measured from its longest stream source, Brower's Spring in Montana at the head of the Missouri River, it stretches 3,710 miles, making it the fourth-longest river in the world.
Where does the name Mississippi River come from?
The name Mississippi comes from Misi-ziibi, the Anishinaabe name used by the Ojibwe meaning Great River, which the French rendered as Messipi. Earlier European explorers gave it other names, including River of the Holy Spirit by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and Colbert River by La Salle in 1682.
Why does the Mississippi River try to change course into the Atchafalaya?
The Atchafalaya River offers a much steeper, more direct path to the Gulf of Mexico, so the Mississippi naturally tends to switch into it through a process called avulsion. To prevent this, Congress authorized the Old River Control Structure, completed in 1963, which diverts 30 percent of the flow while keeping the main channel past Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
What role did the Mississippi River play in the Civil War?
Control of the Mississippi River was a strategic objective in the American Civil War and formed part of the Union's Anaconda Plan. The Siege of Vicksburg ended on the 4th of July 1863, and combined with the fall of Port Hudson it gave the Union the entire lower river and proved pivotal to its victory.
How many states does the Mississippi River drain?
The Mississippi River and its tributaries drain all or parts of 32 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, covering nearly 40 percent of the continental United States. The river itself borders or passes through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Where was water skiing invented on the Mississippi River?
Water skiing was invented on Lake Pepin, a wide stretch of the Mississippi River between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ralph Samuelson of Lake City, Minnesota, created and refined the technique in late June and early July 1922, then performed the first water ski jump in 1925.