50 Fun Facts About Mississippi River

The Mississippi traditionally begins at which Minnesota lake?

Itasca lies just 1,475 feet above sea level, so the river has less than a third of a mile to fall over a journey of about 2,300 miles.

Which is the only US river longer than the Mississippi?

The Missouri is about 100 miles longer than the river it flows into, yet it is the one called the tributary; together they form a 3,710-mile system, the fourth longest in the world.

Counted with its longest tributary, the Mississippi is the world's fourth-longest river system; which river ranks third?

The Yangtze is a couple of hundred miles longer; the American system only comes this close because it is measured from its farthest headwaters in Montana rather than from Minnesota.

The name Mississippi comes from Misi-ziibi, a phrase in which Native American language?

Ojibwe speakers called it Misi-ziibi, and their name stuck for the whole river because the French first reached it in its upper reaches, in Algonquian-speaking country.

What does the name Misi-ziibi, from which 'Mississippi' derives, mean?

Great River, or simply big river, is what the two words say: misi for big, ziibi for river. The grander 'Father of Waters' is a nickname, not the literal meaning.

Henry Schoolcraft coined the name of the Mississippi's source lake from Latin words meaning what?

True head was Schoolcraft's boast in 1832, when he declared the lake the river's real starting point; he is generally credited with splicing the name from the Latin veritas and caput.

Roughly how deep is the Mississippi where it leaves its source lake?

About 3 feet of water, shallow enough for children to wade across, is all there is at the start of a river that is more than 200 feet deep at its deepest.

Where is the deepest point of the Mississippi River?

New Orleans has the deepest water, more than 200 feet of it between Governor Nicholls Wharf and Algiers Point, on a river that starts out only 20 to 30 feet wide.

Ocean ships can sail up the Mississippi to which state capital?

Baton Rouge is as far upriver as ocean-going ships can go; above it the channel is kept deep enough only for barges, so cargo bound farther north changes vessels there.

The 'Middle Mississippi' runs from St. Louis down to the Ohio River confluence at which Illinois town?

Cairo is where the Lower Mississippi begins: below the town the river swells into the broad, looping giant that carried the great steamboats.

Which tributary carries more water than the Mississippi itself at the point where the two meet?

The Ohio delivers well over half the combined flow where they join, so by volume the true main stem would run up it toward Pennsylvania rather than north to Minnesota.

Saint Anthony Falls, the only major waterfall on the Mississippi, is in which city?

Minneapolis grew up around the falls, which powered its flour mills; the lock that carried boats past them was shut for good in 2015 to keep invasive carp from spreading upstream.

Which Minnesota lake is the Mississippi's widest point, at more than 11 miles across?

Winnibigoshish spreads the young river more than 11 miles wide, about two thousand times the 20 to 30 feet it measures where it begins.

The sport of water skiing was invented in 1922 on which wide stretch of the Mississippi?

Lake Pepin is where Ralph Samuelson, now called the father of the sport, first stood up on skis in 1922; until then riders were towed on a single board called an aquaplane.

Which 1963 floodgate complex stops the Mississippi from changing course away from its lower cities?

The Old River Control Structure holds the river's westward leak to about 30 percent of the flow; without it the shorter, steeper route would by now have taken the main channel.

Which river, a distributary in Louisiana, would capture the Mississippi's flow if engineers let it?

The Atchafalaya offers a much shorter, steeper path to the Gulf, so since 1963 engineers have rationed it to about 30 percent of the water coming down from the north.

Which name does the modern lobe of the Mississippi delta take from its shape?

Birdfoot describes the way the river's last channels splay out into the Gulf like toes; the lobe is also called the Balize Delta, after an early French outpost at the mouth.

Left alone, the lower Mississippi silts up its channel and jumps to a new route to the Gulf about how often?

Every 1,000 years or so the river abandons its clogged bed for a steeper one; Louisiana's quiet Bayou Teche and Bayou Lafourche are main channels it left behind.

Which earthquake zone between Memphis and St. Louis produced a series of powerful earthquakes in 1811-12?

New Madrid, a small river town, gave the zone its name; with no seismographs in America then, the quakes' size is still debated, though geologists now put the three main shocks near magnitude 7.5.

Which Tennessee lake was created by the great earthquakes of 1811–12?

Reelfoot Lake formed when the ground sank by as much as 20 feet during the last of the great shocks, in February 1812, and water filled the hollow.

Which Spanish conquistador reached the Mississippi in 1541 and died of fever beside it a year later?

Hernando de Soto had landed in Florida two years earlier hunting for gold; his men are said to have sunk his body in the river, and the survivors, about half the expedition, went on down it to reach Mexico.

Which treaty made the Mississippi the western border of the new United States?

The Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, also promised that the river would stay open to American boats, but Spain held its lower reaches and kept them closed to American shipping for years.

In 1682 La Salle claimed the Mississippi valley for France and named the river after whom?

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister, did not keep the river for long: 'Colbert River' faded from the maps, while La Salle's name for the surrounding territory stuck.

Which pair of French explorers began exploring the Mississippi in 1673?

Marquette and Jolliet canoed down as far as the mouth of the Arkansas, then turned for home rather than risk meeting the Spanish, who they learned held the country farther south.

Which Frenchman founded a city on a great crescent bend of the lower Mississippi in 1718?

Bienville first saw the river in 1699 on his brother Iberville's expedition to find its mouth; four years after founding the city he made it the capital of the French colony.

The United States gained control of the whole river through which agreement?

The Louisiana Purchase went far beyond the envoys' orders: sent to secure the river's outlet to the sea, they were offered Napoleon's entire territory and took it without authority to do so.

Which pre-Columbian city, the largest north of Mexico, stood near the Mississippi opposite present-day St. Louis?

Cahokia may have held 20,000 people at its height, yet it had emptied out before Columbus ever sailed, for reasons archaeologists still debate.

Which steamboat pioneer's company sent the first steamboat down the Mississippi in 1811?

Robert Fulton and his partner Robert Livingston had the boat built at Pittsburgh; it rode out that winter's great earthquakes on the way down and started a regular river service in 1812.

Mark Twain took his pen name from a leadsman's cry meaning the river was how deep?

Two fathoms, or 12 feet, was called out as 'mark twain' by the man sounding the river's depth; Samuel Clemens is thought to have taken the name from his own years as a pilot.

Which 1883 Mark Twain book is a memoir of his years as a steamboat pilot?

Life on the Mississippi opens with a short history of the river, then recounts his years learning it as a pilot and his return, many years afterwards, to travel it again from St. Louis downstream.

Which river town north of St. Louis was Mark Twain's boyhood home and the setting for his Tom Sawyer stories?

Hannibal gave Twain his people as well as his setting: he drew Huck Finn from Tom Blankenship, a poor boy he had played with there.

Which future president was the railroad's lawyer after a steamboat hit the first Mississippi rail bridge in 1856?

Abraham Lincoln argued that one man had as good a right to cross a river as another had to sail on it; the jury deadlocked, the case was dismissed and the bridge stayed.

Completed in 1874 at St. Louis, the Eads Bridge pioneered the large-scale structural use of which material?

Steel was so new to bridge-building that James Eads had every batch inspected; his three 500-foot arches stand on piers sunk into the riverbed by men working in pressurized caissons.

Which Confederate stronghold on the bluffs fell on July 4, 1863, giving the Union control of the river?

Vicksburg had kept the river closed to Union shipping; weeks after it fell the president wrote that 'the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea'.

The 1865 explosion of which steamboat near Memphis remains the worst maritime disaster in US history?

Sultana was built to carry 376 people but had more than 2,000 aboard, most of them Union soldiers just freed from Confederate prison camps and heading home.

Which future president built his reputation directing relief during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927?

Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, supervised relief for a flood that covered more than 23,000 square miles, and he was elected president the following year.

After the 1927 disaster, the Flood Control Act of 1928 set out to rebuild and extend the river's system of what?

Levees alone had been the official answer to floods before 1927; when they failed, the new law added spillways and floodways so that high water had somewhere to go.

Before steamboats, which craft carried farm goods down the Mississippi on a one-way trip?

Flatboats could not be worked back against the current, so their crews sold them for lumber at the journey's end and walked home, many of them up the Natchez Trace.

About 60 percent of which American export travels down the Mississippi to the ports near its mouth?

Grain from Midwest farms rides down the river in barge tows to Louisiana's deep-water ports, where it is loaded onto ocean-going ships for export.

Which architect designed the Gateway Arch that stands beside the Mississippi at St. Louis?

Eero Saarinen won the design competition in 1948 but never saw his arch: he died in 1961, four years before it was completed.

Nutrient runoff carried down the Mississippi is the main cause of what in the Gulf of Mexico each summer?

A dead zone forms when fertilizer washed off Midwest farms feeds algae whose decay uses up the oxygen near the seabed; fish that can swim away leave, and what cannot move dies.

Which federal agency runs the 29 locks and dams on the upper Mississippi?

The Army Corps of Engineers built most of the dams in the 1930s to hold a channel at least 9 feet deep, turning a river of rapids and sandbars into a staircase of pools.

Which ancient inhabitant of the Mississippi swims with its mouth gaping open to strain plankton from the water?

Paddlefish live almost entirely on tiny zooplankton, which they find with tens of thousands of sensors packed into their long, flat snouts.

Which village, Illinois's first state capital, was cut off west of the Mississippi by the great flood of 1881?

Kaskaskia is now the only piece of Illinois west of the Mississippi; the old town itself was swallowed bit by bit as the river moved into a new channel.

Which 1927 musical gave the world the river anthem 'Ol' Man River'?

Show Boat gave the song to Joe, a dock worker on the river; Jules Bledsoe sang it on opening night, but Paul Robeson, who took the part in London the next year, became world-famous in it.

In 1856 the first railroad bridge across the Mississippi linked Davenport, Iowa, with which Illinois arsenal town?

Rock Island's bridge was two weeks old when the steamboat Effie Afton struck it and burned; the lawsuit that followed became a showdown between river men and the railroads.

The Mississippi's drainage basin reaches into which two Canadian provinces?

Alberta and Saskatchewan drain south through the Milk River, a far-flung tributary, so rain that falls on the Canadian prairie can end up in the Gulf of Mexico.

How long does water typically take to travel from the source lake to the Gulf of Mexico?

About 90 days is the usual estimate, because the water sets off at barely a mile an hour, half of walking pace, and only picks up to about three miles an hour near the end.

The Great Flood of 1993 mainly struck which part of the Mississippi?

The upper river and its western tributaries overflowed after months of rain on soaked ground; farther down, the much bigger lower channel carried the crest away with only minor flooding.

Which Union general's Vicksburg campaign of 1862-63 completed control of the lower Mississippi?

The city's residents reputedly refused to celebrate the Fourth of July for decades afterwards.