Mississippi River Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Mississippi River trivia questions with answers. The Mississippi drains nearly everything between the Rockies and the Appalachians, and this quiz follows it the whole way down. It starts at Lake Itasca, where the river is three feet deep and you can hop across on stones, and ends at the Birdfoot Delta and the engineering that stops the whole thing from abandoning New Orleans for the Atchafalaya. Along the way you get the explorers (Álvarez de Pineda, de Soto, Marquette and Jolliet, La Salle), the steamboat age and Mark Twain's pen name, the Civil War at Vicksburg, the Sultana disaster, the 1927 flood that made Herbert Hoover, the earthquakes that created Reelfoot Lake, and oddities like the Illinois town stranded on the Missouri bank. Geography, history, science and a little music. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The Mississippi traditionally begins at which Minnesota lake?
Itasca
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.
Q 02Which is the only US river longer than the Mississippi?
The Missouri
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.
Q 03Counted with its longest tributary, the Mississippi is the world's fourth-longest river system; which river ranks third?
The Yangtze
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.
Q 04The name Mississippi comes from Misi-ziibi, a phrase in which Native American language?
Ojibwe
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.
Q 05What does the name Misi-ziibi, from which 'Mississippi' derives, mean?
Great River
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.
Q 06Henry Schoolcraft coined the name of the Mississippi's source lake from Latin words meaning what?
True head
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.
Q 07Roughly how deep is the Mississippi where it leaves its source lake?
About 3 feet
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.
Q 08Where is the deepest point of the Mississippi River?
New Orleans
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.
Q 09Ocean ships can sail up the Mississippi to which state capital?
Baton Rouge
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.
Q 10The 'Middle Mississippi' runs from St. Louis down to the Ohio River confluence at which Illinois town?
Cairo
Cairo is where the Lower Mississippi begins: below the town the river swells into the broad, looping giant that carried the great steamboats.
Q 11Which tributary carries more water than the Mississippi itself at the point where the two meet?
The Ohio
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.
Q 12Saint Anthony Falls, the only major waterfall on the Mississippi, is in which city?
Minneapolis
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.
Q 13Which Minnesota lake is the Mississippi's widest point, at more than 11 miles across?
Winnibigoshish
Q 21Which Spanish conquistador reached the Mississippi in 1541 and died of fever beside it a year later?
Hernando de Soto
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.
Q 22Which treaty made the Mississippi the western border of the new United States?
The Treaty of Paris
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.
Q 23In 1682 La Salle claimed the Mississippi valley for France and named the river after whom?
Winnibigoshish spreads the young river more than 11 miles wide, about two thousand times the 20 to 30 feet it measures where it begins.
Q 14The sport of water skiing was invented in 1922 on which wide stretch of the Mississippi?
Lake Pepin
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.
Q 15Which 1963 floodgate complex stops the Mississippi from changing course away from its lower cities?
The Old River Control Structure
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.
Q 16Which river, a distributary in Louisiana, would capture the Mississippi's flow if engineers let it?
The Atchafalaya
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.
Q 17Which name does the modern lobe of the Mississippi delta take from its shape?
Birdfoot
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.
Q 18Left alone, the lower Mississippi silts up its channel and jumps to a new route to the Gulf about how often?
Every 1,000 years
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.
Q 19Which earthquake zone between Memphis and St. Louis produced a series of powerful earthquakes in 1811-12?
New Madrid
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.
Q 20Which Tennessee lake was created by the great earthquakes of 1811–12?
Reelfoot
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.
Jean-Baptiste Colbert
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.
Q 24Which pair of French explorers began exploring the Mississippi in 1673?
Marquette and Jolliet
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.
Q 25Which Frenchman founded a city on a great crescent bend of the lower Mississippi in 1718?
Bienville
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.
Q 26The United States gained control of the whole river through which agreement?
The Louisiana Purchase
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.
Q 27Which pre-Columbian city, the largest north of Mexico, stood near the Mississippi opposite present-day St. Louis?
Cahokia
Cahokia may have held 20,000 people at its height, yet it had emptied out before Columbus ever sailed, for reasons archaeologists still debate.
Q 28Which steamboat pioneer's company sent the first steamboat down the Mississippi in 1811?
Robert Fulton
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.
Q 29Mark Twain took his pen name from a leadsman's cry meaning the river was how deep?
Two fathoms
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.
Q 30Which 1883 Mark Twain book is a memoir of his years as a steamboat pilot?
Life on the Mississippi
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.