US Rivers
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50 free US Rivers trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Rivers drew the map of the United States. They mark state lines and the national border, they decided where cities grew, and they carried explorers, steamboats and settlers into the interior long before railroads or highways existed. This quiz covers the country's waterways from every angle: the longest and largest rivers, the ones that form borders, the Mississippi and its great tributaries, famous dams and canyons, and the battles, crossings, novels and songs that made certain rivers part of American history. It is written for geography students brushing up before a test, teachers who want a ready-made classroom round, and anyone who likes to know which river runs through which city. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which river is dyed green for St. Patrick's Day and had its direction of flow reversed in 1900?
Chicago
The Chicago River tradition arose by accident in 1961, when plumbers were using dye to trace illegal pollution. The plumbers union went on to sponsor the yearly dyeing.
Q 02Which river carved the Grand Canyon but has rarely reached the sea since the 1960s?
Colorado
The Colorado is drained so heavily that its lower 100 miles have dried up. A planned 2014 release let it touch the ocean for the first time in 16 years.
Q 03Which river, the longest in the United States, joins the Mississippi just north of St. Louis?
Missouri
The Missouri carries so much silt that it earned the nickname 'Big Muddy'. It runs 2,341 miles from the Rocky Mountains of Montana.
Q 04Which river did George Washington cross on Christmas night 1776 to surprise the Hessians at Trenton?
Delaware
The Delaware crossing set up Washington's victory over the Hessians at Trenton the next morning. Emanuel Leutze's famous painting of the scene dates from 1851, 75 years later.
Q 05Which river, a concrete channel ending at Long Beach, hosted the car race in the film Grease?
Los Angeles
The Los Angeles River ran free until a series of devastating floods led to it being locked into a fixed concrete course. Terminator 2 and Chinatown also filmed along it.
Q 06Which Florida wetland did writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas famously describe as a 'River of Grass'?
Everglades
The Everglades is really a broad, shallow sheet of water creeping slowly along, which is why the phrase stuck. Douglas's book appeared a month before the national park was dedicated.
Q 07Which Mississippi River city, home of Beale Street, was named after an ancient capital of Egypt?
Memphis
Memphis was founded in 1819 by a trio that included future president Andrew Jackson. Both cities stand beside a great river: the Mississippi and the Nile.
Q 08In which Mark Twain novel do a runaway boy and an escaped slave named Jim raft down the Mississippi?
Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn sends Huck and Jim drifting toward Cairo, Illinois, in a free state. It was among the first major American novels written throughout in everyday dialect.
Q 09Which Cleveland river caught fire in 1969, helping to inspire the Environmental Protection Agency?
Cuyahoga
The Cuyahoga had burned at least a dozen times before, the first in 1868. In 1969 a spark from a passing rail car lit an oil slick on its surface.
Q 10Which river forms the border between Texas and Mexico, where it is known as the Río Bravo?
Rio Grande
The Rio Grande's Mexican name uses bravo in the sense of furious or wild. Two stretches, one of them at Big Bend National Park, are protected as Wild and Scenic Rivers.
Q 11Which river flows from the Adirondack Mountains past Albany to New York City?
Hudson
The Hudson is named for an Englishman who explored it in 1609 while sailing for the Dutch East India Company. A huge bay in Canada carries his name too.
Q 12Which river meets the Shenandoah at Harpers Ferry before flowing past Washington, D.C.?
Potomac
The Potomac is nicknamed 'the Nation's River' for the American history along its banks. George Washington was born in its basin, surveyed it and spent most of his life there.
Q 13Which Arizona–Nevada dam was officially called Boulder Dam until Congress restored its name in 1947?
Hoover Dam
Hoover Dam was the name in the bills Congress passed, but the Roosevelt administration called it Boulder Dam after Herbert Hoover lost the 1932 election.
Q 21Which river cuts Hells Canyon, a gorge deeper than the Grand Canyon, on the border of Idaho and Oregon?
Snake
The Snake has carved North America's deepest river gorge, 7,993 feet deep. Elsewhere in Idaho, Evel Knievel failed to rocket across its canyon in 1974.
Q 22Which river forms at Knoxville, flows southwest through Chattanooga and then crosses into Alabama?
Tennessee
The Tennessee misses Georgia by only about 250 feet as it leaves Chattanooga. Since the 1930s it has been dammed nine times by the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Q 23Which Nebraska river, followed by the Oregon Trail, did pioneers joke was a mile wide and six inches deep?
Platte
The Platte probably gets its name from the French for 'flat river'. Gold-rush 49ers called its water 'too thick to drink, too thin to plow'.
Q 14Which city on a crescent bend of the Mississippi River lies largely below sea level behind levees?
New Orleans
New Orleans is nicknamed the Crescent City for that curve. Pumps opened its swamps to building, but the drained ground then sank below sea level.
Q 15Which Minnesota lake did explorer Henry Schoolcraft identify as the source of the Mississippi River?
Itasca
Itasca is a name Schoolcraft invented, stitched together from the Latin words veritas caput, which he meant as 'true head'.
Q 16Which river drops over Horseshoe Falls and American Falls on the border of New York and Ontario?
Niagara
The Niagara flows north on a short run between two of the Great Lakes. Goat Island and tiny Luna Island split its falls into three separate sections.
Q 17Which river, Alaska's longest, carried paddle-wheel riverboats until a highway opened in the 1950s?
Yukon
The Yukon was one of the main routes to the goldfields during the Klondike Gold Rush. It runs 1,980 miles before emptying into the Bering Sea.
Q 18Which river, the largest in the Pacific Northwest, forms most of the Washington–Oregon border?
Columbia
The Columbia takes its name from a Boston ship, the Columbia Rediviva, which in 1792 became the first non-indigenous vessel to enter it.
Q 19Which river flows from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, as the Mississippi's largest tributary by volume?
Ohio
The Ohio pours more water into the Mississippi than any other tributary. It also serves as the boundary between the Midwest and the South.
Q 20Which term names the U-shaped lake left behind when a river like the Mississippi cuts off a meander?
Oxbow
Oxbow lakes are named after the curved part of a harness worn by oxen pulling a plough. They form when a river erodes through the narrow neck of a looping bend.
Q 24Which river rises in the Texas panhandle and flows east as the border between Texas and Oklahoma?
Red
The Red River takes its name from the reddish tint it picks up crossing red-bed country. Its south bank was once part of the frontier between the United States and Mexico.
Q 25Which Florida river was chosen from an atlas for Stephen Foster's 'Old Folks at Home', though he never saw it?
Suwannee
The Suwannee, spelled 'Swanee' in the lyric, was chosen after Foster turned down the Yazoo and the Pee Dee. Florida made the tune its state song in 1935.
Q 26Which river, the longest on the East Coast, flows around Three Mile Island on its way to Chesapeake Bay?
Susquehanna
The Susquehanna supplies half of Chesapeake Bay's fresh water. The bay is in fact the river's own lower valley, drowned when sea levels rose.
Q 27Which Virginia river, flowing through Richmond, did colonists in 1607 name after their monarch in England?
James
The James was named by the Jamestown colonists as they built the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Native Americans had called it the Powhatan River.
Q 28Which river, the longest in New England, forms the boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire?
Connecticut
The Connecticut does not carry the state line midstream. In 1933 the Supreme Court fixed it at the low-water mark on the Vermont shore, ending nearly 150 years of disputes.
Q 29Which river flows past Augusta as most of the border between Georgia and South Carolina?
Savannah
The Savannah boundary has a twist: a 1787 treaty reserved every island in the river for Georgia. In 1990 the Supreme Court gave newly formed islands on the far side to South Carolina.
Q 30Which river drops over two waterfalls into its own Grand Canyon inside America's first national park?
Yellowstone
The Yellowstone is often said to be named for that canyon's yellow rocks, but the people credited with the name never lived along its upper stretches.