Mississippi River

new para inserted between para-3 and para-4Mississippi River. Samuel L. Clemens, quoting Harper's magazine, pronounced the Mississippi River the “Body of the Nation.” The metaphor is appropriate, for the story of the Mississippi mirrors many central themes in American history and culture.

Draining the North American continent from its headwaters in Minnesota's Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi is home to diverse species of flora and fauna. Between A.D. 500 and 1500, mound‐building Mississippian peoples built an agrarian civilization along its banks. Beginning in 1541, Spanish and French explorers including Hernando de Soto, Jacques Marquette, and Louis Joliet, traversed the Mississippi valley. British and American explorers, traders, and adventurers eventually followed.

Events along the Mississippi form a microcosm of American history. Revolutionary War soldier George Rogers Clark fought at Kaskaskias; the Lewis and Clark expedition wintered in 1803–1804 at Wood River; Andrew Jackson defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815; Chief Black Hawk's 1832 defeat, followed by the Cherokee's forced march across the frozen Lower Mississippi, marked the extirpation of America's woodland Indians; Ulysses S. Grant turned the tide of the Civil War at the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863; the “Steamboat Age” on the Mississippi hugely affected the nineteenth‐century economy; the twentieth century was influenced by the diesel towboat and the evolution of the Army Corps of Engineers; and American life was forever marked by the eras of Mississippi valley slavery, racial segregation, and civil‐rights activism.

Devastating floods on the lower Mississippi in 1927 left thousands homeless and hastened the migration of displaced African Americans to northern cities. Another round of flooding in 1993 stirred debate about the policy of trying to confine the river by means of levees, rather than allowing it to expand into its natural flood plain in times of high water.

Artists and writers like George Caleb Bingham, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hamlin Garland, William Faulkner, and Thomas Hart Benton mined the Mississippi's stories, most memorably in Clemens's autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883). Many forms of indigenous American music—gospel, blues, country, jazz, and rock‐and‐roll—were born or flourished along its banks. From geography to history to folk arts and crafts, the Mississippi and its people reflect the core of the American experience.
See also Canals and Waterways; Exploration, Conquest and Settlement, Era of European; Gospel Music, African American; Indian History and Culture: Migration and Pre‐Columbian Era; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Music: Popular Music; Music: Traditional Music.

Bibliography

Mark Twain , Life on the Mississippi, 1883, reprint 1990.
Louis C. Hunter , Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History, 1949, reprint 1993.
Michael Allen , Western Rivermen, 1763–1861: Ohio and Mississippi and the Myth of the Alligator Horse, 1990.

Michael Allen