MISSISSIPPI RIVER

The Mississippi River and its basin are vital components of America's natural environment. In addition, they have had a vital shaping influence upon the history of North American Indians, exploration, military campaigns, pioneering and settlement, politics, folk and high culture, civil rights, and economic development.

The Mississippi River drains the North American continent from its headwaters in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico. Home to diverse and distinctive species of flora and fauna, it was first civilized between 500 ad and 1500 ad by agrarian, mound-building Mississippian Indians. Beginning in 1541, European explorers, traders, and adventurers traversed the Mississippi Valley in the service of Spain; France; Britain; and later, the United States. Before losing the Upper Mississippi Valley and Canada to Britain in 1763, France briefly delivered its claims to the Louisiana Territory to Spain. France regained Louisiana in 1802, only to sell it to the Americans in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase ended an eighteen-year dispute, at last opening the rich port city of New Orleans to American rivermen and seaman.

From the Revolution onward, the Mississippi River witnessed a microcosm of American history. Revolutionary militia general George Rogers Clark fought at Kaskaskia, in Illinois country, in 1778; Lewis and Clark wintered on the Mississippi in 1803–1804 on their way to explore Thomas Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase; Andrew Jackson defeated the British at New Orleans in 1815; the Missouri Compromise debate of 1819–1821 over the status of slavery west of the river polarized America into proslavery and antislavery forces; Chief Black Hawk's 1832 defeat in Illinois, followed by the forced march of the Cherokees across the frozen Lower Mississippi, marked the extirpation of America's woodland Indians; Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was murdered at Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1844; Ulysses S. Grant turned the tide of the Civil War at Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1863; and American life was forever marked by the eras of Mississippi Valley slavery, the Jim Crow laws there, and the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.

The economic history of the Mississippi River is one of technological innovation, beginning with Indian canoes and frontier keelboats and flatboats, moving into the steamboat age, and culminating in the twentieth-century development of diesel-powered towboat and barge commerce along the mighty river's banks. The first Mississippi rivermen were Indians, paddling their sleek, wooden canoes and crude "bullboats" up and down its waters. Immediately following the American Revolution, keelboatmen steered sleek, prowed, sixty-foot-long craft swiftly downstream and then worked very hard to inch cargoes of coffee, sugar, and other trade goods upstream. The introduction in 1811 of steamboats on the western rivers, however, quickly ran the keelboats out of business.

Interestingly, the crude, inexpensive nonsteam flatboat (introduced in the late 1700s) endured well past the advent of steam power and the Civil War. Flatboats were flat-bottomed, box-shaped craft averaging fifty feet in length and twelve feet in width. Flatboats carried pork, corn, furs, hardy fruits and vegetables, and whiskey downstream only. Having sold their loads and boats (as scrap lumber), flatboatmen walked home along the dangerous Natchez Trace route or, after 1811, purchased deck passage aboard northbound steamers.

The keelboat and flatboat workers did not always conform to the rough, tough "alligator horse" image portrayed in folktales and published stories about Mississippi River heroes like Davy Crockett (1786–1836) and Big Mike Fink (1770?–1823), the "king of the river." Many early boatmen were coarse and violent frontiersmen, but as time progressed a boating workforce emerged, characterized by more civilized family men and young farm boys. The average nonsteam riverman was a white Ohio and Mississippi Valley male of English or Celtic ancestry, averaging twenty-eight years of age. Antebellum and postbellum lumber raft crews—navigating large log assemblages down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers—fit most of this description except that this group included more Scandinavian American raftsmen.

The workaday Mississippi steamboat was a small (approximately three-hundred-ton) craft exhibiting little gilt or fancy trappings. As with flatboat and keelboat commerce, peak steamboat shipping time was during high water; the high waters of late fall and early spring greatly reduced the chances of running aground. At those times, the Mississippi was dotted with steamers, crewed by both white and African American boatmen and carrying pork, whiskey, lead, tobacco, cotton, and ticketed passengers. By the 1850s, however, the railroads had proved the steamboat's economic undoing. The steamers were ultimately succeeded in 1903 by screw-propellered, steam- and, later, diesel-powered "towboats" pushing fleets of lashed river barges up and downstream.

In the realm of American culture and arts, the Mississippi River valley has proved seminal to the work of authors ranging from Mark Twain (1835–1910) to William Faulkner (1897–1962). Its environment, wildlife, and working folk have been painted by George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), John James Audubon (1785–1851), and Karl Bodmer (1809–1893). And every indigenous form of American music—gospel, blues, country, jazz, and rock and roll—was born along the banks of, and aboard, the boats plying this great river.

Twain, once a steamboat pilot, referred to the Mississippi River valley as "the heart of America." In all aspects of American culture, the Mississippi River and its people reflect the core of the American experience.

See alsoBlount Conspiracy; Environment, Environmental History, and Nature; Frontier; Louisiana Purchase; New Orleans; Revolution: Diplomacy; Spanish Conspiracy; Steamboat .

bibliography

Allen, Michael. Western Rivermen, 1763–1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

Baldwin, Leland D. The Keelboat Age on Western Waters. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1941.

Haites, Eric F., James Mak, and Gary M. Walton. Western River Transportation: The Era of Early Internal Development, 1810–1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949. Reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1993.

Saxon, Lyle. Father Mississippi. New York: Century, 1927.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Boston: Osgood, 1883. Reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Michael Allen