10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Mississippi River

An indigenous people of North America known as the Ojibwe, who were known to live along the Mississippi River long before any Europeans knew of its existence, are attributed with giving the Mississippi River its name. They called it ‘Misi-ziibi’ which means ‘Great River’.

At 2,341 miles long, the Missouri River tips the Mississippi by about 20 miles to the title of longest river in North America. The Missouri does however flow into the Mississippi River making it the longest tributary of Mighty Miss. When combining the two together they finish fourth after the Amazon, Nile and Yangtze Rivers on the list of longest river systems in the world.

The Mississippi River flows through or along 10 states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, more than 50 cities across those 10 states rely on the Mississippi River everyday for water supply. That equates to roughly around 18 million people.

In the summer of 1922, a man named Ralph Samuelson invented the sport of water skiing on Lake Pepin, the largest naturally occurring lake on the Mississippi River. Already skilled at aquaplaning (standing on a board whilst being pulled by a powerboat), 18 year old Samuelson wanted to bring snow skiing to water. The rest, as they say, is history.

In 27 April 1865, a Mississippi River side-wheel steamboat named the Sultana exploded in what would become the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history. The 260-feet long boat was designed to carry 376 passengers but on that fateful day she had 2,427 souls on board, many of them Union soldiers recently freed from Confederate prison camps. Around 2:00 am, three of the four boilers on the boat suddenly exploded, killing around 1,700 people. The boat burnt and sank near Memphis, Tennessee.

That’s if you’re a Guinness World Record holding swimmer named Martin Strel. Back in 2002, the Slovenian long-distance swimmer, famous for swimming the length of entire rivers, took on the Mississippi River and conquered it in just 68 days. With the Amazon, Yangtze and Danube Rivers also under his belt, you can see why he’s earned the nickname ‘Big River Man’.

If a raindrop falls in Lake Itasca (Minnesota), the headwaters of the Mississippi River, it will apparently take 90 days for it to travel the length of the river and arrive at the Gulf of Mexico.

During the Great Blizzard of 1899, the river completely froze over its entire length, with ice even flowing from it and into the Gulf of Mexico. During the 1918-19 Big Freeze, it froze over again causing river traffic to grind to halt resulting in widespread shortages of coal. The last known occasion it has been known to complexly freeze over occurred during the 1936 North American cold wave.

According to the U.S. National Park Service, the Mississippi River and its flood plain contain at least 260 species of fish, which equates to 25% of all fish species in North America. It’s home to over 50 mammal species and at least 145 species of amphibians and reptiles. It’s also an important migration route for birds, with 40% of the nation’s migratory waterfowl and 60% of all North American birds (326 species) using the river corridor during their spring and autumn migrations.

The Mississippi River has flooded on numerous occasions, with major floods coming in 1927, 1973, 1983, 1993 and 2011. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 has been labeled the most destructive river flood in the history of the United States, causing 247 deaths and leaving 600,000 people homeless after 27,000 square miles were inundated with water after Mighty Miss burst her banks in 145 different places.