The Mississippi River

The Mississippi River drains the vast middle of the United States, gathering water from 31 states and two Canadian provinces before pouring it into the Gulf of Mexico. From its modest source at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it runs some 2,340 miles (3,766 km) south to a sprawling delta below New Orleans. Together with its great tributary the Missouri, it forms one of the largest river systems on Earth, the watery spine of the continent.

For most of its course the river loops and meanders across a broad floodplain, building natural levees and oxbow lakes and shifting its bed over the centuries. Below the confluence with the Ohio at Cairo, Illinois, it swells into the powerful lower Mississippi, lined with the engineered levees that hold it in place. The river carries enormous quantities of sediment, building the Louisiana delta out into the Gulf even as that land now sinks and erodes.

The Mississippi has shaped the nation as a highway and a boundary. It carried steamboats, cotton, and grain, divided the country into east and west in the popular imagination, and remains one of the busiest commercial waterways in the world, moving barges of grain, coal, and chemicals between the interior and the sea.

• Louisiana
  The Pelican State, where the Mississippi meets the Gulf flows through
• Memphis
  A Mississippi River city on the Chickasaw Bluffs flows through
• Minnesota
  The Land of 10,000 Lakes, headwaters of the Mississippi flows through
• New Orleans
  A river-delta city largely below sea level flows through
• The Missouri River
  The longest river in North America joined by
• The Ohio River
  The Mississippi's largest tributary by volume joined by
• Port of South Louisiana
  The Mississippi River's great bulk-cargo port related
• The Mississippi Valley
  The great alluvial valley of the lower river related