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.