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The Mississippi River is the largest river system in the United States, as well as all of North America, at more than 2,300  miles long. It is the fourth longest river and the tenth most powerful river in the world. Originating at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, it flows slowly southwards until it ends about 95 miles below New Orleans, Louisiana where it begins to flow to the Gulf of Mexico. Along with its major tributary, the Missouri River, the river drains all or parts of 31 U.S. states stretching from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the Appalachian Mountains in the east to the Canadian border on the north, and includes most of the Great Plains.

No river has played a greater part in the development and expansion of America than the Mississippi. Since the first person viewed this mighty stream, it has been a vital factor in the physical and economic growth of the United States.

Mississippi River near Cairo, Illinois, Kathy Weiser, May, 2010.

It has stood in the path of discoverers, challenging their ingenuity to cross it. It has fired the imaginations of explorers, luring them on to seek out its mysteries. And always it has stood in the minds of practical men as the key to westward expansion, an economic prize to be sought and held at all cost. As such, it has been fought over on the battlefield and used as a pawn in diplomatic exchanges.

From tiny Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it twists and turns through the land of the Chippewa, 2,348 miles south through the heart of the United States. It sweeps past Minneapolis and St. Paul, growing larger as tributaries add their flows. It is joined by the Missouri River north of St. Louis and receives the waters of the Ohio River at Cairo, Illinois. Here it becomes the Lower Mississippi, a river giant, unequaled among American waters. Flowing south, it touches romantic river towns -- Memphis, Greenville, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. Almost a thousand river miles south of Cairo, it pours its torrent into the Gulf of Mexico.

The area of the Mississippi Valley was first settled by Native American tribes, including the Cheyenne, Sioux, Ojibwe, Potawatomie, Ho-Chunk, Fox, Kickapoo, Tamaroa, Moingwena, Quapaw and Chickasaw.
 

Christopher Columbus may have been the first European to view the Mississippi River. An "Admiral's Map" in the Royal Library at Madrid, Spain, said to have been engraved in 1507, shows the mouth of the river, then called "The River of Palms." Though this may have been the Mississippi River, it has never been confirmed.

In May, 1541, Hernando DeSoto was the first recorded European to view the Mississippi at a point near or just below present-day Memphis, Tennessee. He called it the Río del Espíritu Santo ("River of the Holy Spirit.") After his death in 1542, his

followers continued the explorations. The historian of the expedition, Garciliaso de la Vega, described the Mississippi as a flood of great severity and of prolonged duration. The flooded areas were described as extending for 20 leagues on each side of the river.

One hundred and twenty years later, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet began exploring the the river, traveling from its upper reaches to a point near present-day Arkansas City, Arkansas. Marquette traveled with a Sioux Indian named Ne Tongo and proposed calling it the River of the Immaculate Conception.

In 1682, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and Henri de Tonti descended the greater portion of its length to its mouth. and claimed the entire Mississippi River Valley for France, calling it the Colbert River after Jean-Baptiste Colbert.