Episode 9: What If We’d Named the Mississippi Something Else?

What’s in a name? Would the Mississippi sound as sweet by any other name? If Colbert had carried the day, would Mark Twain have still been inspired? Big Muddy, Old Man River, Father of Waters, we sure seem to have a hard time sticking to one name for this river. In this solo episode, I retrace the steps for how we came to use these names and why names matter. I even take a little detour into the much celebrated but ultimately inconsequential search for the spot where the Mississippi begins. In the Mississippi Minute, I praise an app that has helped me find my way out of the forest more than once.

Here’s a list of a some of the words that indigenous Americans used for the Mississippi River:

• The Dakota (Sioux) people knew it as Wakpa Tanka (great river) or Hahawakpa (river of the falls)
• The Cheyenne called it Má’xe-é’ometaa’a (Big Greasy River)
• The Wyandot (Wendat) word was reportedly Yandawezue (Great River)
• The southern Lenape, who encountered the Mississippi after being forced from the east coast, may have called it namesi sipu (fish river)

And here’s a list of even more indigenous names for the river.

My fanciful map of an alternate universe where the river was explored from south to north is below.

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It is really just an accident of history that the river we know today as the Mississippi carries that name for the length it does.

Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river, and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.I don’t know if the kids today still do this, but when I was in grade school (a five-mile walk across a frozen lake in bare feet), you couldn’t be a spelling champion until you mastered the eleven-letter word for the Most Famous River in North America: M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I. That spelling test would have been a lot easier if attempts to name the river something else had succeeded.

Welcome to episode 9 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast. Would the Mississippi sound just as sweet by any other name? That’s the question in today’s episode. I’ll take you through a little bit of the history of how the river came to be called Mississippi, some alternative names that came and went. The indigenous communities along the river had their own names for the Mississippi, we’ll talk a little bit about that. And we’ll talk about Big Muddy, Father of Waters, Old Man River; a little bit about those nicknames. I’m going to throw in just for a little bit of fun, a brief story on the search for where the river we call Mississippi begins. A quick shout-out to all the Patreon supporters. As always, thank you for your support! And now let’s get on to the episode.

Many of the early Europeans who reached the Mississippi tried to give it a new name, to shore up their own claims of discovery and ownership. The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto might be the exception. While he and his band of marauders were probably the first Europeans to see the big river up close, de Soto apparently didn’t christen the Mississippi. His scribe recorded the name Rio Grande (Big River), but map makers influenced by early Spanish explorations usually labeled it Rio Escondido (Hidden River) or Rio del Espíritu Santo (River of the Holy Spirit). None of those names stuck, though, probably because the Spanish didn’t remain in the Mississippi Valley to enforce their name claims.

A century later, Louis Jolliet and Father Jacques Marquette explored the Upper Mississippi. Both were already familiar with the name Mississippi, but Marquette thought the river should be called Immaculate Conception. His name didn’t gain traction, either. Meanwhile, Louis Jolliet wanted to name it in honor of Louis de Buade (the Governor of New Canada who commissioned the trip), but Rivière de Buade didn’t find favor beyond Jolliet.

La Salle referred to the river as both Mississippi and Colbert (for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the popular seventeenth century Minister of Finances under King Louis XIV). Father Louis Hennepin, the dour missionary sent by LaSalle to explore the Upper Mississippi went on a naming binge, even after some Dakota Indians held him hostage for a few weeks. While St. Anthony stuck as the name for the falls at present day Minneapolis, Lake Pepin isn’t known today as the Lake of Tears, nor did his repetition of Colbert stick to the Mississippi.

Some eighteenth-century maps labeled the lower part of the river “St. Louis,” apparently just after the death of King Louis XIV. That name for the river didn’t have staying power, either.

French voyageurs and Catholic missionaries heard the name Mississippi quite early. The first European to write down the name of the big river was probably Father Claude-Jean Allouez in 1667, a missionary spreading the Christian gospel to American Indians along the Fox River in central Wisconsin. Three years later he repeated the name in another letter to the Reverend Father Superior.

Father Allouez lived at St. Francis Xavier mission near Green Bay, with the Menominee Indians, who knew something about the Mississippi. They spoke an Algonquin language that is similar to the language spoken by the Ojibwe, from whom we got the words Messi-sipi.

It didn’t take long for that name to reach Europe. In 1681, Estienne Michallete created a map on which he refers to the river as “Mitchisipi ou Grande Riviere.” By the 1700s, Mississippi was the name most commonly used by cartographers.

It’s lucky for us that Mississippi survived. Apart from challenging the spelling skills of all those grade school children, the name is poetic, and a Mark Twain book called Life on the Immaculate Conception just wouldn’t have the same ring.

The Dakota Indians—neighbors and sometimes rivals of the Ojibwe—had their own name for the river we call Mississippi, as did the many other Native American communities who lived along the Mississippi. I’ll post some of those names in the show notes.

While it is widely accepted that the word Mississippi is derived from the Ojibwe words for the river, there’s an intriguing story from the southern end of the river involving the Choctaw nation. In his 1899 book History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians, Horatio Cushman related a story about the moment when migrating Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians reached the Mississippi (pre-European contact).

“After many months of wearisome travel, suddenly a vast body of flowing water stretched its mighty arm athwart their path. With unfeigned astonishment they gathered in groups upon its banks and gazed upon its turbid waters. Never before had they even heard of, or in all their wanderings stumbled upon aught like this. Whence its origin? Where its terminus? This is surely the Great Father the true source of all waters, whose age is wrapt in the silence of the unknown past, ages beyond all calculation, and as they then and there named it “Misha Sipokni” (Beyond Age, whose source and terminus’ are unknown).”

Cushman noted that this story had been told to missionaries as early as 1820, although probably with less of the romanticism that permeates Cushman’s retelling of it. By 1820, “Mississippi” would have already been in wide use as the name for the river and the myth-making was well underway. In 1928, Muriel Wright seized on Cushman’s story, suggesting a linguistic connection between the name we use for the river today and those Choctaw words.

“While it is generally accepted that ‘Mississippi’ is an Indian word meaning ‘the Father of Waters,’ yet one seldom hears a discussion with reference to its real meaning nor to which Indian language it belongs, there being more than two hundred and fifty tribes or bands of Indians living in the United States, each having its own language or dialect.

There is a story among the Choctaws, who lived in the Lower Mississippi country before the tribe came to Oklahoma, that they and their kinsmen, the Chickasaws, migrated from a far western country long, long ago. When their leaders, the wise prophets of the two tribes, reached the great river, in the van of the people, they contemplated its broad waters and exclaimed, ‘Misha sipokni!’ Misha in Choctaw means ‘beyond,’ with the idea of far beyond; and sipokni means ‘age,’ conveying the idea of something ancient. Therefore the words of the Choctaw and the Chickasaw prophets meant in substance, ‘Here is a river that is beyond all age,’ or ‘We have come to the most ancient of rivers.’”

As I’ve read various explanations of the meaning of Mississippi, I have occasionally come across someone who asserted that the word is derived from those Choctaw words (they usually reference the work of Cushman and Wright).

We have a strong paper trail that shows the use of the name Mississippi in the early seventeenth century by French fur traders and missionaries who worked among the Ojibwe people, but there’s no such record of the name Mississippi developing independently on the lower part of the river. It’s true that in du Pratz’s History of Louisiana, he translated Mississippi in a way that is consistent with the Choctaw words, but, again, Mississippi was already widely accepted as the name for the river by then (1758).

Still, it is intriguing that two different American Indian nations used a similar sounding phrase for what we now consider the same river, even if they mean something different.

The Mississippi has such a reputation now for its dark brown color that Big Muddy has become one of its nicknames. You may not be aware that there’s an actual Big Muddy River in Illinois that lives up to its name or that those of us who live around St. Louis, like me, insist that Big Muddy is North America’s other big river, the Missouri. When author Christopher Morris, who lives in Texas, visited St. Louis while promoting his book about the Mississippi, he took a little flak from folks around here for naming his book Big Muddy.

Lewis and Clark would be on my side. When they explored the US’s new territory in 1804-1806, they drew much of their drinking water from the Missouri River. They commented that a single pint of water from the river yielded half a wine glass’s worth of sludge. That’s muddy.

Most of that muck is runoff from the eastern Rocky Mountains and the vast central plains of the US. The Missouri donates that sediment to the Mississippi, which relocated the dirt from the middle of North America to the end of the continent where it created Louisiana and parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Big Muddy to Big Mud.

Even though the Missouri carries a heck of a lot less sediment than it once did thanks to the large dams on the upper Missouri, the Missouri still accounts for about 80% of the sediment load in the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

In spite of the overwhelming evidence that the Missouri River is really Big Muddy, some people still need convincing. St. Louis has a Big Muddy Dance Company, a Big Muddy Blues Festival (held on the Mississippi riverfront), and Big Muddy Adventures that takes people canoeing on both muddy rivers. There’s a movie called Big Muddy (1998) that is set in Memphis, not Omaha, and the movie called Mud, while obviously set (and shot) on the Mississippi River, doesn’t even mention the river’s name once in the two-hour film!

The Mississippi’s reputation for muddiness isn’t fair. In 1712, Father Pierre-Gabriel Marest, then living at Kaskaskia, Illinois, wrote in a letter:

“Seven leagues below the mouth of the Illinois River is found a large river called the Missouri—or more commonly Pekitanoui; that is to say, ‘muddy water’—which empties into the Mississippi on the West side; it is extremely rapid, and it discolors the beautiful water of the Mississippi.”

He wasn’t alone in his perceptions. Over a century later, Charles Lanman wrote:

“The moment that you pass the mouth of the Missouri on your way up the Father of Waters, you seem to be entering an entirely new world, whose every feature is ‘beautiful exceedingly.’ The shores now slope with their green verdure to the very margin of the water, which is now of a deep green color, perfectly clear, and placid as the slumber of a babe.”

The brown water of today’s Upper Mississippi is a consequence of human activity; you can’t blame the Mississippi for it. Along the upper portion of its length, the Mississippi runs clear until the Minnesota River dumps a heavy sediment load into it at Minneapolis, a consequence of deforestation along the river and modern row agriculture. It doesn’t get any better as you head south from there, through the heart of today’s industrial agriculture belt.

Still, that Missouri River is thicker and a darker cocoa than the Mississippi. At the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers twenty miles north of St. Louis, you can follow the mud trail of the Missouri for several miles downriver before the two rivers finally finish mixing their flows. That’s why the Missouri is Big Muddy to us in St. Louis; it fouls our Mississippi. Or at least it used to be more obvious about it.

So maybe we can compromise. You can call the Mississippi River “Big Muddy” but only south of its confluence with the Missouri River; leave the northern part of the river out of it. We’ll just pretend that we don’t know what’s going on in Burlington, Iowa (Big Muddy Bar and Grill) and La Crosse, Wisconsin (the Big Muddy Run) or that you have to go north of the Twin Cities today to find a clear Mississippi, like to, appropriately, Clearwater, Minnesota.

Big Muddy is obviously not the only nickname for the Mississippi. The Mississippi has also been known as the Father of Waters since at least the 18th century. The earliest known use of a phrase like Father of Waters appeared in Antoine Simon Le Page du Pratz’s classic The History of Louisiana, published in 1763 (in English; it was originally published in French in 1758). He wrote:

“The Missisippi divides this colony from north to south into two parts almost equal. The first discoverers of this river by the way of Canada, called it Colbert, in honour of that great Minister. By some of the savages of the north it is called Meact-Chassipi, which literally denotes, The Ancient Father of Rivers, of which the French have, by corruption formed Missisippi.”

In 1813, the phrase appeared in its familiar form in The Weekly Register:

“The Mississippi is the Nile of America. The aborigines who resided on its banks called it Mechaseba or Father of Waters. A name, which at once conveys to the mind an idea of the mighty flood, and the simplicity of its description.”

President Lincoln knew the nickname, as well. After Grant had captured Vicksburg, Lincoln wrote in a letter to James C. Conkling: “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” Maybe Lincoln heard that phrase during one of his flat boat trips down the Mississippi in 1828 or 1831.

Back to that story about the Choctaw phrase misha sipokni. A few years ago, I corresponded with Jason Lewis from the Choctaw Tribal Language Program about it. He confirmed that the naming story related by Cushman is familiar to most Choctaw in Mississippi. Assuming that the phrase was used by the Choctaw before Europeans arrived, it’s possible that we carried the name Mississippi from the north but merged it (or confused it) with the meaning of the Choctaw words. So instead of “river spread out over a wide area” we called it Father of Waters, which is basically what du Pratz did.

Other rivers around the world have similar nicknames. The Nile is sometimes called the Father of All Rivers, while Thais regard the Mekong River as the Mother of Waters. (In 1860, Emilie Marguerite Cowell called the Mississippi the “muddy ‘Mother of rivers.’”) We tend to see big rivers in parental terms.

How we see our parents changes as we grow up, though. For many of us, we eventually crossed a threshold where our father was no longer dad but the “old man” (not to be confused with “my old man”, which we reserve for a boyfriend or husband). Maybe we’ve done something similar with the Mississippi. As we’ve grown up as a country, our Father of Waters became “Old Man River.”

The concept of the river as an old man isn’t a recent phenomenon as I mentioned with the Choctaw phrase for the river meaning “a river beyond age” and Du Pratz’s translation of Mississippi as “Ancient Father of Rivers.” Still, while there’s an echo of Old Man River in those phrases, that exact phrase apparently isn’t used until the 1920s when it appears in the song of the same name composed by Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern. Not every nickname for the Mississippi is as ancient as its waters.

Nicknames are often whimsical, but what we call something matters. When Joliet tried to name the river Colbert, he wasn’t just sucking up to his boss, he was also staking an ownership claim for the French colonial empire. He was trying to define who belonged on that river in the future, or who would control access to it, anyway. Other names serve similar roles.

In the twentieth century, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a system of twenty-nine locks and dams on the Upper Mississippi. Lock #1 is at Hastings, Minnesota, and the last lock, #27, is at Granite City, Illinois. The dams impound water to create a minimum depth of nine feet so big boats can travel the river consistently.

The Corps calls the area upstream of each dam a navigation pool and numbers each one for the dams that created them. For example, the area upriver of lock #9 but downriver of lock #8 is called Pool 9. It’s not uncommon for folks who live along the Upper Mississippi to talk about where they live or fished by using these pool numbers. “I caught some big walleyes in Pool 7 the other day” or “From my house, I can see Pool 12.”

Engineers gave us the language of “pools”, which, intentionally or not, redefines the river, changing it from a natural system to a human-controlled route for moving big boats. It tells us who is supposed to be there: barges that carry bulk goods. It also advances an ideology that this river, the Mississippi, is something that exists for our convenience, to make over as we wish to help us make a few extra bucks. Pools we can control; rivers we can’t.

One of the newest names for the Mississippi comes courtesy of the US Department of Transportation, (USDOT) which was authorized by Congress to identify and name water routes that could be integrated with land transportation. (A cynic like me would suggest that this is yet another attempt by highly subsidized shipping interests to secure more subsidies for a transportation system of dubious economic value.)

The USDOT designated the Mississippi from St. Paul to the Illinois River as M-35 (“Waterway of the Saints); M-55 runs from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico. It has a ring to it! Imagine Mark Twain’s revised book: Life on the M-35. Or the new cover version of an old Jimmie Rodgers tune: Miss the M-55 and You. It’s enough to give me the M-35 Blues.

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While we settled on the name Mississippi by the mid-eighteenth century, we were still trying to define what the name applied to—specifically, just where the river we called Mississippi began. This wasn’t just an act of intellectual curiosity. At the end of the eighteenth century, border disputes between the US and England couldn’t be resolved without identifying the source of the Mississippi.

In 1798, British surveyor David Thompson dipped into northern Minnesota to poke around for the Mississippi’s source, settling on Turtle Lake (north of today’s Bemidji and about forty miles from Lake Itasca). Zebulon Pike, who explored the upper reaches of the Mississippi in 1805-1806 thought the river began at Leech Lake, which is about thirty-four miles east of Lake Itasca (although he also said that Red Cedar Lake, now Cass Lake, was the “upper source”).

The colorful Italian explorer Giacomo Beltrami slogged through the area in 1823, stating with great confidence that the Mississippi began at a place he called Lake Julia (which he also declared the source of the Red River of the North); Lake Julia is some sixty miles north of Lake Itasca. Beltrami, by the way, named the lake for Giulia Spada dei Medici, a close friend whose death in 1820 was among the forces that compelled him to wander the world.

In 1832, Henry Schoolcraft determined that Lake Itasca was the source of the Mississippi, thanks largely to the help from his Ojibwe (Chippewa) guide, Ozaawindib, who took him there. The Ojibwe called the lake Elk Lake; they already knew that it was the place where the river they called Missi zibi began. Early French voyageurs had also visited the lake and adopted the same name, translating it into French as Lac la Biche. Trader William Morrison claimed to have visited the lake several times in the early 1800s when he worked as a trader in the area.

So Schoolcraft wasn’t the first Euro-American to visit the lake, and other people were already pretty sure that the lake was the source of the Mississippi. Maybe that’s why Schoolcraft’s visit was so quick and lacked any real scientific rigor. He trusted the information he got from talking with traders and Ojibwe Indians that the lake was the true source. He and his party zipped over to the lake during a military mission and did a quick look around, observing that the lake was in a bowl-shaped depression with no other streams coming or going.

One of the members of the Schoolcraft expedition, Lieutenant James Allen, dutifully recorded this observation:

“There can be no doubt but that this is the true source and fountain of the longest and largest branch of the Mississippi. All our information that we had been able to collect on the way, from traders and Indians, pointed to it as such; and our principal Indian guide, Yellow Head [Ozaawindib], who has proved to us his close intelligence of the country, represents the same. . . . In fact, the whole country showed that there was no stream beyond, for the lake was shut in on all sides by pine hills, and the only opening through them was that by which it discharged itself.”

Schoolcraft, though, is credited as the discoverer of the source of the Mississippi. His prize, besides lasting fame, was christening the lake with a proper European-sounding name. With the help of William Boutwell, he coined the name Itasca by borrowing letters from two Latin words: veritas (truth) and caput (head). He fused the middle letters of that phrase to form the word Itasca.

Since Schoolcraft’s claim, there have been periodic disputes about whether Lake Itasca is indeed the true source of the Mississippi. Some hydrologists consider the source to be Hernando de Soto Lake because it has an underground aquifer that connects to Lake Itasca, while others insist that Nicollet Creek is really the beginning of the Mississippi.

They could all be right, even Beltrami. Defining the “source” of a river, especially a big one, is difficult and there is no single, widely accepted method. Two definitions have been common: the most distant point upstream that carries the most water and the farthest point upstream on the longest tributary.

Neither definition works perfectly. As for the former, the volume of water in a river varies throughout the year, so someone would have to measure river volumes many times a year for several years to get a reliable average, and who wants to do that?

The latter definition isn’t much better. When Euro-Americans ran around assigning their own names to rivers, they didn’t always know how long each river’s tributary was. Besides, rivers are dynamic and often cut new channels through meanders. A river that measures up today might not be the headwaters stream tomorrow after it shaves a few miles off its length.

Modern hydrologists take a different approach. They categorize rivers based on its number of branches using a system proposed by Arthur Strahler in 1952 (usually called the Strahler stream number, of course). A first-order stream has no tributaries; a second-order stream is created when two single-order streams merge. In this system, first- through third-order streams could be considered headwaters streams, and a stream doesn’t become a river until it reaches the seventh order (when two sixth-order streams merge). Based strictly on stream order, the Mississippi officially becomes a river just north of Minneapolis when it merges with the Crow River; by the time it reaches the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi is a tenth-order river. (The Amazon tops out as a twelfth order river, the highest for any river on the planet.)

This system basically dodges the issue of defining a wellspring by acknowledging that a river grows from multiple sources, all those lower order streams. A river may therefore have headwaters, but it doesn’t start from a single source. If you tried to mark the Mississippi Headwaters based on the Strahler system, you’d have to put up a sign at the beginning of the each of the hundreds of first- through third-order streams that feed the Mississippi, which would obviously take a lot of signs. Scientists just don’t make good publicists.

All of this is really just an academic exercise, though. The river we call Mississippi is just one part of a series of connected streams and rivers. We gave it a single name because it makes our lives easier when we impose some order on the world. We’ve tried to define a set of rules for determining a river’s source or headwaters, but as humans, we’re just not that good at agreeing to a common set of rules, much less following them. So if you think you have a better way to define what we mean by the source of a river, feel free to propose it. I’m sure plenty of us would adopt it, and many more would be happy to tell you why it’s a terrible idea.

In spite of our inability to agree on a common definition for the source of a river, we somehow managed to agree to use the name Mississippi for the river that bisects the U.S. How did a name used by the Ojibwe Indians come to be the one used for the whole river, one that stretches from the vast (and frigid) pine forests of the north all the way to warm coastal marshes two thousand miles downstream, passing through territory where many other Native American nations lived, each of which had their own name for that same river? Why did Mississippi survive when Ny-Tonks (Quapaw) or Wakpa Tanka (Caddo) or some variant of those didn’t?

Well, we named the Mississippi backwards. The name Mississippi prevailed in large part because the people who made the maps explored the river mostly from north to south. In 1820, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft was part of the Lewis Cass expedition in northern Minnesota. As they explored the area around what is now called Cass Lake (the Ojibwe called it Red Cedar Lake), Schoolcraft recorded this observation about one of the streams that entered the lake:

“This branch is considered the largest inlet, and preserves, in the language of the voyageurs, the name of the Mississippi.”

Schoolcraft knew about the tradition among the voyageurs to call that stream Mississippi and continued using that same name. The word Mississippi comes from the Ojibwe people, who were key trading partners with those early voyageurs. These are the people who learned the Ojibwe language and place names, many of which were then recorded by the missionaries, the literate ones among those early Europeans. Those place names then reached the Europeans who were making the first maps of North America.

Those early French explorers and missionaries spent most of their time in the northern reaches of the Mississippi basin. In 1683, Father Louis Hennepin published a book—it was a big hit—about his travels around the upper Mississippi. The book included a map that showed a solid line for the Mississippi (he labeled it Colbert) that extended from Canada to roughly the Arkansas River. Below that point, a dotted line to the Gulf of Mexico represented the unknown region where the river ends.

Those early French missionaries and voyageurs didn’t know much about the southern end of the river, because they first encountered the upper part of the river and explored it by traveling south with the current. They picked up the name “Mississippi” from the indigenous people who lived in the north, the Ojibwe Indians, and carried that name with them as they floated downstream.

They didn’t follow any rigid set of rules about which branch carried more volume or was longer; they just applied the name to the body of water as they traveled it. And it stuck. It is really just an accident of history that the river we know today as the Mississippi carries that name for the length it does.

If those early Europeans had first explored the Mississippi from its mouth and traveled upriver, the map of North American rivers would look very different today. Each time explorers reached a confluence of sizeable rivers, they would have to decide which branch was the main stem and would therefore carry the name of the river they were on. They might have made their decision based on the volume or length of the branches, or maybe they would have picked the one that just looked right.

Heading north from the Gulf, the Ohio is shorter than the Mississippi by over three hundred miles, but it carries a lot more water, nearly 50% more most of the time. If you look down at the Mississippi-Ohio confluence from Fort Jefferson Hill at Wickliffe, Kentucky it looks like the Ohio River is the one that continues south, with the Mississippi smacking into the Ohio at a steep angle. Continuing further north, the Missouri is longer than the Mississippi, drains an area more than three times the size of the Upper Mississippi, and usually carries more water, too (at least before it was constrained by several dams in the 20th century).

At the place the Dakota Indians called bdote, the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, the Mississippi is the longer of the two, but they each carry about the same volume of water. But if you look closely at the characteristics of the two river valleys, as geologist Wendell Duffield argued in 2012, there is better geologic continuity from the Minnesota River Valley down through the Mississippi Valley.

This is no surprise. The valleys below Minneapolis were carved by the same glacial meltwaters flowing out of Glacial Lake Agassiz down a super-river we’ve called Warren. If these conventions had all been followed, the names of North America rivers could look very different today. Look at the show notes for a map that shows my own fanciful take on how the rivers might have been named, but I’m assuming that the name Minnesota would carry south from bdote, then Missouri would be the name to the Ohio, except I’ve given the Ohio a new name: Batsun River. I took the Caddo Indian words for the river, Báhat Sássin, and Anglicized them, as we certainly would have done.

If all these names had been used, Mark Twain’s Minnesota River would have ended north of St. Louis, which would have been the great city on the Missouri River. New Orleans would be the rowdy city on the Batsun River. Lake Itasca would probably still be Elk Lake, the outlet for a stream called Mississippi that ended at Minneapolis. The Minnesota River would not have inspired a grand search for its headwaters (it’s in South Dakota, if you’d like to visit). Schoolcraft and Pike would have had to find other expeditions to make them famous.

There would be no epic canoe trips on the Mississippi River. Maybe young and old adventurers and stand-up paddleboarders would challenge themselves with a 2,250-mile trip (3,621 km) ride down the middle of the continent on the Minnesota/Missouri/Batsun River complex to the sea. Or maybe they would challenge themselves with a 3,490-mile trip (5,616 km) from the Rockies down the length of the Missouri and Batsun Rivers to the Gulf of Mexico.

There’d be no Great River, just a couple of Pretty Good Ones. Paul Robeson would not have sung Old Man River. The Big Muddy would run through the great interior of North America, and the Father of Waters would just be some beverage company’s name on a plastic bottle. The great mythology of the river we know today as the Mississippi would have been spread out among several rivers, none of them named Mississippi. And I wouldn’t be doing a podcast about a river.

In The Boy and the River: Without Beginning or End, T.S. Eliot wondered “At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means?” The Mississippi means many things to many people, but only because the name Mississippi flows from Minnesota to the Gulf, through the heart of the US. It became what the Mississippi means when those early French explorers carried the name from the indigenous peoples of the north down to the Gulf of Mexico and back to Europe, so generations of mapmakers would continue to pass it on to the rest of us.

At what point does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? I’d say around 1667.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app, so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free, but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon, you help keep the program going. Just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guidebooks for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original music by Noah Fence. See you next time.