History and economy

Early settlement and exploration

As its respectful Indian name indicates, the Mississippi played an important role in the lives of the aboriginal peoples settled on its banks. To the Native American peoples of the river, the Mississippi was both highway and larder. On it they paddled their cottonwood dugouts and their bark canoes, and from it they took the fish that was a mainstay of their diet. Constant shifts of migration, local or large-scale, interwove tribal languages and cultures. By the time Europeans arrived, the Sioux, who originally had lived on the upper river, had withdrawn westward to give place to Ojibwa, Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Fox, and Sauk. Downriver the Illinois tribe had established prosperous agricultural communities. And in the lower valley itself lived clans of Choctaw, Koroa, Taensa, Chickasaw, Tunica, Yazoo, Pascagoula, Natchez, Biloxi, and Alibamu.

The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, commander of the first European expedition to penetrate to the river, had high hopes of plundering the southern tribes. In May 1541 his raiding force reached the river at a point south of what is now Memphis, Tennessee. But the “Rio Grande,” as the Spaniards called it, provided the newcomers with small profit and much grief. The river Indians launched repeated attacks; the Mississippi floods caught the Spanish unawares; and, ironically, de Soto, the European discoverer of the river, was buried in its waters, after which the rest of his disappointed expedition retreated to the sea, their homemade boats under fire from the Indians.

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The next European explorers of the river appeared in 1673 out of French Canada—two canoe loads of voyageurs commanded by Louis Jolliet, a French government agent, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest. Portaging from the Fox River to the Wisconsin, they paddled down the Mississippi as far as the mouth of the Arkansas River. Nine years later the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, sieur (lord) de La Salle, reached the delta itself, having opened the even-easier portage from the Great Lakes via the Illinois River. He grasped at once the strategic significance of the huge drainage system and promptly claimed the entire Mississippi basin for France. Within a generation the Mississippi became a vital link between France’s Gulf of Mexico settlements and Canada, and La Salle’s claim was vaguely designated as “Louisiana.”

But France’s grasp on the Mississippi was never firm. French traders settled the upper river, establishing towns like St. Louis and Prairie du Chien (now in Wisconsin), whose names survive to this day. But the lower river passed into Spanish hands in 1769, the Peace of Paris (1783) optimistically declared the river as the western boundary of the United States, and republican France reacquired the much-bartered stream only long enough to sell it to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase (1803). This last move recognized what had been obvious for a quarter of a century—the growing domination of the river by the Americans. They came by raft, flatboat, and ark (a “raft with a rim”), built and loaded on the left-bank tributaries that were in the forefront of the westward expansion of the United States. Unwieldy and expendable, these craft floated downstream to leave their cargoes and occupants as advance guards of American political and economic expansion. Only the long, slim keelboats made the return trip. They were worked upstream under pole, paddle, or sail or by the backbreaking “cordelle,” a system under which the crew went ashore with a long bow hawser and pulled the vessel upstream by brute strength.

The torch of exploration also passed to the Americans after the Louisiana Purchase. In 1805–06 the pioneer expedition of U.S. Army officer Zebulon Montgomery Pike struggled to within 80 miles (130 km) of the river’s source, and in 1832 Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an Indian agent for the U.S. government, identified and named Lake Itasca (from the Latin veritas caput, “true head”) as the Mississippi’s starting point.

Development of the river’s commerce

Built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1811, the New Orleans was the first steamboat to appear on the river. Like some fearful omen, its maiden voyage coincided with the series of powerful earth tremors centred in Missouri just south of St. Louis (called the New Madrid earthquake) that caused much flooding and sudden relocation of sections of the main channel. But the New Orleans won through, and within a decade its successors had wrought a revolution on the Mississippi. In 1814 only 21 steamboats called at New Orleans, whereas 191 arrived during 1819, and 14 years later more than 1,200 cargo ships were unloaded during the year. As the freight rates by steamer on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers plummeted, it became cheaper to send freight from Cincinnati, Ohio, to the U.S. east coast via the Mississippi and the long sea passage from New Orleans than to transport it over the Appalachians, a route that was 10 times shorter.

With the introduction of larger, high-pressure engines and more streamlined hulls, the steamboats extended their range, and the Mississippi became economic overlord to half the country. In 1820 the Western Engineer probed up the Missouri. In 1823 the Virginia churned its way up to Fort Snelling at the junction of the Mississippi with the Minnesota River. The steamboats brought an era of unprecedented prosperity to the river. Town after town sprang up, dependent on the regular arrival of packet boats bringing mail and passengers or freight boats that took on local produce and left off manufactured goods. Riverbank plantations maintained their own landings so they could ship crops directly, and riverside towns vied with each other to provide services such as fueling and warehousing. The waterfront at New Orleans, with its double line of twin-stacked steamers mingled with oceangoing ships, was among the busiest in the country.

In 1861, however, came the Civil War; a sharp struggle for control of this vital waterway ensued immediately, which culminated in Ulysses S. Grant’s siege of Vicksburg, helped by the fortified gunboats and armoured steamers of the Union. When Vicksburg and the river fell into Union hands, the Confederacy was dealt a heavy commercial and strategic blow. Pres. Abraham Lincoln, who himself had been a Mississippi flatboatman, could report that “the Father of Waters flows unvexed to the sea.”

During the years immediately after the Civil War, there was a brief but glorious revival in river traffic. New and faster steamboats were built and operated, often in rivalry to one another, a rivalry made famous by the three-day race, commencing June 30, 1870, between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee . The latter won by dint of stripping out all unnecessary superstructure and taking on extra fuel supplies from tenders while steaming upriver at full speed. Yet even as the river was at its most flamboyant, the same westward expansion that had brought its development now passed it over. With the construction of east-west railroads and canals, the Mississippi’s north-south alignment came to be regarded as a nuisance. Towns that had once sought to become staging posts up and down the river now competed to become crossing points. Commercial traffic dwindled, and the grand luxury paddle wheelers gave way to sombre, more prosaic towboats with blocks of barges.