Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Mississippi River

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Located in the heart of North America is one of the most important rivers.  It isn’t the longest river in the world and it doesn’t carry the highest volume of water. However, its location makes it one of the most valuable rivers on Earth It has been the subject of songs, the location of military battles, and is one of the most important economic transportation corridors on the planet. Learn more about the Mississippi River and what makes it so different than any other river in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Search Past Episodes at fathom.fm Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It isn't the longest river in the world, and it doesn't carry the highest volume of water. However, its location makes it one of the most valuable rivers on Earth. It's been the subject of songs, the location of military battles, and is one of the most important economic transportation corridors on the planet. Learn more about the Mississippi River, and what makes it so different than any other river in the world on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time. to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thulein podcast from NPR. I previously did an episode on the longest river in the world, the Nile. Since then, I've set out doing episodes on many of the great rivers of the world. Each major river has its own personality, which is determined by its geography. I considered which river to focus on next, and I thought about the Amazon, of course, the Yang Sea, the Congo, the Danube, the Ganges, and the Indus. All of these rivers will be subjects of future episodes, but I decided to focus on the Mississippi next simply because of how different it is from the others. The Mississippi is the fourth longest river in the world when measured from its traditional source in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, behind the Amazon, Nile, and Yang Sea.

In terms of total water discharge, it's only the 13th largest river in the world. So what makes the Mississippi so different? It has to do with the entire Mississippi drainage basin. The Mississippi drainage basin is the fourth largest in the world behind the Amazon, Nile, and Congo. There's an enormous amount of water, but most of the basin is rainforest with a very low population density. The Nile flows through enormous tracks of desert. There are literally no tributaries all throughout Egypt, and the rapids near the Egyptian-Sudanese border make navigation beyond these rapids impossible.

Likewise, the Congo Basin consists mostly of rainforests like the Amazon, and like the Nile, there are rapids that make river navigation difficult. The Mississippi River Basin has none of these problems. Its location does not go through rainforests with poor soil, but rather through some of the most productive farmland in the world. But before I go into the economics of the Mississippi River, I would like to start from the beginning about how the river formed and its history. The word Mississippi comes from the Ajibuah term for the river, Missy Zibi, which, which translates simply means Great River. The most recent geologic evidence contends that the Mississippi River began flowing approximately 70 million years ago. The river at this time was much smaller than it currently is, and it grew in time as more tributaries began to flow into it.

In particular, the Missouri River appears to have connected to it about two million years ago. There was also a time several million years ago when the Mississippi had a water volume that was on a par with what the Amazon River is today. The thing which really made the modern Mississippi was the most recent ice age. About 50,000 years ago, there was a massive inland sea that drained through the Mississippi and created large floodplains. The river became the equivalent of a superhighway for the native people in the region. The Mississippi region is believed to be one of the locations in the world where agriculture and plant domestication was discovered independently.

There arose a people known as the Mississippian Culture, which existed from around the year 800 to 1600. The Mississippian culture didn't just exist along the Mississippi River, but also many of its tributaries. They're known for their large permanent settlements, which made them stand apart from other Aboriginal peoples in what is today the Central United States. One settlement in particular was the largest settlement north of Mexico, Cahokia. Cahokia probably had a population of about 40,000 people at its peak about 1,000 years ago. It was the largest settlement north of Mexico until Philadelphia passed it in population in 1780. The mountains of Cahokia can still be visited today.

It's located in southern Illinois overlooking the Mississippi River just across the river from St. Louis, Missouri. There were a large number of native tribes which lived in the Mississippi River basin, including The Crow, Dakota, Comanche, Blackfoot, Lakota, Pawnee, Omaha, Cheyenne, Sioux, Ojibua, Potawatomi, Hochuk, Fox, Kickapoo, Quapaw, and Chickasaw. And that list is far from exhaustive. The first European who reached the Mississippi River was the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. He reached the river around the modern-day state of Mississippi.

While the Spanish were exploring the south of the river, the French were exploring the north. The Jesuit priest, Jacques Marquette, and the explorer Louis Joliette explored the river by arriving through the Great Lakes. Joliet made an astonishing discovery. The Mississippi River Basin was only a two-mile or three-kilometer portage from the Chicago River, which flowed into Lake Michigan. This meant that the entire Great Lakes basin which flowed into the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River only required the creation of a very short canal to connect it to the entire Mississippi River basin which flowed out to the Gulf of Mexico. The Illinois and Michigan Canal was opened in 1848, so if you ever wondered why Chicago is located where it is, that's why. The Mississippi River became the border between the British and Spanish empires as per the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the seven years' war. war. Britain was seated all the land to the east, and Spain was given all the land to the west.

When the United States won its independence, the Treaty of Paris of 1783, a different Treaty of Paris, stipulated free navigation on the river. It stated, quote, the navigation of the river Mississippi, from its source to the ocean, shall forever remain free and open to the subjects of Great Britain and the citizens of the United States, end quote. It's here I should probably mention the most important and strategic city on the river, the city that sits in the city that sits near the mouth of the river as it enters the sea, New Orleans. New Orleans was founded in 1718 by the French Mississippi Company. While founded by the French and culturally a French city, it was actually given to Spain in the 1763 Treaty of Paris. While New Orleans is located in a

highly strategic location on the river, it's also located in an absolutely horrible location due to the fact that the city is sinking. But I will leave that story for another episode. Napoleon arranged for the Louisiana Territory, which was most of the land west of the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains to be given to the French. It remained in Spanish control until three weeks before France turned around and sold it to the United States in 1803. With the Louisiana purchase, the entirety of the Mississippi River and its basin was now part of the United States. The purchase ended up being one of the best deals in history as the Mississippi became vital for the expansion of the country and the growth of the economy.

The reason why the Mississippi was so important is that almost all the United States, you know, of the middle of the United States and all of the prime farmland had access to the Mississippi River via tributaries, which made transportation easy and cheap. Almost none of the tributaries had rapids or waterfalls which prevented barges from traveling down the river. This is why the Mississippi stands in contrast to so many of the major rivers of the world. This transportation network assisted in the dramatic growth of the United States and its economy in the 19th and 20th centuries. It also made the river extremely strategic. In the war, of 1812 between the Americans and the British, the British tried to take control of New Orleans,

which would give them control of all the international trade on the river. The American forces defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans in January of 1815. Two weeks after the war had ended, because word hadn't gotten there yet. During the American Civil War, the river once again became a strategic imperative. The Union instigated Operation Anaconda, which would basically control all the water around the Confederacy, including the Mississippi River. The Western Theater of the Civil War was primarily based on getting control of the Mississippi. The Union took early control of New Orleans and then worked their way south through a series of battles and naval conflicts, including the siege of Vicksburg. Starting in the 1830s, trade along the Mississippi increased dramatically with the introduction of steamboats.

Steamboats operated on the river until the first decade of the 20th century, and they were instrumental for the transportation of goods and passengers, especially between St. Louis and New Orleans. Here I should note that the river is very different depending on its location. St. Louis is where the Missouri River meets the Mississippi, making it a historically extremely important location. There is a reason why the ancient settlement of Cahokia was located near modern-day St. Louis. The Missouri River before St. Louis is actually longer than the Mississippi is before St. Louis. The river from St. Louis to New Orleans is very wide in meanders. It really becomes the superhighway that I spoke of before. Above St. Louis, the river is still significant, but it gets smaller as you go further north.

The next notable confluence is where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi. The town here is Cairo, Illinois, and it's spelled like Cairo, the capital of Egypt. If you were to travel back to the early or mid-19th century, most people would have probably bet that the biggest city in Illinois would probably have become Cairo, for the same reason that St. Louis became so big. The Ohio River is even more economically important than the Missouri River, yet Cairo never amounted to much. Today, it only has a population of 1,700 people, despite its strategic location. The northernmost point you can navigate up the river is Minneapolis, and this is because the last waterfall in the Mississippi is St. Anthony Falls.

And this is why Minneapolis is located where it is. Grain from the upper Midwest would come to Minneapolis for milling, and then barges would be loaded below the falls for transportation further south. One of the biggest disasters in the history of the Mississippi River occurred with the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. The flood covered 27,000 square miles or 70,000 square kilometers of southern states, primarily in the Mississippi Delta. 500 people died, and 600,000 people were displaced.

200,000 of those were African Americans. This displacement led to what became known as the Great Migration, which was the migration of rural black people in the south to urban areas in the north. The Great Flood is referenced in many blues songs from the era, including When the Levy Breaks by Memphis, Minnie and Kansas, Joe McCoy, which was later covered and popularized by Led Zeppelin. This great flood led to a series of engineering projects along the river to control future flooding. When the river gets to the Delta in Louisiana, it tends to meander constantly. Enormous amounts of silt are deposited in the area,

and it's able to absorb enormous amounts of water, which is really important when the area is hit by hurricanes. In 1950, the United States government realized that the main channel of the Mississippi River in Louisiana was starting to shift. It was going to divert to the steep, to the steeper Achofalaya River, which is a distributary of the Mississippi. And a distributary, by the way, is a river that forks off the main river, as opposed to a tributary which flows into the river. The Achofalaya was carrying 30% of the total water outflow of the Mississippi, and that was expected to increase to more than 50%. This began a huge engineering project to keep the Mississippi on its current channel which flows past New Orleans. This has resulted in an abnormal amount of silt

flowing out into the Gulf of Mexico, known as the Mississippi River sediment plume. Today, that plume keeps extending out into the Gulf of Mexico by 91 meters or 300 feet each year. What the plume gains is being lost by the rest of the coastline of Louisiana, which is being deprived of all the silt that it normally received from the river. Today, the Mississippi River is still a vital transportation route. Over 500 million tons of goods comes through just the port of New Orleans each year. Millions more tons of bulk goods, including grain, petroleum, iron, and gravel are transported between ports within the river basin system. The river today is estimated to be responsible for over $400 billion in annual economic activity.

Personal travel along the river has also made a comeback. There are now river cruises along the Mississippi, just like there are in Europe. A complete trip from St. Paul, Minnesota to New Orleans will take about three weeks. The Mississippi River is not just one of the biggest rivers in the world. but probably also the most economically important. And it has served as the basis for entire civilizations, and its importance will probably continue for centuries to come. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast.

The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. Today's review comes from listener Sunny Sequim over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, best podcast ever. Thank you for doing this podcast. I finished listening to all episodes within a few months of your two-year anniversary date. Learn so much. Curious about how your approach has been on researching a topic in such a short time that you're able to have a daily show. Hope you will consider doing an

episode on Taiwan where I grew up. Thanks, Lee Huay. The way I approach episodes is that I keep a running list of show ideas that now has over 750 ideas on it. Each idea is something that I already know something about. It's something that I've read about, or maybe I saw a documentary, or experienced firsthand through the course of my travels. So before I even start writing or researching the show, have a rough idea of what I'm going to say. For many episodes, it's more a matter of trying to figure out what I'm not going to say. For example, I could talk about the Mississippi River for hours. The trick is trying to condense it down to about 10 minutes. As for Taiwan, I've actually been there twice, and I've really enjoyed my time in Taipei. I have a couple of Taiwan-related

episodes on the list. One is about Sun Yat-Sen, which is not explicitly Taiwanese-related, but certainly deals with its modern foundation. And another is about the native people of the island, who is believed were the originators of the Micronesian and Polynesian migration into the Pacific. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostogram, you too can have it read in the show.