Mississippi River Commission was forbidden by Congress to build levees to protect lands from overflow, a majority of its members believed them useful for the purpose of navigation improvement. They have, however, effected no sensible improvement in the navigation of the river at low stages, and at other stages no improvement was needed for the purposes of navigation. Neither did they prevent a destructive flood in 1897 and again in 1903. By the 30th of June 1908, $57,510,216.81 had been appropriated for the commission’s work below the mouth of the Ohio.
From the mouth of the Ohio to the mouth of the Missouri, a distance of about 210 m., the river is affected by back water from the Ohio which increases the deposit of sediment, and although the banks increase in height above Cape Girardeau the channel was in its. natural state frequently a mile or more in width, divided by islands, and obstructed by bars on which the low-water depth was only 312 to 4 ft. The improvement was begun in 1872, and in 1881 a project was adopted for narrowing the channel to approximately 2500 ft. In 1896 dredging was begun and in 1905 the further execution of the original project of 1881 was discontinued, because of a new plan for a channel 14 ft. deep from the Great Lakes to the Gulf.
The Upper Mississippi carries only a small amount of sediment and was navigable in its natural state to St Paul, although at low water the larger river boats could ascend no farther than La Crosse, Wisconsin. In 1879 Congress adopted a project for obtaining a channel with a minimum depth at low water of 412 ft., chiefly by means of contraction works. In 1907 Congress authorized further contraction, dredging, the construction of a lateral canal at Rock Island Rapids, and the enlargement of that at Des Moines Rapids with a view to obtaining a channel nowhere less than 6 ft. in depth at low water. By means of two locks and dams, which were begun in 1894 and were about three-fourths complete in 1908, a navigable channel of the same depth will be extended from St Paul to Minneapolis. The United States government has constructed dams at the outlets of lakes Winnibigashish, Cass, Leech, Pine, Sandy and Pokegama, and thereby created reservoirs having a total storage capacity of about 95,000,000,000 cub. ft. This reservoir system, which may be much enlarged, is also beneficial in that it mitigates floods and regulates the flow for manufacturing purposes and for logging.
Although the United States government has expended more than $70,000,000 on the Mississippi river between the mouth of the Missouri and the head of the passes, the improvement of navigation thereon has not been great enough to make it possible for river freighters to force down railway rates by competition. But it is no longer merely a question of competition. The productivity of this region has become so enormous that railways alone cannot meet the requirements of its commerce, and a persistent demand has arisen for a channel 14 ft. deep from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. The first great impetus to this demand was given in 1900, when a canal 24 ft. in depth, and known as the Chicago Drainage Canal, was opened from the Chicago river to Lockport, Illinois, on the Des Plaines river, 34 m. from Lake Michigan. Two years later Congress appropriated $200,000 for the Mississippi River Commission to make a survey and prepare plans, with estimates of cost, for a navigable waterway 14 ft. in depth from Lockport to St Louis. The commission reported favourably in 1905, and in 1907 Congress provided for another commission, which in June 1909 reported against the 14 ft. channel, estimating that it would cost $128,000,000 for construction and $6,000,000 annually for maintenance, and considered a 9-ft. channel (8 ft. between Ohio and St Louis) sufficient for commercial purposes.
The Ohio is commercially the most important tributary, and in flood time most of the commerce on the Lower Mississippi consists of coal and other heavy freight received from the mouth of this river. Its navigation at low water has also been improved by dredging, rock excavation and contraction works. In its upper reaches a channel 9 ft. in depth had been obtained before 1909 by the construction of a number of locks with collapsible dams which are thrown down by a flood. It is the plan of the government to extend this system to the mouth of the river, and it has been estimated that a channel 12 to 14 ft. in depth may ultimately be obtained by a system of mountain reservoirs. Furthermore, the government has given to a corporation a franchise for the connexion of the Ohio at Pittsburg with Lake Erie near Ashtabula, Ohio, by means of a canal 12 ft. in depth. The Missouri is navigable from its mouth to Fort Benton, a distance of 2285 m., and it had become a very important highway of commerce when the first railway, the Hannibal & St Joseph, reached it in 1859. Its commerce then rapidly disappeared, but regular navigation between Kansas City and St Louis was re-established in 1907 and a demand has arisen for a 12-ft. channel from the mouth of the river to Sioux City, Iowa. The Red, Arkansas, White, Tennessee, and Cumberland rivers, which are parts of the Mississippi system, have each a navigable mileage exceeding 600 m.
History.—Although the Mississippi river was discovered in its lower course by Hernando de Soto in 1541, and possibly by Alonso Alvarez de Pineda in 1519, Europeans were not yet prepared to use the discovery, and two Frenchmen, Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette, first made it generally known to the civilized world by a voyage down the river from the mouth of the Wisconsin to the mouth of the Arkansas in 1673.[1] In 1680 Louis Hennepin, sent by La Salle, who planned to acquire for France the entire basin drained by the great river and its tributaries, explored the river from the mouth of the Illinois to the Falls of St Anthony, where the city of Minneapolis now stands, and two years later La Salle himself descended from the mouth of the Illinois, to the Gulf, named the basin “Louisiana,” and took formal possession of it in the name of his king, Louis XIV. By the war which terminated (1763) in the Treaty of Paris, Great Britain wrested from France all that part of the basin lying east of the middle of the river (except the island of New Orleans at its mouth), together with equal rights of navigation; and the remainder of the basin France had secretly ceded to Spain in 1762. During the War of Independence the right to navigate the river became a troublesome question. In 1779 the Continental Congress sent John Jay to Spain to negotiate a treaty of commerce, and to insist on the free navigation of the Mississippi, but the Spanish government refused to entertain such a proposition, and new instructions that he might forego that right south of 31° N. latitude reached him too late. While the commissioners from Great Britain and the United States were negotiating a treaty of peace at Paris, Spain, apparently supported by France, sought to prevent the extension of the western boundary of the United States to the Mississippi, but was unsuccessful, and the United States acquired title in 1783 to all that portion of the basin east of the middle of the river and north of 31° N. lat. In 1785 Congress appointed John Jay to negotiate a commercial treaty with Don Diego de Gardoqui, the Spanish minister to the United States, but the negotiations resulted in nothing. For the next ten years the Spaniards imposed heavy burdens on the American commerce down the Mississippi, but in 1794 James Monroe, the United States minister to France, procured the aid of the French government in further negotiations, for which Thomas Pinckney had been appointed envoy extraordinary, and in 1795 Pinckney negotiated a treaty which granted to the United States the free navigation of the river from its source to the Gulf and the privilege of depositing American merchandise at the port of New Orleans or at some other convenient place on the banks. Spain retroceded Louisiana to France in 1800, but the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 left very little of the Mississippi basin outside of the United States.
As the headwaters of the river were not definitely known, the United States government sent Zebulon M. Pike in 1805 to explore the region, and on reaching Leech Lake, in February 1806, he pronounced that the main source. In 1820 Lewis Cass, governor of Michigan territory, which then had the Mississippi for its western boundary, conducted an expedition into the same region as far as Cass Lake, where the Indians told him that the true source was about 50 m. to the W.N.W., but as the water was too low to proceed by canoe he returned, and it remained for Henry Schoolcraft, twelve years later, to discover Lake Itasca, which occupies a low depression near the centre of the basin in which the river takes its rise. Jean N. Nicollet, while in the service of the United States government, visited Lake Itasca in 1836, and traced its principal affluent, since known as Nicollet’s Infant Mississippi river, a few miles S.S.W. from the lake’s western arm. Jacob Vradenberg Brower (1844–1905), who was commissioned by the Minnesota Historical Society in 1889 to make a more detailed survey, traced the source from Nicollet’s Infant Mississippi to the greater ultimate reservoir, which contains several lakelets, and lies beyond Lake Itasca, 2553 m. by water from the Gulf of Mexico, and 1558 ft. above the sea. Soon after this survey the state of Minnesota created Itasca State Park, which contains both Itasca Lake and its affluents from the south.
- ↑ It seems probable that Joliet and Marquette were preceded by two other Frenchmen, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Menard Chouart des Groseilliers, who apparently reached the Upper Mississippi in or about 1665; but their claim to priority has been the subject of considerable controversy, and, at all events, there was no general knowledge of the river until after the voyage of Joliet and Marquette.
