This lightweight, tough, maneuverable vessel was known only to the northern tribes for the very good reason that the paper birch ( Betula papyrifera) from which it is made grows no farther south than Wisconsin.īut the most important reasons for the delay in exploring the Mississippi were political. In summer, however, the French had an advantage over the Spanish explorers of the lower Mississippi: the birchbark canoe. The rigorous winters limited travelling time, increased costs, and deterred all but the brave or the ignorant from winter journeys. Lawrence, had to face winters in which temperatures of thirty degrees below zero were not uncommon, the land was covered with deep snow, and the river was icebound. French explorers, approaching the river from their colonies on the St.

In the north, climate was a great obstacle. Only when the Spaniards probed inland did they find the continent’s largest river. One reason for this lag is the nature of the Mississippi delta, which is awkward to find from the sea and dangerous to navigate. Despite this there was a gap of three centuries between the date when white men first saw the river and the time of the final discovery of its source, small lakes in upper Minnesota, about 175 miles from the Canadian border. The fact that the Indians were often friendly and peaceable toward the white man, and that there were no difficult cataracts or rapids for most of the river’s course, made the Mississippi easy to explore. French traders heard it from the Chippewa and the other northern tribes and carried it downstream with them, until this word, variously translated as “Big Water” or “Father of Waters,” became the accepted name from Montreal to Louisiana.

The aborigines used a variety of names to describe the river, but it was the Algonquian name, “Mississippi,” which finally won out. Even the Sioux, now associated with the Great Plains, were once a river tribe and paddled fleets of war canoes on the upper Mississippi. These Indians were in a constant state of turmoil, fighting one another and moving up and down the river. Spreading in a vast belt from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico was a multitude of tribes-Fox, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Iowa, Illinois, Winnebago, Miami, Masouten, Chickasaw, Oto, Quapaw, and others. Before the days of the explorers, the Mississippi was an Indian river.

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