- 2 days ago
The Mississippi River is far more than a line on a map — it’s a living force that has shaped American history, geography, law, music, and industry. From Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, this giant river system drains nearly half the continental United States, feeds hundreds of species, and has repeatedly changed course, flooded cities, and redrawn state borders.
Along the way, you’ll hear about Cahokia, steamboats, Mark Twain, the Sultana disaster, the New Madrid earthquakes, the Old River Control Structure, and the strange legal battles created when a river moves faster than the law can follow. It’s a deep dive into river science, U.S. history, environmental change, and the hidden story of the Mississippi Delta.
Perfect for viewers who enjoy geography documentaries, American history, river systems, and educational deep dives into the Mississippi River. Also ideal for searchers looking for Mississippi facts, U.S. geography explained, river engineering, delta history, and documentary-style history and science content.
Along the way, you’ll hear about Cahokia, steamboats, Mark Twain, the Sultana disaster, the New Madrid earthquakes, the Old River Control Structure, and the strange legal battles created when a river moves faster than the law can follow. It’s a deep dive into river science, U.S. history, environmental change, and the hidden story of the Mississippi Delta.
Perfect for viewers who enjoy geography documentaries, American history, river systems, and educational deep dives into the Mississippi River. Also ideal for searchers looking for Mississippi facts, U.S. geography explained, river engineering, delta history, and documentary-style history and science content.
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LearningTranscript
00:00Did you know that parts of the Mississippi River once flowed backwards?
00:03Or that the only reason it still flows through New Orleans is because of Einstein?
00:07At least, sort of.
00:08How about that there'd be no Taylor Swift, Chapel Roan, or Rolling Stones if it wasn't
00:13for a flood in the Mississippi Delta?
00:14There's so much more to Old Man River than most people know about, and you're about
00:18to find some of that out.
00:19Today we're going to give you 50 facts about the Mississippi that'll help you to realize
00:23why it's one of the most important rivers in North America, if not the world.
00:26The Mississippi River runs about 2,350 miles from a small lake in northern Minnesota down
00:33to the Gulf of Mexico.
00:34Water from parts or all of 31 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces drains into it.
00:40That drainage basin covers around 1,245,000 square miles, which works out to about 41%
00:47of the continental United States and about an eighth of the entirety of North America.
00:51Only the Amazon and the Congo drain larger basins than the Mississippi-Achafalaya system.
00:56When we're talking about this river, we're really talking about a plumbing system that
01:00covers nearly half the country.
01:01The source is Lake Itasca in Itasca State Park in Minnesota.
01:05At the spot where the river officially leaves the lake, the Mississippi is only about 18 inches
01:10deep and roughly 18 feet wide, and you can walk across it on stepping stones.
01:14The current moves at about 1.2 miles per hour.
01:17People wade into it and float downstream on intertubes.
01:20That's the same river that 2,000 miles downstream is carrying ocean-going freighters.
01:25The first European to be led to that actual source point didn't arrive until 1832.
01:30His name was Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and he wouldn't have found it without his Ojibwe
01:35guide, a man named Oza Windip, who already knew exactly where it was.
01:39The Mississippi forms the border of 10 different U.S. states.
01:42It separates Minnesota from Wisconsin, Iowa from Wisconsin, Iowa from Illinois, Missouri
01:48from Illinois, Missouri from Kentucky, Missouri from Tennessee, Arkansas from Tennessee, Arkansas
01:53from Mississippi, and Louisiana from Mississippi.
01:56The river does a huge amount of legal and political work.
02:00And because the U.S. Census tells us about 30% of all Americans live somewhere in the Mississippi
02:04basin, that makes this one river responsible for drawing borders that govern roughly a third
02:09of the country's population.
02:10On the upper half of the river, between Minneapolis and St. Louis, there are 29 lock and dam structures.
02:16They form a stairway of water that compensates for a 420-foot elevation drop.
02:21Without that staircase, commercial traffic couldn't get up and down the river.
02:24A full Mississippi tow is one towboat pushing 15 barges, lashed together three wide and five
02:30deep.
02:31The whole thing is about 1,200 feet long, which is four football fields of barge.
02:36You don't find locks and dams on the lower half of the river.
02:38That's because the Missouri, the Ohio, the Illinois, the Arkansas, and various other rivers
02:44flow into the Mississippi and dump in enough water that downstream of St. Louis, the river
02:48is naturally wide enough and deep enough to handle anything you want to put on it.
02:52The deepest point on the entire river is at Algiers Point, just downstream from New Orleans,
02:57where the Mississippi is roughly 200 feet deep.
02:59Compare that to the 18 inches at the source.
03:02The flow at the source is about 6 cubic feet of water per second.
03:05The flow at New Orleans averages about 600,000 cubic feet per second.
03:10That's a 100,000-fold increase from one end of the river to the other.
03:14Along the way, the river passes through several natural lakes.
03:17Lake Winnebagoches in northern Minnesota is about 11 miles wide, and that's actually the
03:22widest point the Mississippi ever reaches.
03:24A couple hundred miles downstream between Minnesota and Wisconsin is Lake Pepin, which is about
03:29two miles wide and deep enough for commercial navigation.
03:32So the Mississippi is running through what are effectively natural reservoirs for much of
03:36its upper section.
03:37The river supports roughly 260 species of fish, which is around a quarter of all the freshwater
03:43fish species in North America.
03:44Some of those species are extraordinarily old.
03:47Some of the things living in the Mississippi are older than the entire era of dinosaurs.
03:52Gulf Sturgeon have fossils going back between 66 and 100 million years.
03:57Catfish fossils date to about 70 million years.
04:00Bofin, another native fish, belongs to a family that first appeared in the Jurassic.
04:04The American Paddlefish, which is sometimes called the Mississippi Paddlefish because of how
04:09closely associated it is with this system, has a fossil record going back about 125 million
04:14years to the early Cretaceous.
04:16That means paddlefish were swimming in these waters millions of years before Tyrannosaurus
04:20rex existed.
04:21They can grow to almost 5 feet long, weigh around 60 pounds, and live up to 60 years.
04:27And oldest of all, alligators trace their earliest ancestors back 245 million years.
04:33Bull sharks also occasionally swim up from the Gulf.
04:35They're one of the very few shark species that can survive in freshwater, and they've
04:40been documented hundreds of miles inland in the Mississippi.
04:42They weigh up to 290 pounds.
04:45Four species of Asian carp, introduced to American aquaculture farms in the 1970s, escaped into
04:51the system and established breeding populations.
04:54Silver carp in particular have a strange behavior, where they leap out of the water when startled
04:58by boat engines.
04:59Exceptional individuals can weigh up to 110 pounds.
05:03Boaters on the Middle Mississippi have been knocked unconscious by carp flying out of the
05:07water at them.
05:09Zoom out from the biology, and the river's drainage basin covers about 1,245,000 square miles.
05:15The entire lowland down the middle of the country, what geologists call the Mississippi
05:20embayment, was once a shallow arm of the Gulf of Mexico that reached north as far as Cape
05:24Girardeau, Missouri.
05:25Over millions of years, the river filled it in with roughly 35,000 square miles of sediment.
05:31The Mississippi carved both its valley and the flat farmland of the Lower South from scratch,
05:36one grain of silt at a time.
05:37That sediment delivery isn't what it used to be.
05:40Since 1850, the amount of sediment carried by the Lower Mississippi has dropped by more than
05:4470 percent.
05:46The reason is upstream dams.
05:48Every dam holds back water, and everywhere water slows down, it drops the sediment it's
05:53carrying.
05:53All the grit that used to reach the delta is now piled up behind the dams on the Missouri,
05:58the Ohio, and the upper Mississippi instead.
06:00The mouth of the river is called the Bird's Foot Delta, because the main distributaries
06:04stick out into the gulf like toes of a wading bird.
06:07Levees on the Lower River now force most of the Mississippi sediment to travel past the
06:12marshes and get dumped out into deep gulf water, where it's wasted from a landbuilding
06:16perspective.
06:16And you can measure the loss.
06:18Coastal Louisiana loses about one football field's worth of wetlands every 100 minutes.
06:24Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles of coastal land, which is roughly
06:29the size of Delaware.
06:31The delta is literally disappearing, and it's disappearing because the river that built it
06:35is no longer allowed to build it.
06:37Long before any of this engineering happened, the biggest human settlement north of Mexico
06:41in the pre-Columbian Americas sat right on the Mississippi floodplain.
06:45It's called Cahokia.
06:46Cahokia.
06:47It's just across the river from modern St. Louis.
06:49At its peak between 1050 and 1150 CE, Cahokia covered about 4,000 acres.
06:55Its population was comparable to London's at the time, with somewhere between 10,000 and
06:5950,000 people living there.
07:01The centerpiece of Cahokia is Monk's Mound.
07:04It's a terrace pyramid of packed clay and soil rising about 98 feet in four stages.
07:09It's the largest prehistoric earthen structure anywhere in the Americas, and it was built without
07:14wheels, metal tools, or draft animals.
07:16Every cubic foot of it was moved in baskets on people's backs.
07:20Cahokia also had a wooden astronomical observatory called Woodhenge, aligned to the solstices and
07:26equinoxes.
07:27Moving a thousand years forward, Samuel Clemens got his Mississippi Steamboat pilot's license
07:31on April 9, 1859, at age 23.
07:35You might not know who that is, until I tell you he got his pen name directly from the river.
07:39However, because Mark Twain, now you know who I'm talking about, was a boatman's call
07:44meaning two fathoms, which is 12 feet, and the minimum safe depth for a steamboat.
07:48When the leadsmen called Mark Twain down the river, it meant you had just enough water to
07:52keep going.
07:54Clemens piloted boats on the Mississippi from 1857 until the outbreak of the Civil War in
07:591861, when civilian traffic on the river essentially shut down.
08:02Almost all modern popular music, from pop to metal, funk to thrash, was born in one part
08:09of the Mississippi.
08:10Out of the floodplain between the Mississippi and the Yazoo River in the state of Mississippi
08:14came the entire genre of Delta Blues.
08:17Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and all those pioneers lead to everything that
08:22followed.
08:23Muddy Waters recorded Rolling Stone in 1950.
08:26It sold around 80,000 copies.
08:28That single song is the reason a British rock band took the name the Rolling Stones, Bob
08:33Dylan wrote Like a Rolling Stone, and why Rolling Stone magazine exists.
08:36All three trace back directly to a blues record made by a man whose music grew out of Mississippi
08:41River Delta soil.
08:43On April 27, 1865, a Mississippi River steamboat named the Sultana blew up near Memphis.
08:50The Sultana was raided for 376 passengers and crew.
08:53On that trip, it was carrying about 2,100 Union soldiers, many of them freshly released
08:59prisoners of war, plus 200 civilians.
09:02That's more than six times its legal capacity.
09:05The boat's owners had convinced the army to put the whole contingent on one ship because
09:09the government paid $5 per enlisted man delivered north and $10 per officer.
09:14Earlier at Vicksburg, the boiler mechanic had told the captain two boiler sheets needed
09:19to be replaced, but the captain ordered a patch job.
09:22North of Memphis, the boilers exploded, and about 1,700 people died.
09:27It remains the worst maritime disaster in US history, possibly worse than the Titanic in
09:32terms of American lives lost.
09:34Most people have never heard of it because it happened 12 days after Lincoln was assassinated
09:38and got buried in the news cycle.
09:40The legal foundation for every Mississippi River border comes from the Treaty of Paris
09:45in 1763, which ended the French and Indian War.
09:48That treaty described the boundary between British and French North America as running
09:52down the middle of the river Mississippi from its source to the river Iberville.
09:57That phrase, the middle of the river Mississippi, is what every subsequent boundary case interprets.
10:02The United States, in the view of the Supreme Court, inherited the 1763 treaty language.
10:07Every border dispute involving this river traces back to one sentence written in 1763.
10:12The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred French claims to the United States, keeping the 1763
10:19treaty language, but some of the laws surrounding the river actually goes back much to the Romans.
10:24A citation in Missouri v. Nebraska, which addresses the law of watercourses, draws on older English
10:29common law and Roman law principles regarding riverine property.
10:33The middle of the river turns out to be legally complicated.
10:37In Iowa v. Illinois, decided in 1893, the Supreme Court had to resolve what middle actually meant.
10:43The court ruled that when a navigable river forms a boundary, the line follows the talweg,
10:48which is the middle of the main navigable channel, rather than the geographic center between
10:52the two banks.
10:53The rule makes sense, because if you put the boundary at the visual midpoint, one state could
10:58end up controlling a shallow sandbar, while the other controls the deep water where all the
11:02shipping actually happens.
11:03So the boundary runs where the boats do.
11:06Then there's the question of what happens when the river moves.
11:09The foundational doctrine comes from Missouri v. Nebraska, decided in 1904, which cites
11:14English common law going back to Blackstone's commentaries from the 1760s.
11:18The rule is that when a river changes course gradually, through ordinary erosion and deposit,
11:23which is called accretion, the boundary moves with the river.
11:26When a river changes course suddenly, which is called avulsion, the boundary stays in the
11:30old channel.
11:31Even if that channel dries up entirely, or becomes a cornfield, the old channel is still
11:36the legal state line.
11:38That's what makes the Mississippi's border strange, because this river changes course
11:41slowly, all the time, and suddenly, with no warning.
11:45Probably the best maps ever made of the Mississippi were the ones drawn by Harold Fisk.
11:49In 1944, Fisk was a geologist working for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and he produced
11:55a series of cartographic plates covering the lower Mississippi from southern Illinois to southern
11:59Louisiana.
12:00On each plate, he stacked every documented channel position on top of each other.
12:05The 1944 channel is shown in blank white.
12:08The 1880 channel is in green.
12:09The 1820 channel is in salmon pink.
12:12The 1765 channel is in light blue.
12:15And behind all of that, he added color-coded traces of prehistoric channels worked out from
12:19aerial photographs and soil analysis.
12:22The result looks like a writhing tangle of colored ribbons.
12:24A single stretch of the lower Mississippi Valley might show a dozen different rivers, all of
12:29which were the Mississippi at some point.
12:31Fisk's maps are public domain documents, and they're also one of the most visually
12:35striking geographical records ever produced by a government agency.
12:39On those maps, you can watch specific avulsions happen.
12:42In 1876, at a bend called Devil's Elbow near the town of Reverie, Tennessee, the Mississippi
12:48broke through a narrow neck of land and cut a new channel.
12:50The cutoff carved itself in under 24 hours.
12:54That single night's work became known as the Centennial Cutoff because it happened during
12:58America's Centennial year.
13:00Because of the Centennial Cutoff, the town of Reverie, though physically connected to Arkansas,
13:05is still legally part of Tennessee.
13:07Before the cut, Reverie was on the East Bank.
13:09After the cut, Reverie was on the West Bank.
13:12But the legal state line stayed in the middle of the old channel.
13:15In 1798, a new island appeared in the Mississippi near St. Louis.
13:19Because it emerged from the river after both Illinois and Missouri were drawing their borders,
13:24it sat in kind of a jurisdictional gap, and neither state had clear authority over it.
13:28That made it attractive to duelists, because Missouri and Illinois had both outlawed dueling.
13:33As the new island was technically in neither state, you could shoot each other there without
13:37facing prosecution.
13:39The island got its name, Bloody Island, for obvious reasons.
13:42In March 1877, a massive ice jam formed on the Missouri River, and the water jumped its
13:48bank and cut a new channel.
13:49The main channel of the Missouri now ran on the east side of a chunk of Iowa land, instead
13:54of the west side.
13:55That piece of Iowa was suddenly stuck on the wrong side of the river.
13:59Because the Supreme Court later ruled the change was an avulsion, not gradual accretion,
14:03the old channel remained the state line.
14:06Today, Carter Lake, Iowa has a population of around 3,400 people.
14:10It's the only Iowa municipality located west of the Missouri River.
14:14Kids there go to Iowa schools, and residents pay Iowa taxes.
14:17But to get from Carter Lake to the rest of Iowa, you have to cross through Nebraska.
14:21The Ponca tribe operates a casino there, and the casino's entire legal existence depends
14:26on the fact that the Supreme Court refused, in 1892, to move the Iowa state line along
14:32with the water.
14:33Along the Louisiana and Mississippi border, things get even messier.
14:36Along the stretch of the Mississippi River that's supposed to be the Louisiana-Mississippi
14:41state line, the legal line is more often not in the river than in it.
14:45Over the past two centuries, the river has cut off bend after bend.
14:49Every time it cuts a new channel quickly, avulsion law freezes the border in the old channel.
14:54So, the modern state line zigzags through swamps, across dry land, and sometimes straight through
14:59cornfields.
15:00The two states maintain reciprocal fishing licenses specifically because an angler on
15:05the Mississippi has no reliable way to know which state he's standing in.
15:08And then there's Kaskaskia.
15:11Kaskaskia, Illinois is the most dramatic version of this story.
15:15Kaskaskia was founded by French colonists in 1703.
15:18When Illinois became a state in 1818, Kaskaskia was the first state capital.
15:22The town sat on the east bank of the Mississippi where an Illinois town was supposed to be.
15:27At its peak, Kaskaskia had somewhere between 3,000 and 8,000 residents.
15:31It had a 650-pound bronze bell, the Liberty Bell of the West, gifted by King Louis XV of
15:37France in 1741, shipped from France to New Orleans, and hauled up the river by boat.
15:42In 1881, after decades of upstream deforestation had increased flood volumes, the Mississippi broke
15:48through and cut a new channel straight through the town.
15:50When the flood receded, most of Kaskaskia was gone, and what survived was on the west side
15:55of the new channel.
15:56The church was dismantled and rebuilt, and the 650-pound bell was saved and installed
16:01on the new site.
16:02But the state line hadn't moved.
16:04The old channel was still the Illinois-Missouri border under avulsion law.
16:08So Kaskaskia remained legally in Illinois, even though the Mississippi River was now running
16:12between Kaskaskia and the rest of Illinois.
16:14Today, Kaskaskia, Illinois is the only part of Illinois located west of the Mississippi River.
16:20To reach it, you have to drive into Missouri and cross a bridge.
16:23Its population is fewer than 25 people.
16:26It's a former state capital reduced to a village you can only reach by leaving the state it belongs
16:31to.
16:31In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi had its worst flood on record.
16:36After months of heavy rain through the Mississippi Valley, the river broke through levee after levee
16:40and spread across the lower south.
16:42At its widest, the river was 75 miles across.
16:46An inland sea formed that stretched from Vicksburg, Mississippi, down to Monroe, Louisiana, about
16:5170 miles of open water by boat through what had been farmland and towns.
16:56The flood damaged more than 920,000 homes, and roughly 330,000 people had to be rescued off
17:02of rooftops.
17:03It displaced roughly 1% of the entire U.S. population at the time, around 120 million
17:09people.
17:10Red Cross operations fed more than 600,000 people.
17:13The flood accelerated the great migration of black southerners out of the Mississippi
17:17Delta toward Chicago and Detroit and changed the sound of American music.
17:22The rising waters drove blues musicians out of the flooded cotton country and into northern
17:26cities where they plugged in electric guitars.
17:28It also put Herbert Hoover, who ran the federal relief effort, on a direct path to the White
17:33House.
17:34And it produced the Flood Control Act of 1928, which at the time was the most expensive domestic
17:39program in U.S. history.
17:41Today, at the mouth of the Mississippi, the river is creating a different kind of catastrophe.
17:45In 2024, the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone measured 6,705 square miles, roughly the size of New Jersey.
17:53The Dead Zone is an area of low oxygen water at the bottom of the Gulf, where almost nothing
17:58can live.
17:59It's caused by nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer runoff from farms in the Mississippi Basin,
18:03which reach the Gulf through the river, feed massive algae blooms, and then suffocate the
18:08bottom water as the algae die and decompose.
18:11NOAA has been measuring the Dead Zone for 38 years.
18:14The five-year average is now 4,298 square miles.
18:18The official goal is to get it under 1,900 square miles.
18:21It's never been that small.
18:23Which brings us to the single most important fact about the Mississippi that almost nobody
18:27outside of Louisiana and the Army Corps of Engineers actually knows.
18:31The Mississippi doesn't want to run through New Orleans.
18:35About every thousand years, over the geological record, the river picks up and moves.
18:40It jumps out of its bed and carves a completely new channel to the Gulf.
18:44It's been running its current path, down past Baton Rouge and New Orleans, for roughly 1,000
18:48years.
18:49It started doing so around 1,000 CE.
18:51By most measures, a change is overdue.
18:54There's a shorter path available.
18:56About 45 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, the Atchafalaya River connects to the Mississippi
19:01at a point called Old River.
19:03The Atchafalaya runs to the Gulf in about 150 river miles.
19:07The current Mississippi route to the Gulf, down past New Orleans, takes 300 river miles.
19:12The Atchafalaya is half as long.
19:14And to make it even more tempting for the river to move, the elevation drop down the Atchafalaya
19:18is more than twice as steep.
19:20Any river given a choice between a longer, flatter path and a shorter, steeper path will
19:25eventually take the shorter one.
19:26By the early 1950s, it was already making the switch.
19:30Between 1850 and 1950, the share of Mississippi flow going down the Atchafalaya rose from under
19:3510 percent to about 30 percent.
19:38The Army Corps of Engineers concluded that without intervention, the Mississippi would complete
19:42its jump to the Atchafalaya by 1990.
19:45The very south of the Mississippi is basically a canal.
19:48Mississippi in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Army Corps built something called the Old
19:53River Control Structure.
19:55The Old River Control Structure is essentially a dam with gates on it, sitting across the channel
20:00that connects the Mississippi to the Atchafalaya.
20:02The Corps sets the gates so that exactly 30 percent of the Mississippi's flow goes down the Atchafalaya,
20:08and 70 percent keeps running past Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
20:12Without that structure, the river would already have completed its move down the Atchafalaya,
20:17and Baton Rouge and New Orleans would be sitting on a dead channel, fed only by saltwater pushing
20:21in from the Gulf.
20:22If that happened, the ports and a big part of the economy would be ruined, as for a start,
20:2760 percent of American grain exports moved down the Mississippi.
20:31At the same time, the lack of fresh water would mean that the water supply for millions of
20:35people would be gone, and the oil refineries and petrochemical plants along the industrial
20:39corridor from Baton Rouge to New Orleans would have no cooling water.
20:43The Corps calculates that the cost of a full switch is in the tens of billions of dollars,
20:48with ongoing costs that would ripple through global grain markets.
20:51One of the consultants on the design was Hans Albert Einstein, the son of Albert Einstein
20:56and a leading expert in river sediment transport.
20:59In 1973, that structure almost failed.
21:02An exceptionally wet winter and a sudden snow melt in the Rockies put the Mississippi into
21:07a flood that the Corps was running at more than half of what they call a project flood,
21:11the theoretical maximum the structure was designed for.
21:14On April 14, 1973, the foreman walked out onto the low sill structure to inspect it and watched
21:21a 67-foot-long retaining wall collapse into the river.
21:24The water started pulling in through the gap, and a huge whirlpool formed.
21:28The foreman reported that vibrations from the water hammering through the structure were
21:32strong enough that you could drive out onto the highway on top of the structure, open your
21:36car door, and the vibration alone would close it for you.
21:40The Corps lowered a camera down through a hole drilled in the middle of the structure to see
21:44what was happening underneath.
21:45The camera showed fish swimming where there was supposed to be solid ground.
21:49The water had scoured out a football field-sized hole over 50 feet deep under seven of the
21:55structures' 11 gate bays.
21:56A second, larger scour hole was eating into the downstream side.
22:00The two were about 150 feet apart, and if they'd merged, the entire control structure
22:05would have dropped into the river, and the Mississippi would have taken its long-delayed
22:08jump down the Atchafalaya.
22:10They held it together by dumping barge loads of boulders into the scour holes around the
22:14clock until the flood dropped.
22:16The low sill structure survived, but it had been permanently damaged.
22:19It can now only handle 60% of the flow it was designed for.
22:23The Corps fixed it by building an auxiliary structure and a hydroelectric plant to take
22:27the extra load.
22:28The combined value of all three structures in current money runs around $2 billion, and
22:34what they're doing every single day is physically holding back the largest state boundary change
22:38in North American history.
22:40Which finally brings us to the most dramatic fact about what this river is actually capable
22:44of.
22:45The central Mississippi Valley was hit by a sequence of earthquakes centered near New
22:49Madrid, Missouri.
22:51Geologists estimate at least three of them fell between magnitude 7.5 and 8.8.
22:56Over four months, more than 2,000 distinct tremors occurred.
23:00The shaking was felt as far away as Canada and Boston, and church bells rang in Boston and
23:04Philadelphia, over 1,000 miles from the epicenter.
23:08The Mississippi River, for a period of several minutes, ran backwards.
23:11There are a few theories as to what happened, including uplift, sieges, landslides, shockwaves,
23:17but in general, the earthquake had changed the riverbed so violently that the river's
23:21flow reversed its direction.
23:23An eyewitness named Eliza Bryan wrote an account of what happened.
23:26She described the sulfur smell that filled the air, the total darkness that followed the
23:31first shock at 2 a.m., and the sound of the river, quote, the roaring of the Mississippi,
23:35the current of which was retrograde for a few minutes, owing, as is supposed, to an eruption
23:40in its bed.
23:41In Tennessee, the shaking dropped a large area of ground, and when the dust settled,
23:45there was a new lake.
23:46Real Foot Lake measures 18 miles by 5 miles and was created inside over four months.
23:52It's still there today.
23:53The state line between Tennessee and Missouri still runs through terrain that was reshaped
23:57by those quakes, and duck hunters and property lawyers argue over parcels in that area whose
24:02legal boundaries depend on a river that for a few minutes in December of 1811 flowed the
24:07wrong way.