The Mississippi River runs for about 2,320 miles through the United States, from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Through North American history, it has been an artery for commerce. Even with modern technologies, it is easier and cheaper to move goods along the river than overland. Riverboats have become associated with the Mississippi River, and the vessels have a long history on the waterway.
“The first European to see the river inland was Hernando de Soto in 1541,” says the Wisconsin Historical Society. The river and its valley were claimed for France in 1682, and came into U.S. hands with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.
The first steamboat to travel the Mississippi was called the New Orleans, for the river’s most important city of the time. Built in Pittsburgh in 1811, it traveled down the river and arrived in her namesake city on January 12, 1812.
Through the early settlement of the Midwest, rivers were the primary method of moving goods and people. River boats on the Mississippi took wood and produce to markets down the river--including to New Orleans, for international export--and brought manufactured goods to the communities upriver. "By 1834 some 230 steamboats plied the Mississippi," says the Tennessee Encyclopedia.
As states passed increasing laws against gambling in the 1820s and 1830s, gamblers moved to the river boats. This was partially because the Mississippi forms a number of state borders; it was not within the jurisdiction of any one state law.
In the Twentieth Century, especially under Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, the Mississippi was made easier to navigate. Dams, locks and levees were built. "By 1930 diesel-powered tugboats and barges had replaced the last of the steamboats," says the Tennessee Encyclopedia.
The Mississippi is still used for shipping; about 300 million tons of cargo move along the river every year. "A single barge can travel twice as far on a gallon of fuel as a train and five times as far as a semi truck," explains PBR's Diane Eastabrook.
