Mississippi River

About

Mississippi River, Minnesota — 1680 Hennepin St Anthony Falls, 1930s-1940s Locks Dams, 1988 Mississippi NRRA 2,340-mi. The gauge at station 05227500 registers a mean flow of 2,928 CFS, a figure that only hints at the river's northern journey. The Mississippi threads 666 miles through Minnesota, from Clearwater County at the headwaters through Beltrami, Cass, Itasca, Aitkin, Crow Wing, Morrison, Stearns, Benton, Sherburne, Wright, Hennepin, Anoka, Ramsey, Dakota, Goodhue, Wabasha, Winona, and Houston counties before crossing into the rest of its 2,340-mile run to the Gulf of Mexico, draining 1,151,000 square miles of the central United States.

The headwaters region carries a long human history. The Mississippi at Lake Itasca is the cultural homeland of the Dakota (Santee Sioux) and Ojibwe peoples. The 1820-1830 Ojibwe-Dakota conflicts over the headwaters, the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters that ceded Ojibwe lands east of the Mississippi, and the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux that ceded Dakota lands all shaped the watershed. Schoolcraft's 1832 survey, commissioned by the Michigan Territorial government, became the basis for the 1872-1900 settlement patterns of northern Minnesota.

The river's next chapter was written in timber. The Mississippi headwaters were logged from 1839 through the 1930s to feed the 1848-1910 St. Anthony Falls sawmills and the 1900-1920 Minneapolis lumber industry — the largest in the world at its peak. Pine, Itasca, Crow Wing, and Cass county timber operations supplied the 14,000,000-board-foot-per-day boom at St. Anthony Falls. The era closed as the white-pine stands were exhausted around 1935, and the 1934 creation of the Chippewa National Forest ended the logging economy.

As logging waned, engineering took over. The USGS streamflow gages at St. Paul, operating from 1888 to 1925, established the Mississippi's mean flow at 12,000 cubic feet per second — the dataset the 1928 River and Harbor Act used to authorize the 9-foot navigation channel. The 1930s-1940s locks-and-dams era followed. Today the Upper St. Anthony Falls Lock and Dam stands as one of three locks and dams operating in the Twin Cities area, monuments to the river's long career carrying commerce through the heart of Minnesota.

The Mississippi is as much a living corridor as an industrial one. The Upper Mississippi River National Wildlife and Fish Refuge unfurls for more than 260 miles, reaching from Wabasha, Minnesota down to Rock Island, Illinois, sheltering the fish and migratory birds that depend on its braided channels. The Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, established November 18, 1988, protects 72 miles through the Twin Cities metro as a National Park Service unit — the most-visited unit in the NPS Midwest region, drawing 3.5 million visitors annually. The 2024 Mississippi River Corridor Critical Area Plan, a joint MnDNR-Metropolitan Council effort, added 32,000 acres of protected land and 156 miles of river trail. Designated a State Water Trail, the Mississippi remains a popular catfish and walleye-fishing destination and the central geographic feature of Minnesota.