I read in the WORLD BOOK that the Mississippi River was actually wrongly named.
That the part of the Mississippi below Saint Louis is really a continuation of the Missouri River. In other words the Missouri River should start in Montana and flow into the Gulf Of Mexico. And the Mississipi should end at Saint Louis.
Which brings me to my question. How do they decide? Like in Pittsburg two rivers the Monongahela and Allegheny merge to form the OHIO. Why can’t they say the the Monongahela merges into the OHIO and keep calling the Allegheny the Ohio river.
How do they decide if it is a merger of two rivers into a new one or whatever?
Well if you’re the first one there who’s white you can call it whatever you want.
In the case of the Mississippi and the Missouri I believe it was the size of the rivers that determined the naming. The Mississippi has a greater volume flowing at St. Louis. Also the Missouri enters in at a right angle and just looks like a tributary.
WAG: Naming the river is arbitrary, what World Book may be saying is the Missouri River has a higher discharge (volume per unit time,IIRC) into the Missouri/Mississippi confluence than the Mississippi; i.e. smaller Miss. River drtaining into a larger Mo. River.
However, by that definition the river that empties into the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Ohio because (also IIRC) the river called the Ohio has a higher discharge than the river called the Mississippi at that point where they converge.
hope I haven’t been too confusing (or wrong, it’s been a while since I studied this).
We had an interesting discussion a couple years back that considers several different methods of deciding which river constitutes the main stream: What is the longest river in the United States? That thread has a link to an even older thread started by some weird guy named Markxxx: The Mississippi or Missouri
Sure it looks tricky when you look at this problem from the top (i.e., headwaters) down. The problem with this approach is that these rivers were mostly explored, described, and named from the bottoms (i.e., the mouth) up.
In other words, why does the “Mississippi” exit into the Gulf? Because that was the first so-named, and as one heads upstream, one then finds (and names and describes) the tributaries draining into the already-named trunk stream.
But clearly, it is an arbitrary problem: for example, it would probably be more correct to say that the Rio Conchos drains into the Gulf of Mexico, considering that above Presido, Texas, the Rio Grande is barely a dribble (if that). Nonetheless, we still call the Rio Conchos a tributary of the Rio Grande.
You know it when you see it. The problem begins when you try to analyze it. Our ancestors looked at the confluence and their decisions were clear. We look at satellite photos and collected data and as a result may desire to impose different criteria in order to determined which river should be entitled to continue on. Now the scientific data might be a good thing for those of us who’ve never been to St Louis, but I daresay the locals have no problem with the status quo.
So what about the case in Pittsburgh? Why do two rivers JOIN to form the OHIO? This is arbitrary? Why can’t one branch be called the OHIO and one the Allegehny?
The fact cited above that the Mississippi as currently defined runs more-or-less straight, and the Missouri looks like a tributary, is probably a factor. It ought to be considered that the rivers were given their names by Native Americans, and their identifications were adopted by settlers. “Mississippi”, as I recall, means “Great Father of Waters”. “Missouri” means “Big Muddy Water”.
Speaking of the big muddy water, my father worked for a barge company in St. Louis. Among bargemen it accepted that St. Louis is on the Missouri River, but that East St. Louis is on the Mississippi. That is because the water from the Missouri has not mixed thoroughly with the Mississippi’s yet at that point. Bargemen could find sublte differences in how the water on either side of the channel looked and “felt”.
Mark Twain observed in Life on the Mississippi that if one accepted that the Missouri continued when it met the Mississippi, then the Missouri was the longest river in the world.
I would imagine that the Allegheny and Monongahela were discovered and named from their headwaters in the East, the Ohio from the end that meets the Mississippi. By the time white men had discovered that the three all meet at one point, the names may have been well-established.
And have you ever been to Pittsburgh and taken a look at how the rivers run together? It doesn’t look like one river running into another. The turn is greater relative to the Allegheny than the Mon, but neither one would be anywhere near straight. Why not call it a new river?
I asked this question on sci.hydrodynamics (or something like that) a few years ago. I had just watch something on the expiditions to fin the source of teh Nile.
I got an answer that hitorically it was chosen based on “flow and geomorphology”, but the moder definition is based on which branch drains a greater area.
Another possibility for why the Missourissippi got broken up the way it did is political. If France, say, is going to claim all of the land west of the Mississippi River, they want to say that the branch which goes up into Minnesota is the Mississippi River, and not the branch which heads on up to Montana.
(I subscribe to the most-distant-headwaters definition, so I consider the flow from the Rockies to the Gulf of Mexico to be one river. Since that river consists of most of both the Missouri and the Mississippi, I use the name Missourissippi. This is obviously a very logical term, which I’m certain will be adopted by everyone reading this.)
