Upon crossing the weir at Lake Itasca, the Mississippi River meanders for a fair distance before passing through Lake Irving and then right away cuts through the lower corner of Lake Bemiji. Not too much farther along, it is impounded to form Stump Lake, and shortly thereafter constrained to fill Cass Lake. Some while later, it is impounded to fill Lake Winnibigoshish and after a short run, it cuts a corner of Little Lake Winnibigoshish. Left to meander for a while, it is then impounded to form Paper Mill Reservoir. Wandering around between nine thousand natural lakes, it hits a dam in Brainerd where Rice Lake takes its spare water. A few more wide spots are forced upon it, by dam or by channeling, before it is finally allowed to flow freely.
I assume that all of these lakes were imposed upon the river, though not all of them seem to have actual dams.
That name sounds a lot like the name of Lake Winnipegosis in Manitoba. I wonder is there is a linguistic link?
EDIT: It appears so – Winnipeg and Winnipegosis are from the Cree language, and Winnibigoshish is from Ojibwe. Both Cree and Ojibwe are related to one another as members of the Algonquian language family. Winnipeg/Winnibig means “muddy water”, “dirty water”, and the -osis/-oshish part is a diminutive suffix.
I looked at Lake of the Woods on a map and concluded that Manitoba, “the land of 100,000 lakes” is actually just the land of one lake with zillions of interconnecting channels.
I do not think that is correct. Go back to look at (Lake Agassiz - Wikipedia) and try to follow the changing landscape to modern times, if possible. For a long time, it was thought that Lake Bemidji was the start of the Mississippi because three small rivers (or two streams and a small river) feed into the lake.
Before people start fulminating about the dumbness of generation ZZZ, back in the 1780s, the second edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica followed page 7099 with page 8000.
Hydrology is sometimes baffling. Why does the Missouri, a mile from the Montana/North Dakota border, not instead flow into the Yellowstone? Why does the Mississippi not serve as a tributary to the Ohio at Cairo? Some of these designations are pretty arbitrary.
I suspect that calling Lake Itasca the source of the Mississippi has more to do with tourism than any hydrological reasons. The whole lake is a park with a visitors’ center and stepping stones so you can walk across the river. I’m sure it’s a better experience for visitors, and less ecologically damaging, than a bunch of people gathered around a spring bubbling out of the ground.
Yeah, I’ve never quite understood how two rivers sometime combine to create a third river, like the Monongahela and the Allegheny come together to form the Ohio.
Two of the rivers were discovered from their source (or between that and where they combine) and the third was named from where it flowed into the Mississippi. They had been named before they realized the actual connection and it was too late to change the signs.
It’s similar in my hometown area. There are many creeks that are saltwater estuaries (Jockey Creek, Town Creek, Goose Creek, Arshomomack Creek, etc.). When they were named, that was the definition of creek in the UK.
In other places, streams ran into the salt water. They looked like estuaries if no one traced them back. So they were named “creeks.” The term then was used to name freshwater streams. People from the Midwest get confused when they see the creeks in our area.
Generally, it is the river moving the larger volume of water at the time of naming that gets the name continuation. Often, the Minnesota contributes a larger volume of water than the Mississippi where they combine in St. Paul. But at the time of measurement, the more northern river won, so Mississippi.
Seriously? I’ve been to where those rivers combine and the Mississippi looked much larger to me. I’ve waterskied on the Minnesota under the approach path at the airport, and it’s barely wide enough to turn the boat around at speed.
I was looking at some pictures online, and they did look wider than I remember. It’s been 30+ years since I was there. Maybe I was there when the flow was low, or my memory isn’t perfect.
Just for accuracy, while “veritas” means “truth” and “caput” means “head,” “veritascaput” doesn’t mean true head. “Verum caput” would, but it’s not Lake Umca.
I don’t know that I believe this “fact.” In Edward Neill’s 1858 The History of Minnesota, from the Earliest French Explorations to the Present Time, this story is given on p. 407. It says that the name was coined by Henry Schoolcraft, and the footnote reports, “It is asserted that this is a name made up by Mr. Schoolcraft from two Latin words, veritas caput. It is true, that by dropping the first and the final syllable of the last word, Itasca is obtained; but Mrs. Eastman says, that it is the name of an Indian maiden.”
Schoolcraft does seem to assert this origin in 1832 (American Railroad Journal 1, p. 751). There’s an article from 1932 that discusses these two stories reported above, which both sound like legendsto me, and some possible / probable Indigenous derivations: C. H. B. and Theodore C. Blegen, “That Name ‘Itasca,’” Minnesota History 13:2 (June, 1932), pp. 163–174.
Lake Baikal (Siberia) has a surface area about the same as Lake Erie, but contains more water than all the Great Lakes combined. Together - Baikal and the Great Lakes - contain 40% of the world’s fresh water.
In addition to all the other disasters that beset the sixth-century late Roman Empire, the seas near Byzantium were frequented by a rogue whale that kept attacking ships: