Throughout history big rivers have always played an important role in peoples’ lives. They supplied water, provided fertile land, but also served as travel and transportation routes. But the significance of a mighty river certainly exceeded its functions. It was regarded as an artery of life. People were bewildered and fascinated by the power of untamed water masses and thus often included big rivers in their cultural myths and even religious ideas. Especially a river with the dimensions of the Mississippi must have deeply impressed people. No wonder American natives called the river ‘the father of waters’ (= one of several meanings of ‘Mississippi’).

The Mississippi River stretches over 3,779 km (2,348mi) and is thus the second longest river of the United States after the Missouri. However, one has to bear in mind that the Missouri as well as many other rivers eventually flow into the Mississippi. Taking all the rivers connected to the Mississippi into account, one can say that the Mississippi River has the third largest drainage basin in the world, draining 41 percent of the 48 contiguous states of the United States. The Mississippi itself crosses the country from the Great Lake area in the North to the Gulf of Mexico in the South. Together with a considerable amount of navigable rivers that flow into the Mississippi, it provides a system of about 12,350 miles of inland waterways for transportation.

All these numbers help to understand why the Mississippi River had such an enormous impact on the development and expansion of America. The people going up and down the river changed, of course, also the types and amounts of boats or ships they used. Finally the people turned towards changing the river itself. They began to tame the river, to protect themselves from its life-threatening floods, and to make it more navigable by building ‘levees for containing flood flows; floodways for the passage for excess flows past critical reaches of the Mississippi; channel improvement and stabilization for stabilizing the channel in order to provide an efficient navigation alignment, [...] and tributary basin improvements for major drainage and for flood control.’ Like almost every attempt of mankind to control nature, this one also had its side-effect. Today, people are considerably concerned about the river as an ecological system.

The Mississippi as an artery of life has always attracted people. We know that many Native American tribes such as the Ojibwa, Winnebago, Fox, Sauk, Chickasaw or Natchez lived along the Mississippi. Later on the river served as a pathway for European expeditions and, finally, for the settlement of Europeans in that area. The first Europeans to travel up the river were Hernando DE SOTO and his party in 1541. Later on the whole valley was claimed for France. This French influence in the area lasted for a long time until the eastern part was ceded to England after 1763 and the western part of the Mississippi valley was finally purchased by the United States in 1803. (Lousiana purchase)

A milestone for the development of transportation on the Mississippi was the invention of the steamboat in 1812. It gave rise to the famous riverboat era on the Mississippi. The first half of the 19^th century was also the cradle period of another medium of transport: The railroad. Many of those first railroads built mainly from the 1830ies onwards were destroyed during the War between the States (1861-65). A new period of railroad construction was inaugurated in the 1880ies. Thus, it can roughly be said that the heyday of the Mississippi steamboats really was in the first half of the 19^th century. Soon after the War between the States the railway system replaced water transportation as the chief mode of transport and travel along the Mississippi. Data available on the state of Mississippi may serve as an example to demonstrate the rapid growth of the railway system. According to the Encyclopedia Americana ‘railway building began on a small scale in 1831’, but despite a significant attempt to expand the railway system after the war, there were only about 1127 miles of main-line tracks in the state Mississippi by 1880. However, by 1,889 this number had grown to 2,366 miles and by 1920 4,369 miles of railway tracks could be used to transport goods and take people across the state of Mississippi.

So, people now had an alternative mode of transport at their disposal. They were no longer dependent on the route the river took; they built railways all across the continent and even more or less along the Mississippi river. There were technical developments in water transport, too, as by and by the steamboat was replaced by screw driven diesel towboats, which made the river boat more competitive, but nevertheless the railway took over the position of the leading technical achievement.