Mississippi Resources on and off the 'Net. For paddlers.

'Net Resources

David Ellsworth and his buddy did the whole river in 40 days. Here's a short synopsys and some photos of his trip.

Camping and bald eagle watching on the Mississippi. With phone numbers and links to camping information for people touring alongside the river by car.

Live Mississippi River shots taken by cameras at Moline, Ill. and Davenport, IA., courtesy BBS Quad-Cities Online. Or at Memphis, Tenn. courtesy WMC-TV and Memphis Online.

Late 1800s photos of paddlewheelers and the Upper Mississippi, by Henry Bosse, courtesy of The Riverview Times, St. Paul, Minn.

Pictures of the Mississippi taken from space! These psychadelic pictures were taken from a space shuttle in 1994, and show which parts of the southern portion of Big Muddy are most prone to flooding.

Wind, temparature and other stats from Mississippi locks and dams 11-22, courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Rock Island District, Water Control Center.

Upper Mississippi River Lock telephone numbers, courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Maps

Flood Control and Navigation Maps of the Mississippi River. by the US Army Corps of Engineers, Mississippi River Commission. To get copies $20 each (remember they come in two parts, north and south of Cairo, Ill, so tell them which one you want), write:

U.S. army Engineer District, Memphis, Corps of Engineers, B-314 Clifford Davis Federal Office Bldg., Memphis, TN 38103-1894

or: U.S. Army Engineer District, Vicksburg, Corps of Engineers, 2101 North Frontage Rd., Vicksburg, MS 39180-5191.

or: U.S. Army Engineer District, New Orleans, Corps of Engineers, P.O. Box 60267, New Orleans, La. 70160-0267.

We actually bought our map in person (after the trip as is tediously explained elsewhere in these pages), so we don't know how long it takes for the Army Corps to send the maps out, or if they charge postage, or if they accept personal checks, etc.

Highly technical maps of the Upper Mississippi River basin (ie. precipitation, "hydric soils," etc.

Books

Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi is a great profile of an awesome body of water, written by a man who's first love was being a riverboat pilot. Interestingly, Twain says he only got into the writing racket because he had no other way to support himself when the war shut down river commerce. He sums up his entire, 21-year mining and writing career in a two paragraph interlude, so he can get on with writing about his life on the river. This book is widely available in regular bookstores; you should also be able to in a good used bookstore.

Tales of the Mississippi, by Ray Samuel, Leonard V. Huber and Warren C. Ogden. 235 pages of river history, including stories of De Soto's Expedition; men who poled their way UPstream; how Capt. Henry Miller Shreve busted the Fulton-Livingston Co.'s steamboat monopoly and designed a boat for clearing away logjams; steamboat races and the Civil War. Loads of drawings and photos. We didn't finish the whole thing but we intend to. It's published by Pelican Publishing Co., Gretna, La. It has a huge bibliography.

Mississippi Solo, by Eddy L. Harris. This is a first-person account of a 30-year-old guy's solo trip down the whole river sometime in the 1980s (book was published 1988). If you can get past the first few chapters (sort of painful explanation of why he did it, why he felt compelled to do it), it's a pretty good read. I especially liked the parts about how he went through the locks. Though as I mentioned I was really glad I didn't read it before our little trip because a lot of his book talks about stops in towns (bars, restaruants, hotels, etc), and we only saw one. Also, Eddy was going fast--something like 30 or 40 miles in the morning BEFORE breakfast, wheras we barely paddled, and made about 30 miles a day mostly on the strength of the current. It's published by Harper & Row.

La Salle, Explorer of the North American Frontier, by Anka Muhlstein. Eric read this one and he'll put up a review soon. It was published in 1992 and 1994 by Arcade Publishing, NY.

Summer in the Wilderness: Embracing A Canoe Voyage up the Mississippi and Around Lake Superior in 1846, by Charles Lanman. A journalist/painter/fisherman's trip up the river in the era manifest destiny. We haven't read it but we intend to. Washington Irving gave it a rave review. It's 208 pages and looks like a pretty easy read. But it may be hard to find.Our edition, published by D. Appleton & Co., was a gift from Eric's sister picked up at the University of Iowa and is bound in canvas.

Guide Books

Canoe Trails of the Deep South, by Chuck Estes, Elizabeth F. Carter and byron Almquist. We bought this book because it had a section on the Bayou Pierre, where we started (we paddled the bayou for a day-and-a-half before hitting Big Muddy). But as it turns out, there are only four paragraphs describing the Bayou, and most of these are dedicated to mile posts as opposed to a description of the Bayou. We didn't really get any useful information out of the book and I couldn't decipher the maps. I would skip this one. Eric likes it, but until he writes his own review, this one stands. It's published by Menasha Ridge Press, Birmingham, Ala.

The Mighty Mississippi, a Traveler's Guide, by Lori Erickson. We didn't use this too much because it looks like it's geared towards tourists in cars, not campers.

Fodor's 1996 New Orleans. We got this because we flew in and out of New Orleans for our trip. Probably any guide book would do. We liked this one because in it, we found the very cool old hotel where we stayed, the Columns. That alone was worth the price of the book. Otherwise we didn't really use it.

If you have ideas for more links, maps or books, please write us at paddle@ericandjoan.com.

links updated Jan. 2000

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