Where the Mississippi Starts Small Enough to Step Across

A footbridge of plain timber lies low over a stream. Its planks are smooth and gray, worn by boots and bare feet and the careful steps of children holding a parent's hand. There is no high railing, no arch, no sign of importance. On one side the water spreads into a lake; on the other it narrows, slides under the boards, and starts off through the trees. The stream is shallow enough to see the dark sand of its bed. It looks as though one good backward step would undo it. This is the Mississippi River, and the lake is Lake Itasca.

The river that begins here will not stay this size. By the time it reaches the towns of the northern river and then the Twin Cities, it will be a working waterway, threaded with locks and barges. Farther south it will gather the Missouri and the Ohio, push past bluffs, flood plains, and refineries, and finally reach the Gulf of Mexico. But in this clearing of pines and birch, all that remains ahead of it. The water is clear and cold. It moves slowly enough that a leaf can drift for a long moment before the current takes it.

The true head

Finding the head of the Mississippi took the better part of a century. Early French explorers knew the river by its Ojibwe and Dakota names and followed the water as far as the Falls of St. Anthony, where Minneapolis now stands; some suspected the source lay to the west, but none were sure. In 1832 a federal expedition under Henry Rowe Schoolcraft finally made its way to Lake Itasca. Schoolcraft was guided by Ojibwe people who knew the lake as the head of the river, and he is remembered for coining a new name for it, a compressed version of the Latin words for "true head": veritas caput. Itasca, the name says, is the truth of the matter.

What Schoolcraft's party found was not a dramatic source. There was no spring bursting from a cliff, no narrow gorge. There was only a lake sitting in a shallow bowl of glacial sand and gravel, leaking at its end into what appeared to be a small creek. What made the place noteworthy was the thing no one could see from the bank: the scale of the sentence that creek was about to write. In the years since, other candidates for the river's ultimate source have been proposed among the creeks that feed the lake, and hydrologists have their technical arguments. But the lake remains the place where the Mississippi declares itself. That declaration is a modest one. It is approximately one long step wide.

Forest and water

Northern Minnesota is a country of lakes, and Itasca is one of the family. The lake is not the biggest in the region, and not the deepest, but it sits in a landscape that remembers the last ice age. Ridges of moraine run through the park, made of the sand and stone that a glacier pushed ahead of it and left behind. The soil is poor and quick to drain, so the forest that grows on it is the patient kind: white pine and red pine, aspen, birch, and spruce, with a thick floor of ferns and fallen needles. Itasca State Park was established to keep this particular corner of that country intact, and it remains a place where the woods press close to the water.

The lake's water is tea-colored in its shallow bays, where cedar and tamarack stand in the swampy edges, and clearer over the sandbars around the outlet. The headwater stream has a bed of clean gravel; the stones in it were sorted by water long before any map showed the Mississippi's shape. In summer the water is cold enough to make the ankles ache. In fall, when the leaves let go, the surface carries red oak and yellow birch out of the lake on the first yards of the river's journey. The outlet is not a place of big sound. It is a place of small ones: the dip of a paddle, the knock of wood on gravel, the voices of families spread along the bank.

The park around the lake gives distance to the source. Trails leave the headwaters clearing and climb among the old pines; the walk down to the shore is one of the well-traveled stretches in the region. The forest is so quiet along those paths that a person can hear the water long before seeing it, though the sound is no louder than a trickle. Itasca has lakes of its own, campgrounds, and a long history as a northern destination. But its center of gravity is here, at the edge of the small lake that happens to feed a river.

A river in one step

The crossing at the headwaters is an act of physical irony. Visitors arrive with the Mississippi already built in their heads—the big river, the brown river, the river of steamboats and levees. Then they walk out onto a small timber bridge and see the whole river beneath them in a single glance. Some stop in the middle and look down. The river passes under their feet without noticing. A child on one bank can hold a conversation with someone on the other bank. The whole width of the Mississippi, at its naming and beginning, is just the distance of a shout.

The warm months bring a procession to this spot. People wade in their shoes and then take their shoes off. They kneel and touch the water, lifting a hand to watch it run off. Some stand still in the middle of the stream and do no more than look upstream and down. The moment is quick, but it lingers. The water one touches here is the same water that will later pass through locks on its way to St. Paul, slide past the fields of western Illinois, and mix with the Gulf at last. The future of the river is enormous. The beginning of it is small enough to lose in a wood.

It is that disproportion that makes the place feel less like a tourist attraction than a fact with a forest around it. The river will be engineered, dammed, dredged, polluted, cleaned, argued over, and depended upon. North of St. Louis it will make the boundary between states; below New Orleans it will build land into the sea. All of that waits downstream. Here, a boot prints the soft gravel and a ripple moves downstream, joining another and another until the creek remembers it is a river.

At the end of the day, when the visitors have gone and the pines are dark along the shore, the outlet is still moving. The water does not stop, and it does not get excited. It slides under the footbridge in the last of the light, carrying a few pine needles and a flattened leaf, and begins, thoroughly and quietly, the whole long way to the Gulf.

Itasca State Park

Photos: Crown Star Images, Tony Webster (CC BY 2.0); Robbschultz69 (CC BY-SA 4.0)