Lake Itasca and the Source of the Mississippi

In the summer of eighteen thirty-two, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft stood at the outlet of a cold, clear lake in the pine forests of northern Minnesota and announced that he had found what European explorers had been looking for since the seventeenth century: the true headwaters of the Mississippi River.

The lake was not large, covering under two square miles, nestled among the pine-covered hills of what is now Itasca State Park. At its northern end, the Mississippi emerged as a stream no wider than a living room, shallow enough to wade across on stepping stones. Schoolcraft named the lake Itasca, drawing from the Latin words verITAS and CAput, meaning truth and head. The name was artificial and the Latin was slightly tortured, but it stuck.

The search for the headwaters had been genuine and long. French explorers in the seventeenth century had followed the river north through a thousand miles of interior, but the upper reaches were Ojibwe territory and the full journey required Ojibwe knowledge and Ojibwe guides. Schoolcraft, who served as the U.S. government's Indian agent for the upper Great Lakes, reached Itasca in part because his Ojibwe guide, Ozaawindib, also known as Yellow Head, knew exactly where the source lay and led the expedition directly to it.

Schoolcraft received full credit for the discovery in the accounts published at the time. Ozaawindib received a subordinate mention. That asymmetry was standard in the literature of American exploration, and scholars have spent the last several decades working to correct the record.

The Mississippi that begins at Lake Itasca is a gentle river, running through pine forests and lakes for its first hundred miles, dropping gradually toward the Twin Cities. By the time it reaches the Gulf of Mexico, twenty-three hundred miles later, it has drained all or part of more than thirty states and two Canadian provinces, roughly forty percent of the area of the contiguous United States. It begins here, in the north woods, moving south through a channel you can step across.