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1 8 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SAVING THE MISSISSIPPI'S SOUECE. 



By H. M. KINGERY, 



WABASH COLLEGE. 



THE true American takes an honest pride in recounting the natural 

 features of our country — its mountains, plains, lakes, rivers, 

 cataracts, trees — all, in Yankee parlance, 'the greatest things on earth.' 

 Of them all none is more truly worthy of admiration than the great 

 river which practically spans our territory from north to south, drain- 

 ing an inland empire on its way. My vacation trip last summer took 

 me to its source, and it is of this, with the peril that has threatened 

 it and the measures taken to avert the peril, that I wish to tell briefly 

 in this article. 



We need not enter upon the vexed question as to what and where 

 the real source is. Every explorer has found some new lake or river 

 or spring which by ingenious definition he could make out to be the 

 'original and only' beginning of the Mississippi. Schoolcraft and the 

 schoolboy agree in saying it is Lake Itasca; but there are streams 

 entering that lake which if followed to their source would increase 

 by a mile or two the total length of the 'Father of Waters,' and so 

 satisfy more fully our national taste for bigness. The largest of these 

 affluents is the 'Infant Mississippi,' discovered and named in 1836 by 

 Jean Nicollet ; but claims are made also for Mary river and lake, for 

 Elk Lake and its tiny outlet, for the Mississippi springs, and for 

 Hernando de Soto Lake. The truth is that each of these contributes 

 its quota to the making of the Mississippi, while Itasca is the reservoir 

 in which all their contributions are assembled. To the geographer it 

 is a most interesting region, close to the watershed whence flow streams 

 of widely different destination. The cook of a surveyors' camp lo- 

 cated on this watershed used to boast that he could throw his dishwater 

 to the left and send it to the Arctic Ocean, or to the right and start it 

 towards the Gulf of Mexico. Not far away rise other streams whose 

 waters find their way to Lake Superior and so to the G-iilf of St. 

 Lawrence. This peculiar configuration was known to the early French 

 explorers, who gave the group of low hills the expressive title * Hauteurs 

 des Terres.' 



Lake Itasca lies in a valley of irregular horseshoe shape, encircled 

 by a range of low hills, and is the largest of a considerable number of 

 lakes in the same depression. Its form is most peculiar (as may he 

 -'ill by a reference to the accompanying map) ; ami it was doubtless 



