Two Rivers Overlook

Below the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers, a place the Dakota called Ma-ko-ce Co-ka-ya Kin and believed to be immediately over the center of the earth and under the center of the heavens, the Minnesota ends as it joins the Mississippi on its journey to the sea. The Mississippi, named from the Ojibwe words Missi Sipi or Great River, begins at Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota and travels 2,350 miles to the Gulf of Mexico, fed by tributaries and watersheds that make it the third largest drainage basin in the world. From the confluence upstream to St. Anthony Falls, the river passes through a unique gorge, dropping deeply into a tight canyon, and here it emerges from that gorge to become the large floodplain river known for a broad valley with braided channels, backwater lakes, sloughs, and wooded islands. Historically, the Mississippi rose and fell with the seasons, spreading across the floodplain during spring snowmelt and becoming slow and shallow in late summer and fall. Navigation projects changed both rivers: Lock and Dam No. 1, completed in 1918, improved passage between Saint Paul and Minneapolis, and Lock and Dam No. 2, completed in 1930 above Hastings, flooded low-lying lands upstream and ensured a minimum nine-foot navigation channel. Today the Mississippi is controlled by 29 locks and dams between Minneapolis and Granite City, Illinois, dropping nearly 420 feet over 669 miles. During World War II, a nine-foot channel was dredged thirteen miles up the Minnesota to Savage so ocean-going tankers could reach a shipyard there, and in the late 1960s a new channel was excavated near Pike Island so long barge tows could bypass a narrow, winding bend, leaving the old channel as a backwater.

St. Paul, Minnesota · United States