The Mississippi River, one of the longest rivers in North America, flows 2,340 miles from Lake Itasca, Minn., to the Gulf of Mexico below New Orleans and is divided into the Upper, Middle, and Lower Mississippi, with certain points on the Lower Mississippi reaching one mile in width. Its floodplain encompasses more than 30 million acres, and its watershed measures 1.85 million square miles, or 41 percent of the U.S., spanning from the crest of the Rocky Mountains to the crest of the Appalachian Mountains and encompassing 31 states and two Canadian provinces. The lower Mississippi is bound by high bluffs and man-made levees next to oxbow lakes, swamps, and marshes, and cities developed there because of the river’s promise as a major commercial corridor. Although the waterway has more than 250 tributaries, most connections in Louisiana are distributaries, which historically spread the river’s water and silt across broad areas and enriched agricultural land on both sides. The river has shifted course many times in geologic history, and its current basin was shaped by the Laurentide Ice Sheet, which ended with the last ice age about 11,700 years ago. Its present course dates to about 800 to 1,000 years ago, when it shifted east from the Lafourche Delta and shaped Scott’s Bluff, one of the first bluffs on the river north of New Orleans. This high land is primarily composed of loess parent material transported gradually by winds during the Pleistocene era, and the loess soil accumulated in significant layers on the east bank of the Mississippi from Scott’s Bluff to points north of Natchez. Scott’s Bluff is believed to be named for Dr. William Bernard Scott, who bought the property in 1839 from Lelia Skipworth, daughter of a former governor of the 1810 West Florida Republic. Local legend places the baton rouge, or “red stick” that gave Baton Rouge its name, at Scott’s Bluff. Today the bluff is home to the campus of Southern University and A&M College, a historically black, 1890 land-grant institution.