What is the Mississippi River valley?

The Mississippi River valley is the fertile area surrounding the Mississippi River where many early Americans settled, generally including the river's floodplain and adjacent agricultural lands from Minnesota south to Louisiana, plus the broader Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio basin that drains roughly 41 percent of the contiguous United States. The valley has been a magnet for human settlement for millennia. Indigenous peoples including the Mississippian culture (about 800 to 1600 CE) built vast earthworks at sites like Cahokia near modern St. Louis (which had perhaps 20,000 residents around 1100 CE, larger than London at the time), Moundville in Alabama, and Etowah in Georgia.

After European contact and the destruction of much indigenous population through disease, the valley remained sparsely populated by Native nations including the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez, Quapaw, Osage, Sauk, Fox, Potawatomi, and others when European Americans began settling. Early American settlement of the valley accelerated after the Northwest Ordinance of July 13, 1787 organized the territory north of the Ohio River and the Louisiana Purchase of April 30, 1803 transferred French claims west of the river to the United States. Settlers came from the Atlantic seaboard states, especially Virginia, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Georgia, often crossing the Appalachians via the Cumberland Gap or the Ohio River.

By 1820 the population of states formed in the valley had reached about 2.5 million, and by 1860 about 12 million, making the Mississippi Valley the heart of American population growth. Steamboats on the river system, beginning with the New Orleans launched at Pittsburgh in 1811, dramatically reduced shipping costs. By 1850 hundreds of steamboats operated between the upper rivers and New Orleans, carrying corn, wheat, pork, and cotton south and manufactured goods north.

The valley's soils are exceptionally fertile, especially the Mississippi River alluvial floodplain (the Bottoms) and the Black Belt prairies. The valley produces vast quantities of corn, soybeans, cotton, rice, sugar cane, and livestock. Cities along the valley include Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Davenport-Quad Cities, St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans.

The Mississippi flood of April 21 to May 5, 1927 was one of the worst natural disasters in American history, displacing about 700,000 people and exposing the failures of segregated levee work systems that exploited Black workers. The Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities, which began around World War I, drew heavily from the Mississippi Valley. The valley's culture has produced major American art forms including blues, jazz, and country music, and writers including Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Toni Morrison drew on its landscapes and history.