The Mississippi: Great River, Fish River or Father of Waters?

The Mississippi River’s name means “great river,” a Minnesota scholar wrote in 1920, but two years later a history of Kentucky said it meant “Fish River.” And as late as 2008, a National Park Service fact sheet was still offering “Father of Waters.”

Missi, great; sippi, river

The scholar was Warren Upham, and his Minnesota Geographic Names says the river “bears for all time the Algonquian name which it received from the Ojibways who paddled their birch canoes on its head stream.” The first part, missi, “means Great,” akin to the Ojibwe kitchi, the “Gitche” you may remember from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. The second, sippi, also written sipi, sebe or zibi, “is the common Algonquian or Ojibway word for a river.” Upham is the same writer we lean on for how Minnesota got its name, the state where the river starts.

He quotes the Rev. J. A. Gilfillan, who wrote that below the mouth of the Leech Lake River the Ojibwe called it Kitchi-zibi, “Great river.” Gilfillan couldn’t find anyone who called it Missizibi, but he thought the old form “so exactly corresponds with their language that it must have been taken from it.”

At first the name covered only the part of the river those peoples knew, Upham says. Marquette, Joliet and La Salle stretched it “to its entire course, displacing the numerous former Indian names” farther south. Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources still puts it plainly today: “Mississippi means ‘Great River’ in Ojibwe.”

Or was it Fish River?

William Elsey Connelley read it differently in the 1922 History of Kentucky. “Sipu in that tongue means river,” he agreed, but he tied the first part to Delaware traditions of a migration to a mighty river, “now believed to have been the Mississippi,” that they called the Namaesi-sipu, “that is, Fish River.” Connelley didn’t hedge: “For it does not,” he wrote of any grander meaning.

He wasn’t alone. An 1880 history of Mississippi by J. F. H. Claiborne lists the names some tribes used for the river, and one of them, a name that looks a lot like Connelley’s, comes with the translation “river of fishes.” We told that side of the story in how the state of Mississippi got its name.

So which reading weighs more? Upham’s has more behind it in these sources: the French first heard the name from Algonquian peoples of the upper river, Gilfillan reported that the Ojibwe called it Kitchi-zibi, “Great river,” and Henry Gannett’s 1905 bulletin for the U.S. Geological Survey also starts with “great river.” Connelley rests on Delaware tradition and doesn’t say where he got it. But Gilfillan never heard the word Missizibi itself, and Claiborne’s “river of fishes” is an older hint pointing Connelley’s way. You won’t find a final answer in these books.

Where “Father of Waters” came from

On the nickname, Upham and Connelley push back. Upham says the phrase “has no warrant in the Algonquian name,” and he quotes Henry Schoolcraft, writing in 1854, that missi means “all” and, used for waters, “the collected or assembled mass of them,” so that it’s “only symbolically” the father of American rivers. Connelley lists “Father of Waters” among the meanings he calls “erroneous and wrong” for the Indian name.

The phrase has stubborn friends, though. Claiborne credits Du Pratz with saying the western Indians had names for the river “all signifying the ‘Father of waters.’” Gannett’s list leans that way too: “great river,” or “gathering in of all the waters,” and “an almost endless river spread out.” And a 2008 fact sheet from the Park Service’s Mississippi National River and Recreation Area said the Anishinabe (Ojibwe) name means “Big River” or “Father of Waters.” The same sheet gave the Dakota name, Hahawakpa, “River of the Falls,” for the falls now called St. Anthony.

Messipi, Missisipi, Meschasipi

Europeans first saw the name in print, Upham says, in the Jesuit Relation of 1666–67, published in Paris in 1668: “the great river named Messipi.” The Relation of 1670–71 described “the great river called by the natives Missisipi,” which “must empty somewhere in the region of the Florida sea.”

Here’s the thing: the French had the name and kept trying others. Marquette wrote Missisipi after his 1673 trip with Joliet, but his map labeled it “R. de la Conception.” The first edition of Hennepin’s travels, in 1683, called it the River Colbert, for “the great French statesman who died that year,” and his later editions switched to “Le Grand Fleuve Meschasipi.” La Salle wrote in 1682 of “the river Colbert, named by the Iroquois Gastacha, and by the Ottawas the Mississipy.” A French map of 1718 hedged: “the Missisipi or St. Louis.” Farther south, Upham notes, the map from Pineda’s 1519 voyage along the Gulf coast had already called it the Rio del Espiritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit.

The spelling that won

The spelling with the double s’s and the double p goes back to Jonathan Carver, who traveled into Minnesota in 1766, according to Upham. Pike, Cass, Schoolcraft and “all later writers” followed him. Before that, Dr. Elliott Coues estimated “probably thirty or more” ways of writing it.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s name records keep dozens of the old forms, from Missicipy to Mitchi-Sipi, plus Namisi Sipu, Haha Wakpa and Father of Waters. They set the official name with a decision of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names in 1931 and follow the river from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, along the borders of ten states. One name for the whole river, and after three and a half centuries, still two readings of what it says.

Historical Sources & References

• Warren Upham, Minnesota Geographic Names (Minnesota Historical Society, 1920). Section “The Mississippi,” pp. 4–6: the Ojibwe origin and “the Great River”; the Jesuit Relations of 1666–67 and 1670–71; Pineda’s 1519 map; Marquette, Hennepin, La Salle and the 1718 map; Carver’s spelling and Coues’s estimate; missi and sippi; Gilfillan’s account; “Father of Waters” with “no warrant in the Algonquian name,” and Schoolcraft’s 1854 comment.
• William Elsey Connelley and E. M. Coulter, History of Kentucky, vol. 1 (1922). p. 3: “Sipu in that tongue means river”; the Delaware Namaesi-sipu, “that is, Fish River”; “Father of Waters” among the meanings he calls “erroneous and wrong”; “For it does not.”
• J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi, as a Province, Territory and State, vol. 1 (1880). pp. 31–32, footnote on the river’s names: Du Pratz’s western names, “all signifying the ‘Father of waters,’” and the tribal name glossed “river of fishes.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905). p. 210, entry “Mississippi”: “An Indian word meaning ‘great river,’ or ‘gathering in of all the waters,’ and ‘an almost endless river spread out.’”
• National Park Service, Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, “River Facts” (teacher fact sheet, 2008; archived copy). The name “comes from the Anishinabe people (Ojibwe Indians),” “Messipi” or “Mee-zee-see-bee,” “which means ‘Big River’ or ‘Father of Waters’”; the Dakota “Hahawakpa,” “River of the Falls.”
• Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, “Mississippi River” state water trail. “Mississippi means ‘Great River’ in Ojibwe.”
• GNIS feature 1629903, Mississippi River (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: the river heads in Minnesota and forms parts of the borders of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana; official name by Board decision (1931); variant names including Father of Waters, Missicipy, Meschasipi, Mitchi-Sipi, Namisi Sipu and Haha Wakpa.