Mississippi is a wide, muddy river, “one of the longest in the world”, and the only way into Louisiana: “going up a river you have never heard of, called Mississippi”. It carries the trade of the north and is known as a place of the damned.
| Type | River |
| Spanish entry | Mississippi |
Water and banks
Its waters are “half muddy”, carrying silt; “Mississippi mud is everywhere” and the region stays swampy. Downstream it opens into deltas, “nests of vermin”. At one recorded point the bank is a strip of about twenty meters with rocks and trees, used as a resting place. At four in the afternoon, siesta hour, it gives “heat, shade, dark heat”.
Course
It rises “right there in the north”, in northern Ohio, reached through the Great Lakes, the route by which some Europeans discovered it, and ends in the Gulf of Mexico. It “serves as a natural boundary between several states”; to skirt Texas to the north one crosses it into Arkansas. Edmund knew it.
Steamboats
Boats with “paddles behind, and steam” ply it; the Reina de Mississippi (“Mississippi Queen”) has huge stern paddles. Travelers book steamer passage or take pleasure barges from Glastonville. Northern trade and the rich come this way to Baton Rouge, on its course; the river and a tributary “have won this territory” from the city.
Reputation
«En Mississippi no perdonan; realmente es un lugar de malditos» (“In Mississippi they do not forgive; it really is a place of the damned”). One account links it to the infernal rivers: “the abyss of Mississippi… is a kind of Lethe, Styx”. Whether this is real or speculation about demons is not established.
Conflicting accounts
- The account that has it rise in Ohio also says it reaches the Appalachia area.
Open questions
- Where the twenty-meter bank lies, and whether it is typical.
- What the “vermin” of the deltas are.
- Fares, schedules and the operator of the Reina de Mississippi.
- Whether lega and baza are materials or mishearings.
- The source of its reputation, and who “does not forgive”.