The Father of Waters

THE biggest bay in the United States I told you is called “the Mother of Waters.” The biggest river in the United States is called “the Father of Waters.” Although the river is called a “father,” he is not a Mr. He is a “Miss.” In the Indian language he is Miss—issippi, and is spelled in this jingly way:

which is very easy to learn.

If I asked you to draw a picture of a river, and also of a tree without any leaves on it, you would probably draw the tree this way—a main stem, with big branches, and big branches with little branches, and little branches with tiny branches—like the picture to the left. And you would probably draw the picture of the river as just a wiggly line—now wouldn’t you? As a matter of fact, the picture of a tree and the picture of a river should be drawn exactly the same way, for they each have a main stem with big branches, big branches with little branches, and little branches with tiny branches—although you may not see all the branches in the picture of a river on the map.

But there is this big difference between a tree and a river:

A tree grows from the bottom to the top of its branches.

A river flows from the top of its branches to the bottom. The sap runs up a tree, water runs down a river. If a river were just a single line and had no branches at all, it would be just as big at the finish as at the start. It’s the river’s branches that make it bigger and bigger. The biggest river in the United States, the Mississippi, starts almost at the top of our country, at a little lake called Itasca, in the State of Minnesota, and flows all the way to the bottom of our country, getting bigger and bigger all the time as its branches flow into it, until at last it reaches a corner of the ocean we call the Gulf of Mexico.