The Mighty Mississippi Author:Bern Keating Reminiscing about his boyhood beside the river, Mark Twain wrote of "...the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun..." — It had been named by the Chippewa Indians long before any European saw it. "Messipi," they called it, "big river." — They named it well. The river was b... more »ig, too big to comprehend all at once. Even today, many statements about the Mississippi are true for only a portion of it....« less