The main stream is two thousand five hundred and three miles in length, or
more truly four thousand one hundred and ninety miles, if the Mississippi
and Missouri be taken; that is, many times the length of the Seine. As
Mark Twain, who is to be forever associated with its history, has said, it
is "the crookedest river" in the world, travelling "one thousand three
hundred miles to cover the same ground that a crow would fly over in six
hundred and seventy-five." For a distance of several hundred miles the
Upper Mississippi is a mile in width. Back in 1882 it was seventy miles or
more [Footnote: Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," p. 456.] wide when
the flood was highest, and in 1912 sixty miles wide. The volume of water
discharged by it into the sea is second only to the Amazon, and is greater
than that of all European rivers combined--Seine, Rhine, Rhone, Po,
Danube, and all the rest, omitting the Volga. The amount is estimated at
one hundred and fifty-nine cubic miles annually--that is, it would fill
annually a tank one hundred and fifty-nine miles long, a mile wide, and a
mile high.
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