One day during my first year of working in the Library and Research Center of the Missouri History Museum I was showing materials to a group of elementary school children. The idea was to show them items from the collection that would give them a sense of history of the area. They could look at old newspapers, magazines, atlases, maps, and books about St. Louis. Fourteen years later, I still smile when I see one of the items that we showed the kids. It was a map of the Mississippi River that starts with the headwaters in Minnesota and goes down to the Gulf of Mexico. Originally it was offered to the public as an uncut ribbon map; it would have been 11 feet long and 3 inches wide and mounted on canvas or linen cloth, wound up on a spool, and encased in a metal or wooden canister. These ribbon maps were not big sellers, so they ended up as folded maps in copies of the 1866 Edwards’ Mississippi River Gazetteer and Directory.

Ribbon map of the Father of Waters (Mississippi River), mounted on wooden spool. Made by Coloney and Fairchild, St. Louis, 1866. Lithograph by Gast, Moeller, and Co. MHM Collections.

This one is a great map, but what makes me smile isn’t really the map but a conversation about it I had with a young boy. I was explaining the map to him, showing where the Mississippi River starts and how small a stream it is in the beginning, compared to what he sees in St. Louis. I told him that I grew up not too far from the headwaters and that I had been there many times. Once I visited the headwaters with my grandparents when I was in elementary school—I could remember trying to jump across the beginning of the Mississippi River. It wasn’t more than 3 or 4 feet across. I couldn’t remember for sure but I think that I did make it across. You could also wade across the beginning of the river because it wasn’t more that a couple of feet deep.

While I did keep the attention of the young lad, I noticed that by the time I finished my story he was giving me a look that told me he did not quite believe it all. He walked away but returned a few minutes later with his buddy and asked me to tell his friend what I had said earlier. So maybe he did believe it. I finished the story a second time. The two of them looked at each other and the buddy said, “I don’t believe him either.”

So now I smile when I see this map because of a fond memory from my childhood and a wonderful conversation with a couple of kids.

—Randy Blomquist, Assistant Librarian