The Fallacy of Sailing up the Mississippi in 600 B.C.

One might wonder why so much comment about the Great Lakes Theory of Lehi’s Land of Promise that is being written about lately. The simple reason is the Great Lakes area, including what is called the Heartland Theory (within the states to the south of the lakes) simply does not have much in the way of scriptural support. Yet, for some reason, it has gained a large following among people who, evidently, know little about the scriptural record or have not really studied the claims of these Theorists.

One such claim is how the Lehi Colony got to the area of the Great Lakes to begin with. Some have passed it off as reaching the lakes via the Mississippi River, while others claim that once across the Atlantic, they sailed up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario. Neither of these routes, as has already been mentioned in earlier posts, would have been possible before modern canals were built and bottom-dredging vessels developed. For some reason, however, people seem to think that because the 2,000 mile long Mississippi River stretches toward the Great Lakes from the Gulf of Mexico, that a sailing ship in 600 B.C could have navigated that river and into Lake Michigan or Lake Erie. However, one should carefully consider the following:

The Mississippi River paddle-wheeled steamboats first entered service in the 1820s. These vessels had a shallow draft of only 3 to 4 foot, as can be seen in this model. Typically these boats were 160’ long, had four decks, were 47.5 feet high, and had a dry weight of about 275 tons.

The hulls were generally wooden, (although a few steel and composite hulls were built after about 1898) and were braced internally with a series of built-up longitudinal timbers called "keelsons". Further resilience was given to the hulls by a system of "hog rods" or "hog chains" that were fastened into the keelsons and led up and over vertical masts called "hog-posts", and back down again.

On the other hand, a deep sea, wood sailing vessel of the 17th-19th centuries, that was the same length would have had a draft of over 18 feet, and a comparable tonnage ship would have a draft of 9 feet, but would be less than half as long. Generally, 18th century sailing vessels considered to have a shallow draft were between draft depths of 10’ 6” to 13.5’.

Today, the depth of the Mississippi River is maintained at a nine-foot level by the Army Corps of Engineers for navigation of modern shipping. But in the 19th century, and the centuries before, the Mississippi required, as most inland waterways do, a shallow draft boat, and the paddle-wheeled steamboats with their three- to four-foot drafts were designed specifically for that task—especially along the Mississippi with its shifting sandbars and extremely shallow sections before modern dredging made it possible for deeper draft vessels to navigate it. Nor could any type of vessel move past the Rock Island Rapids, or the Cedar Rapids in Iowa to reach the closest point the river gets to Lake Michigan (310 miles).

Perhaps most importantly, long before the Corps of Engineers became involved in the early 19th-century, a blockage of the river by a prehistoric log jam made navigation northward beyond the Atchafalaya, near Simmesport in central Louisiana near the Mississippi border, at the confluence of the Red River with the Mississippi, impossible for anything other than small boats and the shallow-draft paddle wheels. The Corps of Engineers, dug a channel, which widened, and diverted the river so now the original shallow route is called the Old River.

Beginning just below St. Paul, Minnesota, and continuing throughout the upper and lower river, the Mississippi is now controlled by thousands of wing dikes that moderate the river's flow in order to maintain an open navigation channel of nine feet for deep sea vessels. The shallow-draft, paddlewheel steamboat “New Orleans” was the first vessel to sail from the Ohio tributary (375 miles south of Lake Michigan) down to New Orleans along the Gulf in December 1811. In 1988, when a record low level of the river occurred, 4 ½ acres of wreckage of wooden ships in Arkansas along the lower river was exposed, illustrating the extreme dangers of early navigation on the Mississippi.

It is one thing to look at a map and say this is the way they traveled, but quite another thing for it to have taken place. Yet, a statement that “this is what happened” takes on a life of its own and is repeated by “believers” until it becomes an accepted fact. However, facts cannot be altered to fit a belief. Getting from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes by ship in 600 B.C. was simply impossible and no amount of rhetoric can change that fact.