Nishnabotna River

"Nishnabotna" redirects here. For the former high school, see Nishnabotna High School. For the former town in Missouri, see Nishnabotna, Missouri.

The mouth of the Nishnabotna River at the Missouri River viewed from the southwest
Flooding (and levee breach) at the confluence on June 16, 2011, during the 2011 Missouri River floods viewed from the northeast. The meander in the river is where it briefly crosses from Missouri to Nebraska on McKissick Island and then back to Missouri before entering the Missouri River.

The Nishnabotna River (/nɪʃnəˈbɑːtnə/) is a tributary of the Missouri River in southwestern Iowa, northwestern Missouri and southeastern Nebraska in the United States. It flows for most of its length as two parallel streams in Iowa, the East Nishnabotna River and the West Nishnabotna River. The east and west branches are each about 120 miles (190 km) long; from their confluence the Nishnabotna flows approximately another 16 miles (26 km).[1]

Several sections of the rivers' courses have been straightened and heavily channelized.

In March 2024 a fertilizer spill killed much of the aquatic life across a 60-mile stretch of the Nishnabotna river in Iowa and Missouri, leaving an estimated 789,000 fish dead in one of the region’s most ecologically devastating chemical spills on record. The source of the spill originated when a valve was left open on a storage tank over the weekend of March 9-11 at NEW Cooperative, an agricultural business in Red Oak, Iowa. The leak drained approximately 265,000 gallons of liquid nitrogen fertilizer into the nearby East Nishnabotna River.[2][3]

Traditionally, it has been assumed that the name "Nishnabotna" comes from an Otoe (Chiwere) word meaning "canoe-making river."[4] However, it has been proposed more recently that the name comes from the Osage language and means "spouting wellspring."[5]

  1. ^ U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. The National Map Archived March 29, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, accessed March 30, 2011
  2. ^ ""Fertilizer spill killed more than 750,000 fish in Nishnabotna River"".
  3. ^ ""Iowa Fertilizer Spill Kills Nearly All Fish Across 60-Mile Stretch of Rivers"". www.nytimes.com. The New York Times. Retrieved March 29, 2024.
  4. ^ Eaton, David Wolfe (1916). How Missouri Counties, Towns and Streams Were Named. The State Historical Society of Missouri. pp. 203.
  5. ^ Bright, William (2004). Native American Placenames of the United States. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. p. 329.