Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2023 January 12

= January 12 =

Fort Benton, Montana
I added the sentence that Fort Benton "was the most upstream navigable port on the Mississippi River System, and is considered 'the world’s innermost port'," cited to a University of Montana website. Since this is an extraordinary claim, I would appreciate some feedback about its accuracy. Cullen328 (talk) 05:14, 12 January 2023 (UTC)


 * I don't have immediate access to it, but I would be quite astonished if Joel Overholser's book Fort Benton: World's Innermost Port (ISBN 0937959278) did not contain at least a little information on the subject. Shells-shells (talk) 05:43, 12 January 2023 (UTC)


 * Alternatively, The Material Culture of Steamboat Passengers: Archaeological Evidence from the Missouri River (p. XI) says:
 * Fort Benton, 3,3 from St. Louis, became the world's innermost port—the farthest port from ocean or sea served by regularly scheduled powered craft (Chittend Corbin, 1998; Lass, 1962; Overholser, 1987).
 * Alansplodge (talk) 11:33, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * "3,3 from St. Louis" should, of course, be "3,300 miles from St. Louis" (the damn Google Books copy having cut off the right-hand side of the page). Similarly, "Chittend Corbin, 1998" should be "Chittenden, 1903; Corbin, 1998". Deor (talk) 15:27, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * “farthest port from ocean or sea served by regularly scheduled powered craft” sounds like a carefully crafted description that will be hard to fact check as it could include a canoe with outboard doing a mail run, for example. As the Amazon system is longer than the Mississippi-Missouri there could be a small place upstream that meets the same definition. (Or on the Nile or Yangtze systems, if the definition doesn’t also require connection to the sea uninterrupted by dams.) Most places in our inland port article seem to be using a different definition of port based on size/type of vessels/facilities. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 19:54, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * If we take "farthest port from ocean or sea" to mean straight-line distance (or really, geodesic distance) to the nearest ocean or sea, then it isn't true. Fort Benton is about 860 km from Possession Sound or 890 km from the Salish Sea. The port of Krasnoyarsk on the Yenisey is about 1600 km from the Gulf of Ob or 1840 km from the Kara Sea. They may mean the distance you have to go downstream to reach an ocean or sea, but then we'd need to exclude endorheic lakes like Lake Titicaca, which aren't connected to any ocean or sea. --Amble (talk) 20:13, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
 * I suggest that the relevant distance is intended to be distance along the river to its mouth, even if they didn't say that. --142.112.220.65 (talk) 06:08, 14 January 2023 (UTC)


 * In Australia List of Murray River distances tells me that the port of Echuca is 975 miles or 1,570 km from the river's mouth. HiLo48 (talk) 06:34, 14 January 2023 (UTC)