Word History: In a letter from August 1863, Abraham Lincoln wrote, "the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea," referring to General Grant's capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi. In the 1700s and 1800s, it was widely believed that the name Mississippi meant "Father of Waters," in a Native American language, and American writers often used the phrase Father of Waters as an alternate, more poetic appellation for the river. (Other mighty rivers, such as the Nile, had also been given this title in English literature before the Mississippi.) However, the name Mississippi actually comes from Ojibwa misi-sipi, meaning simply "big river." In 1666 French explorers somewhere in the western Great Lakes region encountered the Ojibwa name and rendered it as Messipi. The French then took the name with them as they went down the Big River to its delta, and it eventually superseded all the other names for the Big River used by local Indian tribes and by earlier Spanish explorers. Later, in 1798, Congress applied the Ojibwa name of the river to the territory of Mississippi, newly organized from lands inhabited by the Natchez, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.