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I'm writing a Louis and Clark style river adventure and I'm trying to find the best way to lay out my maps. I've been looking at a bunch of maps, but they don't explain a lot of the terminology. Does anyone know of any good sites with information? I'd also to be interested to find something about river mapping before GPS and whatnot.
The only slightly obscure thing I know about river terminology is marking twain, since I live in St. Louis and Mark Twain is kind of a big deal here in Missouri. It means checking how deep or shallow the river is by throwing a string over the side that has a weight on the end of it and you take measurements. Other terms such as fork, branch, rivulet, creek, etc could probably be found by a simple search. Look under Tributary on wikipedia, scroll down for a bunch of links and stuff.
I'm a canoer, so I know a lot of the basic stuff. But I never learned how to read a river map or anything like that. I'll take a look at that. I'm also from Missouri, actually. XD
The only nautical terms I ever mastered were grounded, foundering, capsized, and sunk.
My thinking is that the terms used by a boater would be different to the terms used by a geographer. So while I might be able to tell you the latter, I've no idea if it's what a boater would actually used.