[2] The Mississinewa River has its headwaters near the Indiana state border in northwestern Darke County, Ohio, within 2 miles (3.2 km) of the start of the Wabash.

A series of limestone columns known as the "Seven Pillars of the Mississinewa" stands on the north side of the river about three miles (5 km) southeast of Peru in Miami County.

Having over 100 of his horses killed and fearing a second attack, Campbell ordered his troops to return to Fort Greenville late in the afternoon of the 18th.

In his first book, Work, for the Night Is Coming, published by Macmillan in 1981, Carter created the mythical Midwestern county of Mississinewa.

In that first book, two early poems, “The Undertaker” and “Monument City”, refer to the construction of a large reservoir on the Mississinewa River.

This imaginary and purely literary reservoir is a conflation of the three actual lakes created by dams on the Mississinewa and the two adjacent rivers.

In Carter’s later books, After the Rain and Cross this Bridge at a Walk, additional poems – “The Purpose of Poetry,” “Mississinewa Reservoir at Winter Pool”, “Foundling,” “Isinglass,” “Mussel Shell with Three Blanks Sawed Out,” and “Lost Bridge” – narrate changes and dislocations in the lives of local residents brought about by the coming of the reservoir.