Missouri

• 1. Introduction

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  Missouri sits at the heart of a continent, sharing borders with eight different states, a distinction matched only by its neighbor Tennessee. For thousands of years, people have moved through and settled this land, drawn by two great rivers, vast agricultural plains, and a position that made it the literal doorway to everything that lay west. The state carries four major nicknames at once: the Gateway to the West, the Mother of the West, the Cave State, and the Show Me State. Each one tells a different story about how Missourians see themselves. How did a landlocked state in America's midsection become the departure point for a nation's westward ambitions? How did it give birth to ragtime, Kansas City jazz, and the blues? And why does the very name of the state divide its own residents over how to say it? The answers reach back more than twelve thousand years and run through Indigenous nations, French fur traders, enslaved laborers, Civil War guerrillas, and a Progressive Era governor who declared Missouri a model of public morality for the nation.

• 2. Ancient Ground

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  Archaeological excavations along Missouri's river valleys show continuous human habitation since roughly 9000 BCE. The Mississippian culture, which emerged before 1000 CE, built one of the great pre-Columbian urban networks in North America, with a major center at present-day St. Louis and another across the river at Cahokia, near what is now Collinsville, Illinois. Cahokia functioned as the hub of a regional trading network that stretched from the Great Lakes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The cities of this culture housed thousands of residents and featured massive earthwork mounds built for religious, political, and social purposes, in platform, ridgetop, and conical shapes. The civilization declined by 1400 CE, and most descendants had left the area long before Europeans arrived. St. Louis was so thick with surviving prehistoric mounds that European Americans once called it Mound City, though urban development eventually erased them. When the French and Spanish arrived centuries later, they encountered the Osage and Missouria nations, the people whose names would eventually define the place. The Missouria were a Siouan-language tribe, and French colonists adapted an Illinois-language word for them, Wimihsoorita, meaning "one who has dugout canoes." That adaptation eventually became Missouri, the name of the river, and then the name of the state.

• 3. French Fur and Spanish Rule

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  Ste. Genevieve, founded around 1735, was the first permanent European settlement in Missouri, established by ethnic French Canadians who crossed the Mississippi from the exhausted soils of the Illinois Country. They brought enslaved Africans and Native Americans with them, and slave labor underpinned both commercial agriculture and the fur trade from the beginning. Sainte-Genevieve produced enough surplus wheat, corn, and tobacco to ship tons of grain downriver to Lower Louisiana each year, a supply that was critical to the survival of New Orleans. St. Louis followed on the 14th of February, 1764, founded by French fur traders Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, Pierre Laclede, and Auguste Chouteau. The city rapidly became the center of a regional fur trade with Native American tribes along the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, with pelts shipped downriver to New Orleans for export to Europe. Spanish forces arrived in St. Louis in September 1767, and for nearly four decades the territory was part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. The fur trade and its associated businesses gave St. Louis an early financial sophistication, generating enough wealth for prominent merchants to build fine houses and import luxury goods. The expansion of steamboat traffic after the invention of that technology accelerated the city's growth dramatically, turning it into the commercial gateway through which the continent's interior passed. When the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, it inherited a territory already shaped by more than half a century of French and Spanish colonial enterprise.

• 4. A State Born in Controversy

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  Americans from the Upland South poured into the new Missouri Territory after 1803, bringing enslaved laborers and a determination to expand the plantation system they knew from Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. They settled predominantly in seventeen counties along the Missouri River, in an area of flatlands suited to plantation agriculture that became known as "Little Dixie." Missouri was admitted to the Union in 1821 as a slave state under the Missouri Compromise, with a temporary capital in St. Charles. By 1826, the capital had shifted permanently to Jefferson City. In 1836, the Platte Purchase extended Missouri's northwest corner by buying land from native tribes, making the Missouri River the border north of the Kansas River. This addition made Missouri, briefly, the largest state in the Union, edging out Virginia by a small margin. The Mormon War of 1838 exposed deep fault lines between Southern settlers and Northern newcomers: by 1839, with a formal "Extermination Order" from Governor Lilburn Boggs, old settlers had forcibly expelled the Mormon community and seized their lands. In 1860, enslaved African Americans made up less than 10% of the state's population of 1,182,012. The tensions over slavery were less about current demographics than about the future direction of the state. By that point, the state had completed 140 miles of levees along the Mississippi to control flooding, a sign of how deeply agricultural infrastructure had become embedded in the landscape.

• 5. A State Divided Against Itself

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  The Civil War forced Missouri into an impossible position. Pro-Southern Governor Claiborne F. Jackson secretly requested Confederate arms to seize the St. Louis Arsenal, but Union General Nathaniel Lyon struck first, surrounding the state militia camp and forcing its surrender. When Lyon marched the prisoners through St. Louis, largely under the watch of non-English-speaking German immigrant soldiers, pro-secession civilians rioted, leading to deaths on both sides. The incident, called the Camp Jackson Affair, sharpened divisions throughout the state. Jackson appointed Sterling Price to lead the Missouri State Guard, but was forced to flee Jefferson City on the 14th of June, 1861. In Neosho, he called a rump session of the legislature that quickly adopted an ordinance of secession. The Confederacy recognized Missouri's secession on the 30th of October, 1861. At the same time, the state convention reassembled in the capital and installed Hamilton Gamble as governor, a government immediately recognized by President Lincoln. Missouri then had two rival governments claiming legitimacy. Confederate forces won at Wilson's Creek and the siege of Lexington but eventually retreated to Arkansas. For the next three years, the state was torn apart by guerrilla warfare. Captain William Quantrill, Frank and Jesse James, the Younger brothers, and William T. Anderson waged fast-moving small-unit campaigns. Historians have noted that stories of the James brothers' outlaw years were later romanticized into an American Robin Hood myth. The vigilante activities of the Bald Knobbers in the Ozarks during the 1880s were widely understood as an unofficial continuation of that insurgent mentality, long after the war had officially ended.

• 6. Industrialization and Reform

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  After the Civil War, railroads transformed Missouri's economic geography in ways that rivaled the earlier steamboat revolution. Kansas City became a major transportation hub, and the cattle industry of Texas locked into it through the refrigerated boxcar, which made mass meatpacking possible. Large cattle drives from Texas delivered herds to Dodge City and other Kansas towns; from there, trains carried the animals to Kansas City for slaughter and distribution to eastern markets. The first half of the 20th century was the height of Kansas City's urban prominence, with its downtown filled with Art Deco skyscrapers built during the construction boom of that era. German immigrants arriving in the late 1840s and 1850s created the wine industry along the Missouri River and the beer industry in St. Louis, with their cultural preference for brewing taking lasting institutional form in companies like Anheuser-Busch, now the world's largest beer producer. The Progressive Era brought a governor who tried to use Missouri itself as a demonstration project. Joseph "Holy Joe" Folk won the governorship as a Democrat in the 1904 election and promoted what he called "the Missouri Idea": Missouri as a leader in public morality through popular control of law. Folk conducted antitrust prosecutions, ended free railroad passes for state officials, extended bribery statutes, and made racetrack gambling illegal. He also pushed through regulation of elections, child labor, food, and public utilities. In 1930, a diphtheria epidemic around Springfield killed approximately 100 people before serum was rushed in to stop it.

• 7. Culture, Music, and Identity

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  Ragtime, Kansas City jazz, and St. Louis blues were all born in Missouri, a convergence of musical innovation concentrated in its two major cities. Ragtime composer Scott Joplin lived in both St. Louis and Sedalia. Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker lived in Kansas City. Guitarist and rock pioneer Chuck Berry, singer Josephine Baker, and Tina Turner, billed as the "Queen of Rock," are among the many musicians either born in or closely associated with St. Louis. Rapper Eminem was born in St. Joseph and also lived in Savannah and Kansas City. Singer-songwriter Chappell Roan was born in Willard and performed in the Springfield metropolitan area from 2012 to 2015 before signing with her first label. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is the second-oldest symphony orchestra in the nation, and achieved particular prominence under conductor Leonard Slatkin. Missouri is the native state of Mark Twain, whose novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are set in his boyhood hometown of Hannibal. Authors Kate Chopin, T. S. Eliot, and Tennessee Williams all came from St. Louis. Missouri is also the only state in the Union to host two Federal Reserve Banks, one in Kansas City and one in St. Louis, a structural distinction that reflects its historical position at the boundary between the Midwest and the South. Missouri French, the nearly extinct dialect spoken by descendants of French pioneers who settled the Illinois Country beginning in the late 17th century, remains one of the more unexpected cultural threads still alive in the state, with only a few elderly speakers remaining.

• 8. Weather, Caves, and the Land Itself

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  Missouri's geography ranges from the glaciated rolling hills of the north to the Ozark Mountains in the south, a dissected plateau built on Precambrian igneous rock and riddled with karst topography. More than 7,300 recorded caves make Missouri the second-most cave-dense state in the country, behind only Tennessee, and Perry County holds both the most caves and the single longest cave in the state. Missouri's highest recorded temperature was 118 degrees Fahrenheit, reached at both Warsaw and Union on the 14th of July, 1954. The lowest was -40 degrees Fahrenheit, also at Warsaw, on the 13th of February, 1905. The state lies in Tornado Alley. On the 22nd of May, 2011, an EF-5 tornado killed 158 people and destroyed roughly one-third of Joplin; it caused an estimated one to three billion dollars in damage, was the first EF5 to strike Missouri since 1957, and was the deadliest tornado in the United States since 1947. One of the worst tornadoes in American history before that struck St. Louis on the 27th of May, 1896, killing at least 255 people and causing ten million dollars in damage. Missouri also ranked near its entire history as a political bellwether. From 1904 to 2004, the state voted for the winning presidential candidate in every election but one, in 1956 when Adlai Stevenson carried Missouri but lost the national election. That streak makes Missouri's record across the last 29 presidential elections an accuracy rate of 89.66%, now on par with Ohio.