ID
MO-090
Featured
Missouri means “town of the large canoes” in the language of the Missouri people — a river people who named a river that named a state that named a legend.
Gateway to the West
The Mississippian city of Cahokia, just across the river from present-day St. Louis, was the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico — home to 20,000 people at its peak around 1100 CE. Long after Cahokia’s decline, Missouri’s river valleys were home to the Osage, Missouri, and Shawnee nations when French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet first mapped the Mississippi confluence in 1673.
French settlers established Ste. Genevieve around 1735 and St. Louis in 1764, making Missouri the commercial hub of the vast Louisiana territory. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 transferred the territory to the United States, and in May 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark launched their Corps of Discovery from Camp Dubois across the river, paddling up the Missouri toward the Pacific. The expedition made St. Louis the literal starting point of American westward expansion.
Missouri entered the Union on August 10, 1821 as the twenty-fourth state, after the Missouri Compromise allowed it to enter as a slave state paired with free Maine. The compromise held the Union together for three decades but made Missouri a fault line — neither fully Southern nor fully Northern. When the Civil War came, Missouri fought itself: a pro-Confederate governor fled to Arkansas while a Unionist government took power, and guerrilla violence between “Jayhawkers” and “Bushwhackers” ravaged the border counties throughout the war.
After the war, St. Louis briefly rivaled Chicago as the nation’s second city. The 1904 World’s Fair drew 20 million visitors, introduced the world to the ice cream cone and iced tea, and celebrated the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase. Hannibal on the Mississippi produced Samuel Clemens — Mark Twain — whose novels of boyhood on the river became the country’s most beloved national literature. Kansas City grew into a jazz capital and barbecue capital, its own distinct identity rooted in the stockyards and the blues clubs of 18th & Vine.
Today Missouri is a state of contrasts: St. Louis and Kansas City anchor opposite ends with urban complexity, while vast stretches of the Ozarks and the northern plains remain rural, agricultural, and resistant to change. The Gateway Arch — completed in 1965 — rises 630 feet above the St. Louis riverfront as the nation’s tallest monument, a steel catenary curve that frames the west in every photograph and reminds everyone who built it that Missouri once meant the edge of the known world.
1673
Marquette & Jolliet
French explorers map the Mississippi-Missouri confluence, the first Europeans to document what will become Missouri’s geographic heart.
1764
St. Louis Founded
Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau establish a fur-trading post on the Mississippi bluff. Within decades it is the commercial capital of the Louisiana territory.
1804
Lewis & Clark Depart
The Corps of Discovery launches from Camp Dubois opposite St. Louis, paddling up the Missouri River toward the Pacific. Missouri is the literal starting line of American westward expansion.
1821
Statehood
Missouri enters the Union as the twenty-fourth state under the Missouri Compromise — a slave state balanced against free Maine, a bargain that defers but does not prevent the Civil War.
1847
Dred Scott Case Begins
Dred Scott files suit for his freedom in a St. Louis courthouse. His case reaches the Supreme Court in 1857, whose ruling accelerates the nation toward war.
1860
Pony Express
The Pony Express launches from St. Joseph, Missouri — the westernmost railhead — carrying mail to Sacramento in ten days across 1,900 miles of open country.
1904
World’s Fair
St. Louis hosts the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, drawing 20 million visitors. The ice cream cone and iced tea are popularized here. The city briefly holds itself equal to any in the world.
1927
Lindbergh Flies
Charles Lindbergh, a St. Louis airmail pilot backed by St. Louis businessmen, flies nonstop from New York to Paris. His plane is named the Spirit of St. Louis.
1944
Truman to Washington
Harry Truman of Independence, Missouri, becomes vice president. Within months of taking office, he will make the decision to use atomic weapons — the most consequential single act of any 20th-century president.
1965
Gateway Arch Completed
Eero Saarinen’s 630-foot stainless steel arch is completed on the St. Louis riverfront — the nation’s tallest monument, a parabola of ambition above the place where the West began.
