| Dictionary: Missouri River |
A river of the United States rising in the Rocky Mountains as various headstreams that join to form the Missouri proper in southwest Montana. The longest river in the United States, it flows about 4,127 km (2,565 mi) in a meandering course to the Mississippi River north of St. Louis, Missouri. French explorers first reached the river in the late 17th century, and Lewis and Clark followed it on their journey westward (1804-1806).
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| US History Encyclopedia: Missouri River |
Missouri River, in the central and northwest central United States, is a major tributary of the Mississippi River and the longest river in the United States (2,466 miles). It drains a watershed of approximately 580,000 square miles. Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reached the mouth of the Missouri in 1673. It was known to them as Peki-tan-oui, so named on some of the early maps, and later as Oumessourit. From its source in southwestern Montana, where the Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison Rivers join together, it winds around hills and bluffs, through one of the most fertile valleys in the world, to its junction with the Mississippi (ten miles north of Saint Louis).
The lower part of the Missouri was known to the French trappers, traders, and voyageurs, who ascended it as far as the Kansas River in 1705. In 1720 a Spanish caravan was sent from Santa Fe to the Missouri to drive back the French. The early French called the river Saint Philip. They probably did not go higher than the Platte, which was considered the dividing line between the upper and lower river. In 1719 Claude Charles du Tisne and party went up the Missouri in canoes as far as the Grand River. Credited with being the first white man to visit the upper Missouri country, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, led a party from one of the posts of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1738 to the Mandan villages. Other explorations followed, searching for the "Western Sea" by way of the Missouri River. The Missouri was first explored from its mouth to its source by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804–1805).
Although it was thought for years that no keelboat could ascend the Missouri, it later became the great highway into the West. Gregoire Sarpy is said to have first introduced the keelboat, but the real father of navigation on the Missouri was Manuel Lisa. The first steamboat ever to ascend the river was the Independence, which pushed off from Saint Louis in 1819, reached Old Franklin in thirteen days, and turned back at Old Chariton, in Missouri. In 1831, Pierre Chouteau succeeded in ascending the Missouri in his steamboat Yellowstone. As a result of steamboating, many cities grew up along the edge of the river and several states built their capitals on its bank. Steamboating on the river reached its peak in the late 1850s and declined following the completion in 1859 of the Hannibal and Saint Joseph Railroad.
The Missouri River has always carried in suspension an immense amount of solid matter, mostly very fine light sand, discoloring the water and justifying the name of "Big Muddy." It is said that the yearly average of solid matter carried into the Mississippi by this river is over 500 million tons, brought along for an average distance of 500 miles. While the Missouri has a greater annual flow of water than the Mississippi above its mouth, it is subject to greater fluctuations. These have affected its navigability in certain seasons and caused the shoreline to shift, some farms and villages to disappear, and others to be left far back through deposits of the soil in front of them.
In 1944 Congress authorized a Missouri River basin project to control flooding of the Missouri, improve navigation, develop hydroelectric power, irrigate more than 4.3 million acres in the basin, halt stream pollution, and provide recreation areas. By the 1970s there were seven dams on the Missouri and eighty on its tributaries. The Missouri Basin Interagency Committee, with representatives from seven federal agencies and the governors of the ten Missouri basin states (North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Colorado, Iowa, and Montana), oversees the project. In the late twentieth century, the urbanization, soil erosion, and pollution had made the Missouri River one of the nation's most endangered rivers.
Bibliography
Brower, Jacob V. The Missouri River and Its Utmost Source; Curtailed Narration of Geologic, Primitive and Geographic Distinctions Descriptive of the Evolution and Discovery of the River and Its Headwaters. St. Paul, Minn.: Pioneer Press, 1896, 1897.
DeVoto, Bernard A. Across the Wide Missouri: 1897–1955. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947, 1987; New York: American Legacy Press, 1981.
Griffith, Cecil R. The Missouri River: The River Rat's Guide to Missouri River History and Folklore. Leawood, Kans.: Squire Publishers, 1974.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Missouri |
Course
The principal headwaters of the Missouri are the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers, which rise high in the Rocky Mts., SW Mont., and join to form the Missouri near Three Forks, Mont. The Missouri's upper course flows north through scenic mountain terrain including Gate of the Mountains, a deep gorge. At Great Falls, Mont., the river enters a 10-mi (16-km) stretch of cataracts that prevented navigation to the upper river and effectively established Fort Benton, Mont., as the head of navigation for 19th-century riverboats. Below Fort Benton the Missouri follows a meandering course east through the unspoiled Missouri Breaks and Fort Peck Lake (behind Fort Peck Dam) then southeast through the dammed Lakes Sakakawea and Oahe and across the Great Plains of the W central United States, crossing Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, and forming part of the boundaries of Nebraska, Kansas, and Iowa before crossing Missouri and entering the Mississippi River 17 mi (27 km) N of St. Louis. Nicknamed "Big Muddy" for its heavy load of silt, the brown waters of the Missouri do not readily mix with the gray waters of the Mississippi until c.100 mi (160 km) downstream. The Yellowstone and Platte rivers are the Missouri's chief tributaries.
Human Impact and Use
Above Sioux City, Iowa, the Missouri's fluctuating flow is regulated by seven major dams (Gavins Point, Fort Randall, Big Bend, Oahe, Garrison, Fort Peck, and Canyon Ferry) and more than 80 other dams on tributary streams. These dams, with their reservoirs, are part of the coordinated, basin-wide Missouri River basin project (authorized by the U.S. Congress in 1944), which provides for flood control, hydroelectric power, irrigation water, and recreational facilities. The dams serve to impound for later use the spring rains and snowmelt that swell the volume of the river in March and April and also the second flood stage that frequently occurs in June as the snow melts in the remoter mountain regions. Despite this system of dams, during the extremely rainy summer of 1993 the lower Missouri reached record levels, flooding many areas, eroding farmland, and depositing huge quantities of sand that damaged many thousands of acres of fertile bottomland.
Since the dams have no locks, Sioux City is the head of navigation for the 9-ft (2.7-m) channel maintained over the 760-mi (1,223-km) stretch downstream to the Mississippi. Tugboats pushing strings of barges move freight along this route. From December to March, navigation is interrupted by ice and low water levels (resulting from upstream freezing); summer water levels, which frequently fell so low as to cause river boats to go aground, are now maintained at safe levels by the release of water from Gavin Point Dam. Silt, fertilizers, and pesticides, which are contained in the runoff from agricultural lands, pollute the water above Sioux City, but wastes from industrial plants and from inadequately treated municipal sewage create a more serious level of pollution downstream. There has been a reduction in wetland areas and a loss of fish and wildlife due to the damming of the river.
History
The Missouri River was an important artery of commerce for Native American villages of the Plains culture long before Europeans arrived. The French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet passed the mouth of the river in 1683 and the Canadian explorer Vérendrye visited the upper reaches of the river in 1738. David Thompson, a Canadian fur trader, explored part of the river in 1797. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark followed the Missouri on their journey (1803-6) to the Pacific Ocean and described it at length (see Lewis and Clark expedition). The first steamboat ascended the river in 1819, and hundreds more later navigated the uncertain waters to Fort Benton. Mormons bound for Utah and pioneers bound for Oregon and California followed the Missouri valley and that of the Platte overland to the West. River traffic declined with the loss of freight to the railroads after the Civil War. Although it was revitalized in the mid-20th cent., in the section below Sioux City, through the navigational improvements and flood control efforts of the Missouri River basin project, barge traffic declined in the late 20th cent. Two stretches of the river are protected as the Missouri National Recreational River (see National Parks and Monuments (table)).
Bibliography
See B. De Voto, Across the Wide Missouri (1947, repr. 1972); H. M. Chittenden, Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River (1972); B. Priddy, Across Our Wide Missouri (2 vol., 1982-84).
| Geography: Missouri River |
| Wikipedia: Missouri River |
| Missouri River | |
|---|---|
 The Missouri River in bright blue, and its tributaries in paler blue. |
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| Origin | 45°55′39″N 111°30′29″W / 45.9275°N 111.50806°W[1] Confluence of Madison River and Jefferson River, near Gallatin River,[2] in Gallatin County, Montana. |
| Mouth | 38°48′49″N 90°07′11″W / 38.81361°N 90.11972°WCoordinates: 38°48′49″N 90°07′11″W / 38.81361°N 90.11972°W[1] Mississippi River, near St. Louis, in St. Charles County, Missouri |
| Basin countries | United States of America, Canada |
| Length | 2,540 miles (4,090 km)[1] 2,341 miles (3,767 km)[3] |
| Source elevation | 4,042 feet (1,232 m)[4] |
| Mouth elevation | 404 feet (123 m)[1] |
| Avg. discharge | Great Falls:[5] 292 ft³/s Pierre:[6] 16,000 ft³/s Sioux City: 36,830 ft³/s Omaha: 39,100 ft³/s Kansas City: 56,950 ft³/s Boonville: 69,220 ft³/s Hermann: 87,950 ft³/s[7] |
| Basin area | 529,350 square miles (1,371,000 km2)[3] |
The Missouri River is a tributary of the Mississippi River, and is the longest river in the United States of America.[8][9] The Missouri likely originates at Brower's Spring at the upper reaches of the Jefferson, before joining the confluence of the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin rivers in Montana. From this point, it flows through its valley south and east into the Mississippi north of St. Louis, Missouri. At 2,540 miles (4,090 km)[1] in length, it drains about one-sixth of the continental United States. The Missouri in its original natural meandering state was the longest river in North America. Nearly 72 miles (116 km) of the river have been cut off in channeling[3] and so it is now comparable in length to the Mississippi River. The combination of the two longest rivers in North America forms the fourth longest river in the world.
At its confluence, the Missouri nearly doubles the volume of the Mississippi, accounting for 45 percent of the flow at St. Louis in normal times and as much as 70 percent of the flow during some droughts.[10] It is the second-largest tributary by volume of the Mississippi, trailing the Ohio.
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The headwaters of the Missouri are in the Rocky Mountains of southwestern Montana, near the small town of Three Forks, rising in the Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin rivers. The longest headwaters stream, and thus the Missouri's hydrologic source, likely begins at Brower's Spring, which flows to the Jefferson by way of several other named streams.[11] From the confluence of its main tributaries near the city of Three Forks, the Missouri flows north through mountainous canyons, emerging from the mountains near Great Falls, where a large cataract historically marked the navigable limit of the river. It flows east across the plains of Montana into North Dakota, then turns southeast, flowing into South Dakota, and along the north and eastern edge of Nebraska, forming part of its border with South Dakota and all of its border with Iowa, flowing past Sioux City and Omaha. It forms the entire boundary between Nebraska and Missouri, and part of the boundary between Missouri and Kansas. At Kansas City, it turns generally eastward, flowing across Missouri where it joins the Mississippi just north of St. Louis.
The extensive system of tributaries drain nearly all the semi-arid northern Great Plains of the United States. A very small portion of southern Alberta, Canada and south-western Saskatchewan is also drained by the river through its tributary, the Milk. Another, separate area, in southern Saskatchewan is drained by another Missouri tributary, the Poplar River.
The river roughly follows the edge of the glaciation during the last ice age. Most of the river's longer tributaries stretch away from this edge, with their origins towards the west, draining portions of the eastern Rockies.
The Missouri in name officially begins at Missouri Headwaters State Park at 4,045 feet (1,233 m) in Montana at the confluence of the Jefferson River and Madison River. The Gallatin River joins the river about 0.6 of a mile downstream as it flows northeast. The Jefferson River originates in southwest Montana near the Continental Divide. The Madison and Gallatin Rivers flow out of northwest Wyoming to meet the Jefferson River.
Meriwether Lewis in his journal entry on July 28, 1805 wrote:
The Lewis and Clark decision not to call the Jefferson the Missouri has spurred debate over what is the longest river in North America since the Missouri and Mississippi are nearly identical in length. With the Jefferson the Missouri would be the longest river.
Lewis (who had followed the Jefferson River to the Beaverhead River) said that on August 12, 1805, he visited Beaverhead tributary of Trail Creek just above Lemhi Pass on the Continental Divide in the Beaverhead Mountains on the Montana and Idaho border at around 8,600 feet (2,600 m) which he described:
However in 1888 Jacob V. Brower, who had championed turning the headwaters of the Mississippi River into a Minnesota state park, visited a site in Montana which today is believed to be the furthest point on the Missouri -- now called Brower's Spring. Brower published his finding in 1896 in "The Missouri: Its Utmost Source."
The site of Brower's Spring lies at around 8,800 feet (2,700 m) in the Centennial Mountains. The site is now commemorated by a rock pile at the source of Hellroaring Creek which flows into Red Rock River and then into Clark Canyon Reservoir where it joins the Beaverhead then the Big Hole River before ultimately hooking up with the Jefferson.[11]
In Montana, the river is a Class I water from Three Forks to the North Dakota border for the purposes of public access for recreational purposes[12].
The Missouri enters the Upper Mississippi River near its mile 195. The elevation is approximately 400 feet (120 m). The confluence is ringed by Camp Dubois which is now part of Lewis and Clark State Memorial Park in Illinois; Columbia Bottom Conservation Area on the south bank of the Missouri in St. Louis and on the north bank of the Missouri by the Edward "Ted" and Pat Jones-Confluence Point State Park in West Alton, Missouri.
The river is nicknamed "Big Muddy" and also "Dark River" because of the high silt content. The river meanders from bluff to bluff in the flat Midwestern states, leading to the nickname the "Wide Missouri".
The popular but erroneous conception that the name means "muddy water" arose from the fact that Marquette gave it the indigenous name "Pekitanoui" meaning "muddy".
The state is named after the Missouri River which in turn is named after the Siouan Indian tribe whose Illinois name, ouemessourita (wimihsoorita[13]), means "those who have dugout canoes".[14] The etymology lies behind Bob Dyer's tribute song, "River of the Big Canoes".
The river has also been known as: Big River, Big Muddy, Emasulia sipiwi, Eomitai, Katapan Mene Shoska, Le Riviere des Missouri, Mini Sose, Missoury River, Ni-sho-dse, Nudarcha, Rio Misuri, Riviere de Pekitanoni, Riviere de Saint Philippe, Le Missouri, Le Riviere des Osages, Missures Flu, Miz-zou-rye River, Niutaci, Pekitanoui, River of the West, Yellow River.[1]
Main articles: Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette
The first Europeans to see the river were the French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette who shortly after looking at the Piasa petroglyph painting on the bluffs of Mississippi River above Alton, Illinois heard the Missouri rushing into the Mississippi.
Marquette wrote:
Marquette and Joliet referred to the river as "Pekistanoui" and they made a reference to a tribe who lived upstream on the river as "Oumessourita" which was pronounced "OO-Missouri."[17]), (meaning "those who have dugout canoes"[18]) This was the Illinois (tribe) name for the Missouri (tribe) whose village was nearly 200 miles (320 km) upstream near Brunswick, Missouri.
Marquette wrote that natives had told him that it was just a six day canoe trip up the river (about 60 miles) where it would be possible to portage over to another river that would take people to California.
Jolliet and Marquette never explored the Missouri beyond its mouth.
Main articles: Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont and Fort Orleans
The Missouri remained formally unexplored and uncharted until Étienne de Veniard, Sieur de Bourgmont wrote "Exact Description of Louisiana, of Its Harbors, Lands and Rivers, and Names of the Indian Tribes That Occupy It, and the Commerce and Advantages to Be Derived Therefrom for the Establishment of a Colony" in 1713 followed in 1714 by "The Route to Be Taken to Ascend the Missouri River." In the two documents Bourgmont was the first to use the name "Missouri" to refer to the river (and he was to name many of the tributaries along the river based on the Native American tribes that lived on them). The names and locations were to be used by cartographer Guillaume Delisle to create the first reasonably accurate map of the river.
Bourgmont himself was living with the Missouri tribe at its Brunswick village with his Missouri wife and son. He had been on the lam from French authorities since 1706 when he deserted his post as commandant of Fort Detroit after he was criticized by Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac for his handling of an attack by the Ottawa (tribe) in which a priest, a French sergeant and 30 Ottawa were killed. Bourgmont had further infuriated the French by illegally trapping and for immoral behavior when he showed up at French outposts with his Native American wife.
However after Bourgmont's two documents, Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founder of Louisiana, said that rather than arresting Bourgmont they should decorate him with Cross of St. Louis and name him "commandant of the Missouri" to represent France on the entire river. Bourgmont's reputation was further enhanced when the Pawnee, who had been befriended by Bourgmont, massacred the Spanish Villasur expedition in 1720 near modern day Columbus, Nebraska which temporarily ended Spanish designs on the Missouri River and cleared the way for a New France empire stretching from Montreal, Canada to New Mexico.
After squabbling with French authorities over financing of a new fort on the Missouri and also suffering a yearlong illness, Bourgmont established Fort Orleans, which was the first fort and first longer term European settlement of any kind on the Missouri, in late 1723 near his home at Brunswick. In 1724 Bourgmont led an expedition to enlist Comanche support in the fight against the Spanish. In 1725 Bourgmont brought the chiefs of the Missouri River tribes to Paris to see the glory of France including the palaces of Versailles, and Fountainbleau and a hunting expedition on a royal preserve with Louis XV. Bourgmont was raised to the rank of the nobility, remained in France and did not accompany the chiefs back to the New World. Fort Orleans was either abandoned or its small contingent massacred by Native Americans in 1726.
It is unclear how far up the Missouri Bourgmont traveled. He is the documented first European discoverer of the Platte River. In his writings he described the blonde-haired Mandans, so it is possible that he made it as far north as their villages in central North Dakota.
The Spanish took over the Missouri River in the Treaty of Paris (1763) that ended the French and Indian War/Seven Years War. The Spanish claim to the Missouri was based on Hernando de Soto's "discovery" of the Mississippi River on May 8, 1541. The Spanish initially did not extensively explore the river and let French fur traders continue their activities although under license.
After the British began to exert influence on the Upper Missouri River via the Hudson's Bay Company, news of English incursions came following an expedition by Jacques D’Eglise in 1790. The Spanish chartered the "Company of Discoverers and Explorers of the Missouri" (popularly referred to as the "Missouri Company") and offered a reward for the first person to reach the Pacific via the Missouri. In 1794 and 1795 expeditions led by Jean Baptiste Truteau and Antoine Simon Lecuyer de la Jonchšre did not even make it as far north as the Mandan villages in central North Dakota.[19]
The most significant expedition though was the MacKay and Evans Expedition of 1795-1797. James MacKay and John Evans were hired by the Spanish to search a route to the Pacific Ocean and to tell the British to leave the upper Missouri.[20]
McKay and Evans established a winter camp about 20 miles (32 km) south of Sioux City, Iowa on the Nebraska side where they built Fort Columbus. Evans went on to the Mandan village where he expelled British traders. While talking to Native Americans they pinpointed the location of the Yellowstone River (which they called "Yellow Rock").
They created a detailed map of the upper Missouri that was used by Lewis and Clark.
Main articles: Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark
On October 27, 1795, the United States and Spain signed Pinckney's Treaty giving American merchants the "right of deposit" in New Orleans, meaning they could use the port to store goods for export. The treaty also recognized American rights to navigate the entire Mississippi River.
In 1798 Spain revoked the treaty.
On October 1, 1800, the Spanish secretly returned Louisiana to the French under Napoleon in the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso. The transfer was so secret that the Spanish continued to administer the territory. In 1801 they restored the United States rights to use the river and New Orleans.
Thomas Jefferson, fearing the cutoffs could occur again, sought to negotiate with France to buy New Orleans for the asking price of $10 million. Napoleon countered with an offer of $15 million for all of the Louisiana Territory including the Missouri River. The deal was signed on May 2, 1803.
On June 20, 1803, Thomas Jefferson instructed Meriwether Lewis[21] to explore the Missouri and look for a water route to the Pacific.
Although the deal was signed, Spain still balked at an American takeover, citing that France had never formally taken over the Louisiana Territory. Spain was to formally tell Lewis not to take the journey and expressly forbade Lewis from seeing the McKay and Evans map which was the most detailed and accurate of its time. Lewis was to gain access to it surreptitiously. To avoid jurisdictional issues with Spain they wintered in 1803-1804 at Camp Dubois on the Illinois (United States) side of the Mississippi.
Lewis and William Clark left on May 14, 1804 and returned to St. Louis on September 23, 1806.
The river defined the American frontier in the 19th century, particularly downstream from Kansas City, Missouri, where it takes a sharp eastern turn into the heart of the state of Missouri.
All of the major trails for the opening of the American West have their starting points on the river, including the California, Mormon, Oregon, and Santa Fe trails. The first westward leg of the Pony Express was a ferry ride across the Missouri at St. Joseph, Missouri. The first westward leg of the First Transcontinental Railroad was a ferry ride across the Missouri between Council Bluffs, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska.
The Hannibal Bridge was the first bridge to cross the river when it opened in Kansas City in 1869, and was a major reason why Kansas City became the largest city on the river upstream from its mouth at St. Louis.
Extensive use of paddle steamers on the upper river helped facilitate European settlement of the Dakotas and Montana.
The Department of the Missouri, which was headquartered on the banks of the river at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, was the military command center for the Indian Wars in the region.
The northernmost navigable point on the Missouri before extensive navigation improvements was Fort Benton, Montana, at approximately 2,620 feet.[22]
Since the lower river meanders through a broad floodplain in Midwestern states, it has often changed course and in its wake left numerous oxbow lakes (Big Lake is the largest such lake in Missouri). In the early 1800s the United States Supreme Court (which decides state border disputes) ruled that when the river changed course the border also changed (as happened with the Fairfax District at Kansas City, Kansas which switched from Missouri to Kansas.) However, in the late 1800s the Court began ruling on absolute boundaries, creating geographic oddities such as Carter Lake, Iowa, which is now a piece of Iowa on the west side of the Missouri between downtown Omaha and Eppley Airfield, and the French Bottoms in St. Joseph, Missouri, a piece of Missouri on the west of the river, requiring Missouri residents to go through Kansas to reach Rosecrans Airport.
In the 20th century, the upper Missouri was extensively dammed for flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectric power. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Flood Control Act of 1944, the Pick-Sloan Plan turned the Missouri River into the largest reservoir system in North America. There are six dams in four states: Fort Peck Dam in Montana; Garrison Dam in North Dakota; Oahe Dam, Big Bend Dam, and Fort Randall Dam in South Dakota; and Gavins Point Dam on the South Dakota-Nebraska border.
These dams were constructed without locks, so commercial navigation on the Missouri cannot proceed above the Gavins Point Dam. The Corps of Engineers maintains a 9-foot-deep (3 m) navigation channel for 735 miles (1183 km) between Sioux City, Iowa and St. Louis in non-winter months. The dams aid navigation on the lower river by reducing fluctuations in water levels.
Thirty-five percent of the Missouri River is impounded, 32 percent has been channelized, and 33 percent is unchannelized.[3]
The only significant stretch of free-flowing stream on the lower Missouri is the Missouri National Recreational River section between Gavins Point Dam and Ponca State Park, Nebraska. This federally-designated "Wild and Scenic River" is among the last unspoiled stretches of the Missouri, and exhibits the islands, bars, chutes and snags that once characterized the "Mighty Mo".
The dikes, revetments, and levees constructed by the Corps of Engineers as part of the Missouri River Navigation and Flood Control Project have transformed the once sprawling and constantly changing river into a narrower, deeper, fixed channel designed to more easily maintain the 735-mile (1,183 km) navigation channel. The river carries a large amount of silt and sand, but high water velocity in the navigation channel normally prevents settling out and sand bar accumulations. As a result, unlike the Mississippi River, the Missouri River rarely requires dredging to maintain the navigation channel. The huge amounts of sediment in the Big Muddy have long provided a free source of sand, mined by commercial dredgers to be used in concrete and asphalt for construction, mainly below Rulo, Nebraska. In recent years, the quantity of sand commercially dredged from the Missouri River has dramatically increased as Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis have grown. In 2000, 7.4 million tons of sand and gravel were dredged out of the navigation channel.[23] As commercial sand dredging has increased, the Missouri River bed has gradually cut deeper into the flood plain. Between 1990 and 2005 the river around Kansas City, Missouri has degraded as much as 4.5 feet (1.4 m).
Barge traffic has been steadily declining from 3.3 million tons in 1977 to 1.3 million tons in 2000.[23] The declining barge traffic industry has stirred controversies over the management of the river and whether upstream dams should release more water to maintain commercial navigation standards.
The states of Iowa and Missouri have sought to revive their waterfronts by permitting riverboat gambling. The initial gambling regulations required the casinos to navigate the river. They were subsequently amended so that the casinos could be permanent land-based structures as long as they had a moat with Missouri River water surrounding them.
The American painter George Catlin traveled up the Missouri in the 1830s, making portraits of individuals and tribes of Native Americans. He also painted several Missouri River landscapes, notably "Floyd's Bluff" and "Brick Kilns", both from 1832.
The Swiss painter Karl Bodmer accompanied German explorer Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied from 1832 through 1834 on his Missouri River expedition. Bodmer was hired as an artist by Maximilian for the purpose of recording images of the Native American tribes that they encountered in the American West.
In 1843, the American painter and naturalist John James Audubon traveled west to the upper Missouri River and the Dakota Territory to do fieldwork for his final major opus, Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. A typical example from this folio is "American Bison".
Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham immortalized the fur traders and flatboatmen who plied the Missouri River in the early 1800s; these same boatmen were known for their river chanties, including the haunting American folk song "Oh Shenandoah". Each verse of "Oh Shenandoah" ends with the line, "...'cross the wide Missouri."
The Missouri may be the setting of the Pete Seeger song Waist Deep in the Big Muddy. (There is considerable ambiguity as to location, however. Seeger sings that the action took place in "Loo-siana" and there is also a Big Muddy River in Illinois. One could not "press on" very far into the Missouri and remain only "waist deep.") The song is set in 1942, during training for World War II, but its image of a foolish captain who pushes his men further and further into a hopeless situation was clearly meant to parallel the Vietnam War. In the song, a Captain leading a squad on training maneuvers insists on crossing the titular river, insisting that it is safe to cross. The Captain sinks into the mud, drowns, and his squad turns back, led by the Sergeant who had questioned the Captain's orders.
A. B. Guthrie, Jr.'s popular Western novel The Big Sky (1947) tells the story of a group of men who, in the early 19th century, made the long journey up the Missouri from St. Louis to Montana. Howard Hawks made a film based on the book a few years later.
The following rivers are listed going downstream based on the states where they enter the Missouri.
Although the Missouri drains about one-sixth of the United States, its basin is relatively lightly populated with only 10 million people.[3]
For a full list, see
From mouth upstream to source:
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