Missouri

The first state west of the Mississippi to be admitted to the Union, Missouri was for many years both a jumping-off point to the West and a transportation center for an expanding U.S.-and so it remains. It is here that the country’s two greatest rivers marry their waters. Above St. Louis, the swelling Mississippi is joined by the “Big Muddy”, the Missouri, a voracious giant that western author Stanley Vestal once called “the hungriest river ever created…eating yellow clay banks and corn fields…winding up its banquet with a truck garden and picking its teeth with the timbers of a big red barn”. It is indeed a mouthful of river, and it is only in the past century that men have begun to devise ways to harness its rampaging power.

In Missouri, the residents like to say, the East ends and the West begins. By way of example, they cite eastern-oriented St. Louis, an established manufacturing center with the second-oldest symphony orchestra in the U.S. For contrast, they turn to the younger metropolis of Kansas City, whose westward orientation is reflected in bawling stockyards, grain elevators and the meat-packing industry. Physiographically, Missouri has equally great differences. The rugged Ozark uplands rise in the southern part of the state. East of them lies a flat land of abundant rain and rich black soil.