Can you imagine the state of Missouri with out the great river? I sure can't. Here is a river that has been the source of transportation and food for over ten thousand years for the Native Americans. It begins in the Rocky Mountains of Montana and really ends in New Orleans some 2500 miles later. It drains over 580,000 square miles , give or take a few.

The first travelers were the French Fur Traders in the early 1700's. It was a much different river then, with sand bars, fallen trees, snags and not nearly as deep. The average width was 3/4 of a mile but I can remember in 1951 when it was ten miles wide during the "51 Flood". Someone has said that "The Missouri River is too thin to plow but too thick to drink". During the early years the river carried a lot of silt and moved much slower.

David Thompson, a Canadian fur Trader, explored the area around the Mandan Villages in present day North Dakota in 1797. Then in 1803 the visionary President Thomas Jefferson signed the Louisiana treaty and purchased the Louisiana territory from France. In 1804 President Thomas Jefferson arranged a contingent of men commanded by Captain Meriwether Lewis and co-Captain William Clark, of the United States Army, to explore and find this to be a route to the Pacific Ocean. History tells us that they were successful . They made this trip in a special built Keel Boat that was built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In the early days the canoes and flat bottom boats had little difficulty, however when the Steamboats started to move up the Missouri they encountered all kinds of water hazards and many of them were burned or sunk by snags, which were trees that had fallen in the river and were under the surface when they became soaked. As early as 1824 the Corps of Engineers began removing the snags using a twin hulled boat called a snag boat, where they would pull the tree into the boat and saw it in to little chunks, and what they didn't use they would dump back into the river. In 1912 The Missouri River Bank Stabilization and Navigation Project was authorized by Congress and 9 foot deep and 300 feet wide channel was established from St Louis, Missouri to Sioux City, Iowa.

It is not advisable to try to row up the river. It has been tried many times, but it takes special knowledge on how to negotiate the current and eddies. With all the Navigational changes the river is much swifter. It has been found, even by the experts really a challenge to move up the "Mighty Mo."

Ref. Missouri River Information Center

John Hinz