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Missouri River, "The
Mighty MO"
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 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
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