Boonville: Salt, the Santa Fe Trail, and the War's First Battle in Missouri

The small city of Boonville, Missouri, sitting above the Missouri River on a limestone bluff, owes its existence to salt. In the early eighteen hundreds, Daniel Boone's sons Nathan and Daniel Morgan discovered a salt spring in the hills just north of the river and set up a boiling operation. Salt was more valuable than almost anything on the frontier, a preservative, a trading commodity, essential for survival, and settlers streamed in from St. Louis along the path worn to the spring. That track became known as the Boone's Lick Trail, the main artery of early Missouri migration.

Boonville was formally platted as a town in eighteen seventeen on a site that commanded a bend in the river. River commerce made it prosperous through the eighteen thirties and forties, and it became one of the most important departure points for wagons heading toward the Santa Fe Trail.

Then came the Civil War, and with it a battle that set the tone for Missouri's agony.

On June seventeenth, eighteen sixty-one, barely two months after Fort Sumter, Union General Nathaniel Lyon led a force of federal troops up the Missouri River to confront the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard under Colonel John Marmaduke at the outskirts of Boonville. The engagement lasted less than twenty minutes. Lyon's trained regulars shattered the poorly armed State Guard in what became known as the First Battle of Boonville.

The victory gave the Union control of the Missouri River Valley and drove the Confederate forces into the southwest corner of the state, though they would return to central Missouri before the year was out. It was one of the first land battles of the Civil War, and it effectively decided which way Missouri would lean, however reluctantly, for the remainder of the conflict.

Boonville's antebellum courthouse, its river bluffs, and its historic downtown still carry the quiet gravity of a town that was once at the center of the American story.