Rocheport: Lewis and Clark Slept Here

On June seventh, eighteen oh four, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark camped just below the limestone bluffs at this bend of the Missouri River and noted Native American pictographs on the rock faces above them. The bluffs are still here; the pictographs survive.

Rocheport grew up in the early eighteen hundreds as a river trading post, and through the steamboat era it grew into a prosperous town where the Missouri River trade met the overland trails heading west. The Civil War brought guerrilla raids from both sides and disrupted the commerce.

Today Rocheport is best known as a gateway to the Katy Trail, America's longest rail-to-trail conversion, running two hundred and forty miles across Missouri along the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad bed. The Katy Trail's best-known feature here is a tunnel cut through the Moniteau Bluffs. The town's pre-Civil War buildings are largely intact, the river still bends past the limestone cliffs, and cyclists pass through the stone-arched tunnel every day.