Two Great Rivers, The Missouri and the Mississippi

There is a place just north of Saint Louis where the Missouri River ends. Or rather, where it finishes, having traveled roughly two thousand three hundred miles from its headwaters in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, draining a basin of more than half a million square miles, carrying more sediment per cubic foot than any other river in North America, and delivers itself into the Mississippi. The confluence is loud and visible; the brown turbulence of the Missouri swirling into the clearer green-grey of the Mississippi, the two textures unwilling to blend for miles downstream.

The Missouri River shaped this state more than any other physical fact. It formed the northern and western boundaries, carved the fertile bottomlands where tobacco and hemp and later grain agriculture took hold, and served as the highway of the fur trade and then the westward migration. The first steamboat reached the Missouri in about eighteen nineteen, regular service was running by the eighteen thirties, and by the eighteen fifties dozens of packets a week were running the full navigable length of the river, connecting Saint Louis to Omaha and beyond.

The river was also treacherous: snags, sandbars, changing channels, and sudden floods claimed hundreds of boats and thousands of lives over the course of the steamboat era. The Mississippi River forms the entire eastern border of Missouri, more than five hundred miles of it. It was the artery that connected the interior continent to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, the reason Saint Louis became a commercial center, and the subject of the most celebrated literary portrait any American river has ever received.

Mark Twain grew up watching it from the bluffs of Hannibal and understood, earlier than most, that it was not simply a river but a world, one that was disappearing even as he wrote about it.