Route Descriptions: Missouri

 (route summary courtesy of Mark Hansen)

Topeka to St Joseph, Missouri: The important western trails all originated on the Missouri River around Kansas City. The Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail originated in Missouri in Independence, northeast of Kansas City, and Westport, south of the city (and now part of it) on the state line. The Oregon Trail hugged the south bank of the Kansas River until Topeka, when the wagons crossed on Pappan’s Ferry.  The crossing was just to the left of the Kansas Avenue Bridge, the CrossRoads route over the river. The route crosses the trail on Kansas Avenue at Crane Street, which goes under the bridge a block past First Avenue. 

The Pony Express originated in St Joseph, Missouri, today’s destination. Never a paying proposition, it operated for only 18 months before the completion of the transcontinental telegraph in October 1861 obviated the need for it. St Joe has a Pony Express Monument at 910 Frederick Avenue and a Pony Express Museum at 914 Penn St, both about 4 miles from the hotel. The next station was in Troy, Kansas, which is north of today’s route. 

The northeast corner of Kansas was glaciated, which explains the hills. The SAG is in Valley Falls, which takes its name from falls on the Delaware River. (The Delaware tribe (Lenape), whose origins were in the lower Delaware River Valley, were repeatedly relocated west, including to Kansas (on the way to Oklahoma).) The bridge over the river is a composite of two different truss designs and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Up the road, the little town of Nortonville was once a “sundown town,” from which African Americans were banned after sunset on peril of arrest and fine or worse. 

On the Missouri River, Atchison is the last town in Kansas. It was founded in 1854 after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act on the instigation of Missouri senator David Atchison, who hoped to populate it with enough Missourians to make Kansas a slave state. (He was unsuccessful. By 1858, free-staters controlled the local government.) In 1863, Atchison became the eastern terminus of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad but in name only; the line from Topeka to Atchison was not completed until 1872. It was the birthplace and childhood home of Amelia Earhart, the first woman to complete a nonstop transatlantic flight in 1932. Her disappearance over the South Pacific while attempting to fly around the world in 1937 still fascinates lovers of mysteries. 

In Missouri, Lewis and Clark State Park has a lake that impressed the explorers by its vast flocks of geese when they passed by in 1804. Saint Joseph was founded as a fur trading post in the early 19th century. At the start of the Civil War, it was the west-most place accessible by rail. St Joseph is the birthplace of Nellie Tayloe Ross, the first woman elected governor (of Wyoming in 1925), the sex educator Shere Hite, and the rapper Eminem. It is best known, though, as the place of death of the outlaw Jesse James. In 1882, at 34, he was shot behind the ear by the “dirty little coward” Robert Ford as he stood on a chair to straighten a picture in his home. (The novelist Ron Hansen (no relation) wrote a book about them, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” a marvelous exploration of the meaning of fame and notoriety and the relationship between them.) The house is open for tours, moved from its original location a couple blocks away to a site next to Patee House (1202 Penn St), the city’s historic hotel and the headquarters of the Pony Express. The hole from the bullet that killed the legendary outlaw is visible in the wall.

St Joseph to Chillicothe: Missouri was admitted as the 24th state in the union in 1821. It was the first state entirely west of the Mississippi River and the second state that had been part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 (after Louisiana itself, admitted 1812). The area of northwestern Missouri in today’s route is primarily within basin of the Grand River, a tributary of the Missouri, which you will cross east of Gallatin. At the time of statehood, the Native peoples of the area included the Iowa, the Potawatomi, the Sac (Sauk), and the Meskwaki (Fox), who were forced further west from Missouri by treaties in the 1820s and 1830s. 

Among the early settlers of the region were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons. Soon after the church’s founding in western New York, a group of Mormons emigrated to Missouri in 1831, settling in Jackson County around Independence (northeast of Kansas City), where it had been revealed to the Church’s Prophet, Joseph Smith Jr, that they would found their own community, the “New Zion.” (They also came to live among the “Lamanites,” one of the Hebrew tribes said by the Book of Mormon to have established itself a millennium earlier in the New World, understood by the Saints to be American Indians.) 

Religious bigotry, resistance to the Mormons’ efforts to control local government, and Mormon actions interpreted as belligerent led local vigilantes to forcibly expel them from Jackson Co in 1833. The Saints resettled in other counties to the east and north; in 1838, Smith relocated the Church’s headquarters from Ohio to Far West, a town in Caldwell Co (about 15 mi south of Altamont, which is on the ride route). In Daviess Co, about 4 miles north-northwest of Gallatin (on the route), Brigham Young laid out a temple at a place the Saints called Adam-ondi-Ahman, which according to a revelation received by Smith was the place to which Adam and Eve came after their exile from the Garden of Eden (!). 

Soon after, on election day in August 1838, alarmed by growing Mormon influence in Daviess Co, about 200 non-Mormon men threatened Mormons to keep them from the polls in Gallatin. The two sides came to blows and violent threats ensued. The “Election Day Battle at Gallatin” soon escalated into the “Missouri Mormon War.” In October 1838, a Mormon militia from Caldwell Co marched into Daviess Co, where they forced non-Mormons out of their homes and laid waste to Gallatin – only a shoe store was said to have been left standing – and other communities. A week later, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issued his so-called “Extermination Order” directing the state militia to suppress the Mormon insurrection and “exterminate or drive them from the state if necessary.” Days after, vigilantes set upon and killed 17 Mormons, including boys aged 9, 10, and 15, at Hawn’s Mill in Caldwell Co, about 20 mi west-southwest of Chillicothe. Mormon leaders, including Smith and his brother Hyrum, were arrested and imprisoned. 

The pressure drove the Mormons out of Missouri into Illinois, where they established a new headquarters and temple at Nauvoo, on the Mississippi River across from Iowa. Smith was murdered there by an anti-Mormon mob in 1844. In 1846, led by Brigham Young, the Saints began their exodus from Nauvoo to their final New Zion on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. 

Today’s destination, Chillicothe, was named after a settlement established by the Shawnee after they were forced west from Ohio in the late 1700s. (Chillicothe, Ohio, takes its name from the original Shawnee settlement.) It’s a pleasant little farming town with a pretty downtown. It calls itself “The Home of Sliced Bread.” In 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Co began to supply pre-sliced packaged bread to groceries in the area. Its building still stands at First and Elm, south of downtown a couple blocks east of Washington Street (left) on the way to the hotel. Inside is an economic development office, the old bread slicing machine they used, and a small souvenir shop.

Chillicothe to Kirksville: Today’s ride continues into north-central Missouri. Reflecting patterns of westward settlement, the area historically resembles Iowa to the north in its economy and culture more than the area along the Missouri River immediately south, traditionally called “Little Dixie” because it was settled by southerners who moved upriver. One thing you may notice is a number of businesses, including service stations, bearing the MFA brand. MFA stands for Missouri Farmers Association. It’s a cooperative that was founded in the 1910s in Chariton Co, just southeast of Livingston Co (of which Chillicothe is the seat), to take advantage of a new federal law giving farmers assistance in purchasing their supplies and marketing their crops. In their first transaction, the founders bought baling twine at a good price. 

The next county east from Livingston is Linn Co. Its county seat, north of Laclede, is Linneus. Its name was Linnville until 1840, when the local solons decided to rename it in honor of the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern taxonomy, not bothering to be particular about the spelling. Three miles east of Meadville, a mile north of the route, is a covered bridge over Locust Creek built in 1868, the longest of four in the state. Laclede is notable as the hometown of Gen. John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in France in World War I and the Punitive Campaign into Mexico in pursuit of Pancho Villa in 1916. Pershing was the first General of the Army (four star), although decades later, Congress bestowed the rank posthumously on George Washington and Ulysses Grant. Eight miles southeast of Brookfield is Marceline.  From age 4 to 9, Walt Disney lived on a farm nearby. According to a biographer, a local doctor commissioned him to sketch a picture of his horse, thus encouraging the boy’s interest in drawing. 

The ride route exits US 36 at Brookfield to begin a northeast-ward course to Kirksville, the county seat of Adair Co. Its first permanent settlement by whites began in 1828, soon after the removal of the Sac (Sauk) and Meskwaki (Fox) from the area. The first settlement was called “Cabins of the White Folk,” or “The Cabins,” on the Chariton River west of Kirksville (near the water stop). A year later, Iowa Indians led by Big Neck returned to their hunting grounds in contravention of treaty. According to the residents of the Cabins, they killed a pig and threatened harm to the women. The frightened settlers raised a militia from Adair and neighboring counties to confront them. The Big Neck War ended after a few deaths on both sides and the arrest and trial of Big Neck and other Iowas, who, remarkably, were acquitted. The eruption of the Blackhawk War in Illinois three years later sent another wave of fear through the community, resulting in the construction of two forts, one on high ground adjacent to the Cabins, for protection. 

Kirksville is the home to A. T. Still University, founded in 1892 as the world’s first college of osteopathic medicine, that unique American variety of “alternative” medicine. It is also the host of Truman State University, founded as a teaching college in 1867. President Harry S Truman, a haberdasher from Independence, Mo., for whom the school was renamed in 1996, was the last president who did not have a college degree.