MOMissouri History

Three flags over St. Louis in two days

On March 9, 1804 the Spanish flag came down at St. Louis and the French tricolor went up. The next morning the French flag came down and the American one replaced it. Spain had governed the town since a secret treaty of 1762, France took it back on paper in 1800, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 handed it to the United States, the whole sequence carried out without a shot and without asking the residents. Ten weeks later Lewis and Clark started up the Missouri River from St. Charles.

Osage country, French lead, and a town built on furs

The Osage controlled the Ozark plateau and the prairies west of the river, taxing and raiding whoever tried to pass through. The Missouria, whose name the river and then the state carry, lived along the lower Missouri, and Illini villages sat near the Mississippi. Mississippian people had left earthworks where St. Louis now stands, tall enough that the place was nicknamed Mound City before the largest was carted away in 1869 for railroad fill.

French colonists came for lead rather than beaver, digging at Mine La Motte from the 1720s, and Ste. Genevieve, laid out around 1750 on the Mississippi bottoms, is the oldest permanent European town in the state. Pierre Laclède and the teenaged Auguste Chouteau marked out St. Louis in February 1764 as a fur trading post, unaware that the territory had already been signed over to Spain. Between December 16, 1811 and February 7, 1812 the New Madrid earthquakes shook the bootheel hard enough to be felt on the Atlantic seaboard and to change the course of the river in places.

The compromise that made the state

Missouri applied to enter the Union in 1819 and set off the argument the founders had deferred. Representative James Tallmadge moved to bar further slaves from the new state and free those born there at 25. The House passed it, the Senate refused, and Congress fought for two years. The settlement of 1820 admitted Missouri with slavery intact, brought Maine in as a free state to keep the Senate even, and banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes. A second quarrel then broke out over a clause in Missouri's proposed constitution excluding free Black people from the state, and admission came only on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state.

That 1820 line lasted 34 years. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed it in 1854, and the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1857 in a case that had begun when Dred and Harriet Scott sued for their freedom in the St. Louis Circuit Court in 1846.

Where the trails started

William Becknell took the first wagons from Franklin to Santa Fe in 1821, opening a trade that ran sixty years. Independence, Westport and later St. Joseph outfitted the Oregon and California trails, and the merchants selling flour, oxen and wagon parts made steadier money than the emigrants did. The Pony Express left St. Joseph for Sacramento on April 3, 1860 and lasted eighteen months before the transcontinental telegraph made it pointless. Along the Missouri River, in the counties settled from Virginia and Kentucky and nicknamed Little Dixie, hemp and tobacco were grown with enslaved labor, and from those counties armed men rode into Kansas Territory after 1854 to vote illegally and to burn Lawrence.

A state with two governments

Missouri never left the Union and never comfortably stayed in it. The convention called in early 1861 voted against secession. Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson wanted out regardless, so Nathaniel Lyon broke up the pro-Confederate militia camp at St. Louis on May 10, 1861 in a confrontation that ended with civilians shot in the streets, and Jackson fled the capital. A rump legislature meeting at Neosho voted to secede that autumn, which left Missouri with a Union government at Jefferson City, a Confederate government in exile, and a star on both flags. Lyon was killed at Wilson's Creek on August 10, 1861. Conventional fighting in the state ended with the Battle of Westport in October 1864, but the guerrilla war and the Union response to it, including Order No. 11, which emptied four western counties of their population in 1863, left a bitterness that outlived the war and fed the James and Younger gangs. A state convention abolished slavery in Missouri on January 11, 1865, months ahead of the Thirteenth Amendment.

A world's fair, a machine, and a president from Independence

St. Louis staged the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the Olympic Games in 1904, when it was the fourth largest city in the country. Kansas City's clubs, kept open by Tom Pendergast's machine straight through Prohibition, incubated a looser, riff-driven jazz around Count Basie and gave Charlie Parker somewhere to learn his instrument. Harry Truman came up through that same machine, reached the Senate in 1934 and became president on April 12, 1945. McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis built the Mercury and Gemini capsules and the F-4 Phantom, and the Gateway Arch was topped out on October 28, 1965. Waste oil laced with dioxin, sprayed on the streets of Times Beach to hold the dust down, led the federal government to buy the whole town and erase it in 1983. An EF5 tornado cut through Joplin on May 22, 2011 and killed 158 people.

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