Steam boating on the Missouri River began shortly after statehood, bringing tons of freight and passengers upriver. One of the more unusual cargo’s packed aboard in those early days was crates of house cats.
As the pioneers arrived to take up homesteading they brought along most of their worldly belongings, including livestock and the family dog. But, cats don’t necessarily travel that well over great distances, so they were left behind. Once they arrived though, and started raising the yearly harvest of grains, they discovered Missouri was infested with rats and mice. So, enterprising merchants sent back East for a few kittens.
Back in the early days before the Missouri River was dredged out and levied in, it was a much different creature than it is today. The Missouri used to spread out across most of the river valley floor, with many islands and several channels. Imagine how beautiful it must have been.
Born up in the mountains near Three Forks, Mont., the Missouri River is the longest river in North America, longer even than the Mississippi. Today it is just more than 2,300 miles down the Missouri to St. Louis. Back in 1861, the U.S. Army topographical engineers measured the river at 2,824 miles in length, some 500 miles longer than today. In fact you can float a canoe from its source more than 4,000 miles to the Gulf of Mexico.
Travelers of an earlier day looked upon the river with a sense of reverence; it clearly was one of God’s more spectacular creations. It also was, at times, a force to be reckoned with, which knew no bounds, an awesome, frightening thing not to be taken lightly.
In our grandparent’s day, the mighty river was notorious for changing its course at the slightest whim. The channel moved from one location to another for no apparent reason. Naturally, this made farming along the river a little uncertain. The Missouri River was the champion bank carving, sediment-carrying, tree-toppling stream, with the biggest appetite of all the western waterways. It was eating all the time – eating yellow clay banks and cornfields, 80 acres at a mouthful, winding up its banquet with a truck garden and picking its teeth with the timbers of a big red barn. Each year it would eat 10,000 acres of good rich farmland, plus a forest or two and scads of sandbars.
The great river flows through an alluvial plain and this Ice Age sediment offers little resistance to the swift currents. By the time it reaches Jackson County the Big Muddy suspends 120 tons of soil in every million gallons of water, the muddiest river on the North American continent. The river drops in elevation 2,464 feet along its journey to St. Louis, an average slope of 11 inches per mile as it passes along the northern edge of Eastern Jackson County.
