Ted Stillwell: Trekking across Missouri was once treacherous

It seemed as though everybody was headed out West. And in the 1820s, Independence was a dusty trail town with covered wagons everywhere you looked and a saloon or two on every corner.

Twenty years before that in 1803, when President Jefferson made that big deal with Napoleon of France for the Louisiana Purchase, it effectively doubled the size of the United States. At that particular time in history, there were only two so-called towns in the new territory, New Orleans and St. Louis.

It was next to impossible to travel west out of New Orleans, because the alligators would get you. Either that, or you would get lost in the swamps. So, everybody headed for St. Louis. However, Missouri was not much better. You know how fast the grass grows in your backyard, well think what it was like before the lawn mower was invented. You could not walk across the state of Missouri. The grass on the prairies was taller than a man and so thick you couldn’t wade through it. If it wasn’t tall grass, it was the tangled, thorny underbrush, which was just about as bad.

With 20,000 Indians living in what is now Missouri, there were a lot of old Indian paths criss-crossing the state, but they were just that, a path. If a man had enough nerve, he could probably walk the Indian trails or ride his trusty ol’ mule down one, but no way could you take a covered wagon down one.

So, the Missouri River became the highway – the I-70 of its day. The immigrants would load their wagons on a river barge and pull it up the river. That was before the days of steamboats, so they literally pulled the boats up stream against the current, a grueling task.

Of course, the river was a much different animal in those days. Before the river was channeled, straightened, and levied in, it flowed all over the Missouri River bottoms.

As you travel Missouri 291 toward Liberty, you know how you go down over the bluff across the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad, then travel for a ways on the flat bottomland, and then up over the big river bridge, then travel some more across the bottomland before you go back up over the bluff towards Liberty. Well, it’s three miles across the river bottoms, and in the 1800s the Big Muddy covered the whole three miles. It wasn’t simply one big river as it is today. It had many different channels and lots of willow covered islands, but think of how beautiful it must have been. However, it was very shallow in places and prone to flooding at the drop of a hat.

It seemed as though everybody was headed out West. And in the 1820s, Independence was a dusty trail town with covered wagons everywhere you looked and a saloon or two on every corner.

Twenty years before that in 1803, when President Jefferson made that big deal with Napoleon of France for the Louisiana Purchase, it effectively doubled the size of the United States. At that particular time in history, there were only two so-called towns in the new territory, New Orleans and St. Louis.

It was next to impossible to travel west out of New Orleans, because the alligators would get you. Either that, or you would get lost in the swamps. So, everybody headed for St. Louis. However, Missouri was not much better. You know how fast the grass grows in your backyard, well think what it was like before the lawn mower was invented. You could not walk across the state of Missouri. The grass on the prairies was taller than a man and so thick you couldn’t wade through it. If it wasn’t tall grass, it was the tangled, thorny underbrush, which was just about as bad.

With 20,000 Indians living in what is now Missouri, there were a lot of old Indian paths criss-crossing the state, but they were just that, a path. If a man had enough nerve, he could probably walk the Indian trails or ride his trusty ol’ mule down one, but no way could you take a covered wagon down one.

So, the Missouri River became the highway – the I-70 of its day. The immigrants would load their wagons on a river barge and pull it up the river. That was before the days of steamboats, so they literally pulled the boats up stream against the current, a grueling task.

Of course, the river was a much different animal in those days. Before the river was channeled, straightened, and levied in, it flowed all over the Missouri River bottoms.

As you travel Missouri 291 toward Liberty, you know how you go down over the bluff across the Burlington Northern-Santa Fe Railroad, then travel for a ways on the flat bottomland, and then up over the big river bridge, then travel some more across the bottomland before you go back up over the bluff towards Liberty. Well, it’s three miles across the river bottoms, and in the 1800s the Big Muddy covered the whole three miles. It wasn’t simply one big river as it is today. It had many different channels and lots of willow covered islands, but think of how beautiful it must have been. However, it was very shallow in places and prone to flooding at the drop of a hat.

Maybe they had a downpour in Nebraska, or a snow melt up in Montana, whatever, so by the time those waters reached Jackson County it was a raging torrent. The floodwaters would change the channels and eat away at the river banks and yank those massive cottonwood trees right out by their roots and deposit them downstream in the middle of the river. So, the river was full of dead trees, and this was about as far as they could safely navigate the river. The immigrants would disembark here and proceed overland on the Santa Fe, California and Oregon Trails.

Believe me when I say that life here on the frontier was no bowl of cherries. These rugged pioneers had to cope with chiggers, mosquitoes, ticks, snakes, spiders, bears, wolves, and the big wild cat we call the cougar – not to mention the chills, fever, cholera and plagues; the absence of sanitation and medical facilities. But they were a proud and hardy bunch, strong, able and determined.