On Monday we decided that on Friday we’d drive to Missouri, to Branson. That’s a short turnaround, but I’ve been to Missouri plenty. My Grandmother Eva–not that Grandmother Eva, the other Grandmother Eva–was born in Missouri, in Osgood near the Iowa border, in 1890. When I was five or six, circa 1963, we took her home from Texas to see her siblings. We stayed with one of her sisters, and while the house may have had electricity, it didn’t have indoor plumbing. There was a pump in the yard for water and an outhouse for other sundry stuff. It was on a gravel country road, and at night I saw fireflies for the first time. It was wonderful.

I’ve been to Missouri some since, enough to know that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City is as pretty as MLB stadiums get (though I don’t recommend it in August), and that the riverfront town of Hannibal has seen better days. I’ve been to Missouri enough to know that while any Texan would tell you that Missouri barbecue is mediocre stuff, the sandwiches at Gioia’s Deli on The Hill are worth the effort. On The Hill you can still imagine Joe Garagiola and Yogi Berra as children in the neighborhood’s heyday. Not so much Mark Twain and Hannibal.

Kauffman Stadium, Kansas City, 2015.

There are good fishing rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, and if we were being intellectually honest we would target native Missouri smallmouth, but we haven’t fished for trout in a while, and there are plenty of Missouri rivers stocked at one time or another with trout. In Branson there is the Ozarks’ White River at the Taneycomo Lake dam. One Missouri spring creek near Branson, Crane Creek, claims the purest strain of McCloud River redband trout in the world. They were stocked in the 1880s from eggs imported from California and supposedly dumped off a bridge by railroaders.

Records are a bit sketchy, but Crane Creek has been stocked no more recently than the 1920s. Because it was the site of the second national fish hatchery, the McCloud River redband was the original source of most of the stocked rainbow in the world. Only in Crane Creek does the original strain remain unmixed with other rainbow subspecies.

By all reports the Crane Creek trout are small, skittish, and hard to catch. The stream is narrow and overgrown, and there’s poison ivy and water moccasins. Of course that last is likely overblown, and there are more likely a lot of non-venomous northern water snakes and maybe some moccasins. It is a herpetologist’s truism that everybody thinks that every water snake is a vicious, vindictive, or aggressive cottonmouth, but they aren’t more vicious, vindictive, and aggressive than most of us, and most of the snakes you see in the water aren’t moccasins.

Anyway, it sounds like we have to fish Crane Creek.

I’ve been looking at Missouri rivers for a while, thinking we would avoid Branson. We could do it, but Branson is convenient. It’s a strange place, a tourist destination that is a distant cousin to Nashville. It is a vacation destination for devout Southern and Midwestern protestants, seemingly devoted to clean living, family entertainment, golf, lakeside condos, and fatty foods. There is fishing though, and a good fly shop. It’s about a 10-hour drive from Houston. We can take the dogs, and coming home we can spend the night in Bentonville, Arkansas. Branson eateries tend towards family entertainment and national chains. Bentonville, as the business hub of Walmart, has better places to eat.

A short note on pronunciation

Apparently there’s no correct pronunciation of Missouri. The most common pronunciations are either Missour-ee or Missour-uh, but neither is incorrect, and they aren’t even the only ones. I grew up with Missour-uh, and long assumed that since I had some Missour-uh ancestry my pronunciation must be correct, but no. Still, it’s not wrong either. Oddly, how you say Missouri isn’t governed by education, wealth, race, or even geography. It’s not a South versus Midwest thing. It’s just the luck of the draw or maybe personal taste. Some Missourans say Missour-uh, some Missour-ee, and some go back and forth between them. All things should be so accommodating.

The Missouri Compromise

The U.S. acquired Missouri in 1803 as part of the Louisiana Purchase, and St. Louis became the jumping-off point for a big part of western expansion. In 1821 it became a state under the Missouri Compromise: to maintain political balance, Maine entered the Union as a Free State, while Missouri entered as a Slave State. After the admission of Missouri, no new territory north of the 36°30′ parallel could enter the Union as a slave state.

Julio Reis, Map of the United States c. 1849 (modern state borders), with the parallel 36°30′ north, Wikipedia, 2009.

The state lines in the map above are mostly modern boundaries. West Virginia wouldn’t exist until the Civil War. None of the grey states existed, except California. It’s the green line, the extension of the Mason-Dixon Line along 36°30′ that purportedly controlled American expansion for the next 30 years. See that far north border of Texas, and the Oklahoma Panhandle? The Oklahoma Panhandle was originally claimed by Texas, but when Texas entered the Union in 1845, that northern bit was above the line. To preserve the Missouri Compromise, it was cut off and left as part of the Indian Territory.

After the Missouri Compromise, there was a push among Southern slaveholding states to annex Cuba as a Slave State, to maintain Southern legislative power. It wasn’t going to happen. Cuba was valuable to Spain, and there was no real interest in annexation among most Cubans, but it’s amusing to guess whether Governor Fidel would have been a Republican or a Democrat.

The Missouri Compromise lasted until the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 provided that Kansas and Nebraska would enter the Union as slave or free based on the votes of Kansas or Nebraska settlers. The seemingly sensible resolution threw the now-raging national slave debate into armed war. Abolitionists came to Kansas from the north, and pro-slavery Border Ruffians raided into Kansas from Missouri, and all of them brought convictions, guns, and knives. John Brown got his bones in Bloody Kansas. Kansas finally voted to enter the Union as a free state, but allowing popular local vote to determine only made the Civil War inevitable.

In 1857, in the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court determined that African Americans could not be citizens, that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in its territories, and for good measure that the already superseded Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

New York: Wm. C. Reynolds and J. C. Jones – “Reynolds’s Political Map of the United States” (1856) from the Library of Congress Geography and Map Division.

Population and Demographics

In 1820, the 66,586 population of Missouri was .6% of the nation’s total population. By 1920, Missouri’s 3,404,055 population was a biggly 3% of the total. St. Louis was the 6th largest city in the U.S., and had two major league baseball teams, the Cardinals and the Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles). Kansas City was 19th. By 2020, the St. Louis metropolitan statistical area, with a population of 2,820,253, was ranked 21st. Kansas City, with 2,192,035, was 31st.

In 2020, the total Missouri population of 6,154,913 was .1% of the total U.S. population of 329.5 million. It had gone from .6% in 1820, to 3% in 1920, to .1% in 1920. Missouri still had two major league baseball teams, though one was now the Kansas City Royals. The Kansas City Chiefs won the Super Bowl in 2020. They won again this year.

Missouri’s national importance was driven in part by Mississippi River trade and Westward Expansion, and with the decline of both, the its national importance also declined. Still, Missouri is where the South and the Midwest meet, in the same way that Texas is where the South and the Southwest meet. It is a black/white population, with heavy emphasis on white. Approximately 82% of Missourians are white, with less than 5% of that population Hispanic.

About 12% of the Missouri population is black, mostly centered in St. Louis and Kansas City, and in a stretch of southeastern counties along the Mississippi River, an apparent extension of the Arkansas and Mississippi Deltas. That delta population is likely a remnant of slavery, and the population growth in St. Louis and Kansas City was fueled by the Great Migration, both from the South and from less populated areas in Missouri. Hannibal, for instance was 14.5% black in 1900, but only 6.1% by 2020. Conversely, St. Louis was 6.1% black in 1900, but by 2020 the greater St Louis area was 17% black.

Satchel Paige, Untitled Photo, between 1935 and 1942, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

It’s worth noting that Kansas City became an African American cultural Mecca, being, along with New Orleans, Chicago, and New York, a major jazz hub. Count Basie was from Kansas City. So was Dexter Gordon, Lester Young, Big Joe Turner, Count Basie, and Charlie Parker. It was also the home of the Kansas City Monarchs, perhaps one of the greatest baseball conglomerations ever. Jackie Robinson jumped from the Monarchs to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Satchel Paige played for the Monarchs, and so did Cool Papa Bell, Turkey Stearns, Wilbur Rogan, and Buck O’Neil.

Lester Young by Ojon Mili. Time Inc. – Life magazine, Volume 17, Number 13 (page 40), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44359804

The American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum are at 18th and Vine in Kansas City, and are worth a special trip. And did I mention that Kauffman Stadium is one of the finest stadiums in Major League Baseball? It’s just too bad that Kansas City Barbecue isn’t better.

Of course Mark Twain is from Missouri, and T.S. Eliot, and Maya Angelou.

Politics

Both U.S. Senators from Missouri and four of the six Representatives are Republican. All of the six statewide elected officials, governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, auditor, treasurer, and attorney general, are Republican, and there are sizable Republican majorities in the state senate and house of representatives.

In 2020, Donald Trump carried the state by 56.80% of the vote, compared to Joe Biden’s 41.41%. Biden carried only Boone, Jackson, and St. Louis Counties. Jackson is Kansas City, St. Louis is, well, St. Louis, and Boone, in the middle of the state, is Columbia, home of the University of Missouri. Like other states, less-populated areas vote Republican, urban centers and college towns vote Democratic.

2020 presidential election, Missouri, By KyleReese64 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95975673

Geography

Missouri is divided into three major geographic regions, the Ozark Highlands, the Northern Plains, and the Coastal Alluvial Plain. No mysteries here. The Northern Plains are rolling, and you can grow corn and soybeans, soybeans and corn, and corn. There are lots of streams. It’s Iowa just a wee bit south of Iowa.

The smallest region, the southeast Coastal Alluvial Plain, is an extension of the Arkansas Delta, which is just like the Mississippi Delta but west of the Mississippi. It’s flat, wet, and a good place to grow rice, and cotton. Of course cotton.

The Ozarks are the Ozarks. They extend into Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It’s a dome, cut into topography by erosion, faults, bluffs, rivers, and streams. It’s beautiful, dramatic country.

On the state’s eastern border there’s the Mississippi River. Cutting across the center of the state, roughly along the line that divides the Plains and the Ozarks, is the Missouri River. The Missouri meets the Mississippi at St. Louis.

Mark Twain’s Confederate Service

Mark Twain served as a Confederate militia lieutenant in Missouri, and he deserted after two weeks. Twain scholars have suggested that his desertion didn’t evidence opposition to the Confederacy, as much as concern as to the likely outcome of militia service in what was substantially Union-controlled territory. It’s pretty likely that Twain was dedicated to the South, and that his later reevaluation of the South and its cause was a principal source of his satirical brilliance. It’s hard to imagine Huck Finn written by someone who didn’t distrust most people’s pronouncements, including from time to time his own.

Osgood, Missouri, 2021.