Mapping The Missouri River Through The Great Plains, 1673-1895

For decades, the Way West referred not to any kind of overland trail but to the channel of the Missouri River. St. Louis became famous as the gateway to the West because it was the port of entry to the vast western domains drained in part by this mighty stream. Considering the extensive scholarship devoted to such land routes as the Oregon, Santa Fe, and Overland trails, it is curious that the equally important role of the Missouri River as an artery of exploration has been neglected. Only three works have made any real attempt to offer such a history, two of them popular. The third, by Abraham Nasatir, is a short but heavily documented history of the river from its discovery in 1673 until 1805, when the course of the stream was finally explored in its entirety by Lewis and Clark. Even so, the emphasis in Nasatir\u27s study is on the two decades spanning the years 1785 to 1804. An article by Raphael Hamilton is the only general study that describes and illustrates the history of the mapping of the Missouri River, but a host of published papers significantly augment Hamilton\u27s work. Our purpose here is to draw these scattered sources together in a brief narrative for the period from 1673 to 1895. By the latter date the entire course of the river was known and accurately mapped in detail. From first to last the mapping of the river was inspired principally by commercial interests. For the first century and a half of the Missouri\u27s modern history, Indian trade, especially for furs, dominated the reasons for mapmaking. Maps made during the next seventyfive years, on the other hand, were stimulated in large part by the needs of those using the steamboat to trade with and settle the West. The latter period ended about 1902, with the dissolution of the Missouri River Commission, a federal unit charged with improving the navigational capabilities of the river. This study of the mapping of the Missouri River requires that we consider the entire reach of the stream from the time of its discovery by European explorers. The first crude maps of the Missouri, as well as most later general maps, depicted Native American tribal locations and other details on the Great Plains proper. These details extended well to the north and west of the mouth of the Kansas River, which, in some cultural schemes, marks the approximate eastern boundary of the Great Plains on the lower Missouri River. We are not concerned here with the precision of such details as Native American tribal locations, but rather with the developing exactness of the representation of the river itself through nine generations, or general stages, of Missouri River mapping. Each generation depicted a basic design of the river\u27s configuration, and each ended as new data permitted significant refinement of that particular conformation