Missouri
U.S. state From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Missouri (/mɪˈzʊəri/ miz-OOR-ee) is a doubly landlocked state in the Midwestern region of the United States.[6] Ranking 21st in land area, it borders Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to the east, Arkansas to the south and Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to the west. In the south are the Ozarks, a forested highland, providing timber, minerals, and recreation. The Missouri River, after which the state is named, flows through the center and into the Mississippi River, which makes up the eastern border. With over six million residents, it is the 18th-most populous state of the country. The largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia. The capital is Jefferson City.
Missouri | |
|---|---|
| Nicknames: Show Me State, Cave State, and Mother of the West | |
| Motto: Salus populi suprema lex esto (Latin) Let the good of the people be the supreme law | |
| Anthem: "Missouri Waltz" | |
 Map of the United States with Missouri highlighted | |
| Country | United States |
| Before statehood | Missouri Territory |
| Admitted to the Union | August 10, 1821 (24th) |
| Capital | Jefferson City |
| Largest city | Kansas City |
| Largest county or equivalent | St. Louis |
| Largest metro and urban areas | Greater St. Louis |
| Government | |
| • Governor | Mike Parson (R) |
| • Lieutenant Governor | Mike Kehoe (R) |
| Legislature | General Assembly |
| • Upper house | Senate |
| • Lower house | House of Representatives |
| Judiciary | Supreme Court of Missouri |
| U.S. senators | Josh Hawley (R) Eric Schmitt (R) |
| U.S. House delegation | 6 Republicans 2 Democrats (list) |
| Area | |
| • Total | 69,715 sq mi (180,560 km2) |
| • Land | 68,886 sq mi (179,015 km2) |
| • Rank | 21st |
| Dimensions | |
| • Length | 300 mi (480 km) |
| • Width | 240 mi (390 km) |
| Elevation | 800 ft (244 m) |
| Highest elevation | 1,772 ft (540 m) |
| Lowest elevation | 230 ft (70 m) |
| Population (2020) | |
| • Total | 6,160,281[2] |
| • Rank | 19th |
| • Density | 88.2/sq mi (34.1/km2) |
| • Rank | 30th |
| • Median household income | $53,578[3] |
| • Income rank | 38th |
| Demonym | Missourian |
| Language | |
| • Official language | English |
| • Spoken language |
|
| Time zone | UTC−06:00 (Central) |
| • Summer (DST) | UTC−05:00 (CDT) |
| USPS abbreviation | MO |
| ISO 3166 code | US-MO |
| Traditional abbreviation | Mo. |
| Latitude | 36° 0′ N to 40° 37′ N |
| Longitude | 89° 6′ W to 95° 46′ W |
| Website | mo |
Humans have inhabited present-day Missouri for at least 12,000 years. The Mississippian culture, which emerged in the ninth century, built cities and mounds before declining in the 14th century. The Indigenous Osage and Missouria nations inhabited the area when European people arrived in the 17th century. The French incorporated the territory into Louisiana, founding Ste. Genevieve in 1735 and St. Louis in 1764. After a brief period of Spanish rule, the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Americans from the Upland South rushed into the new Missouri Territory; Missouri played a central role in the westward expansion of the United States.[7] Missouri was admitted as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As a border state, Missouri's role in the American Civil War was complex, and it was subject to rival governments, raids, and guerilla warfare. After the war, both Greater St. Louis and the Kansas City metropolitan area became centers of industrialization and business.
Today the state is divided into 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis. Missouri has been called the "Mother of the West", the "Cave State", and the "Show Me State".[8] Its culture blends elements of the Midwestern and Southern United States. It is the birthplace of the musical genres ragtime, Kansas City jazz and St. Louis blues. The well-known Kansas City-style barbecue, and the lesser-known St. Louis-style barbecue, can be found across the state and beyond.
Missouri is a major center of beer brewing and has some of the most permissive alcohol laws in the U.S.[9] It is home to Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest beer producer, and produces an eponymous wine produced in the Missouri Rhineland and Ozarks. Outside the state's major cities, popular tourist destinations include the Lake of the Ozarks, Table Rock Lake and Branson. Some of the largest companies based in the state include Cerner, Express Scripts, Monsanto, Emerson Electric, Edward Jones, H&R Block, Wells Fargo Advisors, Centene Corporation, and O'Reilly Auto Parts. Well-known universities in Missouri include the University of Missouri, Saint Louis University, and Washington University in St. Louis.[10]
The state is named for the Missouri River, which was named after the indigenous Missouria, a Siouan-language tribe. French colonists adapted a form of the Illinois language-name for the people: Wimihsoorita. Their name means "One who has dugout canoes".[11]
The name Missouri has several different pronunciations even among its present-day inhabitants,[12] the two most common being /mɪˈzɜːri/ mih-ZUR-ee and /mɪˈzɜːrə/ mih-ZUR-ə.[13][14] Further pronunciations also exist in Missouri or elsewhere in the United States, involving the realization of the medial consonant as either /z/ or /s/; the vowel in the second syllable as either /ɜːr/ or /ʊər/;[15] and the third syllable as /i/ or /ə/.[14] Any combination of these phonetic realizations may be observed coming from speakers of American English. In British received pronunciation, the preferred variant is /mɪˈzʊəri/, with /mɪˈsʊəri/ being a possible alternative.[16][17]
Donald M. Lance, a professor of English at the University of Missouri, stated that no pronunciation could be declared correct, nor could any be clearly defined as native or outsider, rural or urban, southern or northern, educated or otherwise.[18] Politicians often employ multiple pronunciations, even during a single speech, to appeal to a greater number of listeners.[12] In informal contexts respellings of the state's name, such as "Missour-ee" or "Missour-uh", are occasionally used to distinguish pronunciations phonetically.
Nicknames
There is no official state nickname.[19] However, Missouri's unofficial nickname is the "Show Me State", which appears on its license plates. This phrase has several origins. One is popularly ascribed to a speech by Congressman Willard Vandiver in 1899, who declared that "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me." This is in keeping with the saying "I'm from Missouri", which means "I'm skeptical of the matter and not easily convinced."[20] However, according to researchers, the phrase "show me" was already in use before the 1890s.[21] Another one states that it is a reference to Missouri miners who were taken to Leadville, Colorado to replace striking workers. Since the new miners were unfamiliar with the mining methods, they required frequent instruction.[19]
Other nicknames for Missouri include "The Lead State", "The Bullion State", "The Ozark State", "The Mother of the West", "The Iron Mountain State", and "Pennsylvania of the West".[22] It is also known as the "Cave State"[23]: 53 because there are more than 7,300 recorded caves in the state (second to Tennessee). Perry County is the county with the most caves and the single longest cave.[24][25]
The official state motto is "Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto", Latin for "Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law."[26]
 | This section needs additional citations for verification. (August 2017) |
| External videos | |
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 Missouri, Westminster College Gymnasium in Fulton, Missouri |
Early history
Archaeological excavations along river valleys have shown continuous habitation since about 9000 BCE.[27] Beginning before 1000 CE, the people of the Mississippian culture created regional political centers at present-day St. Louis and across the Mississippi River at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Their large cities included thousands of individual residences. Still, they are known for their surviving massive earthwork mounds, built for religious, political and social reasons, in platform, ridgetop and conical shapes. Cahokia was the center of a regional trading network that reached from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The civilization declined by 1400 CE, and most descendants left the area long before the arrival of Europeans. St. Louis was at one time known as Mound City by the European Americans because of the numerous surviving prehistoric mounds since lost to urban development. The Mississippian culture left mounds throughout the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, extending into the southeast and the upper river.
The land that became the state of Missouri was part of numerous different territories, possessed changing and often indeterminate borders, and had many different Native American and European names between the 1600s and statehood. For much of the first half of the 1700s, the west bank of the Mississippi River that would become Missouri was mostly uninhabited, something of a no man's land that kept peace between the Illinois on the east bank of the Mississippi River and to the North, and the Osage and Missouri Indians of the lower Missouri Valley. In the early 1700s, French traders and missionaries explored the whole of the Mississippi Valley, and named the region "Louisiana". Around the same time, a different group of French Canadians established five villages on the east bank of the Mississippi River and identified their settlements as being in le pays des Illinois, "the country of the Illinois". When settlers of French Canadian descent began crossing the Mississippi River to establish settlements such as Ste. Genevieve, they continued to identify their settlements as being in the Illinois Country. At the same time, the French settlements on both sides of the Mississippi River were part of the French province of Louisiana. To distinguish the settlements in the Middle Mississippi Valley from French settlements in the lower Mississippi Valley around New Orleans, French officials and inhabitants referred to the Middle Mississippi Valley as La Haute Louisiane, "The High Louisiana", or "Upper Louisiana".
The first European settlers were mostly ethnic French Canadians, who created their first settlement in Missouri at present-day Ste. Genevieve, about 45 miles (72 km) south of St. Louis. They had migrated in about 1750 from the Illinois Country. They came from colonial villages on the east side of the Mississippi River, where soils were becoming exhausted and there was insufficient river bottom land for the growing population. The early Missouri settlements included many enslaved Africans and Native Americans, and slave labor was central to both commercial agriculture and the fur trade. Sainte-Geneviève became a thriving agricultural center, producing enough surplus wheat, corn and tobacco to ship tons of grain annually downriver to Lower Louisiana for trade. Grain production in the Illinois Country was critical to the survival of Lower Louisiana and especially the city of New Orleans.
St. Louis was founded on February 14, 1764, by French fur traders Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, Pierre Laclède, and Auguste Chouteau.[28] From 1764 to 1803, European control of the area west of the Mississippi to the northernmost part of the Missouri River basin, called Louisiana, was assumed by the Spanish as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, due to Treaty of Fontainebleau[29] (in order to have Spain join with France in the war against England). The arrival of the Spanish in St. Louis was in September 1767.
St. Louis became the center of a regional fur trade with Native American tribes that extended up the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, dominating the regional economy for decades. Trading partners of major firms shipped their furs from St. Louis by river down to New Orleans for export to Europe. They provided a variety of goods to traders for sale and trade with their Native American clients. The fur trade and associated businesses made St. Louis an early financial center and provided the wealth for some to build fine houses and import luxury items. Its location near the confluence of the Illinois River meant it also handled produce from the agricultural areas. River traffic and trade along the Mississippi were integral to the state's economy. As the area's first major city, St. Louis expanded greatly after the invention of the steamboat and the increased river trade.
19th century
Napoleon Bonaparte had gained Louisiana for French ownership from Spain in 1800 under the Treaty of San Ildefonso after it had been a Spanish colony since 1762, but the treaty was kept secret. Louisiana remained nominally under Spanish control until a transfer of power to France on November 30, 1803, just three weeks before the cession to the United States.
Part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase by the United States, Missouri earned the nickname Gateway to the West because it served as a significant departure point for expeditions and settlers heading to the West during the 19th century. St. Charles, just west of St. Louis, was the starting point and the return destination of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which ascended the Missouri River in 1804, to explore the western lands to the Pacific Ocean. For decades, St. Louis was a major supply point for parties of settlers heading west.
As many of the early settlers in western Missouri migrated from the Upper South, they brought enslaved African Americans as agricultural laborers, and they desired to continue their culture and the institution of slavery. They settled predominantly in 17 counties along the Missouri River, in an area of flatlands that enabled plantation agriculture and became known as "Little Dixie".
The state was rocked by the 1811–12 New Madrid earthquakes. Casualties were few due to the sparse population.
Admission as a state in 1821
In 1821, the former Missouri Territory was admitted as a slave state, under the Missouri Compromise, and with a temporary state capital in St. Charles. In 1826, the capital was shifted to its permanent location of Jefferson City, also on the Missouri River.
Originally the state's western border was a straight line, defined as the meridian passing through the Kawsmouth,[30] the point where the Kansas River enters the Missouri River. The river has moved since this designation. This line is known as the Osage Boundary.[31] In 1836 the Platte Purchase was added to the northwest corner of the state after purchase of the land from the native tribes, making the Missouri River the border north of the Kansas River. This addition increased the land area of what was already the largest state in the Union at the time (about 66,500 square miles (172,000 km2) to Virginia's 65,000 square miles, which then included West Virginia).[32]
In the early 1830s, Mormon migrants from northern states and Canada began settling near Independence and areas just north of there. Conflicts over religion and slavery arose between the 'old settlers' (mainly from the South) and the Mormons (mainly from the North). The Mormon War erupted in 1838. By 1839, with the help of an "Extermination Order" by Governor Lilburn Boggs, the old settlers forcibly expelled the Mormons from Missouri and confiscated their lands.
Conflicts over slavery exacerbated border tensions among the states and territories. From 1838 to 1839, a border dispute with Iowa over the so-called Honey Lands resulted in both states' calling-up of militias along the border.
With increasing migration, from the 1830s to the 1860s, Missouri's population almost doubled with every decade. Most newcomers were American-born, but many Irish and German immigrants arrived in the late 1840s and 1850s. As a majority were Catholic, they set up their own religious institutions in the state, which had been mostly Protestant. Many settled in cities, creating a regional and then state network of Catholic churches and schools. 19th-century German immigrants created the wine industry along the Missouri River and the beer industry in St. Louis.
While many German immigrants were strongly anti-slavery,[33][34] many Irish immigrants living in cities were pro-slavery, fearing that liberating African-American slaves would create a glut of unskilled labor, driving wages down.[34]
Most Missouri farmers practiced subsistence farming before the American Civil War. The majority of those who held slaves had fewer than five each. Planters, defined by some historians as those holding 20 slaves or more, were concentrated in the counties known as "Little Dixie", in the central part of the state along the Missouri River. The tensions over slavery chiefly had to do with the future of the state and nation. In 1860, enslaved African Americans made up less than 10% of the state's population of 1,182,012.[35] In order to control the flooding of farmland and low-lying villages along the Mississippi, the state had completed construction of 140 miles (230 km) of levees along the river by 1860.[36]
American Civil War
After the secession of Southern states began in 1861, the Missouri legislature called for the election of a special convention on secession. This convention voted against secession, but also qualified their support of the Union. In the aftermath of Battle of Fort Sumter Pro-Southern Governor Claiborne F. Jackson ordered the mobilization of several hundred members of the state militia who had gathered in a camp in St. Louis for training. In secret, he also requested Confederate arms and artillery to help take the St. Louis Arsenal. Alarmed at this action, and discovering the Confederate aid, General Nathaniel Lyon struck first, encircling the camp and forcing the state troops to surrender. Lyon directed his soldiers, largely non-English-speaking German immigrants, to march the prisoners through the streets, and this led to riot by pro-secession citizens. While it is disputed how it started, this riot led to violence and Union soldiers killed by St. Louis civilians. The event as a whole, is called the Camp Jackson Affair.
These events sharpened the divisions within the state. Governor Jackson appointed Sterling Price, president of the convention on secession, as head of the new Missouri State Guard. In the face of Union General Lyon's rapid advance through the state, Jackson and Price were forced to flee the capital of Jefferson City on June 14, 1861. In Neosho, Missouri, Jackson called the state legislature into session to call for secession. However, the elected legislative body was split between pro-Union and pro-Confederate. As such, few of the pro-unionist attended the session called in Neosho, and the ordinance of secession was quickly adopted. The Confederacy recognized Missouri secession on October 30, 1861.
With the elected governor absent from the capital and the legislators largely dispersed, the state convention was reassembled with most of its members present, save twenty who fled south with Jackson's forces. The convention declared all offices vacant and installed Hamilton Gamble as the new governor of Missouri. President Lincoln's administration immediately recognized Gamble's government as the legal Missouri government. The federal government's decision enabled raising pro-Union militia forces for service within the state and volunteer regiments for the Union Army.
Fighting ensued between Union forces and a combined army of General Price's Missouri State Guard and Confederate troops from Arkansas and Texas under General Ben McCulloch. After winning victories at the battle of Wilson's Creek and the siege of Lexington, Missouri and suffering losses elsewhere, the Confederate forces retreated to Arkansas and later Marshall, Texas, in the face of a largely reinforced Union Army.
Though regular Confederate troops staged some large-scale raids into Missouri, the fighting in the state for the next three years consisted chiefly of guerrilla warfare. "Citizen soldiers" or insurgents such as Captain William Quantrill, Frank and Jesse James, the Younger brothers, and William T. Anderson made use of quick, small-unit tactics. Pioneered by the Missouri Partisan Rangers, such insurgencies also arose in portions of the Confederacy occupied by the Union during the Civil War. Historians have portrayed stories of the James brothers' outlaw years as an American "Robin Hood" myth.[37] The vigilante activities of the Bald Knobbers of the Ozarks in the 1880s were an unofficial continuation of insurgent mentality long after the official end of the war, and they are a favorite theme in Branson's self-image.[38]