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Missouri is a midwestern state of the United States, located
near the country's geographic center at the confluence of the two longest
rivers in the United States--the Mississippi and the Missouri. Situated
where North meets South and where the industrial East gives way to the
plains of the West, Missouri exhibits characteristics of all these areas.
It is bordered on the north by Iowa; on the east by Illinois, Kentucky,
and Tennessee; on the south by Arkansas; and on the west by Nebraska,
Kansas, and Oklahoma. During the 19th century Missouri served as a springboard
for countless westward-bound settlers, and the state's cities were long
the westernmost outposts of U.S. civilization. Missouri, an Algonquian
word meaning "people with big canoes," was the name given to the Indians
living near the mouth of the Missouri River.
LAND AND RESOURCES
The terrain of Missouri varies from flat plains to rough hills. The lowest
elevation, 70 m (230 ft), is along the St. Francis River in the southeast,
and the highest point, 540 m (1,772 ft), is Taum Sauk Mountain in the
St. Francois Mountains south of St. Louis.
Physiographic Regions
Missouri has three major physiographic regions: the Ozark Highland, the
Plains, and the Mississippi Alluvial Plain. The Ozark Highland has an
average elevation of about 305 m (1,000 ft); it covers the southern portion
of the state from St. Louis and Jefferson City on the Missouri River to
Oklahoma and Arkansas. The region is famous for more than 5,000 caves
and many large springs. One, Big Spring, in the south central part of
the state, is among the largest springs in the United States. The Ozarks
retain the rolling surface of a plateau near Springfield and in some of
the central areas, but elsewhere swift-flowing streams have dissected
the plateau, forming steep, narrow-crested hills. Relief reaches 230 m
(750 ft) in the most rugged areas (see Ozark Mountains).
North and west of the Ozarks is the Plains region, rising gradually from
200 m (650 ft) near St. Louis to more than 380 m (1,250 ft) in the extreme
northwest. During the past half-million years Pleistocene glaciers extended
as far south as the Missouri River, covering northern Missouri with glacial
till. Parts of the northeast are nearly flat, but in most places postglacial
erosion by streams has resulted in hills and valleys. In a belt about
80 km (50 mi) wide along the Missouri River, the dissected plains are
thickly mantled with loess. South of the Missouri River, along the Kansas
border, the Osage Plains are more open and undulating.
The third major physiographic region, the Mississippi Alluvial Plain,
or Bootheel, consists of the seven southeastern counties. The flat surface
slopes slightly southward from the foot of the Ozark Escarpment.
Soils
Missouri's most productive soils are those of the loess belt along the
Missouri River and the alluvial soils of the Bootheel. Soil erosion, once
a widespread problem, is now better controlled with improved management
practices.
Rivers and Lakes
The Mississippi and Missouri rivers dominate the state's drainage system.
The streams of northern Missouri flow generally southward across the till
plain to these rivers. In southern Missouri streams flow away from the
crest of the Ozark Highland in all directions. Ozark streams are fed by
a complex network of underground drainage systems, and their discharge
is relatively stable throughout the year.
Missouri's largest lakes are artificial. The Lake of the Ozarks, formed
by damming on the Osage River, is one of the world's largest artificial
lakes. Groundwater is abundant.
Climate
Missouri has a continental climate with hot, humid summers and cold winters.
Because it lacks major topographical barriers, the state has a gradual
climatic differentiation, warming from northwest to southeast. The clash
of contrasting air masses in spring and fall may set off violent thunderstorms,
some of which are accompanied by tornadoes.
The average January minimum temperatures range from - 10 degrees C (14
degrees F) in the northwest to - 1 degrees C (30 degrees F) in the southeast.
July maximum temperatures average 33 degrees C (92 degrees F) throughout
the state. Precipitation occurs throughout the year. Mean annual precipitation
ranges from 813 mm (32 in) in the northwest to 1,270 mm (50 in) in the
southeast. Average annual snowfall is 508 mm (20 in) in the northwest
and 130 mm (6.5 in) in the southeast.
Vegetation and Animal Life
At the time of white settlement the flatter parts of the Plains region
were covered with prairie grass that reached heights of 2 m (7 ft). The
more dissected parts were covered with hardwood forests. In the Ozarks
an oak and hickory woodland prevailed, with short-leaf pine intermixed
in the east. The Mississippi Alluvial Plain had a lowland forest of bald
cypress, tupelo, and sweetgum. At present, new-growth commercial forests
are gaining importance, and only in the Bootheel and the Osage Plains
have farms and pastures blocked reforestation. The varied and abundant
wildlife of Missouri includes deer, wild turkeys, and bears.
Mineral Resources
Missouri has about 5.5 billion metric tons (6.1 billion U.S. tons) of
coal reserves in the Plains region, but much of it is in thin seams or
of high sulfur content. The state also has vast reserves of tar sands
in its western counties, but no economical method of mining this petroleum
has yet been found. Missouri is the leading lead-mining state in the United
States, with deposits in the eastern Ozarks. Refractory clays are mined
in central Missouri, and extensive iron ore deposits are found in the
eastern Ozarks. Limestone, marble, granite, and sandstone are quarried
for construction purposes. Cement and lime are also important mineral
products.
PEOPLE
Missouri's population density approximates the national average of about
27 persons per sq km (70 persons per sq mi ), but rural regions in the
Ozarks and in north central Missouri are much more sparsely populated.
During the 1980s, Kansas City overtook St. Louis as the largest city in
Missouri, but its metropolitan-area population is only about two-thirds
that of metropolitan St. Louis. Other large cities are Springfield, Independence,
Saint Joseph, and Columbia. Two-thirds of Missourians live in metropolitan
areas, with one-third of those in the 19 cities with populations of 25,000
or more. Between 1980 and 1990 the population of Missouri increased by
more than 4 percent, and Missouri was among the faster-growing states
in the Midwest but remained below the national growth average.
Missouri has one of the nation's highest percentages of persons over 65
years of age. Blacks, concentrated in the large cities, constitute 10.7
percent of the state's population. The religious affiliation of Missourians
is diverse. Roman Catholics are the largest single religious group, but
Protestants, representing many denominations, form the majority of church
members.
Education
Education in Missouri was conducted primarily in private institutions
until after the Civil War, when free public education became widely available.
Education is at present supervised by a state department of education.
Per-pupil expenditure for public elementary and secondary schools runs
somewhat below the amount for the nation as a whole.
The University of Missouri, founded in 1839, was the first state university
west of the Mississippi River. Today it has four campuses. Eight state
universities and colleges have been established along with Lincoln University,
founded in 1866 as the first state college for blacks (see Missouri, state
universities and colleges of). Private institutions include St. Louis
University (1818) and Washington University (1853), both in St. Louis.
Culture
Missouri supports the arts through a state council on the arts. The Missouri
State Museum is in Jefferson City. The St. Louis Art Museum and the Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art in Kansas City, as well as the plant collections of the
Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis are renowned. The St. Louis Symphony,
established in 1879, is the second-oldest symphony orchestra in the United
States. Branson, in the White River region of southwestern Missouri, is
a national center for country music. Folklore festivals are also an attraction.
Historical Sites
A popular historical site in the state is the Gateway Arch in the Jefferson
National Expansion Memorial. Designed by Eero Saarinen, it is located
on the original riverfront town site of St. Louis and symbolizes the city's
role as gateway to the West. The region surrounding Hannibal is closely
associated with the life and work of Mark Twain. Saint Joseph was the
eastern terminus of the famed but short-lived pony express. Sainte Genevieve
preserves some of the best remaining examples of French Creole architecture
in the Mississippi Valley.
Recreation
The Ozark National Scenic Riverways, the first national riverway, encompasses
the Current and Jacks Fork rivers in the eastern Ozarks. Large tracts
of the Ozarks are in national or state forests. The state also maintains
a large and varied system of state parks. Professional baseball, football,
and ice hockey teams are supported in St. Louis and Kansas City.
Communications
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, founded by Joseph Pulitzer, and the Kansas
City Star and Times are leading metropolitan newspapers. The world's first
school of journalism was founded at the University of Missouri-Columbia
in 1908.
ECONOMIC ACTIVITY
Although Missouri is often considered an agricultural state--and in fact
is one of the nation's leading farming states--manufacturing and service
industries have assumed a more prominent economic role in Missouri than
farming. The number of farms and farmers in Missouri has decreased, a
trend also seen in the nation as a whole.
Agriculture
Missouri remains an important agricultural state. Its principal crops
are soybeans and corn, followed by winter wheat, cotton, and hay. Missouri
usually ranks among the ten leading states in the production of each of
these commodities. The loess belt and the Bootheel are the foremost row-crop
areas, but agriculture is successful throughout the Plains region and
western Ozarks. Most corn is used for livestock feed. This helps explain
why Missouri is a major livestock state, habitually ranking high among
all U.S. states in the production of beef cattle, hogs, and dairy cattle.
Dairying is concentrated in southwestern Missouri. The distinctive agricultural
economy of the Bootheel was once based on large cotton farms, but soybeans,
corn, wheat, alfalfa, and rice have displaced much of the cotton.
Manufacturing
Manufacturing accounts for about 20 percent of the total value of goods
and services produced in Missouri every year. The largest industry is
the manufacture of transportation equipment, especially automobiles, with
the state's production ranking third in the nation; aircraft, spacecraft,
and railroad equipment are also produced. Other major industries include
food processing (primarily brewing, flour milling, and meat-packing),
printing and publishing, and the manufacture of chemicals, fabricated
metal products, machinery, and electrical equipment.
Tourism
Tourist facilities are concentrated at the Lake of the Ozarks and in the
White River region of the southwest. All of the Ozarks offer hiking, cave
exploring, camping, boating, canoeing, fishing, and hunting. Many small
Ozark communities are economically dependent on tourism.
Transportation
Missouri's central location and its economic vitality spurred the development
of a large network of roads, highways, and railroad track. The most heavily
used transportation corridors are those between St. Louis and Kansas City
and St. Louis and the southwest. Commercial barge traffic on both the
Missouri and Mississippi rivers makes St. Louis the nation's busiest inland
river port. Both St. Louis and Kansas City are national air and trucking
centers and serve as major distribution nodes for Missouri and much of
the area of its adjoining states.
Although large artificial lakes are conspicuous in the state's landscape,
hydroelectric power provides only a small amount of Missouri's electricity
production. Coal-fueled plants furnish approximately 85 percent. There
is a nuclear power plant in Callaway County.
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Missouri has had four constitutions: 1820, prior to statehood; 1865 and
1875, in the aftermath of the Civil War; and 1945. Amendments to the constitution
may be proposed by a majority of the legislature or by petition signed
by 8 percent of the voters in two-thirds of the state's congressional
districts. Proposed amendments must be approved by a majority of the voters
in a statewide election. A constitutional convention must be called every
20 years to review the constitution for possible changes. The Missouri
general assembly is composed of the senate of 34 members, half of whom
are elected every 2 years for 4-year terms, and the house of representatives,
with 163 members, all of whom are elected every 2 years. The general assembly
meets annually. The governor is elected for 4 years and may succeed himself
once.
The chief judicial officers are the 7 supreme court judges. The Missouri
Plan for selecting judges, adopted in 1945, has become a nationwide model
for the nonpartisan assignment of judges. Each of Missouri's 114 counties
is governed by a 3-member elected county commission. St. Louis functions
as an independent city with county status.
Both the Democratic and Republican parties have considerable electoral
strength in Missouri, but since World War II the Democrats, strongest
in the cities and the Bootheel, have more often controlled the legislature.
Elected state offices and Missouri's representation in the U.S. Congress
have been rather equally divided between the two parties.
Missouri's Democrats tend to have a more conservative political philosophy
than Democrats nationally. Republicans retain strength in suburban regions
and in the southwestern part of the state.
HISTORY
Among the early Indian inhabitants of Missouri were Mound Builders, whose
earthenwork monuments can be seen throughout the state. The most important
regional tribes were the Osage, Sauk, Fox, and Missouri. Most had moved
from the state by the time of European settlement.
European exploration began with the passage of Father Jacques Marquette
and the trader Louis Jolliet down the Mississippi in 1673. In 1682 the
Mississippi Valley was claimed for France by Robert Cavelier, sieur de
La Salle, who named the territory Louisiana. The first permanent white
settlement in what is now Missouri was made by the French at Sainte Genevieve
in the 1740s.
French settlement in the 18th century was based on lead mining and fur
trading, of which St. Louis (founded 1764) became the center. France ceded
the region to Spain in 1762, but Spanish control was never more than superficial.
The Spanish did, however, permit settlement from east of the Mississippi,
and by 1800 most of the new settlers were from Kentucky and Tennessee.
Spain retroceded the region to France in 1800, and in 1803, Missouri,
along with the rest of the Louisiana territory, was sold to the United
States (see Louisiana Purchase). Missouri was made a U.S. territory in
1812.
Statehood was achieved in 1821 by way of the Missouri Compromise (1820),
which permitted Missouri's entry into the Union as a slave state. In 1837
the six northwestern counties were purchased from the Indians and added
to the state by the Platte Purchase.
Because of its central location and its access to navigable rivers, Missouri
served as the departure point for western trails and expeditions. The
Lewis and Clark Expedition began near St. Louis in 1804. The Santa Fe
Trail opened a thriving trade with the Southwest in 1821, and the Oregon
Trail, beginning in the 1830s and '40s, was used by thousands of settlers
to the Northwest. Both trails originated at Independence, Mo. Steamboat
traffic on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers became important by the
1820s. Later access to the West took place via the overland Butterfield
Trail, the pony express, and the railroads radiating from St. Louis and
Kansas City. The famous Missouri mule was specially bred for the arduous
Santa Fe Trail.
Missouri was primarily a rural, agricultural state. In the Ozarks a subsistence
farmer-woodsman economy, with Appalachian cultural traits, was established.
The Boonslick district in the state's center developed into the richest
agricultural region, based in part on a small-scale slave plantation system.
The Civil War and Economic Growth
By the mid-19th century slavery was becoming uneconomical, and immigrants
from free states and from Europe, especially Germany and Ireland, had
modified the social structure. Nonetheless, slavery remained a controversial
issue in the state. The case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which reached
the U.S. Supreme Court in 1856-57, began in Missouri. The moderate antislavery
stance of Missouri's longtime (1821-51) senator, Thomas Hart Benton, cost
him his political career.
Despite the strong block of proslavery sentiment, a Missouri state convention
voted against secession in 1861. Several major Civil War battles took
place in the state, however, and guerrilla fighting was bitter, bloody,
and statewide. Violence continued after the war in the activities of such
outlaws as Jesse James. The state government was troubled by extremist
groups immediately after the war, but stability was achieved in the 1870s.
After the Civil War, railroad building and the renewed westward movement
of Americans encouraged industry and urban growth. Following a new influx
of foreign immigrants, St. Louis grew to become the nation's fourth-largest
city in 1900.
Economic development in the West fostered Kansas City's growth in agricultural
and cattle-based industries. Missouri's peak rural-farm population was
reached in 1900. Its economic and social growth was depicted in the murals
of Thomas Hart Benton, grandnephew of the senator.
The 20th Century
In the period from 1880 to 1920 lumbering companies exhausted the best
of the Ozark and Bootheel timber, and moved on to new territories. Many
former employees turned to agriculture. In southeastern Missouri large-scale
forest clearing, levee building, ditching, and draining of swamps encouraged
cotton farming and attracted thousands of laborers, many of whom were
black. The Tri-State Mining District, centered on Joplin, was the nation's
largest zinc-producing region, and the lead mines of the St. Francois
region boomed in the 1920s. Political power inexorably shifted from rural
areas to the urban centers, as Missouri's cities expanded in response
to the growing economy. The Depression of the 1930s temporarily slowed
economic growth, and World War II further drained the rural work force,
which left the farms in favor of employment in the cities. Industries
continued to expand in the 1950s.
By the 1960s, however, depopulation and urban deterioration of the inner
part of each metropolitan area had begun. Solutions are complicated by
a fiscally conservative citizenry and by the fact that state boundaries
transect the metropolitan areas of St. Louis and Kansas City.
In the early 1980s, Missouri also was faced with a major environmental
challenge when dioxin contamination was discovered at Times Beach, near
St. Louis. A major cleanup program was begun in 1991. The state faced
another challenge in 1993 as most of its counties were declared disaster
areas, after flooding of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers caused death,
homelessness, and more than $4 billion in property and crop damage.
Despite such problems, Missouri, with its national centrality and diverse
resources, remains economically attractive. The state also has attracted
retirement communities and tourists. A road improvement program has broken
down the isolation of the Ozarks, encouraging the revival of Ozark crafts
and folk culture.
Walter A. Schroeder
Bibliography: Chapman, Carl H. and Eleanor F., Indians and Archaeology
of Missouri, rev. ed. (1983); Chen, Stephen, Missouri in the Federal System,
3d ed. (1986); Dunne, Gerald T., The Missouri Supreme Court (1992); Federal
Writers' Project, Missouri (1941; repr. 1989); Foley, William E., The
Genesis of Missouri (1989); Hardy, Richard J., ed., Missouri Government
and Politics (1985); McReynolds, Edwin C., Missouri: A History of the
Crossroads State (1975); Meyer, Duane Gilbert, The Heritage of Missouri,
3d ed. (1982); Nagel, Paul C., Missouri: A Bicentennial History (1977);
Parrish, William, et al., Missouri, the Heart of the Nation, 2d ed. (1992);
Primm, James N., Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, 2d ed. (1992);
Rafferty, Milton D., Historical Atlas of Missouri (1982) and Missouri:
A Geography (1983); Thelen, David, Paths of Resistance (1991).
(c) 1996 Grolier, Inc.
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