🌉 Missouri

About Missouri

🏛 Gateway Arch, St. Louis

Missouri sits at the geographic and historical center of the continental United States — the Gateway State, where the Louisiana Purchase territory began, where Lewis and Clark departed for the Pacific, and where the great westward migrations of the 19th century were organized and launched. The Gateway Arch, rising 630 feet above the St. Louis waterfront, commemorates this history with the most elegant architectural monument in America, and the city and state that surround it deliver far more depth than that single image suggests.

The Gateway Arch National Park encompasses Eero Saarinen's stainless steel arch (completed 1965), the Old Courthouse where the Dred Scott case was tried, and the riverfront beneath — a 91-acre park on the Mississippi that is the country's smallest national park by area. The tram ride to the Arch's observation room at the summit, through a series of articulating triangular pods that navigate the curve, is a genuine engineering experience; the views of St. Louis, the Mississippi, and the Illinois plain beyond are excellent on clear days. The Museum at the Gateway Arch beneath the monument tells the history of westward expansion with genuine nuance about the indigenous displacement that accompanied it.

Kansas City has two exceptional claims to national significance: jazz and barbecue. The city's 18th & Vine Historic Jazz District is where Charlie Parker grew up and where Kansas City's distinctive jazz style (looser, bluesier, and more improvisational than New Orleans or New York) developed in the 1930s — the American Jazz Museum and the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum (sharing a building) are among the country's most important music and sports heritage museums. Kansas City-style barbecue — low and slow-smoked beef brisket and burnt ends, finished with a thick, sweet tomato-based sauce — is one of America's four great barbecue traditions, and the debate between Joe's Kansas City, Q39, Jack Stack, and Gates is one of the most enthusiastically contested in American food culture.

The Ozark National Scenic Riverways, Missouri's National Park unit, protects 134 miles of the Current and Jacks Fork Rivers — spring-fed streams of extraordinary clarity, cold temperature, and consistent flow, running through dolomite bluffs and old-growth forest in one of the Midwest's finest paddling landscapes. Mark Twain's Hannibal on the Mississippi River — the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens and the inspiration for Tom Sawyer — is one of the country's most genuinely evocative literary pilgrimage sites, with the Twain home, boyhood landmarks, and the Cave (McDougal's Cave from the novel) all accessible.

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