Missouri

On May 14, 1804, a group of explorers pushed off from the banks of the Missouri River near St. Louis on one of the greatest adventures in American history. Led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, the Corps of Discovery traveled nearly 8,000 miles to the Pacific Ocean and back.

The team included soldiers, a young Shoshone woman named Sacagawea who carried her baby on her back, and an enslaved Black man named York. They mapped unknown rivers, crossed the Rocky Mountains, and recorded hundreds of plants and animals that scientists back east had never seen.

The Osage, Missouri, and other native peoples had lived here for thousands of years before French explorers arrived in the 1670s. St. Louis was founded as a fur trading post in 1764, and after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the city became the launching point for everyone heading west.

Missouri became the 24th state in 1821, entering as a slave state through the same Missouri Compromise that made Maine a free state. As a border state during the Civil War, Missouri was deeply divided. More than 1,000 battles were fought here, the third most of any state.

In 1846, an enslaved man named Dred Scott sued for his freedom in a St. Louis courthouse. The Supreme Court ruled against him in 1857, saying that Black people were not citizens and could not sue in court. The decision pushed the country even closer to war.

Ride to the top of the 630-foot Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the tallest monument in the country, built to honor the city's role as the gateway to the West. In the Old Courthouse next door, you can stand in the same room where the Dred Scott case was first heard.

In Hannibal, visit the boyhood home of Mark Twain, who grew up along the Mississippi River and turned it into some of the most famous stories in American literature. And in Kansas City, dig into some of the best barbecue in the country.