Missouri River
Navigation

"never achieved its expectations. Even under the very best of circumstances, it was never a huge industry".

— Richard Opper, former executive director Missouri River Basin Association

Boat travel on the Missouri began with the wood-framed canoes and bull boats that Native Americans used for thousands of years before the colonization of the Great Plains introduced larger craft to the river. The first steamboat on the Missouri was the Independence, which started running between St. Louis and Keytesville, Missouri, around 1819. By the 1830s, large mail and freight-carrying vessels were running regularly between Kansas City and St. Louis, and many traveled even farther upstream. A handful, such as the Western Engineer and the Yellowstone, could make it up the river as far as eastern Montana.

During the early 19th century, at the height of the fur trade, steamboats and keelboats travelled nearly the whole length of the Missouri from Montana's rugged Missouri Breaks to the mouth, carrying beaver and buffalo furs to and from the areas the trappers frequented. This resulted in the development of the Missouri River mackinaw, which specialized in carrying furs. Since these boats could only travel downriver, they were dismantled and sold for lumber upon their arrival at St. Louis.

Water transport increased through the 1850s with multiple craft ferrying pioneers, emigrants and miners; many of these runs were from St. Louis or Independence to near Omaha. There, most of these people would set out overland along the large but shallow and unnavigable Platte River, which pioneers described as "a mile wide and an inch deep" and "the most magnificent and useless of rivers". Steamboat navigation peaked in 1858 with over 130 boats operating full-time on the Missouri, with many more smaller vessels. Many of the earlier vessels were built on the Ohio River before being transferred to the Missouri. Side-wheeler steamboats were preferred over the larger sternwheelers used on the Mississippi and Ohio because of their greater maneuverability.

The industry's success, however, did not guarantee safety. In the early decades before man controlled the river's flow, its sketchy rises and falls and its massive amounts of sediment, which prevented a clear view of the bottom, wrecked some 300 vessels. Because of the dangers of navigating the Missouri River, the average ship's lifespan was only about four years. The development of the Transcontinental and Northern Pacific Railroads marked the beginning of the end of steamboat commerce on the Missouri. Outcompeted by trains, the number of boats slowly dwindled, until there was almost nothing left by the 1890s. Transport of agricultural and mining products by barge, however, saw a revival in the early twentieth century.
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