My Missouri Road Trip
Monday, 30 December 2024My recent December 2024 visits to Kansas City and St Louis bracketed two road trips across the state of Missouri, not to be confused with the Indian hill station of Mussoorie which I visited in October.
▲ Travelling east – Charlotte at the wheel, Simon photographing, me navigating from the back seat – we made an early departure from Kansas City in our Avis Ford Edge.
▲ And soon stopped at the Black Bear Diner for breakfast. Eating – or perhaps more accurately over-eating – at diners is part of what an American road trip is all about. I had a chorizo burrito for my first road trip breakfast. Amazingly there are over 150 Black Bear Diners, concentrated in the western US states.
▲ Marceline is where Walt Disney grew up and you couldn’t ask for a more down-home version of the all-American-diner than Ma Vic’s
◄ Not far east from Kansas City, the big St Paul Lutheran Church cemetery, beside the highway at Concordia near Emma, was our first historic stop. We found a series of graves dated 10 October 1864, these were German settlers, pro-United States (ie Unionist) and anti-slavery who, as a result, were murdered in a Civil War massacre by a Confederate guerrilla force of ‘bushwackers.’ Christian Oetting was the victim of an earlier massacre on 5 October 1862.
▲ Next stop was Columbia where The Columns on Francis Quadrangle are the town’s principal landmark on the Missouri University campus. Originally the six columns were part of Academic Hall, the university’s first building until it was destroyed in a fire in 1892.
◄ Boone County Courthouse features a line-up of war memorials including this one for World War I. It seemed like there wasn’t a war happening anywhere that the Boone County boys didn’t want to join, there’s even a memorial to casualties of the Cold War.
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◄ It was not far south to Jefferson City, the state capital, where the Capitol Building is fronted by a statue of Thomas Jefferson, of course. He’s flanked by a male statue of the Mississippi River and a female one of the Missouri. We’d already walked the fine, but very quiet, main street of the town and checked out the attractive Governor’s Mansion overlooking the Missouri River. We assembled for a tour of the Capitol Building, led by a very enthusiastic guide although you end up with the feeling that Missouri, population around six million, is perhaps rather over-governed. The lower chamber has 163 members and currently leans very decisively towards the red Republican side of American politics, they outnumber the Democrats so much that they have to spill over to their side of the chamber during sessions.
◄ For many visitors the highpoint of the Capitol tour is the House Lounge with its big Thomas Hart Benton murals painted around the walls. There’s a distinct Diego Rivera feel about the paintings which features a slave auction in this mural. Elsewhere there’s somebody (a Mormon?) being tarred and feathered and a night club scene featuring a partying politician-cum-felon (an earlier Donald Trump?). All very strange and interesting. In the grounds around the Capitol Building memorials include one to the Lewis and Clark or Corps of Discovery Expedition which followed the Missouri River to its source and crossed the continent to the Pacific Coast in 1804-1806. The party camped near here soon after the expedition commenced.
▲ The Lewis & Clark Memorial – that’s Simon in black, me in red and between us is York, Clark’s slave who was not finally freed until long after the expedition, he may have been the first African-American to cross the continent, but he was still a slave. Then there’s Captain Meriweather Lewis, his Newfoundland dog Seaman, Captain William Clark taking a sighting through his sextant, and George Drouillard, a French-Canadian-Shawnee guide and translator. That’s the Capitol Building in the background.
I encountered another important member of the expedition when I visited travel writer and all-around adventurer Tim Cahill in Livingston, Montana in 2023. The town has a statue of Shoshone woman Sacagawea and her baby, she was a guide and translator to the Lewis & Clark exhibition which also recruited her husband, another French-Canadian explorer Toussaint Charbonneau. Sacagawea turned out to be vitally important in another way, the presence of a woman – what’s more a woman with a baby – underlined the expedition’s peaceful intentions. In his journal Clark more than once expressed how important she was for the expedition’s success.
▲ Where’s the traffic? I’d noted in Kansas City how little traffic there was on the roads and Jefferson City was even quieter, there was absolutely nobody heading up Main St to the State Capitol. In fact it reminded me of rush hour in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Or the equally empty roads in Nay Pyi Daw, the capital of Myanmar?
◄ From Jefferson City it’s only 24 miles to Fulton where Winston Churchill made his Iron Curtain speech in 1946 and as a result the town has the extremely interesting America’s National Churchill Museum.
▲ The Iron Curtain was generally a concept rather than a physical entity, but the 155km of the Berlin Wall certainly curtained off West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. I’m peering through a strip of Berlin Wall, transplanted to Fulton, Missouri.
▲ Travelling west, from St Louis back to Kansas City, we paused in Hannibal where Samuel Clemens – Mark Twain – grew up and set Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home Museum (there is a mouthful) is a series of houses and buildings where he grew up and lived – there too …
▲ plus a Mark Twain Museum, really it’s all awfully ‘twee’ or simply tacky. Never mind it’s interesting and educational, but in a rather uninspiring style, the whole town feels like it’s living off Mr Twain.
▲ Next stop Marceline, where we breakfasted in Ma Vic’s diner, you have to start the day on pancakes at some point on any real American road trip. If Hannibal had Mark Twain then Marceline had Walt Disney. From the diner we walk past a couple of old and very old locomotives to the Disney Museum which has quite a collection of Disney memorabilia, but it’s mainly letters, notes, some photographs. And do I have any interest in other members of the Disney family, there were quite a lot of them? Well, no.
Although curiously, like Mark Twain, dad was a business and money failure, stumbling from one bad idea to another and, also like the Mark Twain family, things got better when mom took over. Remarkably the story was similar for Harry S Truman, we visit his Library & Museum just outside Kansas City. On the edge of Marceline there’s the Disney farmhouse, but that’s just look-from-the-outside, and the Disney barn was a more recent construction for a film
▲ Finally it’s the freeway again for another 30 or so miles west to Chillicothe which is noted for being the place where sliced bread was invented in 1928? Really, I mean what’s so difficult about that? There’s a Chillicothe-sliced-bread mural and a bunch of other rather nice murals around the centre, including one proclaiming that Chillicothe is the world centre for glove-making. I think my very good and much appreciated gloves (it has been cold in Missouri) are Chinese.
