Missouri
Missouri is a landlocked state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Ranking 21st in land area, it borders Iowa to the north, Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee to the east, Arkansas to the south and Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska to the west. With over six million residents, it is the 19th-most populous state of the country. The largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia. The capital is Jefferson City.
Humans have inhabited present-day Missouri for at least 12,000 years. The Mississippian culture, which emerged in the ninth century, built cities with pyramidal and other ceremonial mounds before declining in the 14th century. The Indigenous Osage and Missouria nations inhabited the area when European people arrived in the 17th century. The French incorporated the territory into Louisiana, founding Ste. Genevieve in 1735 and St. Louis in 1764. After a brief period of Spanish rule, the United States acquired Missouri as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Americans from the Upland South rushed into the new Missouri Territory, taking advantage of its productive agricultural plains; Missouri played a central role in the westward expansion of the United States. Missouri was admitted as a slave state as part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As a border state, Missouri's role in the American Civil War was complex, and it was subject to rival governments, raids, and guerilla warfare. After the war, both Greater St. Louis and the Kansas City metropolitan area became large centers of industrialization and business.
Today the state is divided into 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis. Missouri has been called the "Gateway to the West", the "Mother of the West", the "Cave State", and the "Show Me State". Its culture blends elements of the Midwestern and Southern United States. It is the birthplace of the musical genres ragtime, Kansas City jazz and St. Louis blues. The well-known Kansas City-style barbecue, and the lesser-known St. Louis-style barbecue, can be found across the state and beyond.
Missouri is a major center of beer brewing and has some of the most permissive alcohol laws in the U.S. It is home to Anheuser-Busch, the world's largest beer producer, and produces Missouri wine, especially in the Missouri Rhineland. Outside the state's major cities, popular tourist destinations include the Lake of the Ozarks, Table Rock Lake and Branson. Some of the largest companies based in the state include Cerner, Express Scripts, Monsanto, Emerson Electric, Edward Jones, H&R Block, Wells Fargo Advisors, Centene Corporation, and O'Reilly Auto Parts. Well-known universities in Missouri include the University of Missouri, Saint Louis University, and Washington University in St. Louis.
Etymology and [|pronunciation]
The state is named for the Missouri River, which was named after the indigenous Missouria, a Siouan-language tribe. French colonists adapted a form of the Illinois language-name for the people: Wimihsoorita. Their name means 'one who has dugout canoes'.The name Missouri has several different pronunciations even among its present-day inhabitants, the two most common being and . Further pronunciations also exist in Missouri or elsewhere in the United States, involving the realization of the medial consonant as either or ; the vowel in the second syllable as either or ; and the third syllable as or. Any combination of these phonetic realizations may be observed coming from speakers of American English. In British Received Pronunciation, the preferred variant is, with being a possible alternative.
Donald M. Lance, a professor of English at the University of Missouri, stated that no pronunciation could be declared correct, nor could any be clearly defined as native or outsider, rural or urban, southern or northern, educated or otherwise. Politicians often employ multiple pronunciations, even during a single speech, to appeal to a greater number of listeners. In informal contexts respellings of the state's name, such as "Missour-ee" or "Missour-uh", are occasionally used to distinguish pronunciations phonetically.
Nicknames
There is no official state nickname. However, Missouri's unofficial nickname is the "Show Me State", which appears on its license plates. This phrase has several origins. One is popularly ascribed to a speech by Congressman Willard Vandiver in 1899, who declared that "I come from a state that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri, and you have got to show me." This is in keeping with the saying "I'm from Missouri", which means "I'm skeptical of the matter and not easily convinced." However, according to researchers, the phrase "show me" was already in use before the 1890s. Another one states that it is a reference to Missouri miners who were taken to Leadville, Colorado, to replace striking workers. Since the new miners were unfamiliar with the mining methods, they required frequent instruction. Pit bosses began saying, "That man is from Missouri. You'll have to show him."Other nicknames for Missouri include "The Lead State", "The Bullion State", "The Ozark State", "The Mother of the West", "The Iron Mountain State", and "Pennsylvania of the West". It is also known as the "Cave State" because there are more than 7,300 recorded caves in the state. Perry County is the county with the most caves and the single longest cave.
The official state motto is "Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto", Latin for "Let the welfare of the people be the supreme law."
History
Early history
excavations along river valleys have shown continuous habitation since about 9000 BCE. Beginning before 1000 CE, the people of the Mississippian culture created regional political centers at present-day St. Louis and across the Mississippi River at Cahokia, near present-day Collinsville, Illinois. Their large cities included thousands of individual residences. Still, they are known for their surviving massive earthwork mounds, built for religious, political and social reasons, in platform, ridgetop and conical shapes. Cahokia was the center of a regional trading network that reached from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The civilization declined by 1400 CE, and most descendants left the area long before the arrival of Europeans. St. Louis was at one time known as Mound City by the European Americans because of the numerous surviving prehistoric mounds since lost to urban development. The Mississippian culture left mounds throughout the middle Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, extending into the southeast and the upper river.The land that became the state of Missouri was part of numerous different territories, possessed changing and often indeterminate borders, and had many different Native American and European names between the 1600s and statehood. For much of the first half of the 1700s, the west bank of the Mississippi River that would become Missouri was mostly uninhabited, something of a no man's land that kept peace between the Illinois on the east bank of the Mississippi River and to the North, and the Osage and Missouri Indians of the lower Missouri Valley. In the early 1700s, French traders and missionaries explored the whole of the Mississippi Valley, and named the region "Louisiana". Around the same time, a different group of French Canadians established five villages on the east bank of the Mississippi River and identified their settlements as being in le pays des Illinois, "the country of the Illinois". When settlers of French Canadian descent began crossing the Mississippi River to establish settlements such as Ste. Genevieve, they continued to identify their settlements as being in the Illinois Country. At the same time, the French settlements on both sides of the Mississippi River were part of the French province of Louisiana. To distinguish the settlements in the Middle Mississippi Valley from French settlements in the lower Mississippi Valley around New Orleans, French officials and inhabitants referred to the Middle Mississippi Valley as La Haute Louisiane, "The High Louisiana", or "Upper Louisiana".
File:George Caleb Bingham 001.jpg|thumb|Fur Traders Descending the Missouri by Missouri painter George Caleb Bingham
The first European settlers were mostly ethnic French Canadians, who created their first settlement in Missouri at present-day Ste. Genevieve, about south of St. Louis. They had migrated in about 1750 from the Illinois Country. They came from colonial villages on the east side of the Mississippi River, where soils were becoming exhausted and there was insufficient river bottom land for the growing population. The early Missouri settlements included many enslaved Africans and Native Americans, and slave labor was central to both commercial agriculture and the fur trade. Sainte-Geneviève became a thriving agricultural center, producing enough surplus wheat, corn and tobacco to ship tons of grain annually downriver to Lower Louisiana for trade. Grain production in the Illinois Country was critical to the survival of Lower Louisiana and especially the city of New Orleans.
St. Louis was founded on February 14, 1764, by French fur traders Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent, Pierre Laclède, and Auguste Chouteau. From 1764 to 1803, European control of the area west of the Mississippi to the northernmost part of the Missouri River basin, called Louisiana, was assumed by the Spanish as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, due to Treaty of Fontainebleau. The arrival of the Spanish in St. Louis was in September 1767.
St. Louis became the center of a regional fur trade with Native American tribes that extended up the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, dominating the regional economy for decades. Trading partners of major firms shipped their furs from St. Louis by river down to New Orleans for export to Europe. They provided a variety of goods to traders for sale and trade with their Native American clients. The fur trade and associated businesses made St. Louis an early financial center and provided the wealth for some to build fine houses and import luxury items. Its location near the confluence of the Illinois River meant it also handled produce from the agricultural areas. River traffic and trade along the Mississippi were integral to the state's economy. As the area's first major city, St. Louis expanded greatly after the invention of the steamboat and the increased river trade.