DISCOVERY OF THE MISSOURI.
Such are some of the more striking physical characteristics of this very remarkable stream. It is not surprising that, in the early times, when it first came to be known, it produced a profound impression on the minds of explorers and drew from them expressions of wonder and awe. Marquette and Joliet, who discovered the river in 1673, were floating down the Mississippi in a comparatively clear current, when they came to a point where a mighty volume of water poured itself into the Mississippi from the west shore, carrying trees, stumps, and drift of all descriptions. It filled them with amazement, as it has every person since who has stood at the confluence of these two mighty streams, particularly when the Missouri is bringing down the great floods of spring.
We do not know when the Missouri was first entered by white men, but probably about the year 1700. The French had made sufficient progress along its course in the early years of the eighteenth century to alarm the Spaniards, who, in the year 1720, sent an expedition to destroy the Missouri Indians, the allies of the French. This expedition was itself destroyed by the Missouris, but the event caused the French to build a post some two hundred miles up the river on an island opposite the village of the Missouris. This was Fort Orleans, and was, so far as we know, the first structure erected by white men along the course of the stream.
NAME OF THE RIVER.
The name of the river comes from the tribe of Indians just mentioned, who once dwelt at its mouth, but were driven from this position by the Illinois Indians. The word means “dwelling near the mouth of the river,” and has no reference to the muddy quality of the water.
The fact that the Missouri River is longer than the entire Mississippi, and more than twice as long as that portion of the latter stream above the mouth of the Missouri, has led to the frequent observation that the name which applies to the lower course of the Mississippi should apply also to the tributary. But this would evidently not be a fitting nomenclature. The Mississippi is the trunk stream, receiving the drainage from the Alleghenies on the east and the Rockies on the west. It divides the continent into approximately symmetrical portions. This division has entered into the very life of our national development, and is so natural and convenient that the stream itself from north to south is appropriately known by a single name. The Missouri is the great tributary from the mountains on the west, as the Ohio is from the mountains on the east. The characteristics of the Missouri are so peculiarly its own that a separate name is more befitting than one divided between itself and another and very different stream.
EARLY EXPLORATION.
During the eighteenth century the French gradually extended their knowledge of the river. It is not likely that the voyageurs had ascended as far as to the Mandan villages, a short distance above the modern capital of North Dakota, when, in 1738–43, De la Verendrye crossed over from the north and struck the river at that point. But it is quite certain that at the time of the founding of St. Louis, 1764, the river was well known for a thousand miles above its mouth. From that time knowledge of it increased more rapidly, and when Lewis and Clark went up the river in 1804, they found that white men had preceded them almost to the mouth of the Yellowstone.