Downstream from Franklin Island, the Missouri runs twenty-five river miles past our own front door — the only stretch of this series the paper can walk to.
The order through here is Boonville, then Rocheport, then Cooper’s Landing. The Army Corps puts Rocheport at river miles 182.6 to 188.0 and Cooper’s Landing at 170, so racers reach us roughly fifteen miles before they reach the landing. (Part 4 originally had those two reversed and has been corrected.)
Worth pinning down, since this series uses both systems: river miles are set by the Corps and counted up from the Missouri’s mouth at the Mississippi, which is why they drop going downstream. Race miles count up from the start at Kaw Point. Nothing on the water tells you which one you are looking at, so every number below carries its system with it.
Boonville, and a bridge that outlived its railroad
Franklin Island sits at river mile 195.2. Boonville occupies river miles 192.7 to 197.7, and what racers see from the water there is the Katy Bridge.
It went up in 1931 and 1932 as MKT Bridge No. 191.1 — a railroad milepost, not a river mile — replacing an 1873 structure on the same crossing. The lift span runs 408 feet, which made it the longest central vertical lift span on any railroad bridge in the country when it was built, and a counterweight system could raise or lower it in seventy seconds. In the middle of the Depression, that was the modern thing on this river.
The line it carried ran the floodplain down to St. Charles and washed out again and again. After an October 1986 flood tore up track along the route, the railroad chose abandonment over another repair. The bridge stood unused from 1986 to 2004, when the Coast Guard ordered it removed as a hazard to navigation.
It was not removed. A local campaign kept it, and in 2016 the first segment reopened — to people on foot.
Rocheport, river miles 182.6 to 188.0
Rocheport was laid out in 1825 at the mouth of the Moniteau, on the north bank, as a trading post and a steamboat landing. By 1835 there were eight stores. The freight that paid for them was the hemp and tobacco of the Boonslick country, and hemp was a crop worked by enslaved people. The town existed because boats stopped here.
Then they stopped stopping. The MKT came through in 1892, and in 1893 crews cut a tunnel through Moniteau Bluff — still the only tunnel on the 240 miles of the Katy Trail. That bluff is part of the Manitou formation, the same rock where William Clark recorded pictographs on June 7, 1804. Much of the face came down to make room for the railroad. Pictographs survive downriver near Torbett Spring, between Rocheport and Huntsdale; what was on the rock that was taken out is not recoverable.
Racers will not see the tunnel. It sits inland on the trail, a few hundred yards off the water. What is visible from the river is the bluff line itself — the reason there is a tunnel at all.
Both railroad structures on this stretch have now outlived the railroad: a lift span that has carried no train since 1986, and a tunnel with no train in it. The river made the landing, the railroad remade the town, the railroad left, and the grade it left behind became a path.
Cooper’s Landing, river mile 170
Cooper’s Landing sits at river mile 170, and at mile 163.5 on the Katy Trail. By race distance it is roughly 198 miles from Kaw Point, a little past the halfway mark of a 340-mile race, and the MR340 lists it as a paddlestop.
It is a marina with a campground, a store and a stage, and it is one of the few places on this stretch where a road reaches the water. That is what makes it a fixture for the people who are not in boats — a paddlestop a car can get to is where the waiting gets done.
The General Store is being rebuilt, with a temporary store operating on the site while the work goes on.
Next
From Cooper’s Landing the course runs on toward the Jefferson City checkpoint at river mile 144, past Hartsburg and the Missouri bottoms. That is Part 6.
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