Downstream from the Jefferson City checkpoint the Missouri River opens up, and for forty-six river miles it does not close again.
Jefferson City sits at river mile 144, with a cutoff of 4 p.m. Thursday. The next checkpoint is Hermann, at river mile 98, and its cutoff is 8 a.m. Friday. Nothing between them carries a deadline. Counted the other way — race miles, measured up from the start at Kaw Point — that is mile 224.29 to mile 270.33, and it is the longest run without a checkpoint anywhere below Jefferson City.
Both sets of numbers describe the same water. River miles are the Army Corps of Engineers’ system, counted up from the river’s mouth, so they fall going downstream; race miles count up from Kaw Point. This series has already run one correction for mixing them, so every figure here carries its system with it.
The night stretch
A boat that clears Jefferson City at the 4 p.m. cutoff has sixteen hours to make Hermann’s. Forty-six miles in sixteen hours is a shade under three miles an hour, current included. That is manageable, and for most of the field it means paddling this reach in the dark.
There is not much ceremony to it. RaceOwl’s 2026 route lists three tracking points inside the gap — Mokane at race mile 243.40, Chamois at 250.15, Portland at 253.86 — and none of them is a checkpoint, and none of them stops a clock. The first is nineteen miles below Jefferson City, which is the longest a racer goes on this course without registering anywhere at all.
Chamois is a paddlestop. The race notes it has no ramp vendor, which is the sort of detail that only matters at two in the morning, and then matters a great deal.
The Gasconade comes in
Roughly eleven river miles above Hermann, at the city of Gasconade, the Gasconade River joins the Missouri. Hermann is near that confluence, not at it, and the distinction is worth keeping straight, because the best-known thing that ever happened at the mouth of the Gasconade did not happen in Hermann.
On November 1, 1855, the Pacific Railroad ran its inaugural excursion west out of St. Louis with roughly 600 invited guests aboard. The bridge over the Gasconade gave way under the locomotive. The historical record puts the dead at thirty-one, and it was the first major deadly bridge collapse in American history. This paper has not obtained a primary account of the casualties, so it prints the count and no names.
A town bought in November 1837
Hermann was founded in 1837 by the German Settlement Society of Philadelphia, which had gone looking for somewhere to put a German-speaking settlement and searched Michigan, Illinois and Missouri to find it. The Society’s most important requirement was land on a river. An early group of settlers, led by a schoolteacher named George Bayer, bought ground for the Society in November 1837.
The country had been talked up at a distance. The German emigrant writer Gottfried Duden promoted the region in his writings, and the ground’s likeness to the Rhine valley is widely assumed to be the reason the Society chose it — assumed, because it is repeated far more often than it is documented.
The hillside soil turned out to be poor for most crops and ideal for grapes. Hermann’s trustees sold tracts on the condition that the buyer plant them as vineyards, which is a founding document doing the work a soil survey would do now. The population reached 450 by 1839, and Hermann became the county seat of Gasconade County in 1842. It is the commercial center of the Hermann American Viticultural Area today, in the country called the Missouri Rhineland.
That is the settlement story as it is usually told, and it is missing a column. Missouri’s river-valley wealth in these decades rested on an economy that included slavery; the hemp and tobacco that made the landings upriver rich were worked by enslaved people. What that meant in Hermann specifically, this paper does not know. No figures, no names, no county record in hand. The gap is worth saying out loud rather than filling in: a founding story that names the money and not the labor is half a founding story, and the other half here has not been looked up yet.
The checkpoint
Hermann is river mile 98, race mile 270.33, and the 8 a.m. Friday cutoff there is the last one before the final third of the course. The USGS gauge in town, 06934500, sits at river mile 97.9 — effectively at the ramp — and it reads more than stage: temperature, turbidity, dissolved oxygen and nitrates. Upriver we watch the Boonville gauge, 06909000. Hermann’s is the one that measures what has already gone past us.
Two rail corridors meet the river here, in two different conditions. A working Union Pacific freight main runs the south bank through Hermann. The Katy Trail, laid on an abandoned rail bed, is across the water at McKittrick, about a mile north over the river bridge — the same trail that runs past Rocheport. Racers pass all of it in the dark and most of them see none of it.
Next
Below Hermann the course runs past New Haven and Washington to the Klondike checkpoint at river mile 56 — forty-two river miles, and the last stop before the finish at St. Charles. That is Part 8.
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