Below Cooper’s Landing the course leaves this paper’s stretch of the Missouri River and does not come back. Twenty-six river miles downstream is Jefferson City — the first official checkpoint since Glasgow, eighty-two river miles back.
Two systems of measurement run through this series, and they move in opposite directions. River miles are the Army Corps’ system, counted up from the river’s mouth, so they fall as a boat goes downstream: Cooper’s Landing at 170, Jefferson City at 144. Race miles count up from the start at Kaw Point, so they rise: Jefferson City sits about 224 miles into a 338.5-mile course. Every figure below carries the system it belongs to.
Nothing official for twenty-six miles
Cooper’s Landing is a paddlestop, not a checkpoint. The MR340 has seven checkpoints in all — Kaw Point at the start, then Waverly, Glasgow, Jefferson City, Hermann, Klondike, and the finish at St. Charles — and none of them falls between Cooper’s Landing and the capital.
That does not leave the stretch unwatched. RaceOwl’s 2026 route, which is what the tracker reads, carries twenty-eight points, and two of them sit in this gap: Hartsburg at race mile 208.27 and Marion at 210.03. Hartsburg is a Boone County river village and a trailhead on the state’s own Katy Trail list, about ten race miles below Cooper’s Landing. A boat that has passed it has a little under sixteen race miles left to run.
For a support crew, that is the arithmetic that matters. Cooper’s Landing is a paddlestop a car can reach. The next place anyone is officially expecting a boat is twenty-six river miles later.
The clock at river mile 144
Jefferson City’s cutoff is 4 p.m. Thursday, and it is a hard one — the kind that takes slower boats off the water rather than letting them keep going. The race starts Tuesday morning at Kaw Point, so Thursday afternoon is the third day.
A boat that arrives inside the cutoff still has 115 river miles to the finish at St. Charles, river mile 29, with the Hermann checkpoint at 98 and Klondike at 56 in between. That is roughly a third of the course still ahead, after more than two days on the water.
Lohman’s Landing
The Missouri State Capitol stands on a limestone bluff on the south bank. Lewis and Clark passed that bluff going upriver in 1804.
In 1821 the site was known as Lohman’s Landing — a trading post roughly midway between St. Louis and Kansas City, and not much more than that. It did not stay small. Through the middle of the 1800s, Jefferson Landing was a center of river commerce, and the steamboats working the run between St. Louis and Kansas City docked in front of the Lohman Building.
The freight is where a story like this one usually goes soft. The money on this river in those decades came out of the hemp and tobacco of the Boonslick country upstream, and hemp was a crop worked by enslaved people — the same fact that sits underneath the landing at Rocheport. What crossed the Lohman Building’s dock on any particular day is not something this paper can document from here. Who did the work that made the traffic worth having is not in doubt.
The Capitol standing on the bluff now was built between 1913 and 1917, a little over a century after Clark went by. Down at the water, Jefferson Landing is a state historic site: the same buildings, kept now for being old rather than for being useful.
Upstream, that pattern reads landing to depot to trailhead — the steamboat town that became a railroad town and then a trail town, which is the story this paper tells about its own stretch. Here it reads landing to exhibit. Either way the conversion is the easy half of the ledger, and it does not settle what the first version cost.
What a spectator gets
Cooper’s Landing at river mile 170 and the checkpoint at river mile 144 are the two points on these twenty-six miles where the land side of the race and the water side reliably meet — a paddlestop a car can reach at one end, a checkpoint with a cutoff at the other. That is why the paddlestops carry the weight they do for the people who are not in boats.
The other option is the Katy Trail, which passes through Hartsburg and runs near the river for most of its length. It is the closest thing this stretch has to a grandstand, and it is a rail bed, which is its own entry in the ledger.
Next
Part 7 follows the course from Jefferson City to the Hermann checkpoint at river mile 98 — forty-six river miles, with the Gasconade River coming in at the city of Gasconade, roughly eleven river miles above Hermann.
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