Guides
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Kaw Point to St. Charles, mile by mile — Part 2: Lexington to Waverly
Roughly a day’s paddling downstream from the Kaw Point start, MR340 racers pass two of the river’s oldest Missouri towns: Lexington and Waverly. Neither is…
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Chasing the Reaper: The MR340’s Rolling Cutoff, and the Crew Who Run It
If you’re one of the more than 600 paddlers checking in at Kaw Point in Kansas City on Monday, you already know about the Reaper.…
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Kaw Point to St. Charles, mile by mile — Part 1: Kaw Point & the Kansas City start
Every mile of the MR340 tells a story before the race ever gets there. We’re running this course mile by mile over the next two…
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The Rocheport Bank That Grew Into an Empire: W.S. Woods
Walk Rocheport’s Main Street today and you won’t find a bank. But in 1869, this small river town is where a Missouri doctor-turned-merchant put down…
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Annie Fisher — the Boone County Biscuit Queen Who Built an Empire
Not many people build a small fortune out of biscuits. Annie Fisher did — in Columbia, starting from nothing, in an era stacked against her…
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George Caleb Bingham — the Boonslick’s Own Painter of Frontier River Life
If you’ve ever seen a painting of a Missouri River keelboat or a county election crowded onto a courthouse lawn and felt like you already…
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The Bard of Boonville: How Bob Dyer Turned Missouri River History Into Song
If you spend enough time around Boonslick history circles, you’ll eventually hear someone mention “songtelling” — and then have to explain what that means, because…
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The Historian Who Found Missouri’s Civil War Secret in a Cooper County Courthouse
Most people who go digging through old county court records are chasing their own family tree — a great-great-grandfather’s land deed, a marriage record, proof…
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Rocheport at 200: Celebrating Two Centuries of a River Town Like No Other
Rocheport turns 200 this year — a town where Lewis and Clark passed through, steamboats once crowded the river, and history still lines every street.
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Two Hundred Years of Rocheport: A Town That Has Always Known How to Welcome the World
Rocheport turns 200 in 2025 — from Lewis and Clark to the Katy Trail, here’s how a bypassed river town became one of Missouri’s most…
About This Desk
This is the desk that writes the useful stuff — how to spend a Rocheport weekend, where the trail actually goes, how town elections actually work. Every guide is researched and sourced, and built to be kept and come back to, not skimmed once and forgotten.
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