Guides
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
Thirty years on, Rocheport still remembers the water: the Flood of 1993
In the summer of 1993, the Missouri River rose out of its banks and into Rocheport. It was part of the Great Flood of 1993,…
-
From Prohibition’s ruin to the bluff tops: Missouri wine’s long road home
A century ago, Missouri was one of the most important wine states in the country. Then Prohibition arrived, the vines came out, and the industry…
-
The Katy came to Rocheport: the railroad era before the trail
For nearly a century, the tracks of the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad — the “Katy” — ran along the river bluffs through Rocheport. The trains carried freight…
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.
New guides land in the weekly email — sign up and get them as they’re published. Sign up →