The Missouri was first explored from its mouth to its source by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1804–1805).Īlthough it was thought for years that no keelboat could ascend the Missouri, it later became the great highway into the West. Other explorations followed, searching for the "Western Sea" by way of the Missouri River. Credited with being the first white man to visit the upper Missouri country, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, led a party from one of the posts of the Hudson's Bay Company in 1738 to the Mandan villages. In 1719 Claude Charles du Tisne and party went up the Missouri in canoes as far as the Grand River. They probably did not go higher than the Platte, which was considered the dividing line between the upper and lower river. The early French called the river Saint Philip. In 1720 a Spanish caravan was sent from Santa Fe to the Missouri to drive back the French. The lower part of the Missouri was known to the French trappers, traders, and voyageurs, who ascended it as far as the Kansas River in 1705. From its source in southwestern Montana, where the Jefferson, Gallatin, and Madison Rivers join together, it winds around hills and bluffs, through one of the most fertile valleys in the world, to its junction with the Mississippi (ten miles north of Saint Louis). It was known to them as Peki-tan-oui, so named on some of the early maps, and later as Oumessourit. Father Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet reached the mouth of the Missouri in 1673. It drains a watershed of approximately 580,000 square miles. MISSOURI RIVER, in the central and northwest central United States, is a major tributary of the Mississippi River and the longest river in the United States (2,466 miles).
0 kommentar(er)
