Boone's Lick State Historic Site

Lewis and Clark noted many saltwater springs along this part of the Missouri. Late in 1804 Nathan Boone and his brother-in-law Mathias Van Bibber came on one in what is now Howard County. James Mackay already held it, a reward from the Spanish for leading an expedition up the Missouri, so Nathan and his brother Daniel Morgan Boone bought the right to make salt from him. In the spring of 1805 they began boiling the brine down until the salt crystallized, and sent it downriver by boat to sell in St. Louis. The works grew to about twenty men.

Their trips home to the Femme Osage valley needed an overland route, and the spring gave its name to everything around it. In 1808 Nathan guided William Clark's dragoons west to build Fort Osage along what became the Boone's Lick Road, and in 1814 he surveyed it from St. Charles to Franklin. After the War of 1812 settlers poured along it from the upper South, many bringing enslaved people, as the Boones themselves did, and the Boone's Lick Country became the first major American settlement in central Missouri. The brothers had sold the works in 1810, when attacks by Native people defending their country made the spring unsafe.

A short trail leads to the springs and the remnants of the works, and outdoor exhibits explain how salt was made and why it mattered.