The Missouri River: Rhineland to Boonslick

Karst on the edge of Columbia: a boardwalk through a natural rock tunnel to the Devil's Icebox sinkholes, over a cave that is the only known home of the pink planarian.

Two hundred forty miles of the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas rail bed between Machens and Clinton, mostly along the Missouri River, first opened in 1990 at Rocheport, where it runs through the railroad's stone tunnel.

The homeland of the Missouria, the Nutachi, on the loess ridges at the Great Bend, where Marquette's 1673 map placed their town and a cultural center tells their history.

A Boonslick river town of more than 1,000 that the river and railroads left behind, built and worked by enslaved people, now a village of fifty and a National Historic Landmark.

The salt spring in the Howard County woods that Daniel Boone's sons worked from 1805, whose name spread to a road, a country and the first American settlement of central Missouri.

Two Hermann houses of the 1840s, a violin maker's brick home and a printer's timber house with its own winery, kept as the German home the Missouri Rhineland settlers built.

The school that Black soldiers of the 62nd and 65th U.S. Colored Infantry paid for out of army wages in 1866, now a land-grant university on its Jefferson City hill.

The Westminster College campus where Churchill gave the Iron Curtain speech in 1946, with a bombed Wren church from London rebuilt stone by stone above his museum.

The 1917 capitol on the Jefferson City bluff, built after lightning burned its predecessor, with the State Museum downstairs and Thomas Hart Benton's mural of Missouri in the House Lounge.

A saltpeter cave turned show cave by Lester Dill in 1933, who sold it to Route 66 with barns painted in 14 states, bumper signs and a Jesse James story.