The domed red and white Buchanan County Courthouse in St. Joseph under a blue sky.
Tim Kiser / CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
Missouri · Region

St. Joseph & the Grand River Country

The Pony Express stables and Patee House in St. Joseph, the loess hills and snow geese at Loess Bluffs, Pershing's Laclede and Walt Disney's Marceline depot museum.

5 places to explore

Northwest Missouri is the Platte Purchase corner and the Grand River prairie east of it. For a driver it divides along two roads. St. Joseph sits on the Missouri bluffs, where Joseph Robidoux kept his Blacksnake Hills trading post, and by 1860 it had rail and telegraph lines to the East, which is why the Pony Express began there. North on I-29 the loess hills rise over the river bottoms, with the snow geese of Loess Bluffs below them. East on US-36 come Chillicothe, Laclede, where John J. Pershing grew up, and Marceline, the Santa Fe railroad town of Walt Disney's boyhood.

This was Ioway country. The Ioway call themselves Baxoje, gray snow. Their leaders gave up their claim north of the Missouri in 1824 and the Platte Country in the 1836 Platte Purchase, and the nation lives today as the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Iowa Tribe of Oklahoma.

Caldwell and Daviess counties hold a harder story. In the late 1830s Caldwell was a Latter-day Saint county with Far West as its seat. After an election-day fight at Gallatin in August 1838, Governor Lilburn Boggs ordered that the Mormons be treated as enemies and exterminated or driven from the state. Militia killed eighteen at Haun's Mill on October 30, and most of the church left for Illinois.

What to See in St. Joseph & the Grand River Country

5 places across the region, grouped by what they are.

Natural Areas

A huge flock of snow geese filling the sky above open water at the refuge in winter.

Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge

Mound City

A 7,440-acre Missouri River marsh below the loess hills near Mound City, where up to a million snow geese stop in a typical year and 661 bald eagles were counted in December 2020.

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Historic Sites

General John J. Pershing Boyhood Home State Historic Site

Laclede

The nine-room Gothic house in Laclede where John J. Pershing grew up, with the Prairie Mound School he taught in before West Point and a museum of his career.

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The Patee House porch with white iron columns and a sign reading 1860 Pony Express Office in St. Joseph.

Patee House Museum and Jesse James Home

St. Joseph

An 1858 St. Joseph hotel that held the Pony Express office, a Union provost marshal and two women's colleges, with the house where Jesse James was killed moved onto its lot.

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The red brick Pikes Peak Stables building that houses the Pony Express National Museum in St. Joseph.

Pony Express National Museum

St. Joseph

The St. Joseph stables where the Pony Express began on April 3, 1860, now a museum that also tells how the venture was paid for and why it lasted eighteen months.

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Towns & Gateways

The red brick Santa Fe depot in Marceline that houses the Walt Disney Hometown Museum, on a gray winter day.

Walt Disney Hometown Museum

Marceline

A museum in Marceline's old Santa Fe depot, built on the collection of Walt Disney's sister Ruth, about the five years the Disney family farmed outside this railroad town.

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Stories from St. Joseph & the Grand River Country

History

Jeffrey's Point

The Platte Purchase added six counties to Missouri in 1837, and the man who put it into words for the Ioway had been held in slavery by the founder of St. Joseph.

3 min read
History

Free People of Color

The Latter-day Saints' Missouri troubles began in Independence in 1833, over a newspaper article about Black converts, and ended for their prophet in a Clay County jail.

3 min read

St. Joseph & the Grand River Country rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.

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