Missouri

People of the big canoes

Missouri takes its name from the Missouria people, a Siouan-speaking tribe of the region. The name is popularly said to mean “muddy water,” but the experts read it differently. The Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology interpreted it as “town of the large canoes,” and other authorities render its root syllables as “wooden canoe people” or “he of the big canoe.”

The Missouri Compromise

Missouri’s road to statehood set off a bitter fight in Congress. Its request to enter the Union as a slave state threatened the balance between slave and free states in Congress. The answer was the Missouri Compromise, approved on March 6, 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state at the same time, and banned slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36°30′.

Missourians wrote their constitution in 1820 at the Mansion House Hotel in St. Louis, and the first General Assembly met on September 18, 1820, almost a year before Missouri was formally a state. A new dispute held up admission: the constitution required the legislature to bar free Black people from entering the state. Congress agreed to admit Missouri only if its legislature passed a “solemn public act” promising that the clause would not be used to deny the rights of any US citizen. The legislature complied, and President James Monroe proclaimed Missouri the 24th state on August 10, 1821.

A capital in the middle

Rather than choose an established town, Missouri’s founders decided to put the capital on an undeveloped site overlooking the Missouri River in the center of the state. Governor Alexander McNair signed the bill naming the site of the City of Jefferson on December 31, 1821. Until a capitol could be built, lawmakers met in St. Charles, and the government moved to Jefferson City for good on October 1, 1826. Today’s Capitol, finished in 1917 after its predecessor burned, is topped by a bronze statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain. The capital page tells the story.

The Show-Me State

Missouri’s best-known nickname is not official, but it is on the license plates. The usual story credits Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver, who told an audience in Philadelphia in 1899, “I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.” Another traces it to Missouri miners working in Leadville, Colorado, in the 1890s. The state motto, on the seal since 1822, is Salus populi suprema lex esto, “The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.”

The red, white and blue state flag, adopted in 1913, carries the state’s coat of arms, with its two grizzly bears, inside a ring of 24 stars for the 24th state. The state song is the “Missouri Waltz.”

Bluebirds, hawthorns and mules

Missouri has 54 official state symbols. The eastern bluebird has been the state bird since 1927 and the hawthorn the state flower since 1923; the flowering dogwood is the state tree. The Missouri mule honors the animals that pulled the state’s wagons and plows, in a state that was long the country’s leading mule producer, and galena, the main ore of lead, recalls the mines that drew many early settlers. Some symbols are pure Missouri: the ice cream cone, sold at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair; the Gateway Arch; two famous dogs; and the Hawken rifle, made in St. Louis for western fur traders. Recent laws have named official capitals for barbecue (Kansas City), cowbells (Belle) and even UFOs (Piedmont and Wayne County). See them all on the Missouri symbols page.

Land and people

Missouri covers 69,707 square miles, 21st among the states, and had about 6.27 million residents in 2025, 18th in the country and up from 2020. Its eight neighbors are Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Kansas City, with about 521,000 people, is the largest city, followed by St. Louis, Springfield, Columbia and Independence. Jefferson City, the capital, has about 42,000.