Its motto: The Welfare of the People Shall Be the Supreme Law.

Its nicknames: Bullion State, Cave State, Lead State, Mother of the West, Ozark State, Show me State.

A Serene Landscape Traversed by Two Mighty Rivers

Missouri is a study in contrast: mountain mists and prairie grasses, surging rivers and cloistered caves. It is also a natural crossroads, for Missouri, located in the very heart of America, serves as a link between East and West, North and South.

Much of the state consists of rich farmland. North of the Missouri River, fertile plains are covered by expanses of golden grain. In contrast, most of the state south of the Missouri River is taken up by the varied landscapes of the Ozark Mountain region — an area of forests, lakes, rivers, rugged hills and low mountains. The Ozarks contain some 10,000 springs. The area is also honeycombed with thousands of caves carved out of limestone by underground streams. A spelunker's heaven, Missouri in 1990 reported a record of 5,000 caves within its borders. Some of the creatures that live in them, such as blind white cave fish, that spend their lives in total darkness, or grotto salamander can be found nowhere but in Ozarks.

From the outset, the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, flowing through the state from top to bottom and from side to side, attracted explorers and fur traders. Early river towns such as St. Charles (the state's first capital) and the Town of Kansas (now Kansas City) became busy ports. Today St. Louis and Kansas City continue to serve as two nation's busiest inland ports.

North and South also converged in Missouri. Abolitionists and slaveholders alike lived in the state, and during a long and bloody Civil War Missourians fought on both sides — some, tragically, against their own kin.

The state's many-faceted, contradictory nature was summed up in the 1950's by Irving Dilliard, who wrote: "Missouri is the abolitionist North with its belief in equal rights for all men and women. It is the plantation South with its old ideas of a leisure society. It is the industrial East, busy, noisy, mechanical, commercial. It is the grazing West, miles and miles of pasture and livestock in every direction."

In 1821 Missouri became the 24th American state.

(”The USA Diversity of 50 States”)