Middle West US
Exploring Midwest History and Culture
Sioux City to St. Louis on an Old Pontoon
April 22, 2026
Lisa G. Dill
When you set out to write a book about a river, you realize quickly that you are going to have to make some tough choices or you could easily write a thousand pages. When the river you’ve chosen to write about is the Missouri—2,300 miles long, parts of it nearly 50 million years old, and part of human history for almost 15,000 years—those choices become even harder.
In 2013, four of my mother’s first cousins and I sailed a forty-year-old pontoon boat 730 miles down the Missouri from Sioux City, Iowa to St. Louis, Missouri...Read More
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“Here on the prairies of Illinois and the Middle West we can see a long way in many directions…Here there are no barriers, no defenses, to ideas and aspirations. We want none; we want no shackles on the mind or the spirit, no rigid patterns of thought, no iron conformity.”
-Adlai Stevenson