Sharp Corners: St. Louis and The Arch

Today was our last day in St. Louis so we decided to make our day centered around the Gateway Arch National Park. So far, The National Park system has been very impressive with the content and this is our second visit to one in the last few days. Unlike Lincoln’s boyhood home, this was very well attended. Perhaps because of the holiday or not I am not sure but it was busy.

Other than going to the top of the arch which we did not do, there is a full historical museum about St. Louis and its history underneath the grounds of the arch.

The grassy knoll covers the roof of the museum below

You could easily spend an entire day just growing through the museum as it was very well done with self guided as well as narrated tours. The history went back as far as 800 years to the Cahokia settlement.

One of the things that caught my eye was the story of the Osage Indians. If you read the blog entry from when we were up in Bowling Green last week I showed the picture of the Osage Orange fruit. If you also read the Wikipedia entry on that tree you will notice the link to St. Louis with Pierre Chouteau. He was a member of an important trading family in St. Louis.

The afternoon was taken up with a riverboat ride and tour of the St. Louis portion of the Mississippi River. The captain of the vessel narrated as we travelled the short circular route pointing out interesting buildings and facts of the area. Everything about the downtown is about protecting the city with the steep sloping banks to allow for the large variations that can happen given the size of the rivers. The last picture shows the markings that give riverboat barge captains the knowledge of how much clearance they have under the bridge. It was told to us the largest flood was in 1993 and the level of the water was at the mark 45 on the particular bridge in the picture. That would still allow a vessel 40’ high to pass under that bridge.