Great Rivers

Why should it be a National Park?

Fifteen miles north of St. Louis, the Missouri River finishes a two-thousand-mile run and empties into the Mississippi. A few miles upstream the Illinois River comes in from the northeast. Three of the largest rivers on the continent meet within a short drive of each other, and the country around that meeting is limestone bluff, backwater marsh, and floodplain forest that the rivers still flood. Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1803 and 1804 at Camp Dubois at the confluence, training and waiting for the ice to break. Before them the Illini and the Cahokians lived here; the great mound city is twelve miles away. On the bluff above the Mississippi at Alton is the Piasa, a painted monster that Marquette recorded in 1673 and that has been repainted on the rock face ever since. Bald eagles winter here by the hundreds, drawn to open water below the dams.

In winter the confluence fills with eagles. Several hundred bald eagles come down to the open water below the dams to fish, and the towns along the Great River Road have built January festivals around them. The same bluffs carry the road itself, a byway that runs under limestone cliffs where the Piasa Bird is painted, a figure Marquette described from his canoe in 1673 and that has been repainted on the rock ever since. Fifteen miles the other side of the confluence stands Cahokia, the largest city north of Mexico before Philadelphia, which is itself on this site's list of proposals. The two are one story. The rivers are why the city was there, and a designation that took in both would be describing the reason this particular ground has mattered for a thousand years.