I love Missouri with all my heart. I was born here, I will die here, and I will live out the best days of my life here. I was lucky enough to grow up in the mix of prairie and woods of western and northern Missouri. I can’t think of a better way to learn about the outdoors than seeing deer prints on top of turkey tracks on my way to a farm pond that is stocked full of bass. I discovered the beauty and diversity of southern Missouri after college when one of my best friends took me to Bennett Spring State Park to trout fish. I didn’t know that water could be so clear and cold! I have had the fortune to travel to other parts of this state and I am never disappointed by the mixture of landscape as well as fishing. We have bowfin and alligator gar in the southeast for Pete’s sake! If you can’t find something to fish for in Missouri or you can’t get excited about all the fishing opportunities we have, well then as my uncle Joe of Stockton, Missouri, would put it, “You’re just a sour puss.” This is home and growing up I was taught that you should be grateful for what you have. By God, I AM grateful to be a citizen of the great state of Missouri and if you live here, then you should be too.
For years I have tried to understand why others don’t feel pride in Missouri. Besides the fishing, we have a lot going for us. The St. Louis Cardinals are an iconic team and historically one of the best baseball franchises in Major League Baseball. The Kansas City Chiefs are home to the loudest stadium in the NFL. We have rich history that has roots beyond the Civil War and we were the outpost for westward expansion. The University of Missouri is home to one of the best journalism programs in the country and used to whoop up on the University of Kansas regularly…in football that is. Now we just dash Arkansas’s SEC West dreams and show the University of Illinois who is boss when they have the guts to play us in the sport of their choosing. Sorry about that. I just realized I let my inner Tiger out. It won’t happen again. It probably won’t happen again. It might happen again. I’m sorry in advance.
We are home to The Big Muddy, Johnson’s Shut-In’s, and the birthplace of Jesse James. We are the Cave State, The Show Me State, the home of Throwed Roles, and where Harry S. Truman was born. We hosted a World’s Fair, World Series, and the largest earthquake in United States history. We have more fountains in Kansas City than Paris, the oldest University west of the Mississippi (Saint Louis University), and the Hollywood of the Midwest (aka Branson). We’ve got bluebirds, black bears, mules and mountain lions. We have the largest brewery in the nation, countless wineries, and I know we still have moonshiners. We raise cattle, hogs, chickens, horses, sheep, goats, and I even saw a camel farm once. Heck, there was a crazy old lady that had a couple male lions outside of Warrensburg for a while. (By the way, if I left your region or claim to fame out, let me know and I will post about it, I promise).
I don’t ever have to go to another state to fish! We’ve got it all. We have muddy rivers on our east and west borders that grow some of the largest catfish in the country. There are pristine rivers and streams in the south that hold big populations and hearty trophies of rainbow and brown trout. We have reservoirs that offer bass fishing that is good enough to draw B.A.S.S. tournaments. There are lakes in the state that hold trophy walleye like Bull Shoals and Stockton Lake. If you want to catch wipers/hybrids, head to the Lake of the Ozarks or Truman Lake. If the sweet taste of crappie is what you want then you can’t beat Table Rock Lake or Mark Twain Lake. What more do you want? Sure you could spend thousands of dollars travelling to Alaska for salmon or the Amazon for Peacock Bass, but for that price you could go on numerous trips around Missouri with or without guides and never cover all the water we have.
But maybe we need to keep this to ourselves. Maybe we are the best kept secret in the U.S. I guess we can say that since we don’t know the secrets of other states…because they are secrets. Regardless, while I want to shout it from the top of Taum Sauk Mountain that Missouri is a diamond in the rough, a part of me wants to let people just keep passing through. Let us be the gateway to the west or even the east for that matter depending on perspective. True Missourians know that we aren’t a gateway, we are the destination.
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