In 1850, when overland emigration totaled more than 100,000 persons, about half of those migrants crossed the Missouri River at St. Joseph by ferryboat. It would be twenty years before the first bridge was built across the river.
Missouri’s foremost historian, Floyd Shoemaker, wrote, “No phase of transportation in Missouri is more interesting, or was more important in its day, than ferryboating. Yet no other phase has received less attention from writers despite its continuous annals of more than 150 years.” Without this humble craft, usually inexpensive in cost and operation, serving interstate and intrastate trade and commerce at hundreds of crossings on our 38 streams large enough to be called rivers, Missouri with her largest mileage of navigable streams in the nation would have been retarded in development for decades.
