03.23.2019 - By Prairie Public
The Missouri River never had a Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, to pilot its historic steamboats into the literary canon. Steamboating on the Great Plains in general has been shortchanged by regional historians, beginning with the great one, Walter Prescott Webb, in 1931. This was because Webb was from Texas, and steamboats were not significant drivers of white settlement on the southern plains.