Missourians could hardly have made a more appropriate decision than to name their capital city after Thomas Jefferson. A meeting-place of major rivers, Missouri became a gateway to the promised land—the beckoning West opened up to Americans by Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase.

In the era of overland traders and steamboat pilots, of Thomas Hart Benton and Mark Twain, life in Missouri was strongly flavored by the Jeffersonian spirit, expressed in a suspicion of large cities, a belief that mankind flourished best in a rural setting, and a faith in the free individual as the guardian of liberty.