ST. JOSEPH, MISSOURI
St. Joseph, locals say, is famous mostly for two things: the Pony Express began here and outlaw Jesse James’ life ended here.
The first Pony Express rider, Johnny Fry, galloped out of Pike’s Peak Stables, 914 Penn Street, bound for the Missouri River and points west on April 3, 1860. According to legend, he was so excited about his upcoming adventure he forgot the “mochilla” (mailbag), which had to be rushed to him at the ferryboat landing.
Elsewhere in town, at 1318 Lafayette Street, on April 3, 1882, the notorious James, age 34, was gunned down in his own living room by the “coward” Bob Ford, a member of James’ own gang. Ford had hoped to claim the $10,000 reward offered by then-Gov. Tom Crittenden (he never got it).
Although the two events are important and fascinating, they’re bookends to a relatively short era. St. Joseph history goes back years further, much has happened since, and the town offers numerous other attractions to visitors.
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Top left: Jesse James famously stood on a chair straightening the needlepoint that says “God bless our home” when Ford shot him. The bullet hole now under glass was enlarged by souvenir hunters after the shooting. The gun is a Smith and Wesson 44 like the one Ford used. Top right: The Pony Express monument outside the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau reads: “Wanted: young, skinny, wiry fellows. Not over 18. Must be expert riders, willing to risk death daily. Orphans preferred. Wages $25 per week.” Bottom left: The bedroom of Joseph Robidoux. Bottom right: A giant wooly mammoth rears up at the entry of the Remington Nature Center.
More than a dozen notable museums are among them: the Patee House Museum, the St. Joseph Museums (several under one roof) and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, as well as the expected Pony Express Museum and Jesse James Home.
The city of 76,000 also has a surprising number of parks — 46 — offering everything from picnic areas, ball fields and hiking trails, to nature centers, to Civil War restorations and a Native American burial site. The parks total more than 2,000 acres, and include the 26-mile long St. Joseph Parkway. Developed in 1918, and now on the National Register of Historic Places, it winds through town, Krug Park to Hyde Park, with connections to many of the others.
Then there’s Remington Nature Center with 15,000 square feet of exhibit space, so extensive and well done, it alone is worth the visit to town. Outside the center, paved 1.5-mile St. Joseph Riverwalk moseys along the wind-blown Missouri.
Other attractions include several gilded-age mansions open for tours; a self-guided walking tour of the historic downtown; a sculpture tour; dozens of year-round annual events; a memorial to legendary journalist and St. Joseph native Walter Cronkite; restaurants for every taste and more.
Top left: A painting of a young Abraham Lincoln on the levee at St. Joseph. Lincoln visited St. Joseph in 1859, a year before he was elected president on a “…bitterly cold day.” Top right: A stagecoach like the one Mark Twain rode to Nevada and wrote about in “Roughing It” is on display at the Patee House Museum. Bottom left: “The Peaceful Ruler” by Jeff Best is a permanent sculpture on the St. Joseph Sculpture Walk. Bottom right: Juveniles at St. Joseph State Hospital built this beautiful hot rod.
We suggest starting at one of St. Joseph’s earliest sites, the Robidoux Row Museum, 219 East Poulin Street. The historic apartment building was built by town founder, Joseph Robidoux. It’s now a row of 12 rooms, furnished as they would have been two centuries ago. Daniel Johnson, the museum’s executive director, says originally there were 36 rooms, but the others burned in 1932 and were then torn down.
Johnson explains that the Robidoux family had migrated in 1771 from Montreal to St. Louis, where Joseph Robidoux III was born. He traveled up the Missouri in 1799 at age 16 and the next year established a post for his fur trading business at Black Snake Hills (a holy place for Iowa tribes). It became the nucleus of St. Joseph. Robidoux was the first permanent settler in 1823. The town, now the seat of Buchanan County, was platted a decade later.
Johnson notes that although Robidoux was never “sufficiently recognized” as an equal of Manuel Lisa or Pierre Chouteau, he was also a “giant” in the western fur trade. He died in 1868.
Our next stop was at the Patee House Museum, 1202 Penn Street. A National Historic Landmark, this is one of the finest museums anywhere. Whatever your interests, you’ll probably find related exhibits here.
The Patee was built as a luxury 140-room hotel with running water in 1858, and two years later became headquarters for the newly formed Pony Express. During the Civil War it served as office for the U.S. provost marshal and Union recruiting office. Over the years it was a hotel three times, a girls college twice, a shirt factory, then, after standing empty for half a dozen years, opened in 1965 as a four-story “communications and transportation” museum, operated by the Pony Express Historical Association.
Among the hundreds of exhibits are an 1860 locomotive, 1870 railroad depot, 1920s-style service station and Model T, a stagecoach like the one Mark Twain rode to Nevada and wrote about in “Roughing It,” with the receipt for his $150 ticket. There are wagons, sleighs, buggies, a horse-drawn hearse.
The 1941 Wild Thing carousel with dozens of whimsical animals can be ridden for $1.50. A replica of an old St. Joseph street features a post office, barber shop, ice cream parlor and the dentist office of Dr. Walter Cronkite, father of the famed journalist (who toured it in 2009, a week before his 90th birthday). And there’s much more. We spent a day but could have spent a week.
The house where Jesse James was killed by Robert Ford was moved to the Patee House Museum in 1977.
The four-room, white frame Jesse James Home Museum, also run by the Pony Express Historical Association, was moved to the Patee grounds in 1977. The living room is furnished as it was in 1882, when James climbed onto a chair to straighten a picture and was shot from behind.
His body was exhumed in 1995 for DNA testing, which proved with 99.7% certainty that it was indeed he who was killed here that April day. Grim artifacts from the grave on display include coffin handles and a casting of his skull showing the bullet hole behind his right ear.
Everything you could want to know about the Pony Express you can learn at the fine Pony Express National Museum, which occupies the original stables at 914 Penn Street. The overland mail service, founded by freighting firm Russell, Majors and Waddell, lasted just under 19 months, April 1860 to October 1861. It ended with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph (first telegram received Oct. 26), but was one of the most colorful stretches in American history.
A 12-minute film tells the story of the (financially disastrous) enterprise that provided 10-day mail service between St. Joseph and Sacramento, California, a distance of nearly 2,000 miles.
The firm assembled 500 horses, 80 riders and several hundred other personnel, and built relay stations roughly 10 miles apart along the way to provide fresh mounts. Riders braved extreme weather, harsh terrain, wild animals, even occasional American Indian attacks — though just eight died on the job. The museum tells their story through maps, life-size dioramas, sculptures, mounted animals, text and more. Other exhibits point out early St. Joseph’s importance as the last opportunity for migrants and others headed on west to purchase supplies.
In 1968 an employee of the state psychiatric hospital named George Glore built several full-scale devices that could be found in old time “insane asylums.” Among them are the Lunatic Box, the Tranquilizer Chair and the Utica Crib, on display at the Glore Psychiatric Museum, which is housed in a building once known as the State Lunatic Asylum No. 2 and later called the St. Joseph State Hospital.
St. Joseph Museums — the Glore Psychiatric Museum, Black Archives, American Indian and History Galleries, Civil War Medicine and doll exhibits — are all located at 3406 Frederick Avenue, in the building that originally housed state Lunatic Asylum No. 2. (The name was changed to St. Joseph State Hospital in 1899.)
The asylum, in use for 130 years, was built in 1874 to accommodate 250 patients, said museum communications director Kami Jones. But it opened with 300, and the number had swelled to more than 3,000 by the 1930s and ’40s. A variety of therapies illustrated in four floors of exhibits included wood- and metal-working, weaving, sewing, auto building, physical therapy and others.
But most memorable, though that doesn’t seem like quite the right word, are the full-size replicas of primitive 17th, 18th and 19th century “treatment devices” that were made by patients and employee George Glore for a mental health event in the 1960s. Most of these “devices,” which range from barbaric to downright fiendish, served mainly to restrain the mentally ill. The Glore opened as a museum in 1967. The other small exhibits share space in the building.
Our last stop was at the Remington Nature Center, 1502 MacArthur Drive. Here, “history and nature collide,” says manager Sarah Elder. The exhibits are kid-friendly, and many are hands-on.
A 10-foot-tall wooly mammoth “greets” visitors at the door, and mammoth bones are displayed in a case nearby. Ahead there’s an aviary with half a dozen species of colorfully plumed finches; next, a 7,000-gallon aquarium with goldfish and Missouri River fish. Smaller aquariums hold water turtles, several snake species, an exotic axolotl. Throughout the center mounts — a gray wolf, mountain lion, black bear, bison and others — appear in natural-looking habitats.
There’s a case of gorgeous polished Missouri agates, chert, jasper, petrified wood. Another display explains monarch butterfly metamorphosis. Another holds a hive of honeybees at work.
A timeline and series of life-size dioramas explain mankind’s long journey, from the arrival in North America from Eurasia during the Pleistocene Period through the Mississippian Period.
This tent is part of an exhibit on the fur trade at the Remington Nature Center.
A dozen other dioramas illustrate life in more recent years: during the Midwestern fur trade era; at a busy 19th-century St. Joseph street; when the town was a staging point for wagon trains bound for California or Oregon; at the completion of the transcontinental telegraph; during the Civil War.
The Remington, like so many of St. Joseph’s attractions, could be visited again and again.
Getting there • St. Joseph is about 300 miles northwest of St. Louis.
More info • St. Joseph Convention and Visitors Bureau, 911 Frederick Avenue, open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday; 1-816-233-6688 or 1-800-785-0360; stjomo.com
