The Osage River, impounded here by Bagnell Dam, flows east and north about 82 miles to join the Missouri. At the river's mouth, the Lewis and Clark Expedition camped for several days in 1804, and in 1806 Zebulon M. Pike's Southwest Expedition passed by on the way to visit Osage Indian villages near the Kansas border, where the river's name changes to Marias des Cygnes. Named for the Osage Indians, the French name for Wazhazhe tribes, the river lies in territory ceded by them in 1808. Used by Indians, French trappers, and settlers, the river was later traveled by steamboats before the railroad era. From 1880 to 1915, forests in the area were harvested for railroad ties, and the Osage and Niangua rivers carried them to railroad points; nearby Bagnell was once a leading tie-shipping town. Bagnell Dam, built by the Union Electric Co. of Missouri from 1929 to 1931 at a cost of more than $30,000,000, created the Lake of the Ozarks. The 148 by 2,543 foot dam impounds one of the largest man-made lakes in the U.S., a lake one to five miles wide, 129 miles long, with a 1,300-mile shoreline, extending about 95 square miles above the dam through northern Ozark counties including Benton, Morgan, Camden, Miller, Henry, and St. Clair. The dam became a focal point for a resort industry around the lake, and its completion brought new highways and the Grand Glaize, Hurricane Deck, and Niangua bridges. Camdenton, laid out in 1931, replaced Linn Creek as the seat of Camden County after the old town was abandoned to the rising waters of the lake; a new Linn Creek preserves the old name. The earlier Linn Creek had been an early river port where Joseph W. McClurg, governor of Missouri from 1866 to 1870, had his Big Store on the Osage. Communities in the area include Lake Ozark, Lakeside, Eldon, Versailles, and Warsaw, and notable attractions include Lake of the Ozarks State Park, scenic views on the Gravois, Grand Glaize, Osage, and Niangua arms of the lake, mammoth caves, the ruins of Hahatonka Castle, and Hahatonka Spring, where a notorious band of counterfeiters was said to have operated from headquarters called the Bank of Niangua in the 1830s.