Sunset Park in Florissant is a recreational greenspace of 90 acres stretching 3,000 feet along the Missouri River. Originally known as Desloge Park after philanthropist Joseph Desloge, it began with Desloge’s 1961 gift deed of almost 27 acres to the city and a 13-acre annual lease from Union Electric Company, with additional land acquired in 1963 from Willis and Luella Ehrhardt and in 1975 from William and Molly Riley. In 1964, a renaming contest held by Junior Park Board members and the Park Board was won by Vincent Fonte, Jr. of Florissant, and in 1967 the park was dedicated as the city’s fifth major park. Since then it has provided a quiet place for visitors to view the river, hike, picnic, and experience the seasons. A 2004 park improvement plan added a Nature Lodge overlooking the Missouri River for school instruction and experiential learning about ecology, science, and stewardship, along with plans for a boat marina, walking trails, restrooms, a five-acre scout camp, picnic area, benches, lighthouse, store, and restaurant; that same year, a 501c3 charitable foundation was formed to help secure funding. The Missouri River, the longest river on the North American continent at more than 2,340 miles, begins in the Rocky Mountains of southwestern Montana and joins the Mississippi River just north of St. Louis on the Missouri-Illinois border. Nicknamed the Big Muddy, it carries vast amounts of sediment each year. The stretch flowing past the park is called Mullanphy Bend, about 20 miles from the Confluence, and was named for philanthropist Bryan Mullanphy, mayor of St. Louis in 1847, whose heirs built the Mullanphy Emigrant Home in 1867 to shelter poor westward-bound travelers. The river corridor near the park supports forests, wetlands, valleys, remnant prairies, pastureland, and farm fields, and while mountain lions, black bears, elk, wolves, and prairie chickens once lived here, wildlife seen today includes white tail deer, raccoons, rabbits, coyotes, muskrats, fish such as catfish, sturgeon, bullheads, and carp, and many birds including chickadees, nuthatches, robins, orioles, woodpeckers, Great Blue Herons, Sandpipers, Canada Geese, Belted Kingfishers, Red-tailed Hawks, Turkey Vultures, and wintering American Bald Eagles. Plant life includes cottonwood, serviceberry, poplar, sycamore, and maple trees as well as columbine, aster, wild ginger, wild onion, sweet flag, and milkweed. The Missouri also served exploration and transportation: on May 18, 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their expedition up the river with three boats and 33 people, creating maps that aided later explorers and emigrants, while in the 1800s steamboat travel carried goods and people despite dangerous currents, shifting channels, and submerged snags that caused many wrecks. Today the river remains important for electricity, recreation, navigation, drinking water, irrigation, and industry, and its channel has been modified since the 1930s to support those uses.