Missouri achieved statehood in 1821 through the Missouri Compromise, which admitted it as a slave state while barring slavery north of 36º 30' north latitude in the Louisiana Territory, creating an uneasy balance that lasted until the troubles in Kansas in the 1850s. Its admission brought a flood of migrants of Southern heritage from states including Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia into the fertile Missouri River valley, and many brought slaves or tolerance for slave culture. Central Missouri’s area with the highest proportion of slaveholders became known as the Boonslick, a region whose boundaries were debated but which in this part of Missouri could be traced along the deep valley of the Loutre River. Its position near German settlements centered at Hermann and transportation links to St. Louis helped make Danville a no-man's land by the end of the Civil War. The Boonslick was separated from the rest of the slaveholding South by the Ozark plateau, where slave culture did not take root, and even in the 1860s its trade depended heavily on steamboats on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, with St. Louis standing between it and the rest of the slaveholding South. In 1861, the Boonslick, also called Little Dixie, was the northernmost pocket of Southern and slaveholding sympathies in the United States, but by early 1862 the Confederacy had lost any chance to control it by force of arms and its regular armies were operating out of Arkansas. Geography, along with what some considered a heavy-handed military administration over a population sympathetic to Southern views, contributed to the fierce guerrilla warfare practiced by both sides in Missouri’s Civil War and helped lead to Danville’s date with destiny on October 14, 1864. The region’s name came from Boone's Lick, a salt source west of the Missouri River acquired by Nathan Boone and Daniel Morgan Boone after Daniel and Rebecca Boone moved from Kentucky to Missouri in 1799; the road linking St. Charles to the salt works became the Boonslick Road, and later the broader region on both sides of the Missouri River took the same name. The road originally ended in Howard County, where the Boones’ salt works is now a Missouri State Historic Site, and after extension westward it became the Santa Fe Trail, later U.S. Highway 40, and finally Interstate 70. Daniel Boone died in 1820 at his son’s home near Defiance in St. Charles County, where the house still stands, and his portrait was painted from life that same year by Chester Harding, whose son Chester Harding, Jr. later served as a colonel in the Union army in Missouri’s Civil War. Today the historic Boonslick reflects a blend of agricultural roots with educational and cultural life centered on Columbia, home of the University of Missouri, while communities including Rocheport, Boonville, Fayette, Centralia, and Fulton offer attractions for visitors interested in the region’s history.
