It’s 548 miles from Missouri’s northwesternmost county seat, Rock Port, to its southeasternmost, Caruthersville. But other than their license plates, they have little in common. Corn is in one corner, cotton in the other. One technically belongs to the Omaha media market, one to Memphis. One is solid Great Plains, the other next door to the Solid South.
It’s 403 miles in the other diagonal direction, South West City to Alexandria, the western Ozarks to the Upper Mississippi.
And now, the Gateway to the West and the former northernmost slave state is again being defined by its inability to be defined, this time in the realm of college allegiances, and football most specifically.
The Kansas City Star looked into this in-depth. Read the whole thing, for a little lesson in not just sports, but culture and a little history as well.
There are contrasting personalities, cultures and ways of life in the state’s far reaches. Neighbors here — from the cotton fields of the Bootheel and corn farms in the state’s north to the rolling Ozark Mountains and the big cities on Missouri’s eastern and western borders — sometimes feel more like strangers.