The Missouri Mule: Lodestar of the American West

What made the Missouri Mule such an important part of the state’s history and identity? Solving this riddle takes us back to the very beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, through the heyday of overland freighting, and up to the present-day popularity of trail riding. What Detroit was for the automobile in the twentieth century, Missouri was for the nineteenth-century equivalent of the car—the mule. Using historical documents, oral histories, and a podcaster’s first ride, we’ll follow in the hoofprints of the animal that many historians argue built the American West as we know it.   

Written and narrated by: Kyle Jackson

Producer and engineer: Kyle Jackson

Interview guests: Les Clancy (Ozark Mule Days)

Archival Audio: Missouri Mule History Project, The State Historical Society of Missouri

Theme Song: Fog Holler (used with permission)

Additional Musical Elements: Fog Holler, Casey James Holmberg, Kyle Jackson, Kate Bone

What is Wheels Across the West: History and Legacy of the Santa Fe Trail?

"Wheels Across the West: History and Legacy of the Santa Fe Trail" invites listeners on a fun and fact-filled adventure across time and territory to make sense of an oft-overlooked overland trail. Created, written, and narrated by students at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy, Wheels Across the West covers a wide range of topics that intersect with the past and present of the American West: mules, military forts, missionization, Hollywood Westerns, gun culture, living history reenactors, pioneer women, Black cowboys, and so much more. Transporting listeners from Indigenous pathways, to international wagon caravans, to railroads, highways, and modern-day Main Streets, this series reveals how the infrastructure and cultural landscape of the West has been constructed atop foundations laid long ago.