Chouteau Springs, Missouri

Chouteau Springs is an unincorporated community in Pilot Grove Township, Cooper County, in the U.S. state of Missouri.

In 1799 Jean Pierre Chouteau and his party of fur traders on an inland excursion from the Missouri River came upon bubbling mineral springs in a valley surrounded by sycamores and elms.

The local Osage Indians informed Chouteau of the curative qualities of the mineral water and told him that their braves would often drink from them.

The medicinal properties of these waters are highly spoken of, and numerous individuals have received great benefit from their use.

"[6] On October 12, 1864, 10p.m., Major General Sterling Price marched his Confederate troops from Boonville to Chouteau Springs, a distance of about 11 miles, where they camped briefly on their way to eventually being routed in Westport (Kansas City) by the Union forces and driven into Kansas.

[7] Local resident Maria Eva (Martin) Day recalled that when she was about 16 years old and the Confederate soldiers of Generals Price and Shelby were camped out in Chouteau Springs: "One time I remember well the bushwackers and guerillas took everything we had, even the sauerkraut, and carried it away in their handkerchiefs and in paper.

[16] By the late 1880s, Chouteau Springs Resort had several turreted structures (gazebos) from which to obtain the mineral water, a large dancing pavilion, a pool, and ample picnic grounds.

[22] It was never built.In 1889, Nick, John and Leonard Smith sunk a shaft south of Chouteau Springs, seeking gold.

In a 1982 piece in the Kansas City Times, James J. Fisher called Chouteau Springs "The Town That Could Have Been" and attributed its demise to the building of Bagnell Dam, which created the Lake of the Ozarks, and to the Great Depression.

[34] In 1981, Larry Stout, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, published an article in the Journal of Paleontology regarding his discovery of the unusual occurrence (only the third known in North America) of the brackish-water ostracode Cyprideis salebrosa in Chouteau Springs.

[35] In 1944, William H. Easton of the Illinois State Geological Survey Division published an article which noted, among many other things, that the coral fauna of the Chouteau Springs limestone is larger in number of genera and species than that known from any other Carboniferous formation in this hemisphere (p. 7).