I wrote yesterday about Caleb Bolin's visit to Lucas County --- and his trip onward to visit the source of the Chariton River: Caleb Bolin & Chariton River history, legend & Lore.
What I didn't do was write about the source itself --- I was scrambling to locate a map that illustrated this and ran out of time. So here we are this morning.
If you Google "Chariton River," you'll be told that it rises in southeastern Clarke County, Lucas County's neighbor to the west.
But that's not exactly true, and nomenclature's the culprit here --- the names assigned to streams during earliest surveys, then carried forward to today's maps.
What actually rises in Clarke County is Chariton Creek, a tributary of the Chariton River. It comes in from the west to join the river in Lucas County's Union Township near Last Chance.
The river itself rises at a point due south, in what now are farm fields west and southwest of Humeston in Wayne County's Richman Township. Chariton Creek is outlined in blue on this adaption of a DNR map of drainage patterns. The Chariton River is pink.
This map also shows White Breast Creek, both the main creek and its south branch as they join in one of the Clarke County units of Stephens State Forest, then flow united east-northeast into larger units in Lucas County.
The ridge dividing the Chariton River drainage (Missouri River) and the White Breast Creek drainage (Mississippi River) is very narrow here and the route of the Mormon Trail (sometimes called "trace") that was followed LDS pioneers from the summer of 1846 until about 1850 as they headed west to Mt. Pisgah in Union County, then onward to Council Bluffs and, eventually, Utah's Great Salt Lake valley.
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