Missouri (nicknamed the "Show Me State") is a U.S. state that is located in the Midwestern United States, bordered by Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. It is the 21st most extensive and the 18th most populous of the 50 United States. Missouri comprises 114 counties and the independent city of St. Louis. The four largest urban areas are St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield, and Columbia. Missouri's capital is Jefferson City. The land that is now Missouri was acquired from France as part of the Louisiana Purchase and became known as the Missouri Territory. Part of the Missouri Territory was admitted into the union as the 24th state on August 10, 1821.
Missouri generally mirrors the demographic, economic, and political makeup of America and has long been considered a political bellwether state. It has both Midwestern and Southern cultural influences, reflecting its history as a border state. It is also a transition between the Eastern and Western United States, as St. Louis is often called the "Western-Most Eastern City" and Kansas City the "eastern-most Western city". Missouri's geography is highly varied. The northern part of the state lies in dissected till plains while the southern part lies in the Ozark Mountains (a dissected plateau), with the Missouri River dividing the two. The state lies at the intersection of the three greatest rivers of North America, with the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers near St. Louis, and the confluence of the Ohio River with the Mississippi north of the Bootheel. The starting points of the Pony Express Trail and Oregon Trail were both in Missouri. The main center of United States population as of the 2010 Census is at the town of Plato in Texas County, Missouri.
While Walt Disney was born in Chicago, Illinois, he spent most of his childhood and early career within the state of Missouri, with the town of Marceline being a formative part of his childhood and Kansas City being where he would eventually start his film career with the Laugh-O-Gram Studio.
The dedication of Disneyland's Tom Sawyer Island in 1956 had active participation from the state of Missouri. Hannibal, the hometown of Mark Twain, sent the year's Tom and Becky Program children to serve as honored guests and ambassadors of the city and state. During the dedication, they read a faux declaration from the Governor of Missouri that the island would be declared an annex of Missouri in the middle of Southern California.
