Missouri
Mountain

Prospectors from Missouri gave the peak its name, along with the neighboring Missouri Gulch drainage, during the Chaffee County silver rush of the early 1880s. The state's own name derives from an Indigenous word for canoe. The upper Arkansas valley below had long been hunting ground for the Tabeguache Ute, who ranged across this country until the treaty of 1868 confined Colorado's Ute bands to a reservation on the Western Slope.

No first ascent was ever recorded. With no technical difficulty to bar the way, the earliest climbers were probably the same Missouri prospectors who left the peak its name, but no dated account confirms it. Missouri Mountain ranks 36th among Colorado's ranked fourteeners, a middling height that kept it out of early guidebooks and expedition accounts, and it drew little notice until modern list-finishers began ticking off every summit in the state.