Cuivre River

The Cuivre River is a 41.6-mile-long (66.9 km)^[1] river in the east central part of the state of Missouri, north of the Missouri River terminus. A good part of its course marks the borders between Lincoln and St. Charles counties before emptying into the Mississippi River north of St. Louis. The Cuivre River State Park near Troy, Missouri has its southwestern borders on the river. The river is declared not to be a navigable stream, and shall be so treated by the Secretary of the Army.

The Cuivre River received its name from French-speaking settlers during the French Louisiana. It was named after Baron Georges Leopold Cuvier,^{[citation needed]} a French naturalist and paleontologist, who was first to do comparative anatomy and the classification of animals and fossils. When France acquired the territory west of the Mississippi River, Cuvier sent two of his students to America to get specimens of flora and fauna and to assess the climate and topography of the new acquisition. When the young men reached the river in what is now the Lincoln County area, it was known to the local French as Rivière aux Boeufs because of the numerous buffalo roaming its banks.^{[citation needed]} The two scientists decided a more impressive name for the stream would be "Cuvier", and labeled it such on their maps. When the English-speaking settlers arrived, the spelling was changed to "Cuivre" and the pronunciation anglicized to "Quiver". Because the French word for copper is cuivre, the American settlers mistakenly assumed that the French intended the name to be the "Copper River."^{[citation needed]}

The Battle of the Sink Hole was fought near the mouth of the Cuivre at the end of the War of 1812.

References

1. ^ U.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline data. The National Map, accessed May 13, 2011