Of all the Joplin icons—Langston Hughes, Bonnie and Clyde, Route 66—I never put mining on the list. But that’s how Joplin got its start back in 1873.

I sought to uncover the boomtown you won’t see from the interstate, the boomtown that two horrific tornadoes could not defeat. To do that, I offered my car as collateral for a canoe, put in at Shoal Creek, just a stone’s throw from the birthplace of my hero George Washington Carver, and floated into town.

Guiding my canoe through vigorous riffles along Shoal Creek, I crossed under Highway 71 and floated to the edge of Grand Falls, a drop that stopped my forward progress. Beaching my canoe, I crossed Wildcat Glades to the Audubon center, where I met a collared lizard and a bluntfaced shiner.

Within the hour, I too had become a bluntfaced shiner, donning a miner’s helmet to spelunk the Everett J. Ritchie Tri-State Mineral Museum. Yeah, the name’s a billboard buster, but it honors a guy who assembled a bunch of ore specimens into stunning displays. Seriously, the presentation of lead hasn’t been this tasteful since the Romans used plumbum for platters.

Helmets aren’t required for the tour. I wore one anyway, this headgear as proud as any cardboard crown at Burger King.

I kept stumbling onto bonus displays, like photos of Bonnie and Clyde snapped near their Joplin hideout, and Bonnie’s costume jewelry she left behind when they shot their way out of town.

But the icing on the cake came when I stepped into a small room called the National Cookie Cutter Historical Museum. In this big wide world, there are museums for everything. Tokyo’s Parasite Museum. The Icelandic Phallological Museum in Husavik. The Cockroach Hall of Fame in Plano, Texas. Oh, and Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence. In this little corner of collectordom, the cookie cutter exhibit reminds me what happens when you cross a color wheel with a geometry book, and add dough. A whole family can see this entire museum complex for the cost of a package of Oreos.

–Souls Along the Road. Photos courtesy Joplin Mining Museum