The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is set in St. Petersburg, a town based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain grew up: the Boyhood Home, Cardiff Hill and Mark Twain Cave.
Five stops follow the novel from the whitewashed fence to the cave where Tom and Becky Thatcher get lost, on the Mississippi's west bank. Jackson's Island, the pirates' hideaway, has no identified real model, so that stop marks the town and the river.
In May 1804 William Clark and about 30 others left a winter camp on the Mississippi and turned up the Missouri, the first stage of an expedition sent to cross the newly acquired western part of the country. Captains Meriwether Lewis and Clark kept journals, and many of their entries are quoted here in their own spelling.
The route follows them from Camp Dubois past a sergeant's grave, a tense standoff with the Teton Sioux, a winter at Fort Mandan, the Great Falls, the Continental Divide and the snowbound Lolo Trail to the Pacific, then home by way of Clark's signature on Pompeys Pillar. Where a camp is lost to the river or to time, the pin marks the nearest place you can visit.
Gone Girl is set in the made-up town of North Carthage, Missouri, but David Fincher shot it almost entirely in Cape Girardeau: The Bar on Themis Street, the Common Pleas Courthouse, the old federal building and the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge over the Mississippi.
The route follows Nick Dunne's first days as the husband of a missing woman, from the bar to the press conference, the vigil, the police station and the bridge. One stop, the Drury Lodge, is marked approximately: it has closed and the pin sits on its street.
Bonnie and Clyde's two-year run took them from Eastham prison farm in Texas through a Joplin shootout, the Red Crown Tourist Court in Missouri and Dexfield Park in Iowa, to a roadside ambush near Gibsland, Louisiana.
This route follows the real trail in order, from Clyde Barrow's prison years to the morning of 23 May 1934 and his burial in Dallas. Some spots are only approximately known, and each says so.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles runs from a Manhattan cab stand to Chicago, with Wichita and the train town played by Braidwood and South Dayton.
John Hughes's 1987 Thanksgiving comedy strands an uptight advertising executive and a shower-curtain-ring salesman in a blizzard, then sends them through a shared motel bed, a broken-down train, a burning rental car and a refrigerated truck. This route follows the journey from Park Avenue and LaGuardia to Lambert, Braidwood, Woodstock and the Loop station where Del finally tells the truth.
Little House in the Big Woods begins in a log cabin near Pepin, Wisconsin, and the Ingalls family goes on to a Kansas prairie, a dugout beside Plum Creek at Walnut Grove, Minnesota, and the Dakota homestead at De Smet. All five homesites survive as cabins, museums or marked sites.
The route follows the books in order: the Wisconsin woods of the early 1870s, the Kansas cabin of 1869–1870, the locust-struck dugout of 1874, the surveyors' house and homestead at De Smet, and finally Rocky Ridge Farm in Mansfield, Missouri, where Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote the first four books in the Rock House at 65.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist.
Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
The Oregon Trail follows real landmarks of the 2,170-mile trail: Independence, Missouri, Chimney Rock in Nebraska, Independence Rock in Wyoming and Oregon City at the end. Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote it in 1971; the 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, made buying oxen, fording rivers and dying of dysentery a classroom staple, and the series has sold more than 65 million copies.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
