Across the Mighty Missouri River

The "Oh Shenandoah" is conventional American folk music of not the certain origin, dating to the early nineteenth century.

The song becomes to have started with Canadian and American travelers or fur dealers making a journey down the Missouri River in canoes and has developed a number of different sets of lyrics. Some lyrics mentioned to the Oneida chief Shenandoah and a canoe-going trader who desires to marry his daughter. By the mid-1800s versions of the music had begun to be a sea shanty heard or sung by sailors in various parts of the world.

The music is number 324 (three hundred twenty-four) in the Roud Folk Song Index.

Until the nineteenth century, only travelers who were being searched for their destinies as trappers and dealers of beaver fur journeyed as far west as the Missouri River. Almost all of these Canadian and American "travelers" in the fur trade era were loners who became friendly with, and occasionally married, Native Americans. Some lyrics of this music heard by and before 1860 state the story of a trader who fell in love with the daughter of the Oneida Iroquois pine tree chief Shenandoah (1710–1816), who resided in the central New York state municipality of Oneida Castle. He was a co-founder of the Oneida Academy, which began to be Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and is hidden on the campus grounds.

The canoe-going fur-trading travelers were famous singers, and songs were an essential part of their culture. Additionally, in the early nineteenth century, flat-boatmen who used the Missouri River were well-known for their shanties, including "Oh Shenandoah". Sailors traveling down the Mississippi River selected the song and created it a capstan shanty that they sang while hauling in the anchor. This boatmen's music found its way down the Mississippi River to American clipper ships, and consequently around the world.