MISSOURI is the child of a compromise whose epitaph was written in letters of blood. Its chief city was founded more than a century ago, by a colony of adventurous Frenchmen; and for many years, during whose lapse the title to its soil was savagely disputed by Gaul and Indian, was a fur-trading post. When

VOL. VIII.-17

Laclede Liguest and the brave band of men who followed him set out from New Orleans, in 1763, to explore the country whose exclusive trade had been accorded them by charter from the hands of the governor of the province of Louisiana, the lands west of the Mississippi were unexplored and unknown. Beyond the mouth

THE OLD CHOUTEAU MANSION.

(AS IT WAS.)

of the Missouri the bateau of no prying New Orleans trader had ever penetrated. The song of the voyageur was as yet unheard by the savage; and the inhabitants of the little post of Sainte Genevieve looked with amazement and reverence upon the trappers, hunters and merchants who started from their fort, one autumn morning, to explore the turbid current of the Missouri. Laclede Liguest and his men did not long remain in the mysterious region adjacent to the junction of the two great rivers, but speedily returned to the site of the present city, and there, early in 1764, a few humble cabins were erected, and the new settlement was christened St. Louis, in honor of the dissolute and feeble Louis XV., of France. A hardy and fearless youth named Auguste Chouteau was left in command of the few men protecting the infant town, and at once began diplomatizing with the Missouri Indians, who came in large bodies to visit the strangers, and to learn their intentions. The treaty by which all the French territory on the Mississippi's eastern bank, save New Orleans, had been ceded to the English, had just been made; and scarlet-coated soldiers were daily expected at the forts in the immediate vicinity of St. Louis. Laclede Liguest did not dream that another cession, embracing all lands west of the Mississippi, had been made to the King of Spain, and that his pet town was actually upon Spanish soil; he was happy in the belief that the banner of France would flaunt in the very eyes of the hated English, and was delighted to find that the Indians who

surrounded him were resolved to fight the soldiers of Great Britain to the death. So he merrily extended the limits of his colony; but had been at work hardly a year before he received orders from the governor of Louisiana to surrender to Spain. The governor himself was so chagrined at the orders he was compelled to communicate, that he died of a broken heart soon after; and Laclede Liguest, mute with rage at the pusillanimous conduct of the home government, remained stubbornly at his post, ignoring Spanish claims. The French from all the stations east of the Mississippi took refuge with him when the English came to their homes, and St. Louis grew more and more Gallic until 1768, when the Spanish came in, and after several unsuccessful attempts to gain the confidence of the early settlers, finally quite disregarded their feelings, and in 1770 pulled down the French flag.

In that year the French had consecrated their little log church, built on the land where now stands the great stone cathedral, and in that humble edifice they assembled to mourn the loss of their nationality, and to listen to the counsels of peace given them by their priests. The Spanish commanders finally succeeded in making themselves beloved, and cordially joined with the French in hating the English. Laclede Liguest died during a voyage down the Mississippi, and was buried in the wild solitudes at the mouth of the Arkansas river. His immense properties in St. Louis were sold to strangers. His valiant lieutenant, Auguste Chouteau, became his administrator, and a few years. afterwards the Chouteau mansion was built in the field where now stands a mammoth hotel, around which there is a continual roar of traffic.

Thenceforward, through the bloody days. of the colonial revolution, St. Louis experienced many vicissitudes. It underwent Indian massacres; suffered from the terrorism of the banditti haunting the Mississippi; began gradually to get acquainted with the gaunt American pioneers who had appeared on the eastern bank of the Father of Waters; and in 1788 had more

than a thousand inhabitants. In those days it was scoffingly called "Pain Court" (short bread), because grain was expensive, and the hunters who came to the "metropolis" to replenish their stock of provisions got but scant allowance of bread for their money. The Osages were forever hanging upon the outskirts of the settlement, and many an unfortunate hunter was burned at the stake, impaled, or tortured slowly to death by them. Towards the close of the last century, however, the inhabitants pushed forward into the wilderness, and the fur trade increased rapidly. Hosts of neat, one-story cottages, surrounded by pretty gardens, sprang up in St. Louis; France once more recovered her possessions west of the Mississippi; and in 1804 the settlement which Laclede Liguest had so carefully founded, hoping that it might forever remain French, came under the domination of the United States. A formal surrender of Upper Louisiana was made to the newly enfranchised American colonies; the stars and stripes floated from the "government house" of St. Louis; and the Anglo-Saxon came to the front, with one hand extended for a land grant, and the other grasping a rifle, with which to exterminate Indian, Spaniard or demon, if they dared to stand in his way.

Looking down upon the St. Louis of to-day, from the high roof of the superb temple which the Missourians have built to the mercurial god of insurance, one can hardly believe that the vast metropolis spread out before him represents the growth of only three-quarters of a century. The town seems as old as London. The smoke from the Illinois coal has tinged the walls a venerable brown, and the grouping of buildings is as picturesque and varied as that of a continental city. From the water side, on ridge after ridge, rise acres of solidly built houses, vast manufactories, magazines of commerce, long avenues bordered with splendid residences; a labyrinth of railways bewilders the eye; and the clang of machinery and the whirl of a myriad wagon-wheels rise to the ear. The levee is thronged with busy and uncouth laborers; dozens of white steamers are shrieking their notes of arrival and departure; the ferries are choked with traffic; a gigantic and grotesque scramble for the almost limitless West beyond is spread out before the vision. The town has leaped into a new life since the war; has doubled its population, its manufactures and its

ambition, until it stands so fully abreast of its wonderful neighbor, Chicago, that the traditional acerbity of the reciprocal criticism for which both cities have so long been famous is latterly much enhanced. The city, which now stretches twelve miles along the ridges, branching from the watershed between the Missouri, the Meramec and the Mississippi rivers, flanked by rolling prairies richly studded with groves and vineyards; which has many railroad lines pointed to its central depots, and a mile and a half of steamboats at its levee, a thousand miles from the sea; whose population has increased from 8,000, in 1835, to 450,000, in 1873; which has a banking capital of nineteen millions; which receives hundreds of thousands of tons of iron ore monthly, has bridged the Father of Waters, and talks of controlling the cotton trade of Arkansas and Texas,-is but little like the St. Louis of the days when Col. Stoddard had his headquarters in a rude cottage, and the United States, in his person, had just adopted the infant city. In those days the houses were nearly all built of hewn logs, set upon end, and covered with coarsely shingled roofs. The town extended along the line of what are now known as Main and Second streets; a little south of the square called the Place d'Armes, Fort St. Charles was held by a

and the Labbadies were the principal merchants; French and English schools flourished; peltry, lead and whisky were used for currency, and negroes were to be purchased for them; the semi-Indian garb of the trapper was seen at every street corner; and thousands of furs, stripped from the buffalo and the beaver, were exported to New Orleans. The mineral wealth lying within a hundred miles of St. Louis had hardly been dreamed of; the colonists were too busy in killing Indians and keeping order in the town, to think of iron, lead, coal and zinc.

The compromise which gave the domain of Missouri to slavery checked the growth of the state until after it had passed through the ordeal of the war. How then it sprang up, like a young giant, confident in the plenitude of its strength, all the world knows! St. Louis, under free institutions, has won more prosperity in ten years than under the old régime it would have attained in fifty. It is now a cosmopolitan capital, rich in social life and energy, active in commerce, and acute in the struggle for the supremacy of trade in the South-west. The ante-bellum spirit is rarely manifested now-a-days; progress is the motto even of those men of the old school who prayed that they might die when they first saw that "bleeding Kansas" had indeed bled to some purpose, and that a new era of trade and labor had arrived. The term conservative" is one of reproach in St. Louis to-day; and the unjust slur of the Chicagoan, to the effect that the Missou

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COURT HOUSE-ST. LOUIS.

rian metropolis is "slow," puts new fire into the blood of her every inhabitant. After the ravages of the war, both state and city found themselves free from the major evils attendant upon reconstruction, and entered unimpeded upon a prosperous career. The one hundred thousand freedmen have never constituted a troublesome element in the state; no political exigencies have impeded immigration or checked the investment of capital; and the commonwealth, with an area of more than 67,000 square miles of fertile lands, with two millions of inhabitants, and eleven hundred millions of dollars worth of taxable property; with a thousand miles of navigable rivers within and upon her boundaries, and with vast numbers of frugal Germans constantly coming to turn her untilled acres into rich farms, can safely carry and in due time throw off the various heavy obligations incurred in the building of the railway lines now traversing it in every direction. The present actual indebtedness of the state is nearly nineteen millions, for more than half of which sum bonds have been issued.

The approaches to St. Louis from the Illinois side of the Mississippi are not especially fascinating, and give but a poor idea of the extent of the city. Alighting from some one of the many trains which enter East St. Louis from almost every direction, one sees before him a steep bank, paved with "murderous stones," and the broad, deep, resistless current of the great river, flowing swiftly, and bearing on its bosom tree trunks and branches from far away forests. East St. Louis stands upon famous ground; its alluvial acres, which the capricious stream in past days covered every year with its waters, have been the scene of many fierce contests under the requirements of the so called code of honor, and its sobriquet was once "Bloody Island." It is now a prosperous town; hotels, warehouses and depots stand on the ancient duelling spot; immense grain elevators and wharves have been erected on the ground which the river once claimed as its own. Huge ferryboats ply constantly across the river; but the railway omnibuses and the ferry-boats are soon to be but memories of the past, for the graceful arches of the new bridge are completed, and trains can cross the Mississippi to a grand union depot in the center of St. Louis. The crowd awaiting transportation across the stream has always

the ferry boats up the bank to the streets of St. Louis, the tatterdemalion drivers urging on the plunging and kicking mules with frantic shouts of "Look at ye!" You dar!" These wagons, in busy days, were constantly surrounded by the in-coming droves of stock, wild Texan cattle, who with great leaps and flourish of horns objected to entering the gangways of the ferry, and now and then tossed their tormentors high in the air; and troops of swine, bespattered with mud, and dabbled with blood drawn from them by the thrusts of the enraged horsemen pursuing them. Added to this indescribable tumult were the lumbering wagon trains laden with iron or copper, wearily making their way to the boats; the loungers about the curbstones, singing rude plantation songs, or scuffling boisterously; the nameless ebb-tide of immigration scattered through a host of low and villainous barrooms and saloons, whose very entrances seemed suspicious; and the gangs of roustabouts rolling boxes, barrels, hogsheads and bales, from morning to night, from wagon to wharf, and from wharf to wagon. Below the bridge, the river, gradually broadening out, was covered with coal barges and steam tugs, and above it, along the banks, one saw, as now one still sees, dark masses of homely buildings, elevators, iron foundries, and hosts of manufactories; while along the shore thousands of logs, fastened together in rafts, are moored.

been of the most cosmopolitan and motley character. There may be seen the German emigrant, flat-capped and dressed in coarse black, with his quaintly-attired wife and rosy children clinging to him; the tall and angular Texan drover, with his defiant glance at the primly-dressed cockneys around him; the "poor white" from some far southern state, with his rifle grasped in his lean hand, and his astonished stare at the extent of brick and stone walls beyond the river; the excursion party from the east, with its maps and guide books, and its mountains of baggage; the little groups of English tourists, with their mysterious hampers and packets, bound toward Denver or Omaha; the tired and ill-uniformed company of troops "on transfer" to some remote frontier fortress; the smart merchant in his carriage, with his elegantly dressed negro driver standing by the restive horses; the hordes of over-clothed young commercial men from the Northern and Western cities, with their mouths distended by Havana cigars, and filled with the slang of half a dozen capitals; and the hundreds of negroes, who throng the levees in summer, but in winter depart like the swallows, feeling even the slightest hint of snow, or of the fog which from time to time heightens the resemblance of the Missourian city to London. The levee on each side of the river, in days before the bridge was built, was a kind of pandemonium. An unending procession of wagons loaded with coal, was always forcing its way from

The old French quarter of the town is now entirely given up to business, and but little of the Gallic element is left in St. Louis. Some of the oldest and wealthiest families are of French descent, and retain the language and manners of their ancestors; but in the exterior there are few traces of the domination of the French. Some souvenirs yet remain; streets, both English and American in aspect, bear the names of the vanished Gauls. Laclede has a monument in the form of a mammoth hotel; and the principal outlying ward of the city, crowded with vast rolling mills, and iron and zinc furnaces, is called Carondelet. On the Illinois side of the river the village of Cahokia still lingers, a mossgrown relic of a decayed civilization, and