Part 19 (2/2)

Being a frontier town, St. Louis was of course a resort for trappers and traders but, unlike the frontier towns of to-day, not for desperadoes. The early settlers seem to have stamped upon the place its distinctive quality of quietness. Here the North American Fur Company had its headquarters for a long time, and from this point the adventurous subordinates of John Jacob Astor went forth in all directions in search of peltries. One of these, a Colonel Russell Farnum, leaving St. Louis afoot reached Behring Strait in 1813-14, crossed over the ice, traversed Siberia and, arriving at St.

Petersburg, was presented to the Emperor. This memorable journey was the wonder of Europe at the time, for Farnum went from St. Petersburg to Paris and then came home by way of New York. He wrote a record of his adventures and sent it to a New York publisher but it was lost and the writer died before he could again transcribe his narrative.

The War of 1812 with Great Britain for a time was of small concern to St.

Louis. Later, however, the Indians of Missouri were armed by the people and pitted against the Indians employed by the British. The trading-posts in which St. Louis was interested extended twelve hundred miles to the north and there agents from St. Louis counter-plotted against the British.

The Yanktons and Omahas were matched by the Americans against the Iowas and several battles were fought in which the British-bought savages were worsted. The war coming to an end, Indian hostilities ceased and the fur trade throve under the peace. Rivals to the American Fur Company were started. The business expanded, and soon the necessities of commercial intercourse led to the organization of two banks, the second of which, known as the Bank of Missouri, was organized February 1, 1817. Inflation was the order of the day. The town took on airs of magnificence and extravagance. Wealth acc.u.mulated so rapidly that some seemed at a loss to spend it, and gave entertainments in which the tasteful and the barbaric were strangely mingled. The United States held sales of public lands and there were ”rushes” such as we have seen in recent years in Oklahoma.

Building was undertaken in a lordly fas.h.i.+on and extravagant prices were asked for everything. The demand for money was so great that recourse was had to lotteries to raise funds for an academy at Potosi, to provide fire-engines for the city, to erect a Masonic Hall. The lotteries soon got into politics and were not dislodged until late in the seventies, after a fight not unlike that waged for many years in Louisiana. It was in 1817 that the Legislature of Missouri established the public-school system and incorporated the inst.i.tution which persists to-day in the St. Louis Board of Education, though it was many years before there was a public school in the city. In the same year, in St. Louis, Thomas H. Benton, afterwards United States Senator from Missouri for thirty years, leaped into notice, engaged in a quarrel with Charles Lucas, United States Attorney for the Territory of Missouri, and in a duel across the river, or rather on an island in the river that has since become joined to the Illinois sh.o.r.e, killed him. The place where the duel was fought became the rendezvous for duellists and was called ”b.l.o.o.d.y Island.” In 1817 the first Bible Society in the Territory of Missouri was formed. The inflation of the day ended as usual in collapse, but St. Louis and Missouri suffered less harm than other sections.

When, in 1818, the Territory of Missouri applied for admission to the Union the slavery question arose. There was a slight preponderance of sentiment in favor of slavery, but very slight. The Missouri Compromise left its mark on Missouri and St. Louis. The State was always regarded, however its representatives stood, as doubtful on the slavery issue. From 1820 to the breaking out of the Civil War it was always a compromise State and in that war it was ever between two fires, furnis.h.i.+ng soldiers in startling abundance to each side and sympathizing with both. St. Louis suffered in that long drawn out situation. A paralyzing incert.i.tude was bred in the city's mind, even toward progress. The people, especially the French, did not take kindly to steamboats. ”When Missouri was admitted to the Union,”

says Elihu Shepard, ”there was no steamboat owned in the State and but one steam mill.” The a.s.sessed valuation of the town property was less than $1,000,000 and the whole corporation tax less than $4000 per year while Missouri remained a territory. The town contained six hundred houses, one third of which were of stone or brick, the remainder wooden, one half of which were framed. The population was estimated at five thousand, one fourth of whom were French. The estimated annual value of the trade was $600,000. Steamboats from the Ohio River took the carrying trade between St. Louis and New Orleans, and the imports were estimated at $1,000,000.

All these conditions, while due in some measure to the extreme conservatism and self-satisfaction of the dominant French element, were undoubtedly due in larger measure to the hard times that prevailed when Missouri became a State. St. Louis was incorporated as a city December 9, 1822. A spice of adventure always entered into the then predominant business of the community, for the fur companies fought with each other, and all of them made common cause against the great Hudson Bay Company in the North, with its headquarters in Canada. The people of that time thought little of distances which even now seem great. Traders and trappers went without hesitation through the wilderness to the very surf of the Pacific and the people of the city never dreamed that what we now call Yellowstone Park was very far away. Often enough the adventurous commercial traveller who left St. Louis came back without his scalp or never came at all. The city was picturesque. Men clad in buckskin and carrying rifles in their hands elbowed representatives of first families attired in the fas.h.i.+on that came from Paris, via New Orleans, or consorted with red Indians in paint and feathers--and too often, too, in liquor. St. Louis and Missouri were ”big”

in politics about that time. Missouri was for Clay, but Missouri's representative did not vote for him and John Quincy Adams was chosen President. After this Missouri became a Jackson State, and committed herself to the South.

A patch of color in the drab details of the history of St. Louis for the few years after the incorporation was the visit of Lafayette to the city on April 29, 1825, and his sumptuous entertainment by the enthusiastic inhabitants, most of whom, probably, loved the Frenchman more than the friend of Was.h.i.+ngton. In June, 1825, the first Presbyterian church was consecrated by Rev. Solomon Giddings, who ”had a very respectable congregation” for a city which was preponderantly French and Roman Catholic. The French language was spoken in the homes of half the families of the town. There were less than a dozen German families in a city which now is more distinctly Teutonic than any other in the country, except Milwaukee. The slavery issue was all the while growing, and in 1828 there was formed at St. Louis a branch of the American Colonization Society, the purpose of which was to further the settlement of free blacks in Liberia.

Many of the largest slave-owners in the city and State were members and officers of the society. Between 1820 and 1831, a progressive movement started. The new Court House was dedicated in 1829, and the work of opening and paving streets was pushed with energy. The old French families resented the new life and moved into the country. The pace was too fast for them.

The hunters, trappers, _voyageurs_ and bargemen began to disappear. The city took on a truly American aspect, but the increase of population was slow. Between 1820 and 1830, the population increased only 2000, but between 1830 and 1840 the increase was nearly 10,000, reaching the total of 16,649.

Gradually Americanism made its impress. The wharf was lined with steamboats and the levee with great stores. Steam ferryboats multiplied. The city became a great river town, second in importance only to New Orleans. The lead mines to the south of the city were productive. Manufactures of various sorts sprang up. An insurance company was incorporated. Prosperity was checked by fear of the great Black Hawk, who, at the head of the Sac and Fox Indians, took the war-path in Illinois. Immigration and transportation of goods to and from the North was checked till Black Hawk was defeated and his tribe transported to the other side of the river, where the influence of Great Britain could not reach them. No sooner, however, had the city recovered from its slight panic than there came another and graver excitement, another lull in business. Jackson's bank veto was the cause. As if this were not enough to discourage the community, along came the cholera, which in five weeks destroyed four per cent. of the population. Cholera has reappeared since, from time to time, the most serious visitation being in 1866, but the city as it grew began to pay attention to the sewage question and in half a century had perfected such a sewer system as is not surpa.s.sed in any city in the world. In 1835 the City Council sold the town Commons, a tract of about two thousand acres, and devoted nine tenths of the proceeds to street improvements and one tenth to the public schools, and from this small beginning arose the system which to-day directs the education of the children of a city of 575,000 inhabitants. In 1829 the St. Louis University, a Jesuit inst.i.tution, was founded, which has been since a centre of higher education for the sons of the well-to-do Roman Catholics of the entire South and Southwest.

Considerably later was founded the inst.i.tution now Was.h.i.+ngton University, one of the best endowed educational establishments in the country, with a manual training department famous the world over, and with its Mary Inst.i.tute for girls ranking with the best seminaries of the country. At an early day the Roman Catholic religious sisterhoods of charity and instruction established branches here. The Sisters of Charity founded a hospital in 1832, aided by the liberality of John Mullanphy, which has been in continuous service ever since. The Sisters of the Visitation came later and established their convent for the higher education of girls and did for the girls of the West and South what the St. Louis University did for the boys. Still later came the establishment of medical colleges, one in connection with the St. Louis University, and later the inst.i.tutions founded by McDowell and Pope, from which grew the swarm of large medical and surgical colleges which now make St. Louis one of the most important centres of medical education in the land.

[Ill.u.s.tration WAs.h.i.+NGTON UNIVERSITY AS PROJECTED, NOW UNDER CONSTRUCTION.]

Events moved rapidly after 1835. The growth of river traffic was steady.

The drift of emigration westward was beneficial to St. Louis in every way.

Men and money flowed in from the East and the South. There were rumors of railroads, and, in April, 1835, a convention was held by representatives of eleven of the most populous counties of the State to take steps to induce the construction of railroads in the State and to and from the city.

The modern spirit manifested itself in every direction, and the year 1836 found the people regarding St. Louis as a metropolis, though in that year occurred an incident demonstrating that the taint of barbarism lingered to some extent among the people. A negro who had stabbed a constable was seized by a mob and tied to a tree and burned to death, amid a chorus of execrations,--an episode only too frequently duplicated in different sections of the country of late years. At this time St. Louis had 15,000 inhabitants, but it was not till the year following that a theatre was known. In the same year a brick fire-engine house was built, and leading citizens were proud to be members of the company and ”run with the machine.”

St. Louis was much interested in the Texan war of independence, and from its stores supplies went to the followers of Houston, while many of the younger men of the community left to join the Lone Star warriors in their struggle. Later, when the war with Mexico began, there were multiplied activities in the city, because the Government here outfitted many of its troops. Here next were heard the first mutterings of the storm that broke in 1861. Elijah P. Lovejoy, anti-slavery in sentiment, edited the _St.

Louis Observer_. On the night of July 21, 1836, persons unknown broke into the publis.h.i.+ng room and wrecked the establishment, scattering the type into the street. No one was punished for the offence. Lovejoy went to Alton, where later he was slain by fanatical opponents of his abolitionism, who unwittingly wrote his name high on the list of the martyrs to freedom. St.

Louis had its first daily mail September 20, 1836, and on the same day the _Missouri Republican_ commenced the publication of a regular daily edition.

In 1837 Daniel Webster was banqueted, and it was estimated that there were more guests at the banquet than there were inhabitants of the city when Lafayette was feted twelve years before.

[Ill.u.s.tration ST. LOUIS IN 1854. FROM A PRINT IN MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTION.]

[Ill.u.s.tration FOREST PARK, ST. LOUIS.]

Following in quick succession, events too numerous to be recapitulated marked the history of the town. In spite of floods and cholera and a great fire, which swept away the business portion of the city, the community went steadily ahead. The gold-fever helped St. Louis, for the Argonauts going overland outfitted here, as in very recent years their fellows bound for the Klondike and Cape Nome outfitted at Seattle. As the West built up St.

Louis builded too. Something substantial from the westward-moving stream always found its way into the coffers of the St. Louis merchants. The prosperity and power of the South lent prestige to the city. The city was a great cotton market. It had a vast trade up and down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, up and down the Ohio and the Tennessee. The fleets of steamboats at the wharves grew in size, until, old inhabitants say, there were three or four miles of them at the river front at one time, being loaded and unloaded day and night by singing negroes. As agriculture grew in importance, St. Louis became a great wheat market, a great market for cattle and swine, horses and mules. Its manufactures in every line throve, as well they might, for it was the great depot of the West, with a straightaway water route to the sea. There was plenty of work, plenty of money, and more than plenty of pleasure. The society of St. Louis was exclusive and magnificent. The ante-bellum b.a.l.l.s were gorgeous affairs. The women were beautiful, of the Southern type, and when it was desired to say of one of them that she was royally bejewelled, a common phrase used was ”She wore a n.i.g.g.e.r on every finger.” Steamboatmen, planters, slave-traders, merchants dealing in cotton or in sugar, spent money like water. The town was, as we say in these days, wide open, and of a perilous liveliness, for the incoming Northerners and Easterners were never equal to the task of suppressing what the New England American regards as vices not to be temporized with. The brightness and gayety, however, did not wholly conceal the dread of the sorrow that was to come. St. Louis was, for the most part, intensely Southern; but the Revolution of 1848 had brought to this country and to St. Louis a great number of Germans, who were set against slavery and secession. The storm broke, and the breaking was a severe setback to St. Louis, whose prosperity was founded chiefly on that of the South. Its sympathies, through social, political, business ties, were mainly with the South. The war destroyed business. St. Louis, if not the enemy's country, was strongly suspected of disloyalty, and for a time it seemed as if war would smite the city itself, while there hung in the balance the decision of the alternative of Governor Claiborne Jackson of Missouri that he would ”take Missouri out of the Union or into h.e.l.l.” Feeling ran high in the community. Almost a battle was fought on its outskirts. St. Louis had bitter experiences of martial law, while its commercial activities seemed to be mostly controlled by people who had government contracts. Here, where Grant had been known as a none too tidy farmer, his name was loathed, as was Lincoln's, by the larger element, while the Germans were profoundly loyal. The misfortunes of the South were unfortunate for St. Louis in every instance, and when the scourge of war pa.s.sed, the region whence St. Louis had drawn most of its wealth was devastated, and the sceptre of trade pa.s.sed to the North. As the fortunes of St. Louis declined from these causes, they and other causes operated to push Chicago to the front, even though, when Chicago had been twice visited by fire, St. Louis, as the greater city, made large contributions to the relief of the sufferers. St.

Louis did not go backward, but the country to the north recovered from the war and improved more rapidly than that to the south and southwest, and the northern and western trade went to Chicago. St. Louis managed, in the face of such obstacles, to hold its own. The work of expansion and extension of improvement went steadily ahead, though with great conservatism. The boom idea, that grew after the war, was never hospitably entertained in St.

Louis, though the manufacturers and merchants found a new trade and strenuously developed it in the new Southwest. The southwestern railway systems began to take shape, and the prosperity of St. Louis came back in great measure late in the eighties. The great St. Louis bridge had been opened in 1874, and the city was put in touch with the East, but the greater movement of the country's wealth and energy was being felt in the territory that was out of trade touch and political sympathy with the field in which St. Louis was once supreme. Nevertheless St. Louis added to her beauties steadily. She acquired Forest Park, the greatest natural public city park in the country, after Fairmount in Philadelphia, also O'Fallon Park, but little less magnificent. Through the philanthropic generosity of Henry Shaw she acquired Tower Grove Park, which is perhaps the finest specimen of the park artificial to be found anywhere. Later, Mr.

Shaw left to the city by will his botanical garden, an inst.i.tution famous the world over for its collection of plants of almost every species. The city paved all its downtown streets with granite, and later its outlying streets with asphalt, erected a new custom house, a Four Courts Building, stupendous water-works, and constructed a gigantic extension of the sewer system. The development of the system of street railway transportation in St. Louis was more rapid and more perfect than in any other city in the world. A new mercantile library was built and the public-school library was made free. Churches increased in great numbers. Schools multiplied and were overcrowded in places where within twenty years had been quarry ponds and cow pastures. The growth of business, the multiplication of banks, the overspreading of the population since 1880, has been bewildering in its progress, and remains so, in spite of the fact that there has been all this time in process of building, directly across the river, a sort of overflow city of sixty thousand people. The city lost its river trade but has made up for it in utilization of the railroads, and is now preparing again to use the mighty, free, natural highway for the transportation of products to the world at large. St. Louis, so often thought of as slow, has really grown with phenomenal rapidity. It is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, a city of homes, and a city of perhaps more beautiful homes widely distributed in different sections than are to be found elsewhere. The wealthy men of St. Louis are almost all young men. The greater fortunes in St. Louis, with but few exceptions, have been made within the past twenty years, and many of them in the last ten years, and these now utterly eclipse the fortunes that have been handed down from the earlier days. The city has to-day a population of 575,000. In the suburban territory there are over 700,000 more people in close relations.h.i.+p daily and almost hourly with the business and social life of the city. The ”slow old town” is not so slow when it is remembered that within one year after a cyclone swept it in May, 1896, there was not a trace of the visitation. Its conservatism is very real, but it is not stagnation. St. Louis has gone on with its work, even though war and the industrial tendencies consequent on war, and the political and social drift growing out of war have been in opposition to the city's progress. The city has built steadily but well, pa.s.sing through the panic of 1893 without a single failure. The earlier history of the town shows how the conservatism so thoughtlessly derided came to be ingrained in the life of the city. It shows, too, the pertinacity which has made St.

Louis the fourth city in the Union, in defiance of the disaster that befell its prestige in the great war, and in defiance too of the circ.u.mstance that the new popular national activities generated after that great conflict found their most congenial field in regions practically out of reach of, and wholly antipathetic to the interests of the chief city of Missouri. The new South and the new Southwest mean a new St. Louis. And we shall see what the new St. Louis means when the city expresses its higher and better self in the Exposition with which its people purpose to celebrate the purchase, by the United States, in 1803, of the Louisiana Territory.

[Ill.u.s.tration EADS BRIDGE AT ST. LOUIS.]

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