Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

HISTORIC 

ST. LOUIS 

250 Years Exploring New Frontiers 

by J. Frederick Fausz, Ph.D. 

A publication of the University of Missouri–St. Louis

Thank you for your interest in this HPNbooks publication. For more information about other 

HPNbooks publications, or information about producing your own book with us, please visit www.hpnbooks.com.

HISTORIC ST. LOUIS 

250 Years Exploring New Frontiers 

by J. Frederick Fausz, Ph.D. 

A publication of the 

University of Missouri–St. Louis 

HPNbooks 

A division of Lammert Incorporated 

San Antonio, Texas

DEDICATION 

To the memory of James Neal Primm 

and to the UMSL students who inspired us both. 

First Edition 

Copyright © 2014 HPNbooks 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing 

from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to HPNbooks, 11535 Galm Road, Suite 101, San Antonio, Texas, 78254. Phone (800) 749-9790, www.hpnbooks.com. 

ISBN: 978-1-939300-61-4 

Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 2014938682 

H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S 

2 

Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers 

author: J. Frederick Fausz, Ph.D. 

contributing writer for sharing the heritage: Joe Goodpasture 

HPNbooks 

president: Ron Lammert 

project managers: Roxanne Landman, Bob Sadoski, 

Larry Sunderland, Michael Swengrosh 

administration: Donna M. Mata, Melissa G. Quinn 

book sales: Dee Steidle 

production: Colin Hart, Evelyn Hart, Glenda Tarazon Krouse, 

Christopher Mitchell, Tony Quinn

CONTENTS 

5 INTRODUCTION by UMSL Chancellor Thomas F. George 

6 FOREWORD Reflections by St. Louis Mayor Francis G. Slay 

7 PROLOGUE St. Louis: Where the Past is Present for the Future 

12 CHAPTER 1 Exploring the Confluence of Cultures and Rivers 

32 CHAPTER 2 Exploring St. Louis as Capital of the American West 

49 CHAPTER 3 Exploring a Steamboat City of Expanding Commerce 

80 CHAPTER 4 Exploring the World’s Fair City in a Railroad Era 

106 CHAPTER 5 Exploring Urban Challenges in an Automobile Age 

142 EPILOGUE Inspiring Community Spirit in the New Millennium 

164 SHARING THE HERITAGE 

310 SPONSORS 

312 ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

C O N T E N T S 

3

Statue of King Louis IX of France. 

Known as the Apotheosis of Saint Louis, 

the statue by Charles H. Niehaus was 

unveiled at the 1904 World’s Fair. 

Two years later, the city had it cast in 

bronze and placed in front of the Saint 

Louis Art Museum, where it remains a 

beloved landmark. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FAUSZ FAMILY, 2010. 

“We shall not cease from exploration, 

And the end of all our exploring 

Will be to arrive where we started, 

And know the place for the first time.” 

–St. Louis native, T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “No. 4” (1942). 


4

INTRODUCTION 

The history of St. Louis is one of opportunity and dreams coming true. 

That’s apparent in the pages of this outstanding book chronicling the birth and 

development of St. Louis over the past 250 years. It’s a story of individuals seeking 

better lives for themselves and their families. It’s a story of individuals coming 

together to create great communities, companies and institutions. It’s our story. 

I am especially proud of this publication as the University of Missouri–St. Louis 

is a primary sponsor and many of the individuals mentioned in the book have 

strong associations with our campus—either as graduates or supporters. I also 

was delighted that one of our faculty members, Dr. J Frederick Fausz, oversaw 

editorial direction and content creation. He’s a natural storyteller and an 

outstanding historian whose knowledge of Western American history makes him 

one of our favorite professors. 

St. Louis has a rich history. It has experienced much growth and change over 

the past 250 years. It has seen success and failure—many times over. For many, 

St. Louis was a gateway to somewhere else. For others, like me, it became a home. 

I consider us the fortunate ones. 

St. Louis will continue to grow and change. And, while I like to read about 

St. Louis’ rich, historic past, it’s working for a better future that inspires and 

excites us at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. 

We’re in the business of making dreams come true. 

Thomas F. George 

Chancellor 

University of Missouri–St. Louis 

I N T R O D U C T I O N 

5

FOREWORD 

Above: Mayor Francis Slay, City of St. Louis. 

Below: Official anniversary logo of the 

stl250 Committee; used with permission as a 

registered Signature Event. 

The brilliance of St. Louis’s celebration of its 250th anniversary year is that only the barest 

attention is being paid to the actual details of our foundation as a fur trading post by Pierre Laclede 

and Auguste Chouteau. 

Instead, our civic focus will be on other things: the river itself; the immigrants who found their 

way here; the buildings and neighborhoods in which they settled; the churches and civic 

cathedrals in which they congregated; the sports they adored; the great public spaces they built; 

the foods they popularized; the strength with which they struggled with the injustices of slavery 

and segregation, the ravages of Depression; and the mistakes they made. 

Like most St. Louisans, I am the descendent of immigrants. I was raised on a block in which 

I knew everyone. The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis is my idea of a church and the Eads is my 

idea of a bridge. I have never lived farther than a half mile from a park. I bleed red and blue for 

the Cardinals, Blues, and Rams. I have a taste for provel, in quantity. 

I have long thought that the Great Divorce of 1876, in which the city of St. Louis separated 

itself from St. Louis County, was our biggest civic misjudgment. From it can be traced the roots 

of a dozen other consequences that continue to vex us. 

The year in which we celebrate our founding is our most recent best opportunity to reflect 

on the courage and ingenuity of St. Louisans who faced flood, fire, discrimination, and violence; 

kept faith in their home; and built—if not yet a Shining City Upon a Hill, at least a vibrant and 

diverse city perched on the bank of a great river, where all are welcome. 

–Mayor Francis Slay, City of St. Louis 


6

PROLOGUE 

A C I T Y W H E R E 

T H E P A S T I S P R E S E N T F O R T H E F U T U R E 

“In joyful homes where the happy dwell, 

Where life is in gladness led, 

It cometh the heart with sighs to swell, 

The memory of the Dead.” 

–St. Louis poet Ethel Grey, The Memory of the Dead, 1850. 

In recent years, St. Louis has faced its greatest socio-economic crises since the Great Depression, 

with a dramatically diminished population and declining stature among American cities. In a 

Time magazine essay on Bastille Day, 2008, David von Drehle wondered if “Poor St. Louis”—a 

“Midwestern city with an Athenian heart”—could ever reclaim the global prestige of 1904, 

when it was the only city ever to host a world’s fair and Olympic games simultaneously. Would 

retaining local ownership of the iconic Anheuser-Busch Brewery, von Drehle queried, “be enough 

to give this city a few more years of dignity”? 

The new Saint Louis Art Museum East 

Building at sunset on June 6, 2013, 

reflecting the Statue of Saint Louis. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT COHEN, 

COURTESY OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. 

P R O L O G U E 

7

The iconic Clydesdales remain a popular 

St. Louis treasure. Copyright @ Anheuser- 

Busch, LLC. Used with permission of 

Anheuser-Busch, LLC. All rights reserved. 

St. Louis will never regain the international 

acclaim of that spectacular summer over a 

century ago, when, as America’s fourth largest 

city, with the nation’s biggest brewery, it 

welcomed the world as a gracious host. 

But it takes more than one event or a 

single business to nurture the civic pride 

and community spirit that are essential in 

determining a city’s true “dignity.” Residents 

are the key shapers of urban reputations, 

for by embracing and sharing an accurate 

knowledge of a city’s entire history, they 

create connections through time and well 

into the future among all people who 

have lived there. That reinforces the reality 

that everyone occupies the “same boat” and 

must tap all talents and share all sacrifices 

to keep the fragile craft of community 

from sinking. 

Remembering is the greatest honor and 

highest compliment that anyone can bestow 

on ancestors who created the society we live 

in. Respect for the debts owed to that local, 

familiar past is why people buy tombstones, 

publish obituaries, and name children after 

relatives. When a city honors famous citizens 

with street names, plaques, or monuments, it 

enhances the relevance of history, validating 

the shared humanity between the living 

and the dead and ensuring that our labors 

have created legacies that will last long after 

our passing. 

The site of St. Louis resembles an 

“amphitheater” and on that natural “stage” 

our city has played major roles in historical 

dramas for two-and-a-half centuries. Only 

three dozen U.S. cities are as old as St. Louis, 

and our “City of the Sainted King” has 


8

achieved national fame that is deserving of 

remembrance, recognition, and respect: 

S St. Louis was the first permanent European 

settlement closest to the strategic confluence 

of America’s two longest rivers—one 

of the best city sites on the continent. 

S St. Louis was the last permanent French 

city created in the present limits of the 

United States, and it perpetuated that 

special culture following France’s loss of 

its American empire in 1763. 

S St. Louis did not displace a Native American 

population and pioneered innovative, 

alternative frontier policies of peace and 

prosperity as a hospitable “Indian capital” 

of diplomacy and trade. 

S St. Louis was a true city by design, function, 

and significance from its earliest days, 

thanks to civic-minded businessmen, whose 

profits from global commerce developed 

a consumer culture of affluence, civility, 

and philanthropy. 

S St. Louis became a “refuge” for French 

colonists from all areas of North America; 

served as Spain’s northernmost regional 

capital in its New World empire; and was 

the first capital of the American West after 

the Louisiana Purchase. 

S St. Louis was the last home of the Corps of 

Discovery commanders, Meriwether Lewis 

and William Clark, and their influence 

made the city a “Gateway to the West” for 

generations of American entrepreneurs and 

European immigrants. 

S St. Louis served as the “Mother City” of 

the West, whose citizens promoted many 

“daughter settlements” that became future 

towns in Missouri and several other states. 

S St. Louis was the Union capital west of 

the Mississippi and the only southern 

city to support Lincoln, playing key 

roles in winning the Civil War and 

emancipating slaves. 

S St. Louis was a major commercial hub 

of the heartland, connecting eastern, 

western, northern, and southern regions 

via steamboats and railroads. 

S St. Louis became a large industrial center 

and America’s fourth largest city by 1900, 

promoted as the possible future capital of 

the United States. 

S St. Louis was a popular destination for 

international immigrants and tourists long 

before it achieved fame for the World’s Fair 

and Olympic Games in 1904. 

S St. Louis has played a major role in aviation 

history for over a century, before and 

after Charles Lindbergh’s famous transatlantic 

flight in a plane named for the city. 

S St. Louis achieved international prominence 

for its architecture, represented by the 

Eads Bridge, its early skyscrapers, Lambert 

Airport Terminal, and the Gateway Arch. 

S St. Louis has been a leading city in proposing 

progressive civic solutions to serious 

problems of urban decline since 1900. 

S St. Louis has world-class universities, free 

cultural institutions, and notable parks, 

historic sites, medical facilities, musical 

traditions, museums, and research libraries, 

with unparalleled archives on the history 

of the American West. 

S St. Louis has an incomparable heritage of 

baseball excellence, winning eleven World 

Series championships as the first National 

League city west of the Mississippi. 

S St. Louis has harnessed the potential of 

the new millennium most aggressively, by 

supporting innovative new businesses, 

improving the attractions of inner city living, 

revitalizing neighborhoods, expanding job 

opportunities, welcoming immigrants, and 

creating new options for popular entertainment 

and cultural refinement. 

That small sample of accomplishments 

should provide encouragement to the 3,000,000 

people who live in the St. Louis Metropolitan 

Map of St. Louis, 1892, from Shewey’s 

Pictorial St. Louis, Past and Present 

(St. Louis, 1892), p. 17. 


9

T H E U N F U L F I L L E D P R O M I S E S 

O F A N N I V E R S A R I E S 

Major public anniversary celebrations represent the best and worst aspects of history. 

They attract broad interest and temporarily make information about the past more popular, 

but such popularity often encourages fleeting entertainment over lasting enlightenment 

and the marketing of silly souvenirs instead of respect for serious research. Anniversaries 

highlight the difference between popular heritage—often flawed personal memories, 

mere rumors, and sheer fantasies about the past—and professional history, the disciplined 

accumulation of accurate, verifiable evidence about events that no one remembers. The 

arrival of the new millennium illustrated those differences. The many millions of people 

who participated in that massive global revelry celebrated the wrong year—revealing an 

astonishing level of ignorance about chronology in a commemoration that should have 

been all about chronology. 

St. Louisans have long had their own problems with chronology and seem incapable of 

reaching a consensus about the correct founding date of their city. The Official Bicentennial 

Celebration in 1964 honored the wrong “birth date” of February 14, and it has been 

virtually impossible to alter erroneous personal memories with professional research ever 

since. A popular publication recently proclaimed that “an actual date of the city’s 

founding…is unknown due to the lack of documents from 1764 and inconsistencies of 

these papers.” That is a lie fabricated by a PR promoter pretending to know history. 

Historians, like lawyers, give far more credence to written records than hearsay 

accounts, and the only founding date in a surviving manuscript written by an eyewitness 

(the city’s eminent co-founder, Auguste Chouteau) is February 15, 1764, which he 

consistently confirmed several times between 1804 and 1825—including testimony 

under oath. All of the earliest historians of St. Louis accepted and repeated that date, 

and the city’s first official public celebration of its founding was held on Monday, 

February 15, 1847. But flawed English translations of Chouteau’s Narrative of the Founding 

of St. Louis in 1858 and 1911 misread his “5” for an inaccurate “4”—and all of the leading 

city historians in 1964 were too careless to note that discrepancy. That error proliferated 

like a computer virus. As more and more citizens celebrated the wrong date in the past 

fifty years (unfortunately made more popular due to its association with Valentine’s Day), 

flawed memories became resistant to verified, irrefutable evidence from experts. 

Once the mistakes of the early translators became widely known, however, all recent 

scholarly historians have agreed that February 15 is correct. And national, neutral 

commentators cannot fathom the local dispute, as when Charlie Rose on the CBS Morning 

News wished St. Louis a happy birthday on February 15, 2013. Unless St. Louisans stop 

trivializing historical dating as a personal whim, they will continue to perpetuate fictitious 

heritage instead of factual history. How can we expect young students to respect history if 

our most mature citizens disregard that most basic fact about their hometown? And how 

many other of our biased beliefs defy accuracy and honesty? 

Area, reminding them that human potential 

and commercial capital for 250 years have 

resolved crises far worse than those of today. 

Sadly, however, few residents appreciate those 

major milestones of impressive leadership 

that stimulated civic loyalty in past generations. 

The most relevant, resonating history is 

usually local and personal, starting with an 

awareness of family genealogy, progressing 

to an appreciation of one’s unique neighborhood, 

and resulting in a broader, advanced 

understanding of the hometown and what it 

has contributed to the state, the nation, and 

the world. 


10

But for decades, public schools have 

almost entirely replaced local history with 

global “social studies”—while making all 

courses dealing with humanity subordinate 

to “STEM” subjects (science, technology, 

engineering, and math). The failure to excite 

young minds about the history of St. Louis is 

an inexplicably missed opportunity, since the 

city was co-founded by a teenager whose 

exciting frontier experiences with French, 

Spanish, British, American, and Indian populations 

over sixty-five years could serve as an 

engaging multicultural “textbook” by themselves. 

Reading any history for pleasure and 

enlightenment has also declined dramatically 

in our era of proliferating electronic devices 

and the quick, short, and misspelled text 

messages they facilitate. History would probably 

be more popular and palatable if it were 

marketed as “social networking with the dead.” 

History is the memory of an entire society, 

and amnesia about the events that predated 

one’s birth is akin to the confusion experienced 

when someone overhears only a partial 

conversation without knowing the topic or 

how it began. A knowledge of history is 

required for a meaningful patriotism that 

goes beyond mere flag-waving, because it 

provides details about the sacrifices of 

earlier generations in solving social crises. 

History also promotes citizenship and a wellfunctioning 

democratic government. People 

who live only in a self-absorbed present will 

never be able to differentiate between old 

trends and new ideas, lacking the wisdom of 

historical context when they enter the voting 

booth with no direction for improving the 

future. Finally, an intensive knowledge of the 

past is the best preparation for understanding 

the present. The study of history requires 

broad reading, a commitment to understanding 

all sorts of people and their motives for 

making decisions in a variety of contexts, and, 

especially, a commitment to factual accuracy. 

Throughout world history, cities have been 

special centers of multicultural convergence, 

where a rich mix of intellectual, technological, 

political, and commercial “explorers” advanced 

progress with new ideas and innovative 

solutions. St. Louis emerged as a great 

metropolis because of its urban entrepreneurs. 

In every century, its business leaders 

have invested in risky enterprises and used 

their expertise as political leaders, civic 

planners, and generous philanthropists to 

improve the lives of fellow citizens. The 

organizational profiles in the “Sharing the 

Heritage” section showcase the considerable 

accomplishments of major corporations, 

small businesses, important non-profit 

groups, and venerable cultural institutions. 

Taken together, their stories serve as an 

enduring time capsule of 2014, which future 

generations can use to measure the progress 

of their ancestral explorers in years to come. 

This book chronicles 250 years of the most 

significant “explorations”—physical, political, 

intellectual, commercial, cultural, and social— 

that made the City of St. Louis famous in 

American history. The depth of coverage 

required, enhanced by a vast number of rare 

illustrations, precluded information on events 

beyond the city’s boundaries. But everyone 

in the entire metropolitan region should recognize 

that St. Louis is a special place where 

the past is still present for shaping a future 

filled with pride and dignity. What St. Louisan 

William Vincent Byars wrote about his ancestors 

over a century ago still holds true today: 

Aerial View of the downtown core of 

St. Louis on November 19, 2008. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BRIAN HOLSCLAW; 

PERMISSION FOR USE GRANTED THROUGH 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. 

“Their deeds, their thoughts, each brave word bravely said, 

Live past the grave and master it, to give 

The living help and strength when life is fraught 

With sorest need of courage.” 

–J. Frederick Fausz 


1 1

“Indians live much better than men under tyranny and arbitrary government…. 

Nature has given them a soul which…condemns dishonesty, petty fraud, 

and all…vices which are daily practiced…in refined life.” 

–John Dunn Hunter, Osage captive (1823) 

C H A P T E R 1 

EXPLORING THE CONFLUENCE 

OF CULTURES AND RIVERS 

Above: Detail of the Mississippi-Missouri 

River Confluence, 1997. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BOB SRENCO 

(BOB@SRENCOAERIALPHOTO.COM) AND USED 

WITH PERMISSION. 

Right: Purported Portrait of Pierre de 

Laclede Liguest. The sailing ship in the 

background symbolized Laclede’s voyage to 

New Orleans in 1755, and his expensive 

clothing may have been a family gift to a 

second son as he began a commercial career 

in America. For the complex details about 

Laclede portraiture, see J. Frederick Fausz, 

Founding St. Louis: First City of the 

New West (Charleston: The History Press, 

2011), 207. 

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS 

(OBJ: 1916 024 001); PERHAPS COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL 

IN THE FAMILY’S BEDOUS MANSION. 

While the crusader king, Louis IX of France, was killing Muslims in the thirteenth century, 

some 10,000 Native Americans were living at the future site of St. Louis, then a suburb of the 

impressive Mississippian metropolis of Cahokia. Five hundred years later, French colonists 

founded the first—and final—town here since those Indian mound-builders. Although they 

named it to honor the only French monarch to achieve sainthood, the popular nickname 

of “Mound City” was more appropriate, since two dozen of those man-made landmarks gave 

St. Louis a distinctive appearance for another century and 

imparted a special connection with Indians ever since. 

In his 1974 historical novel, Centennial, James Michener 

wondered why, of all the frontier towns founded near the 

same time, “St. Louis alone should grow into one of the 

world’s great cities.” His answer was “Brains”—referring 

to the many wise decisions made by the intelligent, 

well-educated city founder, Pierre de Laclede Liguest. 

That gentleman merchant was uniquely qualified to be 

a successful frontier entrepreneur, city planner, and 

Indian diplomat, given his multilingual abilities, 

commercial ambitions, military training, and tolerant, 

liberal attitudes derived from the French Enlightenment. 

Above all, he was an explorer who founded a city 

of explorers. 


12

W H A T ’ S I N A N A M E ? 

Pierre de Laclede Liguest is the full correct name of the founder. As a native of the French 

Pyrenees province of Bearn, he learned the local Occitan-Gascon language from infancy and 

had to study French as a second (and foreign) language. He never used diacritical marks in 

signing his name, and to do so retroactively is inaccurate with regard to proper non-French pronunciation. 

In his native dialect, Laclede was pronounced as “Laclayed”—neither the “Lacled” of 

proper French nor the anglicized “Lacleed” of the local St. Louis gas company. Laclede also 

insisted on attaching Liguest—a Bearnais word meaning “willow tree(s)”—to his surname, 

because as a second son who could not inherit his father’s estate, he was entitled to revenues 

from a family forest along the Aspe River. Liguest also functioned like “junior” or “younger” 

in distinguishing Pierre from his father of the same name. Liguest appeared only as an addon 

to the signature of his surname, and he was always addressed as “Laclede” in conversation. 

Laclede was born on November 22, 1729, 

into one of the “most distinguished” gentry 

families in the beautiful Aspe Valley of 

Bearn—a small but fiercely independent 

province of “free shepherds” nurtured by 

the rugged peaks of the French Pyrenees 

along the Spanish border. His surname 

means “gate” in the unique Bearnais dialect— 

most appropriate for someone who founded 

the “Gateway to the West.” His mother, 

Magdeleine d’Espoey d’Arance, was a noblewoman, 

and his father, Pierre de Laclede, was 

a wealthy landowner and university-educated 

attorney serving the judicial parliament of 

Navarre in the provincial capital of Pau. 

Young Pierre was born in a seventeenthcentury 

stone mansion at Bedous, then a 

village of 2,000 residents. He was remarkably 

independent at an early age, since his mother 

died when he was only four, after bearing 

seven children in seven years—twice delivering 

babies only eleven months apart. As a child, 

Pierre was tutored in a home filled with books, 

cultural refinement, and scholarly conversation, 

learning that the sterling reputation of one’s 

family was the “truest measure of wealth.” 

Above: “Maison Laclede,” the founder’s birth 

home in Bedous, remains in use today as a 

special holiday rental property. 

PHOTOGRAPH AND PERMISSION TO PUBLISH 

COURTESY OF THE PROPRIETOR, CECILE TEISSEIRE. 

Below: Panorama of the Monumental 

Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, 

by John J. Egan, c. 1850. This portrayal 

of Mississippian Indian mounds was one 

of twenty-five vignettes in a massive 

panoramic painting measuring 7’ high 

and nearly 350’ long, recently restored. 

COURTESY OF THE SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM; 

ELIZA MCMILLAN TRUST (34:1953). 


1 3

Lush “Garden of Bearn” landscape near 

Bedous, 2011. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PHOTOGRAPHER IAN STOKES 

OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM. 


14 

Generations of Lacledes had enough property 

to qualify as landed gentry or even 

aristocrats, but they achieved greater local 

distinction as industrious and talented public 

servants, scholars, physicians, lawyers, merchants, 

and priests. Laclede’s paternal grandfather 

was a merchant and royal officeholder 

under Louis XIV, who was respected for his 

personal integrity and public generosity. 

Pierre’s uncle, Jean Joseph Laclede, was a 

celebrated author and close friend of Voltaire, 

the famous philosopher. And Pierre’s older 

brother, Jean (heir to the family fortune) was 

an attorney and pioneering botanist, named 

by King Louis XV as the “Master of Waters 

and Forests in Bearn.” 

The Lacledes of Bedous lived in a fertile 

farming region known as the “garden of 

Bearn,” where numerous conical mounds and 

surrounding mountains made the landscape 

distinctive. It was a region as productive as 

it was picturesque, where the main food 

crop was maize, farmed by women as in 

Native America. Pierre grew up eating 

“Indian corn” and learned how his family’s 

water mill operated long before he owned 

one in St. Louis. Most importantly, Laclede 

lived along rivers his entire life and feared 

devastating floods in deep mountain gorges 

before he built St. Louis on a limestone ledge 

high above the “American Nile.” His boyhood 

also may have influenced his insistence on 

living in the first stone home built in St. Louis, 

then very rare in that region, because it was 

the traditional housing material for all classes 

in Bearn. 

Six other small villages within a few miles 

of Bedous offered additional lessons for a 

curious boy. In Accous, the popular pastoral 

poet, Cyprien Despourrins, wrote verses 

during Laclede’s lifetime that praised poor 

shepherds who valued personal pride above 

wealth. In Osse, Calvinism had flourished 

since the 1500s, and the Catholic Lacledes 

were notably tolerant in respecting and 

protecting those Protestants during frequent 

religious wars. Across the river from Bedous, 

the Laclede family forest supplied masts 

for the French Navy. Jean-Jacques Blaise 

d’Abbadie, a Bearnais nobleman and naval 

official, met young Pierre in the 1740s when 

he came to select the trees he needed. They 

would meet again—in 1763 New Orleans— 

when d’Abbadie, as the new Director-General 

of Louisiana, confirmed Laclede’s fur trading 

monopoly that helped get St. Louis started.

As a teenager, Pierre enrolled at the 140- 

year-old Jesuit College in Pau, some sixty 

miles from his home. There, he marveled at 

the magnificent palace of King Henri IV, 

a direct descendant of Saint Louis and first 

monarch of the Bourbon dynasty, who ruled 

Bearn prior to reigning over France. Laclede 

later moved to Toulouse, attending a military 

academy to expand his interests beyond 

book-learning. Active and athletic, he was 

awarded an ornate sword as a champion 

fencer and soon after joined the provincial 

militia. Patrolling the high Pyrenees passes 

between France and Spain, only thirty miles 

from Bedous, Pierre gained proficiency in 

Spanish and became a keen observer of 

cultural differences in that borderland of 

mixed populations. 

When he turned twenty-five, Laclede 

decided to pursue a merchant career in a 

transatlantic world of greater opportunities. 

With no prospects of inheriting his father’s 

fortune, he became a self-made entrepreneur, 

embracing the traditional Bearnais belief that 

every man had “wealth and power within 

himself,” but only “unremitting activity” 

would bring success and satisfaction. On 

June 7, 1755, the talented, multilingual 

swordsmen sailed from La Rochelle, exchanging 

the “grandeur and sublimity” of the 

Pyrenees Mountains for the steamy lowlands 

of Louisiana. Laclede departed from that 

port, rather than the closer City of Bordeaux, 

because the powerful, Protestant Rasteau 

family of La Rochelle had a dominant 

economic influence in New Orleans. Those 

transatlantic merchants were allied with 

Laclede’s future business partner and his 

attorney in Louisiana, and La Rochelle 

supplied the merchandise for the expedition 

that founded St. Louis. 

Laclede arrived in New Orleans as the 

French and Indian War began, and he became 

Left: The royal palace at Pau, birthplace 

and home of King Henri III of Bearn, 

who became Henri IV, King of France, as 

the first monarch of the Bourbon dynasty. 

Laclede studied nearby in the Jesuit 

school he founded, and his knowledge that 

Henri was a direct descendant of Saint Louis 

may have influenced the naming of his 

new settlement; nineteenth-century print in 

the author’s collection. 

Below: “Plan et Projet de la Nouvelle 

Orleans, August 9th, 1763”—dated one day 

before Laclede and Chouteau departed on 

the voyage to found St. Louis; nineteenthcentury 

facsimile in the author’s collection. 


1 5

Map of French Illinois settlements in the 

mid-1760s by British military surveyor/ 

cartographer Thomas Hutchins; from a 

1904 facsimile of his 1778 book in the 

author’s collection. 


16 

a business partner of Colonel Gilbert Antoine 

de St. Maxent, his commander in the Louisiana 

Militia. Maxent was a leading merchant and 

the government’s supplier of diplomatic 

gifts to dozens of allied native nations. 

He probably introduced Laclede to his Conti 

Street neighbor—Marie Thérèse Bourgeois 

Chouteau—whose husband had abandoned 

her and their young son, Auguste. Under the 

laws of Catholic France, she could neither 

divorce an absent husband nor remarry until 

his death. Considering herself “widowed,” 

she began a twenty-year liaison with Laclede 

that produced four children, all baptized with 

the Chouteau name for propriety’s sake. 

After the fall of Quebec and the surrender 

of Montreal, by 1760 New Orleans was 

France’s last unconquered capital in mainland 

North America. Officials there knew that 

Great Britain was certain to win the French 

and Indian War and control all lands east 

of the Mississippi River—including several 

French Illinois villages and the administrative 

capital at Fort de Chartres. Count Kerlérec, 

the Governor-General of Louisiana, had built 

that huge fortress and installed his brotherin-law, 

Major Pierre-Joseph Neyon de Villiers 

as Commandant of Illinois. Those two military 

heroes, who wore the coveted medal of 

the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis, 

along with leading New Orleans merchants 

and Director-General d’Abbadie, planned to 

build a new French regional capital on 

the west bank of the Mississippi to replace 

Fort de Chartres. The company of Maxent and 

Laclede received an official six-year monopoly 

on the furs of the Upper Mississippi and 

Missouri River valleys for privately funding 

several public projects at the new settlement. 

With a quarter share in that daring venture 

1,200 miles upriver, Laclede promoted Indian 

trade alliances to obtain the furs that would 

alleviate an economic depression in New 

Orleans; provided a new home for the 

Illinois French who refused to live under 

a military occupation by British Protestants; 

and protected the trans-Mississippi West 

from English invasion. 

Laclede headed upriver from New Orleans 

on August 10, 1763, with his teenaged 

stepson, Auguste Chouteau, while pro-French 

Indians were still battling British troops in 

Pontiac’s War. The partnership of the affluent, 

intellectual 34-year-old European and the 

poor, barely-educated 14-year-old Louisiana 

Creole represented a complementary convergence 

of different backgrounds and varying 

generations that provided unbroken continuity 

in the successful development of St. Louis until 

Chouteau died sixty-five years later! Those 

entrepreneurs did not take other residents of 

New Orleans with them as potential settlers, 

since the ideal founding families of St. Louis 

already lived in Illinois—veteran Canadians

and French Creoles acclimated to the region 

and used to daily interactions with African 

Americans, Indians, and metis in multicultural 

frontier communities. 

Reaching Illinois in early November after 

a voyage of eighty-five days, Laclede and 

Chouteau established a temporary home and 

company headquarters in the village adjoining 

Fort de Chartres. Just a few weeks later, 

in bone-chilling December weather, they 

explored the west bank of the Mississippi 

up to the mouth of the Missouri River, 

seeking an ideal site for Laclede’s new 

settlement. Fifteen miles south of that 

muddy convergence, they spotted a great 

mound rising thirty-two feet above a twomile-long 

limestone bluff. That strategic, 

flood-free site near the confluence of 

America’s two longest rivers (and close 

to the Illinois and Ohio Rivers, as well) 

was ideal for shipping heavy cargoes a 

thousand miles in every direction. That 

location also contained ample trees and 

abundant limestone for building, fresh 

water springs, and an extensive prairie 

for farming and pasturing livestock. 

Additional geological gifts nearby—salt 

for preserving animal skins, lead for 

making musket balls, iron for forging 

tools, surface coal for fuel, extensive clay 

pits for brick-making, and huge caves for 

cold storage—made Laclede’s location 

the best on the continent for contented 

residents pursuing large-scale, longrange 

fur trading. Such incomparable 

natural advantages allegedly caused 

Laclede to declare that his town “might 

eventually become one of the finest 

cities in America,” with the commercial 

clout and central location for “creating 

[other] settlements.” 

The most indispensable resource, 

however, was human: talented and loyal 

Osage hunters eager to trade for desirable 

European products of metal, cloth, and 

glass. Laclede could not have started or 

sustained a fur trade without a critical 

commercial alliance with that cooperative 

native nation. Long renowned by 

French Canadians as the “Masters of the 

Hunting Country” west of the Mississippi 

River, some 10,000 Osages possessed a huge 

animal empire of 100,000 square miles; a 

superior fighting force of some 2,000 mounted 

warriors to defend it; and expertise in procuring 

and processing all of the marketable mammals 

most desired in Europe. Historian Kathleen 

DuVal observed that the Osages were “far 

more successful than either France or Spain at 

building a mid-continental empire,” which 

encompassed most of present-day Missouri 

and large portions of Kansas, Oklahoma, and 

Above: The Big or Great Mound— 

La Grange de Terre (“barn of the 

earth”)—photographed by St. Louisan 

Thomas M. Easterly in the 1860s before 

it was destroyed. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE 

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS. 

Below: Osage Warrior, painted from life 

in 1806 by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret 

de Saint-Mémin when this Indian visited 

President Jefferson in Washington, D.C. 

He wears a “crown” of vulture beaks and 

a deer-and-porcupine quill “roach,” 

but his other adornments were imported 

trade goods: the metal armband and brooch 

around his ear, Delft spotted beads, a long 

white “hair pipe” of French porcelain, black 

silk from Detroit, and red vermilion body 

paint from China. In addition, European 

razors, knives, and scissors would have 

allowed him to remove all body hair 

(including eyebrows), as was traditional 

with Osage warriors. 

COURTESY OF THE WINTERTHUR MUSEUM. 


1 7

Above: Laclede Landing at Present Site 

of St. Louis (detail), by Oscar Edward 

Berninghaus, c. 1914. 


GIFT OF AUGUST A. BUSCH, JR. 

Below: Vincent Voiture [posing as] 

Saint Louis, by French painter Philippe 

de Champaigne, mid-seventeenth-century. 

Poet Voiture portrayed Louis IX, featuring 

items associated with the thirteenth-century 

crusading king: royal crown, fleur-de-lis 

scepter, ermine skin mantle, and Jesus 

Christ’s crown of thorns, remnants of which 

Louis allegedly brought from the Holy Land. 


FRIENDS FUND (719:1961). 

Arkansas. Thomas Jefferson and other credible 

eyewitnesses described Osage warriors as 

“most gigantic”—averaging about 6’6” in 

height. They were ruthless foes of rival tribes 

but reliable friends of the French, who made 

them “free men” able to make a living by 

providing European muskets over several 

decades. In 1725, an Osage chief was the 

honored guest of King Louis XV—Onontio, 

the “Great Father” in France—and his visit to 

the “other side of the sun” represented the 

mutual respect among devoted allies. 

The French and Indian War had curtailed 

shipments of new weapons, however, and the 

Osages welcomed Laclede because he could 

export their backlog of valuable furs to the 

best markets for guns and other premium 

products. That European gentleman with business 

acumen—a rare founder of a colonial 

American city who was not a nobleman, missionary, 

military leader, or buckskin-wearing 

hunter—succeeded in forging one of the 

longest, strongest, and most lucrative multi- 


18

ethnic commercial alliances ever. Fur trading 

was the only frontier enterprise that united 

Indians and Europeans in a mutually-desired 

peaceful partnership. Colonial St. Louisans were 

richly rewarded for befriending the Osages, 

earning their trust, valuing their talents, 

supplying their needs, and protecting their 

lands, liberties, and life-ways from hostile 

competitors that threatened financial ruin 

for everyone. The “English, Anglo-Americans, 

and Spanish nations have succeeded only in 

inspiring fear and alienation” among Indians, 

wrote a Parisian visiting Missouri in 1800, 

while the French nurtured their “affection.” 

Their “proximity to the Indians, the ease of 

communicating with them, [and] the need to 

…live in their villages in order to trade… 

had no small influence on the character of 

the colonists.” 

“Towns were the spearheads of the frontier,” 

wrote historian Richard Wade, and the “story 

of Western urbanism begins at St. Louis.” 

But Laclede and Chouteau were successful 

city founders because they recognized that 

“Western urbanism” really began with Indian 

mound-builders and that Native American 

towns were the sustaining sources of economic 

development before Europeans ever arrived. 

When Chouteau and thirty laborers from 

Illinois began building St. Louis on Wednesday, 

February 15, 1764, they did not displace any 

resident Indians. But the Osages identified 

with the familiar, welcoming symbolism of the 

St. Louis site because of the many Mississippian 

mounds. The Osages were known as “elevated 

mound people” and lived on high hilltops at 

their capital of Marais des Cygnes (“Swamp of 

Swans”) in southwestern Missouri. Claiming 

cultural connections with ancient moundbuilding 

societies, the Osage Nation in 2009 

purchased “Sugar Loaf” on Ohio Avenue—the 

last surviving Indian mound in the city limits 

of St. Louis—as the future site of an interpretive 

center about their heritage. 

The ambitious new town that was taking 

shape on a strategic section of the mighty 

Mississippi did not have a name for three 

months. While Chouteau’s construction crew 

cleared the land, Laclede had stayed in Illinois 

protecting his merchandise and recruiting 

new settlers. But he returned in the Spring, 

and according to Chouteau’s written recollections, 

on or near April 25, 1764—the 550th 

birthday of Saint Louis—Laclede named his 

town in honor of that crusading medieval 

monarch. The forty-three-year reign of 

King Louis IX was a golden age of art and 

architecture, education and charity, but Pope 

Boniface VIII canonized him because he led 

two crusades in the Holy Land and died there 

on August 25, 1270 (his Feast Day). Laclede 

hoped to flatter the current King Louis XV 

by honoring his patron saint, even though 

the medieval monarch’s killing of cultural 

aliens was incompatible with the goals of his 

namesake town in America. 

But Laclede wasted that self-serving 

compliment to the reigning French monarch 

because he had given western Louisiana, 

including the site of St. Louis, to his Bourbon 

cousin, King Carlos III of Spain, in November 

1762. The transaction was so secret that not 

even royal officials in New Orleans knew of 

it for twenty-two months, and St. Louisans 

only learned about that shocking situation in 

December 1764. Realizing that the Kingdom 

of France did not now protect its countrymen 

on either side of the Mississippi River, the 

twice-“orphaned” Illinois French reconciled 

themselves to the fact that St. Louis was built 

International boundaries following the 

French and Indian War, showing St. Louis 

in an imperial setting. “File: North America, 

1762-83” created by Jon Platek in 2008 and 

reproduced under the free use policy of 

Wikimedia Commons. 


1 9

First St. Louis Courthouse, built in 1770 

and used for a century; shown here in the 

1890s at Third and Plum Streets. Typical 

of most buildings in eighteenth-century 

St. Louis was Colonial French vertical log 

construction clearly seen here. Logs were 

hewn flat and either set directly in the 

ground or placed on sills. The spaces 

between the timbers were filled with clay 

and grass (bouzillage) or rubble stone and 

clay (pierrotage). Flat boards could then 

be applied, but most residences would be 

plastered and whitewashed, giving a more 

refined appearance for town living than the 

crude, horizontal-log cabins of frontier 

Americans in a forest. 

FROM A PRINT IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

on a legal bluff more gigantic than the city’s 

limestone one, and that they had to rely on 

one another to protect their property and 

livelihoods. New settlers continued to arrive 

steadily until late 1765, after Great Britain’s 

“Black Watch” regiment had reached Fort 

de Chartres. For almost two years, dozens of 

French Illinois families had dismantled their 

houses, salvaging “the boards, windows, and 

door frames, and everything else they could 

transport” and crossed the international 

boundary line of the Mississippi River to 

begin new lives in St. Louis. They brought 

something much more valuable than building 

materials—a heritage of multiethnic toleration 

living in racially-mixed societies. 

The “sensible and clever” Laclede was 

a pragmatic problem-solver who fashioned 

St. Louis into a true city by design, function, 

and significance, despite its small population. 

He laid out streets on a grid pattern like New 

Orleans, already conceiving his city as a thriving 

port serving a vast inland empire. By 

investing heavily in a grist mill and other 

buildings for the benefit of the community, 

Laclede enhanced the reputation of St. Louis 

as imaginatively conceived, innovatively 

developed, and immediately populated. 

But Laclede’s greatest legacy was encouraging 

his colonists, who already lived on free 

riverfront home sites, to govern themselves. 

The first Spanish lieutenant governor would 

not take up permanent residency in St. Louis 

until late 1770, giving Laclede’s colonists six 

years to design the society they desired— 

without an intrusive national government, 

a meddlesome local bureaucracy, a coercive 

military, or judgmental priests. As perhaps the 

freest European population anywhere in 

North America, early St. Louisans enjoyed 

unprecedented liberties, self-governance, and 

financial success, without the need for a 

constitution, a legislature, an army, police, 

judges, juries, jails, or lawyers to live 

comfortably, safely, and compatibly in Indian 

Country. The customary laws of Paris, 

Catholic teachings, peer pressure from closeknit 

families, and Creole traditions of neighborliness 

and camaraderie restrained serious 

violence among liquor-loving residents who 

built billiard parlors many years before they 

constructed a church. 


20

S T . L O U I S ’ S F O U N D I N G F A M I L I E S 

Beaugenou 

Becquet/Bequette 

Chancellier 

Chouteau 

Cotté 

Delin 

Dodier 

Gamache 

Hervieux 

Kierserau/Kiercerau dit (“known as”) Renaud 

Labrosse 

Laclede 

La Grain/La Grange 

Mainville dit Dechenes 

Marcheteau dit Desnoyers 

Martiqné/Martigny 

Mercier 

Picard 

Pichet 

Pothier 

Prunet dit La Giroflee 

Ride 

Rivière dit Bacuné 

Roi 

Salé dit La Joie 

Taillon/Tayon 

Laclede’s colonists maintained good relations 

with, and were actually protected by, 

some of the most feared Indian warriors 

in the West, because they were business 

partners who rejected the punitive European 

heritage of military conquest and coerced 

conversion of native nations. Created solely 

to make money, St. Louis represented an 

admirable, alternative western frontier of 

tolerant trade and tender ties with friendly 

“savages” in a civilized “wilderness” more 

profitable than dangerous. Even the town’s 

derogatory nickname of “Pain Court” (“meager 

bread”) became a badge of honor, since 

St. Louisans chose to cultivate good relations 

with Indians rather than to cultivate native 

lands that produced conflict and intruded on 

animal habitats. While farming gave the 

colonists “little or no gain,” commerce made 

“them rich”—but also dependent upon 

Indian hunters for the type, size, condition, 

and timely delivery of fur harvests. 

French residents and Spanish rulers used 

to different monarchs decided to respect a 

single king—the fur trade. As early as 1766, 

rival British merchants complained that 

Laclede’s town already dominated the “whole 

trade of the Missouri, of the Mississippi 

northwards, and of the Indian Nations near 

Lake Michigan”—far exceeding the profits 

expected by the New Orleans planners. 

Demonstrating the value of the Missouri 

Valley that the royal courts of Europe had 

discounted, the Osages and other Indians 

supplied Laclede with 625,000 pounds of 

furs between 1772-1775, including 215,000 

pounds of shaved, brain-tanned deer leather 

expertly manufactured by Osage women and 

Statue of Laclede by Jonathan Scott Hartley, 

1904, modeled on facial features of his 

nineteenth-century Chouteau descendants. 

Described by contemporaries as having a 

“commanding presence,” Laclede probably 

stood about 5’ 9”—short for Bearn—but a 

height that made him up to a foot taller 

than most of the French troops stationed at 

New Orleans in the mid-eighteenth century. 

PRINT FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


2 1

Right: Portrait of York by Michael Haynes 

(www.mhaynesart.com); used with 

permission of the artist. William Clark’s 

slave, York, made vital contributions to the 

Corps of Discovery and then spent several 

years in St. Louis. The author used this 

image to represent African Americans in 

colonial St. Louis, both slave and free, 

who worked in the fur trade as traders, 

voyageurs, or hunters. 

Opposite: Furs, Indian weapons, and 

European metal imports associated with 

French St. Louis’s commercial alliances with 

native nations; author photograph of objects 

in his collection. On the front cloth are an 

Indian trade musket and an early version of 

the “Missouri War Ax,” both from 

the 1790s. 

133,000 pounds of raw skins. Everyone knew 

that the Osages were the true “bankers” of 

the region, because their “buck”-skins served 

as St. Louis’s currency for decades. Until the 

Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the St. Louis 

fur trade averaged $220,000 per year in 

wholesale prices (half of the London retail 

price and equal to many millions today), 

with profit margins reaching 80 percent. 

The governor in New Orleans compared 

such vast wealth from furs to the gold and 

silver mines of Spanish America and declared 

that St. Louis was “one of the most populous, 

extensive, well-managed, and respectable of 

all settlements that have been established.” 

Spanish officials praised French St. Louis 

as the most “modern settlement” in all of 

Louisiana, and they were delighted to discover 

that collecting dead mammals was “very 

advantageous” in providing full employment; 

nurturing “the affection of the natives;” and 

preserving “Public Security.” A 1779 military 

census revealed that fur trading provided 

the sole livelihood for 67 percent of all 

St. Louis men—22 merchants, 17 traders, 

84 boatmen, and 24 hunters—not including 

a silversmith and a tailor who made items 

for Indians. Those who profited indirectly 

from the Indian trade included two bakers, 

two cobblers, a butcher, and a “musician.” 


22

The frequent presence of Osage hunterwarriors 

was nothing to fear, and since 

they preserved the peace and promoted the 

prosperity of their St. Louis partners, the 

young frontier town became famous as a most 

desirable “refuge of all the French,” especially 

those from traditional fur trading regions. 

As of 1780, 63 percent of adult males in the 

town had been born in Canada (137); 21 

percent (46) originated in the “Illinois Country,” 

including native-born St. Louisans; and a 

surprising 13 percent (29 men) emigrated 

from France—including wealthy, well-educated 

merchants known to Laclede. 


2 3

A C O L O R F U L C O L O N I A L C A P I T A L 

Americans today can appreciate the “modern” racial diversity in eighteenth-century 

St. Louis, inhabited by people of many hues, multiple heritages, and mixed bloodlines. 

In a 1787 Spanish census, analyzed by historian Peter K. Johnson, the small city contained 

896 whites, 188 blacks, and 83 “tan or colored” mixed bloods. 

A F R I C A N 

A M E R I C A N S 

One or more highly-respected and talented black pilots skillfully navigated the boat that 

brought Laclede and Chouteau from New Orleans in 1763, and eight years later, their new 

settlement had at least 124 African American slaves (74 males, 50 females)—totaling 25 

percent of the population. St. Louisans adhered to the 1724 French Code Noir [“Black Code”], 

as liberalized by Spanish officials. Those slave laws were more humane than racial policies 

in most Anglo-American colonies. Masters were required to feed and clothe their slaves 

properly and to care for those who were old, infirm, or sick. Officials encouraged the 

Catholic conversion of blacks and enduring slave marriages. It was illegal to split up slave 

spouses and their young children in separate sales. Slaves could attain their freedom, after 

which they enjoyed the same rights and privileges of other residents. “Slave tutors” were 

automatically considered “freemen.” 

Seven African Americans were slain and thirteen captured defending St. Louis from 

the British-Indian attack in May 1780. By 1800 the town had 269 black slaves and 67 free 

blacks, up from 37 in only nine years. Free African Americans included Joseph Neptune; 

Esther, a former slave who received a Spanish land grant; and the famous Jeanette Forchet, 

who owned a house and farm and married two black men, including Valentin, a gunsmith 

and Indian trader. 

N A T I V E 

A M E R I C A N S 

Indians from twenty different cultures, including Osages, Pawnees, Sioux, Omahas, 

Mesquakis, and at least one Mohawk, also lived in colonial St. Louis. In 1770 Indians 

comprised about 17 percent of the town’s population, with 69 (12 percent) being highlyvalued 

household slaves. In the late 1760s and early 1770s, 14 Native American slaves lived 

in the Laclede-Chouteau home alone. One of them, Therese, managed Madame Chouteau’s 

household for forty-six years before being freed in 1814. According to Johnson, in the 

1780s, about 10 percent of European households contained at least one Indian slave, and 

at least 15 white men had Indian wives. St. Louisans baptized 103 Native Americans in 

the 1770s alone, a third of all Indians baptized there until 1821. Historian Tanis Thorne has 

estimated that by 1800, at least one adult in 80 percent of St. Louis households may have 

had some Indian ancestry. 

As early as 1765, Laclede’s thriving town also 

became the mid-continental center of Indian 

diplomacy. That coincided with the arrival of 

Captain Louis Saint Ange de Bellerive, the last 

French commander at Fort de Chartres, who 

transferred his flag and the last twenty royal 

marines to St. Louis after surrendering that 

stone citadel to British troops. A Montreal 

native and a close friend of Chief Pontiac, Saint 

Ange had vast experience negotiating with 

many native nations. As the only French commandant 

in St. Louis history, Saint Ange worked 

with Laclede to create a hospitable, centrallylocated 

site where “red men could walk the 

white road” in the “clean earth” of a friendly 

village not “dirtied by bloodshed.” In most 

years, thirty-two tribes from the Siouan plains, 

Caddoan prairies, and Algonquian lakes sent 

diplomatic delegations to St. Louis—and stayed 

to shop, drink, and dance with residents— 


24

without any serious violence. In 1781, 130 

tribes from both sides of the Mississippi 

gathered in that “Indian Capital” to discuss the 

dire consequences of the successful American 

Revolution. In 1769, Saint Ange further solidified 

the special, Indian-friendly “spirit of 

St. Louis” by retrieving the corpse of Chief 

Pontiac, who had been murdered across the 

river. He had him buried in a French officer’s 

uniform coat under one of today’s major downtown 

intersections. That popular legend can 

neither be confirmed nor refuted, but it has long 

symbolized yet another pro-Indian connection 

among early St. Louisans, who like Pontiac, 

also hated, defied, and battled the British. 

In 1778, Laclede died suddenly and prematurely 

at the age of forty-nine. His fortune had 

diminished over the years, as he spent large 

sums improving his town and loaning money 

to residents. But he bequeathed a legacy of 

lifelong learning and talented leadership to 

his trusted stepson, Auguste Chouteau, and 

his only birth son, Jean Pierre Chouteau. With 

support from the Osages and two merchant 

in-laws from southwestern France—Sylvestre 

Labbadie and John Cabanné—the Chouteau 

brothers succeeded admirably as Indian traders 

and city fathers for decades to come. Auguste 

advised his accomplished descendants in the 

“Royal Family of the Wilderness” that the 

fur trade “requires…a complete knowledge of 

Indian customs, characters, habits, ways of 

living, [and] hunting, …without which one 

will always…fall from errors to errors.” 

“Trade Territory of St. Louis in the Late 

18th Century,” a map by James B. Musick 

in his St. Louis as a Fortified Town 

(self-published, 1941), between pp. 78-79. 

Author long deceased and copyright 

not renewed. 


2 5


26

L A C L E D E ’ S 

B O O K S H E L F 

Laclede imparted a legacy of cultural refinement to his little city, derived from his formative 

years when Enlightenment rationalism was a dominant influence in France. He was 

described as “very well educated,” and he used profits from dead animals to buy books to 

satisfy his curious mind. While living in St. Louis, he purchased 215 imported volumes in 

only fourteen years. His library included an impressive range of subjects: dictionaries in 

French, Spanish, and English; French, Spanish, and British histories; military codes and 

tactics; French, international, and maritime commerce; business finance and accounting; law 

and judicial studies; geography and geometry; theology and philosophy; anatomy, medicine, 

and surgery: engineering and hydrology; agronomy and botany; ancient histories of the 

Holy Land, Greece, and Rome; biographies of the Roman emperors; classic philosophical 

treatises by Bacon, Descartes, Locke, and Rousseau; political commentary by Addison and 

Steele; a surprisingly large number of plays and dramatic criticism; and a 1751 London 

edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity! 

The Chouteau brothers faced the most 

serious threat to St. Louis just two years after 

Laclede’s death. At the “Battle of St. Louis” 

on Friday, May 26, 1780, several hundred 

British-led Great Lakes Indians attacked the 

town of only 700 people. Suffering casualties 

of 7.5 percent (21 residents killed, 7 wounded, 

and 25 captured), St. Louisans drove off the 

jealous fur rivals to win the westernmost 

conflict of the American Revolution for Spain 

and its U.S. allies. That victory also prevented 

Great Britain from gaining control of the 

Mississippi River. With tempers flaring and 

spirits undaunted, some 147 French kin and 

neighbors, plus dozens of Indian allies, 

launched two successful revenge raids against 

British outposts along Lake Michigan in the 

winter of 1780-1781. 

Following its wartime triumphs, St. Louis 

emerged stronger than ever, enjoying enhanced 

prestige and greater prosperity as a maturing 

regional capital. By its twenty-fifth birthday 

in 1789, St. Louis was the oldest permanent 

French town on its original site in Upper 

Louisiana, thanks to Laclede’s ideal placement 

high above the river. The town of Ste. Genevieve 

had been destroyed in the Great Flood of 

1785, which forced a total evacuation and 

rebuilding miles away. St. Louis was also 

the largest French town in Upper Louisiana, 

with a population of 1,168 (200 more than 

“New” Ste. Genevieve). Its residents were 

“more wealthy” than other colonists, living 

in “200 Houses, most of…Stone,” that were 

“better built than [at] any Town on the 

Mississippi.” Even Anglo-Americans described 

St. Louis as “the handsomest and genteelist 

village” in Upper Louisiana and perhaps “the 

happiest on earth.” 

Opposite: Vintage volumes and antique 

spectacles (Laclede wore glasses in his 

later years). 

PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR FROM OBJECTS IN 

HIS COLLECTION. 

Below: Troops of the Spanish Louisiana 

Regiment in St. Louis, 1804, an 

original painting by Michael Haynes 

(www.mhaynesart.com) and used with 

permission. The captain, sergeant, 

drummer, and fusilier (with a 1757 musket) 

shown here in uniforms “almost identical to 

the way they had looked in 1769”—as well 

as 1780, when 34 troops from this regiment 

helped militiamen and civilians defend 

St. Louis against a British and Indian attack 

in “The Battle of St. Louis.” 


2 7

Above: The Mansion of Auguste Chouteau 

(c. 1794-1841), the grandest early house 

in the West, a view “engraved expressly” for 

[Richard] Edwards’s Great West and Her 

Commercial Metropolis, Embracing… 

A Complete History of St. Louis… 

(St. Louis, 1860), 534. 

Below: Bourbon St. Louis, with a French 

population but a Spanish commandant from 

1770 to 1804, is represented by these two 

coins from the 1760s—the larger one from 

France with the profile of King Louis XV, 

and the smaller one from Spain, issued 

by Carlos III. 

PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR FROM OBJECTS IN 

HIS COLLECTION. 


28 

In terms of colonial French architecture, 

St. Louis by 1795 was older than its mother 

city of New Orleans, due to two huge fires and 

three hurricanes that recently destroyed over 

a thousand buildings in the southern capital. 

Preserving the style of former French Louisiana 

plantation homes was the magnificent mansion 

of Auguste Chouteau. In the 1790s, he had 

thoroughly remodeled and dramatically 

expanded the original stone home he had 

built for Laclede in 1764. That showpiece of 

merchant affluence occupied an entire block in 

St. Louis’s city center, with large dimensions 

that were nearly identical to those of George 

Washington’s impressive “Mount Vernon.” 

Chouteau’s imposing “castle” served as a 

community hospitality center for visiting 

European nobles, Indian chiefs, and prominent 

American dignitaries for decades. The mansion 

had floors of black walnut; a crystal chandelier; 

a dining room with three large tables, 46 chairs, 

40 tablecloths, and 42 pounds of sterling silver 

eating utensils; 11 landscape paintings; framed 

portraits of Napoleon; a 600-volume library; 

and a fancy clock with a bust of Voltaire on top. 

Auguste shared the Laclede family’s affinity for 

that famous French philosopher, as well as his 

stepfather’s commitment to living well. 

Chouteau was able to afford that expensive 

lifestyle because of vastly increased fur profits 

in the 1790s, which the Spanish Bourbon 

regime facilitated. In building the trading outpost 

of Fort Carondelet (named for the Spanish 

governor) exclusively for the Osages in southwestern 

Missouri, Auguste and Pierre curtailed 

Indian raids on white farms and averted a 

Spanish war against their Osage friends and 

relatives. As a reward, the Chouteaus received 

an eight-year royal monopoly on all Osage furs, 

which amounted to nearly 60 percent of the 

entire Missouri Valley trade annually. In order 

to provide Osage customers and St. Louis consumers 

with luxurious products from London, 

the Chouteaus shipped the most expensive furs 

up the Illinois River and Lake Michigan to 

Michilimackinac. From there, British merchants 

took them to Montreal’s coffee house auctions.

Thanks to lax Spanish enforcement of 

smuggling laws, in 1794 alone the Chouteaus 

brought their Indian allies dozens of new 

muskets, 10,000 European-knapped gunflints, 

2,160 knives, 2,160 awls, 4,300 rings, 

70,000 trade beads, 670 virgin wool blankets, 

and 200 pounds of vermilion (mercuric 

sulfide red body pigment). St. Louisans 

enjoyed 2,000 pounds of Canadian maple 

sugar, 30 gallons of rum, 27 gallons of 

Madeira wine, 50 pounds of chocolate, 

30 pounds of Chinese tea, 108 pairs of 

Moroccan leather shoes; silk stockings; 

and fancy cloth products made in England, 

Ireland, Russia, Holland, and India. Pierre 

Chouteau purchased a custom-made saddle 

from Sam Beazley of London, with tacking, 

stirrups, and his initials all in sterling silver. 

The Chouteau brothers were true internationalists 

well in advance of modern globalization. 

Those French Creoles living under 

a Spanish flag used a German agent in 

London to procure trade goods from Europe 

and Asia; had them shipped to Scottish, 

Irish, Jewish, English, and French merchants 

in Canada; transported those cargoes to 

St. Louis by Algonquian birch-bark canoes; 

and engaged traders and voyageurs from 

many ethnic origins to deliver imported 

merchandise to a vast variety of native 

nations up to a thousand miles from 

St. Louis. The success of the Chouteaus also 

stimulated explorations far up the Missouri 

River by envious St. Louis competitors, 

such as Jacques Clamorgan, Manuel Lisa, 

James Mackay, and John Evans. 

The late 1790s represented the zenith of 

Bourbon St. Louis’s global commerce, as the 

wealth of the world poured into that tiny 

town suddenly grown to almost 2,500 

residents (a 78 percent increase). Flush 

with desirable consumer goods but 

needing to buy food for its non-farming 

business elites, the capital city of Upper 

Louisiana resembled the “hub” of a 

large wheel, with “spokes” connecting 

it to several surrounding agricultural 

villages that provided sustenance. The 

international fur trade stimulated a 

flourishing, diversified regional economy 

involving 3,300 residents, who, 

F O R E I G N E L I T E S I N A F R O N T I E R C I T Y 

“St. Louis was always remarkable,” observed a nineteenth-century American, 

“for the degree of gentility among the better sort of its inhabitants.” Among 

European-born notables who settled in late eighteenth-century St. Louis were: 

Gabriel Cerre, a wealthy Montreal-born merchant with London connections. 

Jacques Ceran de St. Vrain, the merchant brother of the Spanish commandant. 

Charles de Hault de Lassus, a Flanders-born Frenchman, who was Spain’s last 

Lieutenant Governor of St. Louis. 

Pierre Francois de Volsay, Paris-born army officer and member of the Royal and 

Military Order of Saint Louis. 

Father Pierre Joseph Didier, procurator of the Abbey Church of St. Denis, Paris. 

Louis Chauvet Dubreuil, French merchant son of a La Rochelle attorney. 

Charles Gratiot, Swiss-born French Huguenot trading with London and Canada. 

Joseph Hortiz, a well-educated Spanish native; secretary to lieutenant governors. 

Sylvestre Labbadie from Tarbes near Bearn, the richest St. Louis merchant by 1794. 

Marie Philippe Leduc, Paris-born officeholder with extensive legal expertise. 

Dr. Claude Mercier, a physician and surgeon from France. 

Charles Sanguinet, son of a Quebec notary and avid book collector. 

Dr. Antoine Francois Saugrain, a Paris surgeon related to Guillotine who knew 

Jefferson and Franklin and introduced smallpox vaccinations in the West. 

Antoine Soulard, a French navy veteran and the royal surveyor in Upper Louisiana. 

Benito Vasquez, an army adjutant and merchant from Galicia, Spain. 

Giuseppe Maria Francesco (Francis) Vigo, an Italian-born Spanish fur trader who 

helped fund the American Revolutionary expeditions of George Rogers Clark. 

in 1796, produced 75,000 bushels of maize, 

35,000 bushels of wheat, 25,000 pounds 

of tobacco, 219,000 pounds of lead, and 

6,000 bushels of salt, while pasturing 

4,000 cattle and 600 horses. Laclede’s 

original prediction that St. Louis’s “central 

position” would stimulate other settlements 

had come true, and his foresight was 

reflected in the late twentieth-century motto 

of the Regional Chamber and Growth 

Association: “St. Louis, Perfectly Centered, 

Remarkably Connected.” 

St. Louis in 1796; detail of the map, 

“Plan de la Ville de St. Louis Des Illinois,” 

by Georges de Maillard de Bois Saint Lys to 

accompany the published journals of French 

General Victor Collot in that year. 

REPRODUCED WITH PICTORIAL EDITING FROM 

A 1907 PRINT IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


2 9

L A C L E D E ’ S L A S T I N G L E G A C I E S 

He was an entrepreneur and an explorer who made business the priority of St. Louis 

He co-founded the Chouteau Dynasty that remained influential for many generations 

He commanded the expedition that founded St. Louis 

He selected an incomparably strategic town site, significant for commerce ever since 

He gave his town a name of fame, which has never changed 

He laid out a grid system of streets considered “modern” in 1764 

He linked the destinies of New Orleans and St. Louis as river capitals 

He established a very successful, long-term fur trade for economic stability 

He was a master of Indian diplomacy, achieving a key and long-lasting Osage alliance 

He created a tolerant, enlightened “Indian Capital” for multi-tribal diplomacy 

He helped keep the British out of the trans-Mississippi West 

He assisted Spanish officials, earning their trust by speaking their language 

He recruited the perfect settlers for a multicultural trading town 

He promoted unprecedented freedoms and self-governance among residents 

He recruited diverse immigrants, while making St. Louis a “refuge of all the French” 

He promoted French culture, civility, literacy, and affluent consumerism 

He made St. Louis a bookish, intellectual frontier city of great libraries and avid readers 

He invested a fortune in city buildings, amenities, merchandise, and loans to residents 

He encouraged confidence by his steady, consistent, and rational decision-making 

Walnut Armoire made in St. Louis, 

c. 1765 to 1790, by Jean Baptiste Ortes 

(from Laclede’s hometown of Bedous). 

PHOTOGRAPH BY CARY HORTON; COURTESY OF 

THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS 

(OBJ:1905 013 0001). 

The highly successful boom town of buckskins 

disproved the Jeffersonians’ belief that 

“primitive” Indian hunting “only afforded a precarious 

subsistence” and could never support 

a sophisticated society. The alliance between 

astute merchants and accomplished Indian 

allies had made St. Louis the most prosperous, 

peaceful frontier city in America long before the 

Louisiana Purchase. That “center of manners, 

urbanity, and elegance” supported full employment 

and even cultivated “the fine arts,” as 

a Parisian intellectual noted. The affluence of 

St. Louis’s consumer society in the last decade of 

the eighteenth century challenged the frontier 

stereotypes of crude cabins, deficient diets, 

and scarce schooling, as increasing numbers of 

distinguished Europeans, with excellent educations, 

expensive tastes, and enormous talents, 

moved to that remote little center of “refinement 

and fashion” funded by mammal skins. 

Increasing numbers of Anglo-American 

backwoodsmen also moved near the St. Louis 

area in the late 1700s, including Daniel Boone 

and his extended family. They came from a 

violent trans-Appalachian frontier that contradicted 

the tolerant, Indian-friendly conduct of 

St. Louisans. Elite French families feared 

“brawling” Kentuckians, as “too Numerous 

[and] too Lawless…ever to be restrained”— 

loathing that “plague of locusts” determined 

to “gain all the vast continent occupied by the 

Indians.” But Anglo-Americans have always 

loved their frontier fighters. A hero-worshipping 

writer in 1829 characterized Boone as 

one of the prominent “riflemen of the west, 

the daring sons of the forest, to whom danger 

was sport, hardship was pastime, death was 

nothing, and glory everything.” Such mythmaking 

has never died. Historian R. Douglas 

Hurt recently wrote that Boone “epitomized 

the frontiersman” as “an excellent hunter 

and trapper,” who led western pioneers to 

“a dangerous frontier” and protected them 

with “his rifle, courage, and leadership.” 

But killing Indians was a cruel and uncreative 

solution to intercultural conflicts, compared 

to St. Louis’s alternative frontier policies 

that generated lucrative exports in partnership 

with Indians, while never profiting from 

genocide. Laclede and other Catholic businessmen 

demonstrated all of the capitalistic 

achievements erroneously believed to be 

exclusive to the “Protestant Ethic.” They also 

shared the stereotypical “frontier traits” of 

Anglo-Americans—self-reliance, individualism, 

and personal freedom—without slaughtering 

their native neighbors. Rather than venerating 

buckskin-wearing baby-killers of the backwoods 

as national heroes, citizens in today’s 

complex and increasingly dangerous multicultural 

world could learn some lessons 

from Laclede. He may have been the ideal 

frontiersman, because he promoted interethnic 

commerce while rejecting blood-thirsty 

prejudices that destroyed Indians and dispossessed 

them of their homelands. That talented, 

tolerant French explorer was more insightful, 

progressive, and compassionate than the 

“American heroes” who practiced “wilderness 

savagery” from sea to sea. While Americans 

then and now have typically ranked the success 

of our society based on its victories, colonial 

French St. Louisans took a more humane 

approach and judged a society by its victims. 

While Boone’s brawn epitomized the heritage 

of rural Missouri, Laclede’s brain created 

a civilized, non-violent, and economically 

advanced city in his century that remains a 

marvel of creativity and compassion to this day. 


30

The 1914 Statue of Laclede by George 

Julian Zolnay, photographed with the Civil 

Courts Building and The Bell Telephone 

Building in the background; no date. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY 

MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS. 


3 1

Detail from the John Mitchell Map of 1755, 

one of several versions in the Library of 

Congress; pictorial editing of a reprint in the 

author’s collection. That British cartographer 

anticipated the Paris treaties of 1763, 1783, 

and 1803 in which “Greater Virginia” 

expanded aggressively westward into 

French and Spanish territory according to 

its early seventeenth-century sea-to-sea 

royal charters. 

“The time is not far distant…when the uncultivated wilds of the interior part of the continent, 

which is now only inhabited by the tawny sons of the forest, …will be exchanged for… 

agriculture…[and] turn those sterile wildernesses into rich, cultivated…fields.” 

–American William Fisher, 1812 


EXPLORING ST. LOUIS AS 

CAPITAL OF THE AMERICAN WEST 

On the evening of August 6, 1803, St. Louisans received sudden and shocking news when an 

American courier arrived from Vincennes and delivered a dispatch to Carlos Dehault Delassus, 

the last Spanish lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana. It was a note from General William 

Henry Harrison, the Virginia-born governor of the Indiana Territory, announcing “the entire 

cession of New Orleans and the whole of Louisiana to the United States.” As darkness descended 

on that distressful evening, the Chouteau clan feared that their extensive fortune and expansive 

family had reached the twilight of their dominance under Bourbon administrators. 


32

The bitter disappointment of being sold 

to the Americans was considerably magnified 

because French St. Louisans had spent 

the previous nine months anticipating a 

“golden age” of cultural rebirth and expanded 

commerce under Emperor Napoleon. He had 

reclaimed the Louisiana territory from Spain 

in 1800, but his ambitious plans for a new 

French-American empire were dashed by a 

successful slave revolution in Haiti and war 

with Great Britain. Those St. Louisans who 

remembered being abandoned by France in 

1763 especially resented Napoleon’s insincere 

“regret” in not reuniting with “those who 

have been Frenchmen.” When U.S. officials 

replaced the national banners of Spain and 

France with the stars and stripes in the March 

1804 “Three Flags Ceremony,” it seemed like 

a final, bitter surrender to Anglo-Americans. 

An eyewitness reported that “the cheers of 

the [French] crowd were faint and few, as 

many, many of the people shed bitter tears of 

regret at being transferred…to a strange 

government, with whose manners, habits, 

language, and laws they were not familiar.” 

It was Captain Amos Stoddard, the first U.S. 

commandant in St. Louis—not Napoleon— 

who expressed his delight with St. Louis in 

1804: “The town contains about 200 houses, 

mostly very large and built of stone; it is 

elevated and healthy, and the people are 

rich and hospitable; they live in a style equal 

to those in the large seaport towns, and I 

find no want of education among them.” 

Despite an anti-Indian prejudice that refused 

to credit the Osages for St. Louis’s success, 

Stoddard predicted that the city would 

“soon become a star of no 

inconsiderable magnitude in 

the American constellation.” 

And he was right. Even 

though American officials 

originally regarded New 

Orleans as the most desirable 

city in the Louisiana Purchase 

Territory, St. Louis would 

prove far more influential 

in developing the potential 

of that gift from Napoleon. 

The Louisiana Purchase 

was a transformative event 

that quickly revolutionized and completely 

traumatized French and Indian populations in 

the West. The acquisition and initial, partial 

exploration of those 828,000 square miles 

Left: Portion of the “Town Layout in 1804,” 

by Dr. Robert Moore of the National Park 

Service at the Gateway Arch. 

USED WITH PERMISSION. 

Below: Nineteenth-century portrait of 

Auguste Chouteau. 

COURTESY, MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (1869 001 0001). 


3 3

Meeting the Cajaux, June 8, 1804, 

painting by Michael Haynes 

(www.mhaynesart.com) and used with 

permission. As Lewis and Clark headed up 

the Missouri River, they passed several 

French fur convoys on their way to St. Louis 

in a variety of vessels, including the lashed 

together canoes seen here and another boat 

paddled by an Indian woman—all loaded 

with animal skins from a thousand 

miles away. 


34 

were accomplished by Virginians to benefit 

Virginia, which claimed sea-to-sea sovereignty 

via royal English charters to the Jamestown 

founders. Two centuries of westward expansion 

followed, as land-hungry Virginia frontiersmen 

invaded Indian homelands and created terrortories 

of terrible atrocities to procure the 

fresh, fertile lands needed to grow their soildestroying 

tobacco. By 1774, Spanish Louisiana 

was already called the “Western Parts of 

Virginia,” and after George Rogers Clark’s 

invasion of British Illinois four years later, 

there was a “Fort Jefferson” on the Ohio River 

and a Randolph County (named for the family 

of Jefferson’s mother) across from St. Louis. 

Despite old animosities and continuing 

misgivings, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau were 

determined to remain rich and relevant by 

demonstrating their usefulness to President 

Jefferson and his fellow Virginia “Sovereigns 

of the Country” who administered St. Louis. 

By 1803, Virginia was being called a “new 

Rome.” It was already the largest state in area 

(117,000 square miles) and population, with 

514,000 whites and 346,000 black slaves, 

and its leading aristocratic revolutionaries 

were on their way to monopolizing the U.S. 

presidency for 32 of the first 36 years of the 

new nation. 

Accepting the reality that numerical 

superiority, military supremacy, and commercial 

indispensability had shifted from the Osages 

to the Americans, Laclede’s heirs volunteered 

their services as city leaders, political advisors, 

multilingual diplomats, treaty negotiators, 

and liaisons with other French residents. 

The potential to exert greater influence on 

a grander scale convinced the pragmatic 

capitalist, Auguste Chouteau, to write his 

famous “Narrative of the Founding of 

St. Louis” in 1804—informing U.S. officials 

about the indispensable role his founding 

family should continue to play. According to 

historian Jay Gitlin, those “French founders 

are still celebrated today,” because they 

literally “earned a place in the city they had 

created,” allowing St. Louis to avoid “the 

marginalization that was the fate of other 

non-Anglo communities” taken over by the 

United States.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition broke the 

ice with formerly resentful French merchants, 

who supplied the Corps of Discovery with 

several skilled boatmen, essential merchandise, 

valuable advice, and even maps of the 

Missouri River made a decade earlier. But 

St. Louisans did not condone the prejudicial 

attitudes and hostile actions of the Expedition 

commanders toward Indians that reflected 

Virginia’s traditional frontier bellicosity. The 

Corps of Discovery killed two Indians 

and threatened countless others. Lewis 

and Clark expected “Father” Jefferson’s 

dependent “red children” to “Demean 

themselves towards our government” 

and “readily yield their exclusive 

friendship to those whose Power 

they Dread.” Those commanders, who 

carried special surveyors’ compasses 

that Indians called “land stealers,” 

forged the “future path of civilization” 

that would all too soon “receive… 

the overflowing tide of our own 

population.” The one million words 

that Lewis and Clark wrote in their 

travel journals encouraged generations 

of Americans to exploit a future white 

West after it was emptied of native 

populations and traditions that had 

made French St. Louis so successful. 

After traveling over 8,000 miles 

in twenty-eight months, the Corps 

of Discovery ended triumphantly at 

St. Louis on September 23, 1806. 

Acknowledging Laclede’s ideal town 

location, Lewis and Clark made 

St. Louis the first capital of the 

American West—and their new home. 

Lewis became territorial governor, 

while Clark was chief of Indian affairs, 

and together they altered the traditional 

trade and native relations of French St. Louis. 

Most of present-day Missouri was to be 

cleared of Indians to make room for voting 

American farmers, while fur trading beyond 

its borders was permitted for the time being 

with more stringent bureaucratic regulations. 

President Jefferson viewed Indian commerce 

as a coercive means to deprive native nations 

of their homelands. He planned to have 

“good and influential” Indians “run into debt” 

with white traders, forcing them to surrender 

tribal territories to eliminate those obligations. 

Once native territories were too small for 

productive hunting, Indian males would 

have to become “civilized” plow- farmers—or 

starve. Historian Woody Holton observed 

that Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” was 

designed to benefit whites, and “there could 

be no empire without the extermination of 

Indians that blocked its path.” 

Lewis and Clark’s revolutionary policies 

for the Far West encouraged white trappers 

to harvest beavers in the Rocky Mountains— 

stealing those valuable resources without 

sharing the profits with native hunters. The 

Corps commanders had discovered prime 

beaver pelts in those high altitudes of the 

U.S. West that finally matched the quality of 

Canadian ones in northern latitudes, and 

they created a beaver boom upon their return 

Beaver pelts in every size and color from the 

Fausz family collection. 


3 5

The expulsion of all Indians by 1830 from 

the new State of Missouri was represented 

in this illustration from Ballou’s Pictorial 

newspaper of Boston on July 28, 1855. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

to St. Louis. In 1807, Clark and Lewis’s 

brother became partners with Manual Lisa, 

Pierre Chouteau, Sr., and other investors, in 

the new “St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.” 

Governor Lewis procured a $7,000 federal 

grant to fund one upriver trapping 

expedition, and that conflict of interest in 

using his public office to enhance the private 

profits of friends would ultimately doom 

the Osages. 

Even though Osage furs were still 

lucrative, deerskins could not compete with 

beaver pelts in profitability. As both explorers 

and administrators, Lewis and Clark made 

the Osages expendable, because their 

territory—“immense tracts of fine Country” 

that were “much more fertile” than Virginia— 

now had greater value than their trade. 

The Osages were victims of their own 

success in making French St. Louis a 

profitable town that proved so appealing 

to land-hungry Anglo-Americans. The 

native allies of Laclede and Chouteau 

generously shared their precious wisdom of 

the West with President Jefferson’s fellow 

Virginians, who used that knowledge to 

undermine Osage hegemony and to diminish 

their legacy. 

Jefferson was determined to make the 

United States the supreme power beyond 

the Mississippi, but he could not risk 

an immediate confrontation with the 


36

A M O T L E Y M I X O F M I G R A N T S 

While the Americans forced out native populations, the Louisiana Purchase encouraged an influx of new white residents from 

across the country, which perpetuated a different type of multiculturalism than colonial St. Louis. 

U.S. General James Wilkinson arrived at St. Louis in July 1805 as governor of Upper Louisiana. Theodore Roosevelt wrote that 

“in all our history, there is no more despicable character.” He was already controversial, having been implicated in army plots against 

General Mad Anthony Wayne and even George Washington and would survive several courts martial. In September 1805, Aaron Burr, 

Jefferson’s former vice president, met with Wilkinson at St. Louis, allegedly to discuss the treasonous plot to create their own western 

empire. General Wilkinson’s controversial and contentious tenure as governor ended in August 1806, after which it was revealed that 

he had been a well-paid Spanish spy for years and plotted to destroy the Lewis and Clark Expedition! 

Sacagawea came to St. Louis to visit her Shoshone-French son, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau (“Pomp”), being raised by William Clark. 

Baptized by a Trappist monk in 1809, with Auguste Chouteau serving as his godfather, Pomp studied at the Catholic academy that 

evolved into Saint Louis University. At nineteen, he accompanied the Duke of Wurttemberg on his western travels and lived in Europe 

from 1823 to 1829. He spent the next four decades as a valued western guide, conversant in English, French, Spanish, German, and 

several native languages. 

Clark’s slave, York, lived in St. Louis after his valuable contributions as the only African American member of the Lewis and 

Clark Expedition. 

Captain Joseph Conway, a friend of Daniel Boone, had fought Indians in Ohio, where he had been shot three times and scalped 

three times but killed seven warriors. 

Judge James Hawkins Peck from Tennessee literally delivered “blind justice” by conducting court while wearing a blindfold. 

Massachusetts-born fur trader Russell Farnham took the longest route to St. Louis, traveling from the Columbia River by way of 

the Bering Strait, St. Petersburg, Paris, and an Atlantic crossing, to deliver British bank drafts to John Jacob Astor in New York City 

before arriving here as a suspected British spy captured in the Great Lakes. 

“great nation” of the populous Osages. The 

president was respectful in his 1804 meeting 

with Osage chiefs—the first Indians in the 

Louisiana Purchase Territory to visit him. 

But he grew more aggressive by 1806, after 

they had obeyed him by not retaliating 

against the vicious attacks of tribal enemies. 

Once the Osages began behaving like 

“Quakers,” the emboldened president 

demanded that they abandon their traditional 

homeland—or else. Americans, he threatened, 

“are strong, we are numerous as the stars 

in the heavens, and we are all gun-men” 

who “do not fear any nation.” 

Indian artifacts representative of those in 

Clark’s Indian Museum on Main Street, 

St. Louis. 



3 7

U.S. government gifts to Indians. 

As Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 

St. Louis, William Clark chose this cotton 

fabric and other designs, as official gifts 

to native delegations. The tomahawk is 

marked “USID” (Indian Department) 

and was given to tribes as a treaty gift. 

Author’s photograph of his artifacts. 

In 1808, Governor Lewis suddenly 

suspended trade with the Osages, falsely 

accusing them of killing white settlers. He 

threatened a war of extermination using their 

many Indian enemies unless they signed the 

controversial Treaty of Fort Osage. Several 

intimidated Osage chiefs ceded 52,480,000 

acres of their traditional territory to the U.S. 

government, receiving only a fraction of a 

cent per acre. Having never warred with the 

Americans, the Osages were shocked to be 

the first western Indians dispossessed of their 

homelands and the only ones forced to 

abandon a still-profitable fur trade. In the 

Second Treaty of St. Louis in June 1825, 

Clark took the last 40,000 square miles of 

Osage lands and soon forced them to leave 

the state they had helped create. 

St. Louis under the Americans remained 

the center of Indian diplomacy in the West. 

An eyewitness in the 1820s described how 

Indians, “a hundred or more at a time” would 

“promenade down our Main Street in Indian 

file,” including bare-legged chiefs wearing 

U.S. army officer coats and “military hats 

with plumes,” while warriors, draped in 

“Mackinaw blankets,” each carried “a flaming 

scarlet umbrella…in one hand and…a palm 

leaf fan in the other.” They headed for 

William Clark’s Indian Council Chamber 

and museum of Indian curiosities on North 

Main Street. The museum was described as 

“the most complete” collection of Native 

American artifacts and portraits in white 

hands “anywhere in the United States” that 

early. In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette was 

very impressed by what he saw—especially 

the grizzly claw necklace—as were other 

European elites of the era who were 

fascinated by Native American cultures. 

Although the Indian items collected by “Red- 

Headed Chief” Clark honored indigenous 

cultures in one sense, his filing cabinets 

were filled with treaties documenting the 

419,000,000 acres he wrested from the 

homelands of many western tribes. 

Clark’s rapidly rising career symbolized 

the new opportunities for U.S. army officers 

in St. Louis. The town’s strategic site made it 

an ideal launching point for new explorations. 

In 1805, Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike left 

there in an unsuccessful attempt to seek the 

source of the Mississippi River. With soldiers 

from Fort Bellefontaine, a U.S. army base 

north of St. Louis, Pike then led an 1806-07 

expedition to the Arkansas and Red Rivers, 

eventually reaching the Rio Grande. A dozen 

years later, Major Stephen H. Long left 

from St. Louis to map present-day Kansas 

and Nebraska—establishing a precedent by 

taking artists Samuel Seymour and Titian 

Peale to paint exquisite scenery that helped 

Americans to visualize the West. 

During the War of 1812 army personnel 

from Fort Bellefontaine protected the town 

from British and Indian invasion. In 1813 

Clark led a successful raid on the pro-British 

Sauk and Fox stronghold at Prairie du Chien 

(Wisconsin) with 60 soldiers and 140 St. Louis 


38

militiamen. Following the war, Clark, 

Auguste Chouteau, and Ninian Edwards 

of Illinois, negotiated new treaties with 

thousands of Indians from twenty-nine native 

nations assembled at Portage des Sioux. 

The necessity to document such federal 

Indian treaties with legal precision 

symbolized the increasing influence of 

American attorneys in a French town that 

never had any use for that profession. 

Legions of U.S. lawyers also thronged to 

St. Louis to litigate contested Spanish land 

grants, with a mostly negative impact on the 

French founding families. For at least half 

a century after the Louisiana Purchase, 

“lawyering” provided upward social mobility 

for Americans in Missouri, whose training in 

English common law, rather than the nowobsolete 

French civil law, gave them a distinct 

advantage in courtrooms and political 

campaigns. In 1808, Virginia-born Frederick 

Bates, a St. Louis judge and future Missouri 

governor, produced a 372-page Compilation 

of the Laws of the Territory of Louisiana—a 

milestone of territorial maturity. It was printed 

in St. Louis by Irishman Joseph Charless, 

who, that same year, began publishing the 

Missouri Gazette and Louisiana Advertiser, 

the first newspaper in the West. 

Political institutions also reflected the 

maturation of St. Louis, which was officially 

incorporated as an American “town” in 1809. 

The first elected trustees represented a cultural 

confluence, as Auguste and Pierre Chouteau 

and brother-in-law Bernard Pratte served with 

Edward Hempstead (a Connecticut lawyer 

who married into the French Dubreuil family) 

and Alexander McNair (a former army officer 

from Pennsylvania). They established the 

first “police patrol” and set curfews for a 

diverse and potentially disruptive population 

that included Indians, “bragging” Mississippi 

boatmen, Canadian voyageurs, and rifle-toting 

Kentucky hunters. 

In 1815 old French elites formed the 

“Little Junto” dominated by the Chouteau 

brothers and their commercial kinsmen: 

Pratte, Charles Gratiot, John P. Cabanné, 

Sylvestre Labbadie, and Gregoire Sarpy. 

They sought to have their extensive Spanish 

land grants confirmed and favored fur 

A N “ O R N A M E N T E D C I T Y ” I N A N E W S T A T E 

In the year that statehood was achieved, St. Louis had 651 homes—232 built 

of stone or brick—with 108 new dwellings constructed in the last six years alone. 

The 1821 St. Louis Directory and Register, compiled by John A. Paxton, recorded 

the current status of Missouri’s “commercial metropolis.” Despite an economic 

recession from 1819 to 1823, the town featured: 

Thriving Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Methodist congregations; 

Saint Louis College with 65 students using Bishop DuBourg’s 8,000-book library; 

10 common schools; 

5 weekly newspapers, several printers, and a bookstore; 

a portrait-painter “who would do credit to any country”; 

“professional musicians” who played at balls to encourage “healthy” dancing; 

2 “cordial distillers” and candy-makers; 

12 tailors, 3 hatters, 13 shoemakers, 5 jewelers, and at least one watch-maker; 

4 hair-dressers, several perfumers, and a comb factory; 

46 “mercantile establishments” trading with the “distant parts of the Republic”; 

27 attorneys; 

a hospital, 13 doctors, 3 midwives, and 3 druggists; 

57 grocers and 4 bakers; 

3 gunsmiths; 

8 large inns/hotels, plus many boarding houses; 

6 livery stables, 3 saddlemakers, 9 blacksmiths, and 3 coach builders; 

a ferry to Illinois and stages running to Edwardsville and Franklin; 

2 brickyards, 2 potteries, a nail factory, a tannery, and 3 soap and candle manufacturers; 

28 carpenters, 3 masons, 14 brick-layers, 13 furniture makers, and 10 house painters; 

4 “Coopers, Block, Pump, and Mast-makers”; 

5 billiard parlors, each paying $100 in annual state and city taxes; 

one brewery “of a quality equal to any in the western country”; 

2 beer gardens for “entertainment and recreation”—one atop an Indian mound, 

and a theatre at 72 North Main Street. 

trading over extensive farming. Those French 

town leaders were supported by General 

Clark and his nephew, John O’Fallon, along 

with Hempstead and McNair, who were 

sympathetic to those priorities. Opponents of 

the Junto included John B. C. Lucas, Joseph 

Charless, Rufus Easton, William Russell, and 

David Barton, who supported American real 

estate speculators and increasing the number 

of immigrant farmers. 

Such political rivalries among local luminaries 

took on greater importance as statehood 

approached. Meeting in St. Louis’s Mansion 

House Hotel, a constitutional convention 

produced a draft document by July 1820. 

With representation based on population, 

St. Louis dominated the proceedings with 


3 9

An 1820 Bank of Missouri $10 Note, signed 

by president Auguste Chouteau. It portrays 

Thomas Jefferson as a Roman emperor, 

but with French St. Louis’s symbols of 

commerce, rather than the president’s 

preference for agriculture. 


18 percent of the delegates, including: David 

Barton (who presided over the convention), 

Virginian Edward Bates (the future first attorney 

general), fur traders Pierre Chouteau, Jr., 

and Bernard Pratte, Alexander McNair 

(the state’s first governor), General William 

Rector (U.S. army surveyor), banker Thomas 

Riddick, and John C. Sullivan (a justice of 

the county court). 

Eighteen years after the Louisiana Purchase, 

Missouri entered the Union as the twentyfourth 

state on August 10, 1821—the first 

one located entirely west of the Mississippi 

and also have a bilingual constitution in 

French and English. The new state had a 

population of 56,000 whites, mostly from 

Virginia and Kentucky, and 10,000 black 

slaves, representing 19 percent of the state’s 

population and 15 percent of St. Louis’s. 

Missouri would be the northernmost slave 

state in the West—as mandated by the 

Missouri Compromise of 1820—sharing a 

southern border with Virginia and Kentucky 

at a latitude of 36 degrees, 30 minutes, as 

predicted by the Mitchell map of 1755. 

But Virginians had compromised the 

Bourbon culture of St. Louis long before 

statehood, making an Indian-friendly city 

into the capital of a white-dominated state 

cleared of Native Americans. That cultural 

victory was apparent when Missouri’s new 

state capital and St. Louis’s latest army base 

were both named for Jefferson in 1826, the 

year he died. By mid-century, St. Louisans 

universally praised the once-contentious 

Louisiana Purchase, regarding it as a “Happy 

Annexation,” without which, their city 

“would be in everything at least a quarter 

century behind where we are now.” Most of 

the old French families were reconciled with 

Americanization, widely praising Jefferson, 

whose “pen gave freedom to the eastern half 

of our republic, and his diplomacy united it 

to the other half.” Today, Missouri has more 

monuments honoring Jefferson, including his 

original tombstone on the Mizzou campus, 

than any state except Virginia. 

The past of Virginia had become the future 

of Missouri because, despite their different 

religions, languages, laws, and cultures, the 

French founders and American administrators 

shared two traditional socioeconomic 

goals: perpetuating race-based black slavery 

and profiting from all natural resources in the 

West. From 1804 to 1816, Virginians represented 

the largest group of Anglo-Americans 


40

(30 percent) who migrated to Missouri, and 

three of the first four Missouri governors 

had been born in Virginia. Of the next seven 

governors down to 1857, two were Virginians, 

while the other five came from the Virginiainfluenced 

trans-Appalachian frontier states 

of Kentucky and Tennessee. For many decades, 

the most prominent leaders throughout 

Missouri had all been born somewhere else. 

“The most obvious result of Americanization 

in St. Louis,” wrote historian James Neal Primm, 

“was deplorable public behavior.” There was 

a growing acceptance of increasing violence, 

as illustrated by the measly $500 fine levied 

against an 1840 murderer who had beaten a 

newspaper editor to death with an iron cane. 

Primm observed that such violence was 

not attributable to the “wild” frontier, since 

“St. Louis was no longer the frontier”—“it 

had been less violent when it was.” From the 

1820s to the 1840s, a growing number of gun 

shops opened in St. Louis after the removal 

of so-called “hostile savages” out of Missouri. 

On sale in St. Louis were a large variety of 

dueling pistols, “pocket” guns, “desperate” 

knives, sword canes, daggers, Bowie knives 

with pistol attached (“which will shoot and 

cut at the same time”), self-cocking revolving 

pistols that fired “6 times in only 4 seconds,” 

and even small cannons for personal use. 

Ironically, the Hawken advertisement for 

firearms adjoined one for grave stones, and 

both businesses were located on Washington 

Avenue. Ads from the St. Louis Business 

Directory for 1847. 



4 1

L I T I G I O U S L A W Y E R S D U E L I N G T O T H E D E A T H 

Deadly duels were extremely rare under the French and Spanish, and “there had been no murders in St. Louis for forty years” 

prior to the Louisiana Purchase, according to Primm. But American attorneys, influenced by the traditional dueling culture of 

the Old South, sought to defend their “honor as civilized gentlemen” by shooting other lawyers, often on “Bloody Island” in the 

middle of the Mississippi River. 

In 1810 the earliest notable duel involved attorney James A. Graham and Dr. Bernard G. Farrar of Kentucky—a second who had 

to stand in for his cowardly brother-in-law when he failed to appear. Farrar mortally wounded the man he had no grievance against 

and then offered medical assistance. 

In 1817, only a year after arriving in St. Louis from Tennessee, future U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton killed lawyer Charles Lucas, 

son of his political rival, Judge J. B. C. Lucas. It was their second duel, after both men had been wounded three months earlier. 

The most spectacular duel on Bloody Island occurred in August 26, 1831, when Congressman Spencer Pettis faced off against 

U. S. Army Major Thomas Biddle. They stood only five feet apart and fired simultaneously. A large crowd on the riverbank heard 

the chilling result, “both mortally wounded!” Pettis died the next day at the age of 29, while Biddle succumbed two days later, 

aged 41. Senator Benton, a close friend of Pettis, wrote a stirring account of “one of the most desperate encounters that had ever 

occurred in the country,” an essay circulated in newspapers throughout the nation. 

John Smith “T” (identifying his Tennessee roots) claimed that he had killed 14 men in duels, including a nephew of former 

Vice President Aaron Burr. He was always acquitted and strolled St. Louis streets with four pistols, a rifle, and two knives. 

In addition to the standard “pistols at ten paces,” an 1845 duel was fought with swords, and in 1857, adversaries considered 

using rifles at sixty paces. A. B. Chambers and Thomas B. Hudson shot a total of six bullets at each other, missing every time, 

and ended their dispute without bloodshed. Duels continued until the Civil War, but they were outlawed in the 1865 state 

constitution—a provision that remained until 1945! 

Changing Street Names from French to 

English—a map by Musick in his St. Louis 

as a Fortified Town; copyright expired. 

In 1826, the St. Louis city council adopted a 

“modern” system of naming most downtown 

streets for trees (Walnut, Pine, Chestnut, 

etc.) like Philadelphia. Market Street and 

Washington Avenue were already too 

familiar to change, however. 

In 1822, the state legislature made St. Louis 

an official “city” with a mayor and 9 original 

aldermen. The city’s population had increased 

300 percent by 1818, and in the early 1820s, 

it had 5,500 residents, with another 4,200 

people living on the outskirts. When 

Pennsylvania native, Dr. William Carr Lane, 

defeated both Auguste and Pierre Chouteau 

in successive elections for mayor of St. Louis 

in the mid-1820s, the 155 old French families 

realized that an ever-expanding population 

of foreigners would forever put them at 

a disadvantage at the polls. A 187 percent 

increase in immigrants between 1810 and 

1820, and another 208 percent from 1820 

to 1840, had diluted the French population 

and diminished the recognition of their 

past contributions among the new citizens. 

A visiting Parisian observed that the city’s 

“rich, esteemed French” residents were 


42

“reclusive [and] irrelevant, clinging to slavery 

and their traditions.” A Presbyterian geographer 

in 1834 claimed that the St. Louis French 

were “a population of a very peculiar character.” 

They were “amiable” and “quiet” and retained 

their own language,” which was “somewhat 

corrupted” by living with Americans. 

French residents endured the changing 

names of their original streets and the 

tiresome mispronunciation of their native 

language. Leaving politics to the Americans, 

they seemed content with making money 

from their vast inventory of properties—and 

hosting the most lavish balls and receptions 

in the city’s largest, fanciest mansions. 

Hospitality had long been a French specialty, 

and in April 1825, the descendants of the 

founders threw the biggest party of all in 

welcoming the Marquis de Lafayette to St. Louis. 

Clark joined the Chouteau brothers as the 

official hosts who wined and dined him and 

his entourage, after the state legislature and 

Virginia-born governor declined to honor the 

old military hero who had helped America 

win its independence. Auguste Levasseur, 

Lafayette’s secretary and chronicler of his 

“Farewell Tour,” wrote that the April ball 

was attended by “the most brilliant and 

most numerous company,” and he praised the 

“luster of the decorations…and the elegance 

of the ladies,” which “made us forget entirely 

that we were at the entrance of the wilderness.” 

Lafayette’s immensely popular visit contributed 

to the resurgence of pride and 

productivity in every sphere of traditional 

French influence—from Catholicism to fur 

trading. Between 1818 and 1834, St. Louis 

became famous as the “Rome of the West,” 

constructing a church, a cathedral, and a university 

under inspired leadership. In 1818 

the Right Reverend Louis William DuBourg, 

a Sulpician priest born in Santo Domingo 

and former president of Georgetown College, 

assumed his duties as the new Bishop of 

Louisiana. His critically important decision to 

make St. Louis his diocesan headquarters, 

rather than New Orleans, confirmed the city’s 

position as the ideal gateway for Catholic 

missionaries to reach potential Indian 

converts in the Far West. 

DuBourg began the expensive and nevercompleted 

first brick Catholic church on 

Laclede’s Church Lands and founded the 

St. Louis Academy, which evolved into Saint 

Louis University, the first college west of the 

Mississippi, in 1832. He also encouraged Jesuits 

to open the first Catholic school for Native 

American boys in the nation and recruited 

Grenoble-born Mother Rose Duchesne (now 

Saint Philippine) and five other French nuns 

French St. Louisans, like French Canadiens, 

were famous for their formal balls. This 

Dance in the Château St. Louis, Quebec 

was painted by George Heriot in 1801. 

COURTESY OF THE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF CANADA, 

ACCESSION NO. 1989-472-1; COPYRIGHT EXPIRED. 


4 3

Les Indiens Osages, one of two matching 

1827 lithographs of original portraits by 

Parisian artist, Louis-Leopold Boilly. 

This shows three of the six Osages, 

most prominently the woman, Mohongo 

(“Sacred Sun”), who went to Europe in 1827 

with St. Louis promoter, David Dulauney, 

and interpreter Paul Loise, a Chouteau 

metis. They performed popular native 

dances for French, Dutch, and German 

crowds and met King Charles X. But they 

were abandoned and stranded in France, 

until Lafayette and Bishop DuBourg paid 

for their passage home in 1830. That strong 

French connection continues today, as the 

Osage Nation selects young men and 

women to make a similar journey. 


of the Society of the Sacred Heart. They 

founded a convent school in St. Charles— 

“the first free school for American and Creole 

girls west of the Mississippi”—according to 

Barbara O. Korner. She noted that the 

“Society of the Sacred Heart was the only one 

of the six European orders that came to 

America prior to 1830 that survived.” Its 

local legacy also included a similar school for 

French girls and a female Indian seminary, 

both based in Florissant, because property in 

downtown St. Louis was too expensive, having 

increased 500 percent in only two years. 

DuBourg’s equally energetic successor— 

and the first bishop of the Diocese of 

St. Louis—was Joseph Rosati. His leadership 

helped St. Louisans forget the funding 

nightmare associated with the brick church 

and redirected community efforts to create 

a beautiful limestone cathedral worthy of a 

growing city of increasing fame. After three 

years of construction, his masterpiece was 


44

completed in 1834. Known today as the 

Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, King 

of France, the “Old Cathedral” adjoining 

the National Park Service grounds of the 

Gateway Arch is undergoing extensive 

interior and exterior renovations that will 

make it a much-visited historic showpiece 

once again. 

Rosati’s cathedral faced south, but almost 

everything else associated with St. Louis was 

focused on the West. The religious resurgence 

of the French community was accompanied 

by an even more impressive commercial 

revival. The elite Chouteau family 

had never stopped expanding its 

influence and affluence through 

marriages with prominent Americans 

and Catholic immigrants, while lowerclass 

Frenchmen worked for William 

Clark as U.S. Indian agents and interpreters 

of native languages. The early 

1820s, however, brought revolutionary 

changes that dramatically expanded 

the scope and profitability of the western 

fur trade. Mexico gained its independence 

from Spain, which opened 

the Santa Fe silver trade to daring 

Missouri entrepreneurs, who enjoyed 

profits of 2,000 percent that helped 

fund fur trading. St. Louisans needed 

such capital to compete with the 

newly-merged old Canadian rivals— 

the Hudson’s Bay Company and the 

North West Company of Montreal— 

which now invaded the northern 

plains of the United States searching 

for furs and Indian allies. And in 

1822, too, Congress closed the government’s 

subsidized nonprofit fur factories and 

stopped competing with private merchants. 

Exploiting those simultaneous, interconnected 

developments at the perfect time was 

William H. Ashley, Missouri’s first lieutenant 

governor, general of the state militia, and a 

gunpowder manufacturer. The St. Louis fur 

trade was already contributing 

about $600,000 to the city’s total 

annual commerce of $2,000,000. 

But the recent death of Manuel 

Lisa, the masterful fur magnate 

who pioneered combined trading 

and trapping expeditions up the 

Missouri River, created an opening 

for Ashley. In 1822, he partnered 

with Andrew Henry, a former 

Michilimackinac merchant, to 

dispatch white trappers into the 

Rockies to harvest beavers from 

Indian territories while avoiding 

hostile river tribes. Ashley’s expedition to 

Green River, Wyoming, required 70 trappers, 

160 pack mules, and $20,000 worth of 

merchandise to produce profits of $60,000 

on 9,000 pounds of pelts. 

Left: The “Old Cathedral,” a year after 

its completion in 1834, showing the rectory 

on the right and an orphanage to the left. 

An 1835 lithograph by L. D. Pomarede. 

COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS. 

Below: The “Old Rock House”—a stone 

fur warehouse built in 1818 by Spanish 

entrepreneur, Manuel Lisa, as it appeared in 

the mid-twentieth century before being 

dismantled to make way for the 

Gateway Arch. 

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 

AT THE JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL. 


4 5

Above: Trappers on the Prairie: Peace or 

War? Lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1866. 


Below: Replica Medal of the Upper Missouri 

Outfit, dominated by Pierre Chouteau, Jr. 


Predictably, Indians attacked white intruders 

stealing their resources, and by 1831, had 

killed at least 170 trappers. From 1823 to 

1828, St. Louis companies lost $100,000 

to Indian thefts of horses, mules, guns, 

traps, supplies, and pelts. Despite those 

losses, trapping was very profitable, netting 

$1.65 million in 1831 after expenses of 

$2.1 million, partly because trappers earned 

only $150-$200 per year for risking their 

lives. Ashley also created the rendezvous 

system, which kept mountain men in the 

West year-round without the need to build 

expensive permanent forts. He reaped a fortune 

on markups of 2,000 percent for essential 

supplies (and recreational liquor) needed by 

about 600 western trappers per year. 

In 1826, Ashley sold his successful company 

to fellow St. Louisans, where neighbors and 

even family members fought fiercely for 

supremacy in the fur trade. At least eight 

Chouteau kinsmen, for instance, served in 

four different fur companies, until Bernard 

Pratte’s French Company of five Chouteau 

cousins drove the others out. In 1822 the 

American Fur Company (AFC) owned by 

the German immigrant, John Jacob Astor, 

established a “Western Department” in 

St. Louis. Historian Walter Stevens claimed 

that Astor was “baffled” by the Chouteaus’ 

“well-established relationship with the 

Indians,” and in 1834, he sold the “Missouri 

River Outfit” of the AFC to St. Louisans 

Pratte and his cousin, Pierre Chouteau, Jr. 


46

C O R E D I S C O V E R I E S B Y S T . L O U I S M O U N T A I N M E N 

Historian Howard Lamar observed that “it was the fur trappers, rather than Lewis and Clark, who found the actual paths by which 

settlers could move themselves and their possessions to Oregon, California, and Utah.” Although the following mountain men were 

born elsewhere, most lived in St. Louis and died in Missouri: 

S James Pierson Beckwith, inaccurately known as “Beckwourth” 

(1798-1866?) was born a Virginia slave and became the 

most famous of several African American mountain men. 

He traveled in California, Colorado, and New Mexico, before 

living with Crow Indians as an adopted chief. His many 

adventures were recorded in a popular 1856 book. 

S Charles and William Bent operated Bent’s Old Fort (“the Adobe 

Castle”) trading post in Colorado between 1833-1849 with 

Ceran St. Vrain, the great-grandson of Laclede. 

S Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville (1796-1878) was a 

U.S. army officer who failed as a fur merchant in the Far West 

but pioneered a heavy-wagon route across the Continental 

Divide in the 1830s and was immortalized in a book by 

Washington Irving. 

S Jim Bridger (1804-1881), a Virginian, was among the first of 

Ashley’s trappers in 1822, and in 1824-25 was the first white 

man to discover the Great Salt Lake and geysers of Yellowstone. 

He also established stagecoach and rail routes in Wyoming 

and Montana. 

S Robert Campbell (1804-1879), a Northern Ireland immigrant, 

enjoyed a meteoric rise as a self-made mountain man and 

St. Louis merchant with partner William Sublette. Campbell 

invested in steamboats, railroads, real estate, the Merchants 

National Bank, and the Southern Hotel. Living in a mansion of 

Victorian splendor on fashionable Lucas Place, he entertained 

President Grant, General Sherman, and other notable leaders 

and helped negotiate Indian treaties. When he died in 1879, 

his $2,000,000 estate far eclipsed that of city patriarch, 

Auguste Chouteau. 

S John Colter (1775-1813), a valued Virginia veteran of the 

Lewis and Clark Expedition, returned to the Far West in 

1806-08, becoming one of the first white beaver trappers in 

the Bighorn Basin and the Yellowstone Valley. 

S Andrew Henry (1775-1833) was an innovative entrepreneur 

with the early St. Louis fur companies under Lisa and Ashley 

and a major proponent of using white trappers. 

S Wilson Price Hunt (1783-1842) led a successful overland 

1810-12 expedition from St. Louis to Astor’s Fort Astoria in 

Oregon, pioneering a route through the Snake River Valley 

and parts of the later Oregon Trail. He sold Russian sealskins 

in China and exported rare Chinese goods to New York. 

S Jedediah Smith (1799-1831) was a talented ex-Ashley trapper 

who explored South Pass, Wyoming; Utah’s Great Basin; the 

Oregon coast; and Sierra Nevada Mountains. He led the first 

American expedition to reach California from the southwest. 

S William Sublette (1799-1845) began trapping with Ashley 

and helped develop the Overland Trail—being “the first to 

prove that wagons and cattle could be taken across the 

Great Plains,” according to historian Mary Ellen Rowe. He was 

a successful business partner of Robert Campbell in St. Louis. 

The last mountain man rendezvous in 

1840 signaled the end of the beaver boom, 

which, in only two decades, had attracted 

3,000 trappers but alienated ten times that 

many western Indians. Many of the 150 forts 

and outposts built between 1822 and 1840 

were named for prominent St. Louisans 

(using their first names like European royalty). 

And the most innovative of those entrepreneurs 

had one final trick up their fur sleeve— 

switching to an Indian trade in buffalo hides 

after beaver pelts ceased to be profitable. The 

younger Chouteaus, in particular, prospered 

for more decades by selling sturdy, heavy 

bison leather from the Northern Plains to 

eastern industrial cities that needed belts to 

run factory machinery. In 1840, St. Louisans 

shipped 67,000 huge buffalo hides to their 

hometown and 110,000 more eight years 

later, along with the popular delicacy of 

25,000 buffalo tongues. 

The deaths, only a decade apart, of very 

different but equally revered frontier leaders— 

Auguste Chouteau and William Clark—represented 

the creation of a composite western 

culture synonymous with nineteenth-century 


On Tuesday, February 24, 1829, the 

Missouri Republican reported that “the venerable” 

Chouteau, the co-founder and long-reigning 

“Patriarch of St. Louis,” had died that morning 

in his famous mansion along the riverfront 

that had shaped his career. He was the 

centerpiece in the influential, multicultural 

dynasty created by Laclede and Marie Therese 

Bourgeois Chouteau—the oldest and most 


4 7

Nineteenth-century animal hide coat with 

Indian quill embroidery in Canadian metis 

style, perhaps owned by Auguste Chouteau. 


MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (OBJ 1906 013 0002). 


48 

successful of her five children, 52 grandchildren, 

and 69 great-grandchildren when 

she died in 1814. A Frenchman in the 1830s 

observed that the Chouteau name remained 

“a passport that commands safety and 

hospitality among all of the Indian nations 

of the United States, north and west,” as 

two generations of family members had 

founded fur posts and future towns in 

Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, South Dakota, 

and Montana. 

During his sixty-five-year residency along 

the Mississippi, Chouteau had survived the 

debts, doubts, and dangers of frontier fur 

trading, merging business ties with bloodlines, 

while St. Louis increased 2,000 percent 

in population and expanded its commerce 

“over a larger territory…than any other city 

in the Union.” Auguste retired from active 

fur trading in 1816 and devoted the remainder 

of his life to civic service, philanthropy, 

nurturing his many merchant kin, and 

advising the U.S. government on Indian 

issues. When he died in 1829, he left an 

estate that included 21,500 acres of land and 

another 39,000 acres of debatable legality— 

not counting developed city properties. 

He left $83,000 in IOUs, mortgages, and 

promissory notes from 800 people and 

over $17,000 worth of personal property, 

which included 600 books and 50 slaves, 

but only $32.12 in cash, which reflected a 

fur trader’s traditional reliance on credit. 

Subsequent generations of Americans have 

found Chouteau’s most precious 

possession to be his 

“Narrative of the Founding 

of St. Louis”—making his 

city even more distinctive as 

one of only a handful in history 

to have an eyewitness 

document on its beginnings 

by a founder. 

William Clark outlived 

Chouteau by nine years and 

died a revered local celebrity 

and national hero on 

September 1, 1838, at the 

age of sixty-eight. The city’s 

diverse citizenry honored 

him with a mile-long funeral 

procession. In addition to 

being co-commander of the 

famous, influential Corps of 

Discovery, Clark had served 

as brigadier general of 

Missouri’s militia; territorial 

governor from 1813 to 

1820; and head of U.S.- 

Indian affairs in the West 

between 1807 and 1838, 

under different titles. His 

Indian museum and cartographical expertise 

enhanced St. Louis’s reputation as the capital 

of the American West. As a diplomat, he 

personally negotiated thirty-seven treaties 

that dispossessed Indians of their homelands 

and played some role in 20 percent of all 

370 U.S. treaties with native nations. 

According to his biographer, Landon Y. Jones, 

“the cruelties of Clark’s time and the 

strengths of his character did not contradict 

one another…. He was a man whose 

complexity encompassed both.”

“No country on earth, of equal extent, has so many advantages…as the Valley of the Mississippi…. 

The introduction of steam-boats into this vast region, watered by large rivers, 

…has greatly increased…the facilities for trade and emigration.” 

–Robert Baird, View of the Valley of the Mississippi, 1834 


EXPLORING A STEAMBOAT CITY 

OF EXPANDING COMMERCE 

As Laclede and Chouteau intended, St. Louis was always the capital of a river empire, 

extending its influence via multiple tributaries from the Plains to Pittsburgh and the Great Lakes 

to the Gulf of Mexico. For decades, the city’s waterfront had welcomed local log canoes (pirogues), 

large birch-bark canoes made by Canadian Indians, and a wide variety of flatboats, keelboats, 

rafts, barges, and other vessels. Between 1763 and 1816, human muscles powered watercraft for 

the 90-120 days it took to travel the 1,200 miles upriver from New Orleans. But that all changed 

quite suddenly in 1817, when a small steam-powered paddle-wheeler, named Zebulon M. Pike, 

chugged into St. Louis to make startled residents aware of revolutionary technology that would 

alter their lives and livelihoods. In 1825 the traveling companion of the Marquis de Lafayette 

observed that the improved steamboats of that era could make the trip from New Orleans in a 

mere ten days, returning downstream in only five. Described in that year as “the great warehouse 

for all the commerce…west of the Mississippi,” St. Louis was already building its own fleet of 

steamboats in a large facility. Paddle-wheelers made such an enormous impact on the region— 

both immediate and long-lasting—that a steamboat is still the prominent illustration on the 

official seal of St. Louis City. 

Nineteenth-century Mississippi River 

steamboats published in Alcee Fortier’s 

History of Louisiana, vol. I (New York and 

Paris, 1904). 


4 9

St. Louis Levee, a mid-nineteenth century 

daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly. 

A contemporary St. Louisan wrote that 

“a mile and a half of steamboats lying at the 

wharf of a city one thousand miles from the 

ocean, in the heart of the continent, is a 

spectacle which naturally inspires large 

views of commercial greatness.” 


MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (17070). 


50 

The geographical realities of steamboat 

navigation on the Mississippi enhanced the 

value of Laclede’s central site. According to 

historian Jeffrey Adler, “it was unsafe for 

larger boats to operate above St. Louis, and it 

was unprofitable for smaller steamers to work 

the river below the town.” As an ideallylocated 

“reloading point,” St. Louis truly 

became the “Lion of the Valley” that dominated 

the commerce of the region’s waterways. 

The Mississippi split America in half, and 

St. Louis’s strategic site made it the dominant 

interior river port for a century—first as 

America’s western-most of eastern cities and 

later as the eastern-most of the nation’s western 

cities. From whatever direction St. Louis 

was viewed, it seemed destined to be the 

“future seat of empire,” wrote an observer in 

the 1820s, because “no place in the world 

situated so far from the ocean,” could match 

its “commercial advantages.” In the next 

decade, a visiting U.S. senator noted that 

St. Louis’s “gentlemen of fortune preferred… 

the sound of…steamers arriving or departing 

to the lowing of herds,” as the region 

transitioned from the plodding pace of 

plows to the unprecedented speed of steampowered 

vehicles. 

St. Louis’s rapid growth and rising stature 

were directly tied to the evolving size, 

speed, and sophistication of steamboats, 

which poured “wealth and prosperity into 

her lap.” Harnessing the latest technology 

to maximize its ideal location, St. Louis was 

being discussed as “the future capital of a 

great nation” and received “the attention not 

only of our own inhabitants, but also those of 

foreign lands.” Surpassing both New Orleans 

and Cincinnati in river traffic by the early 

1840s, St. Louis shipped nearly 263,000 tons 

of merchandise and greatly expanded its 

work force. Twenty years later, St. Louisans 

owned 168 steamboats, more than the 

residents of any other interior port city, and 

they employed 3,500 men just in building or 

repairing them. In addition, there were 

jobs for large numbers of pilots, crewmen, 

deckhands, dockhands, and warehouse 

workers, many of them African Americans. 

In 1860 almost 3,500 riverboats, averaging 

550 tons, called at the city, obscuring 

the wharf with a “forest of chimneys.” 

Counting 170 steamers jostling for access to 

the levee at one time, an observer thought 

they resembled huge “white bears” in a 

feeding frenzy.

Reflecting the prominence, pride, and 

prosperity that the Steamboat Age brought 

to St. Louis, residents erected a magnificent 

Greek Revival courthouse of monumental 

proportions between 1839 and 1864. Rising 

192 feet high like a riverfront beacon on the 

crest of a hill, it was the city’s tallest building 

from 1864 to 1894, after the Civil War 

addition of its huge iron dome, modeled 

after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. With one 

columned entrance facing the river and 

another focused on the vast hinterland of 

future expansion, that big, beautiful building 

represented the dual focus of St. Louis in 

the mid-nineteenth century as both “Queen 

of the River” and “Gateway to the West.” 

As important as the Mississippi was, steamboats 

also increased the fame and fortune of 

St. Louis with trade and travel along the 

Missouri River. In 1831, St. Louisans demonstrated 

how a new invention could improve an 

old fur trade, when the steamer Yellow Stone 

(120’ long x 20’ wide) left the levee with 

22 crewmen, 75 employees of the American 

Fur Company, and 1,000 gallons of whiskey 

on a successful maiden voyage to Fort Union 

(near today’s North Dakota-Montana border). 

Two years later, that “Fire Boat that walks 

on the Waters” transported German Prince 

Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied and Swiss artist 

Karl Bodmer deep into Indian Country, making 

St. Louis a tourist capital for a steady 

stream of European sightseers, who enhanced 

the city’s reputation around the world. That 

same year, the United States designated St. 

Louis as an official “port of entry,” which provided 

federal funding for Robert E. Lee and 

other army engineers to clear river sandbars. 

The “Old Courthouse” in the mid-1840s, 

without the huge iron dome of the 

Civil War era. 

A NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGRAVING IN THE 

AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


5 1

Karl Bodmer’s 1848 lithograph portraying 

Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied 

visiting the Minitaree/Minatarre Indians 

at Fort Clark in 1833. 


ST. LOUIS (41863). 


52 

The confluence of the continent’s most 

notable commercial rivers attracted increasing 

hordes of investors and immigrants who 

boosted St. Louis from the nation’s fortyfourth 

largest city in 1830 to sixth place 

by 1850. Farmers seeking western lands 

purchased them in St. Louis, while eastern 

merchants created prosperous futures even 

before Missouri entered the Union. Among 

the earliest businessmen from the East were 

St. Louis’s first Jewish residents—the three 

Polish Philipson brothers from Philadelphia. 

They invested in the fur trade, opened a store 

stocked with desirable merchandise from the 

Atlantic coast, and in 1815, founded the 

“St. Louis Brewery,” the city’s second oldest. 

Following the example of Laclede, they brought 

culture to the city along with their capital. 

Joseph Philipson performed and taught music; 

Jacob was a tutor of English, German, and 

French; and Simon assembled a significant 

collection of 150 paintings and 100 prints, 

including works by Boticelli, da Vinci, Hals, 

Holbein, Murillo, Raphael, Rubens, and Titian! 

Many other “Yankee merchants” soon 

followed—young, aggressive members of 

family firms in New York and New England 

who opened business outlets in the capital 

of western capital. They established about 

75 percent of new companies in the 1840s, 

and by 1850, New Yorkers represented 

36 percent of all St. Louis businessmen and 

New Englanders another 20 percent. More 

than fifty financial institutions were founded 

in less than thirty years to handle the 

58 percent of city investments contributed 

by those easterners. The appropriately-named 

“Boatmen’s Bank” opened in 1847 as the 

first savings bank west of the Mississippi. 

Insurance brokers also enjoyed rapid growth, 

since 550 very expensive steamboats were 

destroyed in accidents between 1820 and 

1850. Thirty steamers owned by city 

residents sank in only four years in the 

“Mississippi Graveyard” between St. Louis 

and Cairo, Illinois. 

Among leading Yankee merchants were 

Daniel Page of Maine and his partner, Henry 

Bacon from Massachusetts, who invested in 

flour mills. Beginning in 1827, they built 

twenty-two others at a rate of nearly one 

per year, vaulting St. Louis into first place 

among U.S. cities in flour production. 

Hudson Bridge of New Hampshire made a 

fortune selling cotton, surplus army goods, 

stoves, and steel plows. Henry and Edgar Ames

from New York invested in meatpacking 

and grain elevators, while Connecticut-born 

William and Henry Belcher founded the 

country’s largest sugar refinery. Oliver and 

Giles Filley, also from Connecticut, manufactured 

stoves that dominated the national 

market. In 1851, Samuel Cupples moved his 

woodenware factory from Cincinnati, and 

only twenty years later, St. Louis “ruled the 

world in this trade.” The furniture-making 

firm of Heslep and Taylor relocated from 

Pennsylvania in the early 1800s, and within 

a few decades, St. Louis had fifty such 

factories, generating $5.8 million in exports. 

By 1850, manufacturers who used the 

Mississippi to ship their products had 

increased the city’s custom receipts 1,200 

percent in a single decade. The assessed value 

of taxable property rose from $1.5 million in 

1828 to $43 million by 1855. 

Profitable products stimulated the city’s 

population growth at a rapid rate. The number 

of residents rose from 14,000 in 1837 to 

78,000 by 1850—twice the population of 

Pittsburgh, which had been founded the 

same year. The Missouri Republican reported 

that 1,500 people arrived in some weeks, 

including 800 in one thirty-six-hour period! 

Chouteau’s Pond, the city’s earliest and 

much-loved recreation area, which was 

drained as a health risk following the 

1849 cholera epidemic. Oil painting of 

1844 by D. Barbier. 


ST. LOUIS (1908 001 0002). 


5 3

Interior of Chauncey L. Filley’s 

Queensware Importing House, 108 Main 

Street, St. Louis, an illustration from 

Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 

November 24, 1860. 


With the city’s population at least doubling 

with predictable regularity, one resident 

boasted that St. Louis had grown larger and 

changed more in only fifty years than 

“England [had] in five hundred years after 

the Norman Conquest.” But St. Louis faced 

a far greater challenge than medieval 

England, for it had to accommodate, and try 

to integrate, throngs of European immigrants 

whose cultures were neither French nor 

Anglo-American. As early as 1828, a welltraveled 

observer noted that “very few towns 

in the United States, or the world have a 

more mixed population,” with “immigrants 

from all of the states…[and] people from 

all quarters of the world.” As a popular 

consumer reflection of such cultural 

diversity, the St. Louis Directory of 1840 ran 

advertisements for “all kinds of German 

Goods,” as well as “French and American 

paper hangings.” 

In 1850 nearly 16 percent of St. Louisans 

were Irish, 70 percent of whom were recent 

arrivals in the Potato Famine era. They were 

welcomed by Irish-Americans who had 

settled in St. Louis much earlier from other 

states—not directly from the old country. 

Those original arrivals tended to be affluent, 

accomplished, and acculturated enough to 

surmount any prejudicial impediments to 

their careers. They included Alexander McNair 

(Missouri’s first governor), John Mullanphy 

(the city’s first millionaire), Joseph Charless 

(pioneering publisher), Sheriff James Rankin, 

and Benjamin and John O’Fallon—Irish 

Protestant merchants and Indian agents who 

were nephews of William Clark. Those and 

later residents demonstrated their cultural 

pride by organizing the city’s first St. Patrick’s 

Day celebration in 1820 and established a 

private relief agency to help “distressed Irish 

Families.” When former judge and mayor, 

Bryan Mullanphy (son of John) died in 1851, 

he left one-third of his estate to “furnish relief 

to all poor emigrants” coming to St. Louis— 

the forerunner of the Travelers Aid Society. 


54

Eighteen German families were also in 

St. Louis by 1833, with some pre-dating 

the Louisiana Purchase. Only a decade after 

Gottfried Duden circulated enthusiastic reports 

about Missouri in 1827, 6,000 Germans were 

living in St. Louis, with 24,000 more engaged 

in farming and wine-making amid the 

Rhine-like landscapes of central Missouri. 

Among those “Thirty-ers” were conservative 

Lutherans from Saxony, who founded 

Concordia Seminary, Missouri’s first coeducational 

college. In 1835, there were enough 

Germans in St. Louis to support a weekly 

newspaper, Anzeiger des Westens (“Information 

of the West”). Some 20,000 German “Forty- 

Eighters”—political activists who had failed 

to revolutionize their country in that year— 

arrived by the early 1850s to make a permanent 

impact on the city. Some of them resided 

in Belleville and other Illinois communities 

due to the expensive and scarce housing in 


The Missouri Republican in 1857 reported 

that Germans had “inundated [the city] with 

breweries, beer houses, sausage shops, 

…Swiss cheese and Holland herrings. We 

found it almost necessary to learn the 

German language before we could ride in 

an omnibus, or buy a pair of breeches, and 

absolutely necessary to drink beer at a 

Sunday concert.” The “Vauxhall Beer Garden” 

was popular as early as 1823, and thirty years 

later, “Uhrig’s Cave” attracted large crowds 

that mixed suds with songs, including 

operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan. Johann 

“Adam” Lemp opened the Western Brewery in 

1840 to produce lager (aged) beer, mellowed 

in the cool caves under the city. His son 

pioneered the use of refrigerated railroad cars 

to distribute St. Louis beer nationally, as the 

Lemp Brewery became the largest one outside 

of New York with a single owner. At least 

forty other St. Louis breweries predated 

Anheuser-Busch, producing 190,000 barrels 

Old trunks symbolizing the wave of 

immigrants who came to St. Louis in the 

mid-nineteenth century. 



5 5

Portrait of Constantin Blandowski by 

Carl Wimar,1861. Blandowski (1812-1861) 

was a Polish soldier and noted fencer born 

along the Prussian border. He served in 

Algeria with the French Foreign Legion, 

the Polish Revolution of 1848, and both 

Sardinia’s and Hungary’s wars for 

independence from Austria, before arriving 

in St. Louis in the 1850s. As a captain in 

a company of German volunteers who 

captured Camp Jackson, he was wounded 

by civilian gunfire and died following the 

amputation of his leg. (Details from William 

C. Winter’s The Civil War in St. Louis: 

A Guided Tour [1994], pp. 65-66.). 

COURTESY, SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM; 

GIFT OF MRS. F. W. SCHNEIDER (179:1946). 


56 

per year before the Civil War, worth well 

over $1,000,000. In one six-month period 

in 1854, city residents consumed 18,000,000 

glasses of beer—thirteen years after St. Louisans 

had founded a “Total Abstinence Society.” 

By 1850, more than 20,000 Germans and 

11,000 Irish comprised over 40 percent of 

the city’s population. The large, sudden 

presence of so many “foreigners” with strange 

accents prompted a nativist backlash by 

anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant Americanborn 

extremists in the Whig and Know- 

Nothing parties. The “worst riot in the 

city’s antebellum history” occurred in August 

1854 between nativists and Irish immigrants, 

resulting in 10 fatalities and 33 injuries, with 

93 buildings damaged. When naturalized 

as voting citizens, most of those immigrants 

supported the Democratic Party, which elected 

two Irishmen and one German as mayors in 

three successive elections between 1847 and 

1849. Despite facing common prejudices, 

the “Scrubby Dutch” in south city and 

“Kerry Patch Irish” in north city maintained 

separate neighborhoods; rarely cooperated to 

challenge hostile nativists; and often clashed 

over cultural differences and the competition 

for jobs.

Another group of immigrants in St. Louis 

has received much less attention than they 

deserved. In their recent book, When the 

Saints Came Marching In, Fred E. Woods and 

Thomas L. Farmer revealed that “three to four 

thousand Mormons were living in St. Louis” 

by 1849, with many establishing permanent 

roots. Despite Governor Lilburn W. Boggs’s 

1858 executive order to exterminate the 

Mormons, “the Latter-day Saints found a safe 

haven of tolerance in St. Louis” and steady 

employment as well. An official Mormon 

publication in 1855 observed that “this city 

has been an asylum for our people from 

fifteen to twenty years…. There is probably 

no city in the world where Latter-day Saints 

are more respected, and where they may 

sooner obtain an outfit for Utah.” 

Historian James Neal Primm described 

mid-century St. Louis as a “city in motion,” 

with large numbers of people coming in 

and going out on a daily basis. A large group 

of St. Louisans “went out” to fight in the 

Mexican-American War, earning great distinction 

and generating future prosperity for 

their hometown. Jefferson Barracks mobilized 

U.S. soldiers and supplied support services, 

while local militia units with memorable 

names—the “St. Louis Legion,” the “Native 

American Rangers,” and “The Laclede 

Rangers”—were commanded by leading 

citizens, such as Colonel Robert Campbell 

and Major Meriwether Lewis Clark. St. Louis 

General Stephen Watts Kearny, commander 

of Jefferson Barracks, led his elite U.S. 

Dragoons in the capture of Santa Fe and the 

pacification of California, and he served as 

military governor of Mexico City. 

The war with Mexico reinforced St. Louisans’ 

traditional interest in the Southwest. Reputedly, 

some residents had smuggled nearly $3,000,000 

in silver out of Santa Fe before the fighting 

began. No sooner had the war ended than 

gold was discovered in California, creating 

a rapid rush of prospective prospectors 

through the Gateway City. In 1849, alone, 

Marching St. Louis Militiamen on 

Market Street, a watercolor painting by 

Mat Hastings, 1843. 


ST. LOUIS (1949 097 0041). 


5 7

Emigrants Crossing the Plains, 

steel engraving by F. O.C. Darley, 

in William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque 

America. The Land We Live In, vol. I 

(New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872). 


an estimated 60,000 people arrived in 

St. Louis on their way to gold-fields or 

other western sites. City merchants provided 

whatever they needed, from shoes to saddles, 

and guns to grub—and especially the famous 

Murphy Wagons made in town—experiencing 

a more reliable rush of gold locally without 

risking their lives in California. 

About a third of those new arrivals chose 

to stay in St. Louis, and the influx of so many 

young, unmarried men lowered the average 

age of city residents to 21 by 1850, with 

males outnumbering adult women by nearly 

two to one. At mid-century, over 50 percent 

of St. Louis residents had lived here less than 

two years, and many of them would remain 

for only a couple more. St. Louis’s hospitality 

industry capitalized on that constant mobility 

by operating 23 restaurants and 33 hotels 

in 1850—including the fashionable Planters’ 

House Hotel, where the famous “punch” was 

created. New Yorker Edgar Ames, who owned 

the luxurious Lindell Hotel, was passionate 

about “work[ing] to beautify our city,” both 

as a philanthropist and a businessman who 

realized that an attractive appearance appealed 

to tourists. New trends in public transportation 

kept pace, as twelve-passenger, horse-drawn 

carriages, known as “omnibuses,” served “the 

citizens of St. Louis and strangers visiting 

the city.” 

Many of those “strangers” never left, 

bringing new ideas and different customs 

in attempting to transform fluid St. Louis 

society to suit their goals. Ten percent of the 

“Eastern Migration” in the mid-nineteenth 

century consisted of doctors, lawyers, and 

ministers. Some of the most fervent New 

England Protestants hoped to make St. Louis 

a “New Jerusalem” by “civilizing” what a 

Massachusetts congressman called the “wild 

men of the Missouri,” who were plagued by 

“savage” Indians, “foreigners,” and “papists.” Far 

more tolerant, and a great boon to the city’s 

intellectual progress, was the Reverend William 

Greenleaf Eliot. He was only twenty-three 


58

when he arrived in 1834 to found the first 

Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the “Saint 

of the West,” as a crusader for educational 

excellence, the abolition of slavery, women’s 

rights, and the creation of a city art museum, 

among other cultural causes. 

Less spiritual Eastern capitalists hoped 

to make St. Louis a secular, profitable “New 

York of the West.” They succeeded to a degree, 

because the 300,000 people who migrated 

to California maintained a commercial 

connection with the welcoming Gateway 

City that many knew well. In 1858, John 

Butterfield’s Overland Stage linked St. Louis 

with San Francisco, the largest town west of 

it, while the later Pony Express delivered mail 

between St. Louis and Sacramento. Although 

maps depict Independence, Missouri, as the 

embarking point for most of the major 

western trails to California, Oregon, Utah, 

and elsewhere, St. Louis was the true “Mother 

of the West,” before and after those massive 

treks across the Plains. 

Oil portrait of William Greenleaf Eliot, 

1854, by Charlotte C. Eliot. 


ST. LOUIS (1960 057 0001). 


5 9

H O R R I F I C D I S A S T E R ! 

By late 1855 the Pacific Railroad stretched to Jefferson City, and although far short of the California coast suggested by the 

company name, that achievement was worthy of a public celebration. On All Saints’ Day, November 1, 1855, some 600 prominent 

St. Louisans, including the mayor and aldermen, boarded a fourteen-car train for a festive, promotional trip to the state capital. 

But a pouring rain and a temporary, poorly-designed wooden trestle over the Gasconade River resulted in a “terrible catastrophe.” 

Eight miles west of Hermann, the bridge collapsed, catapulting the engine and most of the wooden cars into the river or onto its 

banks thirty-six feet below. Thirty-one passengers were killed, including politicians, pastors, railroad promoters—and Henri Pierre 

Chouteau, scion of the city’s founding family. At least 70 others were severely injured, and they suffered for two days until reaching 

professional medical treatment in St. Louis. Monday, November 5th was a day of public mourning in the city for what proved to 

be the worst train disaster in Missouri history. 

With few exceptions, natives and newcomers, 

alike, arrived in St. Louis having 

traveled on, or at least crossed, water, but 

the increasing allure of the Far West alerted 

St. Louisans of the need to develop railroads. 

No one saw the limitless potential of one city 

dominating both modes of transportation 

better than St. Louis’s hometown Democratic 

Senator, Thomas Hart Benton. He was an early 

and influential national prophet for the 

profits promised by the “Manifest Destiny” of 

westward expansion. He dreamed of fulfilling 

the ancient goals of Columbus by accessing 

the wealth of Asia via modern rail links to 

the Pacific coast. In 1849 he captured the 

attention of a railroad planning conference at 

the courthouse by pointing to the West and 

proclaiming: “There Lies India!” Entrepreneurs 

found no incompatibility with investing in 

riverboats and railroads at the same time, for 

steel train wheels and wooden paddle-wheels 

both used steam efficiently and profitably 

to transport people and products. In 1849 

the river-dredger, Captain Henry Shreve, 

promoted St. Louis’s Pacific Railroad when 

he lived here. Joining him were Yankee 

capitalists, Hudson Bridge, Thomas Allen, 

and Henry Bacon, among others. In 1853, 

the locomotive St. Louis reached Franklin, 

Missouri, at a top speed of twenty-one miles 

per hour along the first rail line west of 

the Mississippi. 

Above: Portrait of Thomas Hart Benton 

in 1854, long-serving U.S. senator from 

St. Louis. Frontispiece engraving in his 

Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the 

Working of the American Government 

for Thirty Years, from 1820 to 1850, 

vol. I (New York: D. Appleton and 

Company, 1854). 

Right: Although no illustrations of the 

Gasconade Train Disaster are known to 

exist, this is a nineteenth-century image of 

a similar railroad wreck in the 



60

Daguerreotype of Henri Pierre Chouteau 

(1805-1855), son of Auguste Chouteau, 

and his wife, Clemence Georgine Coursault. 

This was probably taken shortly before 

November 1855, when Henri died in the 

Gasconade Train Disaster. His death 

set in motion the transfer of his father’s 

manuscript, “Narrative of the Founding of 

St. Louis,” to his younger brother, Gabriel, 

who donated it to the Mercantile Library, 

which published the first translation 

in 1858. 


ST. LOUIS (40532). 


6 1

Detail of panoramic river lithograph, 

“View of St. Louis, Missouri”—“Our City,” 

by A. Janicke & Co., published by Hagen 

and Pfau at the Anzeiger des Westens 

newspaper office, 1859. 

REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF THE 


By 1850 rapid transformations in all 

aspects of urban living made St. Louis the 

“American Seville”—a bustling port of a huge 

inland empire, where grassy prairies substituted 

for ocean waves, and furs were the profitable 

equivalents of Spain’s bullion from the 

New World. Like the original Seville, St. Louis 

looked westward for its fortune, and increasing 

numbers of European nobles toured the 

“Grand Emporium of the Great West” to experience 

the allure of exotic Indians and majestic 

landscapes. A “Who’s Who” of foreign dignitaries 

drawn to the capital of frontier America 

included Prince Paul of Wurttemberg, Prince 

Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Duke Bernard 

of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Albert Edward, 

Prince of Wales, the Hungarian freedomfighter, 

Louis Kossuth, and Prince Napoleon, 

nephew of the famous French emperor. 

Many of those elite tourists sponsored 

early western artists to capture the grandeur 

of incomparable scenery before the days of 

photography. “Painting, mapping, sketching, 

and photographing the West were among the 

great accomplishments in nineteenth-century 

America,” observed historian Howard Lamar, 

and St. Louis hosted some of the greatest 

western artists, including: John J. Audubon, 

George Caleb Bingham, Karl Bodmer, George 

Catlin, Charles Deas, Chester Harding, Henry 

Lewis, John Casper Wild, and Carl Wimar. The 

paintings of Charles Russell, born in St. Louis 

in 1865, stimulated a revival of romantic 

depictions of the so-called “Wild West” after 

it no longer existed. 

With an annual economy worth millions, 

St. Louis soon resembled old Seville as a 

progressive center of cultural refinement, 

when successful capitalists became avid 

philanthropists of intellectual institutions. 

They founded the St. Louis Academy of 

Sciences, which had already published thirty 

volumes of research by 1856. Businessmen 

also endowed the Mercantile Library in 1846 

as the first circulating library, documentary 

archive, and art gallery in the American West. 

For decades, it hosted lectures by eminent 

international literati—celebrity writers such 

as Louis Agassiz, Henry Ward Beecher, 

Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 


62

Washington Irving, Francis Parkman, Harriet 

Beecher Stowe, William Thackeray, Mark 

Twain, Daniel Webster, and Oscar Wilde, 

who came to inspire a growing group of 

local intellectuals. 

In 1853, St. Louis opened the first public, 

tax-supported high school west of the 

Mississippi, fifteen years after the city provided 

free elementary education. Two decades 

later, Susan Blow became a national pioneer 

in establishing kindergartens. She joined 

William Torrey Harris, the much-praised 

superintendent of schools, and other members 

of the German-influenced “St. Louis Movement” 

and St. Louis Philosophical Society to make 

the city “a national cultural center” committed 

to educational progress. A growing number 

of St. Louisans considered free public education 

to be the “basis of a republic’s prosperity 

and the handmaid of virtue.” The highlyregarded 

private Seminary founded by Eliot 

was dedicated to a well-educated citizenry, 

and it spawned nonsectarian Washington 

University in 1857 and Mary Institute two 

years later. That gave the city four colleges by 

mid-century, following Saint Louis University 

in 1832; Kemper College, the first Protestant 

institution for training physicians, in 1838; 

and Concordia Seminary of the Lutheran 

Church-Missouri Synod, which had relocated 

to the city in 1849. 

Churches also played increasing roles in 

promoting the civility of urban life in the 

frontier West. Catholic congregations expanded 

from two in 1841 to eight by 1850, while 

Presbyterian churches increased from three 

to ten in those years. In 1850 there were 

two Baptist churches, five Episcopalian 

congregations, and seven Methodist chapels, 

plus two African-Methodist churches. In a 

single decade, German immigrants opened 

nine diverse Protestant churches, in addition 

to the sole Lutheran congregation of 1841. 

German residents also dominated the 

musical culture of St. Louis. In the 1840s, the 

talented Charles Balmer formed the Oratorio 

Society (the city’s first male chorus), the 

Left: View of Lucas Place, a fashionable 

neighborhood in the mid-nineteenth 

century made famous by Robert Campbell’s 

Victorian mansion (now the Campbell 

House Museum). Campbell defied the 

stereotype of mountain men who died 

violently, young and poor. Engraving from 

[Richard] Edwards’s Great West…and 

History of St. Louis (St. Louis, 1860). 

FRONTISPIECE COURTESY OF THE 


Below: Portraits of Charles and Jacob 

Kunkel, German pianists and composers 

in St. Louis, from the title page of their 

“Triumphal March” (St. Louis, 1868). 



6 3

R E M E M B E R I N G T H E F O U N D E R S 

Opposite: A St. Louis city parade from an 

1874 illustration in Harper’s Weekly that 

closely matches the description of the 

1847 celebration. 


According to the Missouri Republican, residents had “never witnessed such a turnout” for the 

1847 celebration of the city’s founding. Amid flowers and flags hanging from every window 

and a military band playing the Marseillaise, the “Most Honored Guest of the Day”—Pierre 

Chouteau—arrived in a fancy carriage guarded by four mounted Indians, “dressed in the full 

costume” of the Plains tribes. That honor guard symbolized “the presence of friendly Indians” 

who had protected and partnered with Laclede. 

Passing by the reviewing stand, fronting the courthouse on Fourth Street, were representatives 

from every public and private, corporate and civic, organization, from firemen to school children, 

marching in a huge parade. Making a grand spectacle was a twenty-foot-long replica of the 

General Pike (the first steamboat to visit St. Louis in 1817). It was mounted on wheels and 

pulled by eight white horses. Following that was a replica of an eighteenth-century keelboat, 

named the Laclede. 

The Hibernian Charitable Society marched under a “Harp of Erin” banner. Its members all 

wore green sashes and played Irish tunes. Keeping with the theme of immigration, many other 

residents—“male and female, white and black, old and young”—wore costumes reflecting their 

diverse native cultures. When the Hunting Club marched by, the crowd cheered a horse with 

deer horns mounted on its head! 

The most popular floats were the five huge brewery wagons, each pulled by four horses of 

varying colors and hauling “mammoth casks” containing 18 barrels of beer. Riding on the 

Lemp Brewery float was a man dressed as the King of Flanders, “inventor of beer,” while the 

other breweries featured “a good, round, portly representation of a hearty, jolly beer drinker.” 

Not to be outdone, the Barrel-Makers Society wagon carried the largest cask of all—holding 

25 barrels of beer that coopers had constructed in only seven hours! 

The “Parade of Schools” featured students carrying a large banner depicting Minerva, Goddess 

of Wisdom, with the mottos: “Knowledge is Power” and “Intelligence, Industry and Enterprise.” 

After a long parade and an even longer historical oration by the scholarly Wilson Primm, 

prominent citizens conducted Pierre Chouteau to a Grand Banquet in the State Tobacco 

Warehouse. Tables were set for 1,200 diners, but only 400 showed up, since many thought 

the dinner would be too crowded. But there was no lack of enthusiasm among attendees, 

who drank over twenty toasts, including: 

To the Founders of St. Louis, for their wisdom in settling the site that was now “the seat 

of empire!” 

To Missouri, “the largest of the American states in territory and the richest in natural resources.” 

To the City of St. Louis—“What it shall become, may be conjectured from what it is.” 

Those heavy-drinking diners who were still able to stand attended a Grand Ball at the 

Planters’ House Hotel. Its “spacious ball room” was filled to capacity, and “happiness ran riot 

in the mazes of the dance, and thus the night was passed.” 

Philharmonic Society, and the Polyhymnia 

Society—all antecedent elements of the later 

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, founded in 

1880 as only the second one in an American 

city. In 1837, Meriwether Lewis Clark designed 

the New St. Louis Theater—the first in the 

country to have individual seats and a removable 

floor. Wyman’s Hall, Bates’s Theater, and 

“The Olympic” also became favorite venues 

for visiting entertainers. In 1835 the opera 

composer, John Howard Payne, drew large 

crowds; violinist Norwegian Old Bull came in 

1845; and many St. Louisans attended the 1861 

performances of African American pianist, 

“Blind Tom,” a ten-year-old prodigy. But few 

attractions could match the popular appeal 

of Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale,” 

whom P. T. Barnum brought to town in 1851. 

Offering less high-brow entertainment was 

“Captain Jack’s Floating Palace,” with its large 


64

steamboat theater and a museum packed 

with ancient artifacts and intriguing relics. 

The largest crowd ever assembled in 

St. Louis up to that point celebrated the first 

public anniversary of the city’s founding on 

Monday, February 15, 1847. Such attention 

for an eighty-third city birthday seemed odd. 

But the thousands of citizens who thronged 

into streets and saloons, banquet halls and 

formal balls, to honor the French founders 

hoped to recapture some of the community 

cohesiveness of the colonial town that 

had faded with the huge migrations of 

diverse “foreigners.” 

Seeking a tangible reminder of 1764, revelers 

honored eighty-nine-year-old (Jean) Pierre 

Chouteau—“the last of St. Louis’s original settlers” 

(as a young child) and “the only” living 

resident “whose eyes have looked upon the 

face of Laclede.” Speaking in French, Chouteau 

recalled “the purity, simplicity, and honesty” of 

the original town. While Laclede was regarded 

as a “common sire” of all St. Louisans, no one 

publicly acknowledged that Pierre Chouteau 

was actually Laclede’s only son, despite the 

widespread knowledge of that blood bond. 

Pierre, himself, said only that he had been 

“acquainted” with “Monsieur Laclede.” 


6 5

C H A R N E L H O U S E O F C H O L E R A 

After witnessing that grievous loss of life, St. Louis poet, Ethel Grey, wrote: 

“Muffled and slowly the footsteps fall, 

With a dull and laboring tramp’ 

They carry the dead to the Charnel House, 

So cold and dark and damp. 

In single rows they lay the dead, 

Long files of corpses grim, 

Each ghostly face upturned is seen 

By the light of the torches dim.” 

The “Charnal House,” in Sunset Gleams from the City of the Mounds (New York, 1852). 

Above: Mid-nineteenth-century bottle of 

“Wm. Hall’s Cholera Cure”. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S ARTIFACT COLLECTION. 

Opposite, top: “Great Fire of the City on 

the 17th and 18th May 1849,” lithograph 

by Julius Hutawa (1849), showing the 

downtown areas destroyed. 


ST. LOUIS (888). 

Opposite, bottom: A “Laclede Brick,” 

of St. Louis, age unknown, one of several 

companies that made the city’s clay 

pits, busy brickyards, and decorative 

architectural details famous for more than a 

century following the Great Fire of 1849. 



66 

That grand spectacle of parades and 

patriotic speeches would not be repeated 

anytime soon, because, only two years later, 

St. Louisans were preoccupied with present 

tragedies that took precedence over past 

triumphs. In 1849 the city endured simultaneous 

catastrophes that left residents more 

mournful than celebratory. A major epidemic 

of Asiatic Cholera raged for nine months, 

beginning slowly in January and peaking in 

July—when 639 people died of that disease 

in a single week, 145 in one day—including 

most likely old Pierre Chouteau. Semi-official 

death tolls ranged from 4,283 to 4,547, but 

some residents claimed that the “Board of 

Health doesn’t report one half of the cases.” 

Large numbers of dead children may have 

been undercounted in the traumatic confusion 

to collect and dump corpses in “a common 

trench” as quickly as possible. Many 

would be reburied in the new Bellefontaine 

Cemetery, with little effort for a more 

accurate accounting. Since 3,268 Catholics, 

alone, were buried in 1849, a total minimum 

death toll of 5,500 (almost 8 percent of the 

population) was most likely. Some estimates 

of mortality range as high as 10 percent, but 

whatever the headcount, most historians 

agree that St. Louis suffered a greater mortality 

in 1849 than any other city in the nation. 

May 1849 would claim 431 cholera victims, 

but that tragic news was eclipsed in the middle 

of the month when a huge, devastating fire 

erupted among dozens of densely-packed 

steamboats along the levee, destroying 23 of 

them and 9 other vessels. High winds drove 

the flames into city streets, and over ten 

hours consumed 430 buildings in a fifteenblock 

area of the downtown core, from the 

Levee to Second Street, between Spruce and 

Locust. The central post office was lost, but 

the cathedral was spared by brave citizens 

who blew up nearby buildings to create 

firebreaks before the flames reached that 

sacred site. The heroic Irish fireman, Thomas 

Targee, died doing so—one of only three 

fatalities. Total property losses amounted to 

$6,000,000—$502,000 for buildings, $600,000 

for boats and cargoes, and $5,000,000 for 

merchandise in warehouses. The fire exacerbated 

the perennial lack of housing for the 

88 percent of residents who rented in a tiny 

city of only 4.78 square miles (3,060 acres). 

The eminent German immigrant, Henry 

Boernstein, observed that the “Great Fire” 

had left the “richest and busiest part [of 

St. Louis] in ashes and ruins, considerably 

outbidding the cholera in horror.” 

Both the contagion and the conflagration 

left the “unhappy city” in grief and disbelief, 

with fewer citizens to recall now-obliterated 

old landmarks and dear friends. 

But residents rebounded with resilience 

from those twin tragedies with a progressive 

spirit and aggressive action. They constructed 

new buildings with fire-resistant cast iron 

exteriors and locally-made bricks, and 

increasing numbers of new structures—such

as the six-story Barnum’s Hotel in 1854— 

rose higher than ever to make more efficient 

use of restricted space. Officials drained 

the polluted Chouteau’s Pond; improved 

sanitation and water quality; and created new 

medical facilities, fire-fighting capabilities, 

and quarantine policies. According to the noted 

German scientist, Dr. George Engelmann, his 

adopted city was “the center of North America, 

if not the world…. We burn one third of our 

steamboats, destroy one tenth of the wealth 

of our citizens in one night, kill one tenth by 

cholera…only to show how much we can 

stand without succumbing.” 

St. Louis survived those natural disasters, 

but human prejudices and political divisions 

over race relations drove it to the brink of 

“succumbing” in the next two decades. At 

mid-century, St. Louis had 2,636 African 

American slaves (3.4 percent of the city’s population) 

and 1,400 free blacks (1.8 percent). 

The latter included a thriving middle class 

of African American entrepreneurs, such as 

Elizabeth Keckley (later dressmaker for Mrs. 

Lincoln), who operated successful businesses, 

owned property, and collected rents from 

blacks and whites alike. Cyprian Clamorgan, 

from an old mixed-race family of French 


6 7

Selling people at the courthouse, as depicted 

in the oil painting, The Last Sale of Slaves 

(c. 1880), by Thomas S. Noble. 


ST. LOUIS (1939 003 001). 


68 

Caribbean Creoles, introduced those startling 

revelations to the public in his 1858 book, 

The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis. 

The relatively “mild” type of “householdservant 

slavery” that had existed under the 

colonial French and Spanish became a more 

severe form of chattel slavery under the 

Americans. In his famous 1847 autobiography, 

William Wells Brown, a fugitive slave 

from St. Louis, wrote that the “city did not 

look or function like a plantation,” but “the 

same omnipresent, oppressive social system 

prevailed.” The city shared the prejudices 

of its Deep South trading partners and 

auctioned slaves on the courthouse steps. 

Evidence of the infamous “slave pens” that 

held such human inventory remained until 

1963, when construction of Busch Stadium 

finally obliterated that scar on the downtown 

landscape. St. Louis slaves were prohibited 

from assembling in public, meeting at night, 

or drinking alcohol and received ten lashes 

on the bare back for each offense. White 

males over the age of eighteen were required 

to serve on community “patrols” to enforce 

those regulations. 

Fearing that slaves “would be rebellious” 

was an admission that African Americans and 

whites shared the same rational human desire 

for freedom, opportunity, and respect. In 1847 

a wealthy St. Louis businessman offered a $200 

reward for the capture and return of a slave 

couple he had owned for fifteen years. He 

seemed shocked that they were so discontented 

as to escape with their three children, 

aged 4, 6, and 12. The husband was “of good 

address,” carried “an ivory headed cane,” and 

probably arranged to reach Chicago by 

“covered wagon.” His wife and most of the 

children were described as “bright” and 

wearing some new clothing. Blacks, both 

slave and free, received assistance and

encouragement from Baptist minister John 

Berry Meachum, a former slave who founded 

St. Louis’s first African American church in 

1822. He operated a secret school for blacks, 

while his wife, Mary Meachum, was a conductor 

on the Underground Railroad, helping 

escaped slaves cross the Mississippi River to 

reach freedom in Illinois. 

The free blacks in St. Louis were “only 

half-free.” After being incorporated as a town 

in 1809, some of the earliest ordinances 

dealt with keeping blacks “in line.” State law 

prohibited free blacks from coming to settle 

in Missouri; learning to read and write; and 

assembling in groups. Due to their mobility 

and wider range of experiences, African 

Americans who had never been slaves were 

a greater concern for the white majority 

than slaves. German and Irish immigrants 

resented them as competitors for jobs, since 

they often worked for lower wages. But 

prominent citizens were more concerned 

with security issues. In March 1835 the 

state legislature required all free blacks in and 

surrounding St. Louis to obtain a license 

from the county court, and 145 did so fairly 

quickly, according to Christine Human 

Hughes. But on Halloween night of that year, 

Robert Wilkinson, a free black barber, who, 

ironically, worked at the Southern Hotel. 

Daguerreotype portrait by Thomas M. 

Easterly, c. 1860. In the decades following 

McIntosh’s murder, such middle-class 

African Americans had more to fear 

than most slaves because their economic 

independence and freedom of movement 

threatened rabid racists. 


ST. LOUIS (17221). 


6 9

leading residents from diverse cultural 

backgrounds met to discuss more stringent 

controls over free blacks. William Clark, 

Pierre Chouteau, Sr., Pierre Chouteau, Jr., 

Sylvestre Labbadie, Henry Von Puhl, Dr. 

Samuel Wherry, William Ashley, and riflemaker 

Samuel Hawkins sought to expel free 

blacks who had not been born in St. Louis or 

no longer had family ties here. 

Just a few months later, on April 28, 1836, 

such seething prejudices erupted most 

publicly when a large white mob, including 

two mayors and other prominent politicians, 

participated in the “revolting spectacle” of 

a “human bonfire.” The victim was Francis 

McIntosh, a free mulatto steamboat steward, 

who, being threatened with death during 

an arbitrary arrest, had killed one constable 

and severely slashed another. Outraged 

citizens grabbed McIntosh from jail, chained 

him to a downtown tree, and burned him 

alive, cheering and jeering at his agony. The 

“disfigured” and “roasted” corpse remained as 

a gruesome warning to all blacks who dared 

to assault whites, and tourists for many years 

cut off slivers of the charred execution tree as 

grisly souvenirs. 

Most newspapers feared that such repulsive 

violence had “damaged the fair fame of 

our town,” but defended the lynch mob for 

preserving the peace amid the growing 

paranoia about Nat Turner’s 1831 Virginia 

massacre of whites and northern abolitionist 

condemnations of slavery. Judge Luke 

Lawless (well named) found no individual 

guilty of murdering McIntosh, because so 

many people had participated. Community 

consensus against black violence seemed to 

justify even the most horrific white vigilantism. 

Elijah Lovejoy’s St. Louis Observer joined 

the northern press in condemning the judge’s 

“monstrous” leniency of a public atrocity. 

Hateful residents attacked the messenger 

who reminded them of their shame in a 

not-so-civilized city. Lovejoy moved to Alton 

for his own safety, but he was repeatedly 

attacked there, too, for his growing antislavery 

opinions. A mob murdered him in 

November 1837. Following those bloody 

tragedies, new Missouri laws prohibited the 

circulation of abolitionist publications and 

required black steamboat crews to be jailed 

until their vessels departed. 

Because St. Louis “had earned a national 

reputation for barbarism” and judicial 

malfeasance, city officials strictly adhered to 

due process in 1841, ensuring that a slave 

and three free blacks accused of murder 

received a competent defense in a fair trial. 

But after their convictions, a huge crowd, 

exaggerated as “75 percent of St. Louisans,” 

thronged to witness their executions. A boat 

company advertised tickets for a passage 

to Duncan’s Island to see the spectacle of 

“Four Negroes Executed.” The need for white 

citizens “to instill fear and obedience in 

blacks” then prompted a “macabre display, 

for several days, of the heads of the four men 

in the front window of Corse’s Drug Store at 

69 North First Street.” 

Historian Julie Winch wrote that city 

“authorities were far from happy that a free 

community of color existed at all,” and a 

St. Louis Anti-Abolition Society was founded 

in 1846. According to Adam Arenson, “as a 

booming metropolis in a border state, St. Louis’s 

demographic stew mirrored the nation’s 

regional, political, and ethnic diversity as no 

other city did,” making it “a place of lively 

contradictions.” Even the complex and 

divisive issue of race, however, had to 

have an unequivocal, eventual resolution. 

Otherwise, how could St. Louis, the cultured 

and affluent “great heart of the Republic,” 

claim to be a civilized city while treating its 

African American residents so brutally? 

In 1847, St. Louis was illuminated by 

gaslights for the first time, but that year was 

a dark one for the married city slaves, Dred 

and Harriet Scott, and their two daughters. 

They were suing for their freedom, since 

they had been taken from Missouri to live in 

Illinois and other free states where slavery 

was illegal. They were very brave to take on 

a racist system, especially considering the 

public violence of the previous decade. 

Entering a courtroom just a few steps from 

where slave sales were held symbolized the 

great odds against them. The Scotts lost their 

suit on a legal technicality, but a retrial freed 

them on January 12, 1850, only to have 

the Missouri Supreme Court overturn that 


70

verdict two years later. The U.S. Supreme 

Court made its famous ruling on March 6, 

1857, denying freedom for the Scotts and 

declaring that all African Americans, even if 

free, did not have the rights of U.S. citizens. 

Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision also 

nullified the Missouri Compromise of 1820 

by ruling that Congress never had the 

authority to exclude slavery from any state or 

territory. Dred Scott and his family would 

be freed by a new owner two months later, 

but in the years ahead, racial politics heated 

up, since all of the West was now open to 

the legal, and virtually unlimited, spread 

of slavery. 

The Dred Scott Case focused national 

attention on St. Louis, where polarizing 

ideologies clashed in efforts to dominate city 

Oil portrait of Dred Scott by Louis Schultze 

(1888), based on the famous print published 

in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 

June 27, 1857. 


ST. LOUIS (1897 009 0001). 


7 1

Abolitionist map of Free and Slave states— 

with Missouri in the middle—revealing 

nineteenth-century propaganda in an 

old school textbook. 



72 

politics. On the eve of the Civil War, St. Louis 

was a populous metropolis of 160,000 people—the 

sixth largest city in the United 

States, with annual manufactures worth 

$27 million, seventh highest in the nation. 

But St. Louis’s central location, which had 

long given it an economic advantage, now 

became a political liability, as northern and 

southern, eastern and western, interests 

clashed there. As prolonged violence erupted 

in nearby “Bleeding Kansas,” and threats of 

secession grew, St. Louis’s profitable river trade 

with the slave South seemed increasingly 

“disreputable” to the city’s Yankee businessmen. 

Many moved their money and often 

their residences to the slave-free city of 

Chicago, which also offered new investment 

opportunities in railroad routes to northeastern 

states. By 1860 only 24 percent of 

entrepreneurs from New York and New 

England remained in St. Louis, and their 

investments in the city plummeted to a mere 

13 percent. Liberal antislavery sentiments, 

however, continued to thrive among Eliot’s 

abolitionist Unitarians and well-educated 

German radicals, who published 40 percent 

of the city’s newspapers. 

Anti-secessionist St. Louisans embraced 

eastern influences that increasingly linked them 

to Illinois and other free states—challenging 

Missouri’s rural “Little Dixie” counties with 

slave populations of at least 25 percent. 

In 1861 the city’s mayor was a “Union, 

Anti-Black Republican,” and while leading 

St. Louisans supported a variety of national 

political parties, most were moderates who 

wanted to expand economic opportunities 

for whites without promoting freedom for 

slaves. But they certainly did not want slavery 

to spread. As early as 1857, Benton disciples 

Gratz Brown and his cousin, Francis Preston 

(“Frank”) Blair, Jr., supported a very gradual 

emancipation of Missouri slaves, but above 

all, they wanted to keep the state in the 

Union. When they and Virginia-born Mayor 

John Wimer won elections that year, Brown 

proclaimed that St. Louis was now “The Free 

City of the Valley of the Mississippi.” 

In the 1860 presidential election, even 

supporters of Abraham Lincoln were divided 

into conservative and radical factions over 

racial issues. He won the city—9,483 votes 

to 8,538 for the moderate Illinois Democrat, 

Stephen Douglas. But St. Louis voters overwhelmingly 

rejected Southern extremism, 

casting only 544 votes for the pro-slavery 

Southern Democrat, John C. Breckinridge of 

Kentucky. Arenson observed that “St. Louis… 

[was] the largest city in a slave state to vote 

for” Lincoln, and its citizens also reelected

President Lincoln’s Cabinet in early 1861, 

with Postmaster-General Montgomery Blair 

(top left), and Attorney General Edward 

Bates (top center) representing twenty 

percent with St. Louis connections. 

Engraving from Horace Greeley, 

The American Conflict: A History of 

the Great Rebellion…(Hartford, 1866). 


7 3

A Confederate envelope retrieved after the 

capture of Camp Jackson on May 10, 1861. 

The letter inside was dated the day before 

and included secessionist sentiments of the 

writer, perhaps Captain George West, 

a “Minute Man” of the Missouri Guard, 

to his brother. 


ST. LOUIS (D4592). 


74 

him in 1864 with support comparable to 

that of Philadelphia. Blair’s older brother, 

Montgomery, had been one of Dred Scott’s 

lawyers and would soon join Lincoln’s 

cabinet, while Brown became a U.S. senator 

in 1863. St. Louisan Edward Bates served as 

Lincoln’s attorney general in his first term, 

while his brother-in-law, Hamilton Gamble, 

helped keep Missouri in the Union as acting 

governor from 1861 to 1864. 

When Lincoln took office in March 1861, 

seven Southern states had already seceded, 

and a special state convention met at the 

Mercantile Library to determine whether 

Missouri should stay in the Union. It would 

for now, by a vote of 70 to 23, because 

secession was considered too radical a choice 

to make that early. However, Missouri’s 

new Southern-leaning, pro-slavery governor, 

Claiborne Fox Jackson, rejected President 

Lincoln’s call for state troops to defend the 

Union, and Jefferson City took control of the 

police in St. Louis City to block antislavery 

activity. St. Louisans were hardly united, 

however, and they organized rival pro- and 

anti-slavery militias that reflected their 

cultural diversity. 

Rich French families, lower-class Irishmen, 

and farmers from Little Dixie organized as a 

state militia of “Minute Men” to oppose a 

“tyrannical” federal government and raised 

secessionist flags above the courthouse and 

the old Berthold Mansion of “plantation 

architecture.” Frank Blair countered those 

pro-Southern forces by recruiting large numbers 

of German St. Louisans into the “Blair 

Rangers,” the “Black Rifles,” and especially 

the “Wide Awakes”—free-soil militiamen 

increasingly on the lookout for secessionists. 

With his Washington connections, Blair’s 

4,000 militiamen, almost all Germans, had 

been mustered in as U.S. soldiers under a 

new commander of the St. Louis Arsenal, 

Colonel Nathaniel Lyon. Supported by 

Lincoln, Lyon circumvented the authority 

of General William S. Harney, who had 

whipped one of his female slaves to death 

and was considered too sympathetic to the 

Confederacy’s need for armaments. 

As tensions mounted, both pro- and antisecessionists 

focused on the St. Louis 

Arsenal. Founded in 1827, it was the “largest 

military storehouse in the slave states” by 

1860, with many cannons, 60,000 muskets, 

1.5 million cartridges, and 90,000 pounds of 

gunpowder that would be invaluable for 

starting or thwarting rebellion. In March 

1861, the Missouri Militia under General 

Daniel M. Frost of St. Louis established 

“Camp Jackson” at the intersection of Grand 

Boulevard and Olive Street, where heavy 

cannons could bombard the Arsenal. He had 

an estimated force of 1,000 men, including 

300 strongly secessionist “Minute Men.” 

When a steamboat arrived with howitzers 

and siege cannons captured by Confederates 

from the federal arsenal at Baton Rouge, 

few doubts remained that “se-cesh” officials 

in Jefferson City intended to seize 

the St. Louis Arsenal. But Colonel 

Lyon was prepared. In late April, 

he secretly shipped most of his 

munitions across the river to 

Alton, in pro-Union Illinois. And 

in early May, he disguised himself 

as a woman, using a thick veil 

to hide his heavy beard, to spy on 

Camp Jackson. 

On Friday, May 10, 1861, Lyon 

successfully attacked Frost’s garrison 

with 6,000 troops—the vast 

majority being German “Home 

Guard” volunteers led by Blair, 

Henry Boernstein, Franz Sigel, and 

others. Surprised and overwhelmed

y superior numbers, General Frost surrendered 

Camp Jackson without a fight or a single 

casualty. But as Lyon marched hundreds of 

prisoners into crowded city streets, a huge, 

angry mob jeered the “Damned Dutch,” pelted 

them with rocks, and fired pistols into their 

ranks. Lyon’s men suffered four killed and ten 

wounded, while three of the secessionists 

they were guarding also died. His troops 

responded with random gunfire that killed 

30 civilians—including one woman and five 

children—while as many as 50 other citizens 

suffered wounds. That civil(ian) war in the 

streets of St. Louis “cast a dark veil over an 

otherwise glorious day” for the Union cause. 

The carnage on what pro-Southerners called 

“Black Friday” was witnessed by future 

Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William 

Tecumseh Sherman, who would see far worse 

atrocities to come. 

The “Camp Jackson Affair” was the only 

“battle” fought in St. Louis during the Civil 

War, while the rest of Missouri experienced 

another 1,161 engagements. Lyon, promoted 

to general, captured Jefferson City and 

Boonville, driving the secessionist state 

government into exile before he was killed at 

the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in August 1861. 

The support he had received from Free Soil 

Germans, Yankee abolitionists, and other 

anti-Confederate citizens gave credit to 

St. Louis as a liberal Union stronghold. Lyon’s 

initiative prevented Camp Jackson troops 

from expelling all free blacks from St. Louis, 

as intended by the governor’s racist police 

board. Instead, Major-General John C. Frémont, 

Senator Benton’s son-in-law, took command 

of the city and quickly issued an August 1861 

proclamation freeing its slaves. Although that 

emancipation was short-lived, given Lincoln’s 

priority to keep the key border state of 

Missouri in the Union, Fremont successfully 

imposed martial law in the city. That quelled 

most Confederate sympathizers by incarcerating 

“traitors” and spies in the Gratiot Street 

Prison, however unjustly. 

As Lincoln’s city on the Mississippi, St. Louis 

was invaluable to the northern cause in the 

West. It became the “Arsenal of the Union,” 

supplying 40 percent of all bullets to federal 

troops. At nearby Carondelet (soon to be 

annexed), the talented, self-taught engineer, 

James B. Eads, constructed the iron-clad gunboats 

Carondelet, St. Louis, Louisville, Pittsburg, 

and the larger, better-armed Benton. Those 

innovative vessels played prominent roles in 

General Grant’s attacks on rebel river forts, 

eventually leading to the fall of Vicksburg. 

Dividing the Confederacy ultimately made that 

former St. Louis resident the most successful 

Union commander in the East, as well as 

the West. 

The Eads Boatyard in Carondelet, 

showing the construction of Union gunboats; 

from a nineteenth-century publication, 

The Soldier in Our Civil War. 



7 5

On top is an amputation saw, with razorsharp 

edge on one side for cutting flesh and 

a serrated edge for cutting bone. Below are 

small, portable surgical instruments made 

by A. M. Leslie & Company, St. Louis, 

and owned by Dr. O. D. Fitzgerald of 

Ozark County, Missouri. 

CIVIL WAR MEDICAL EQUIPMENT FROM THE 


Four thousand soldiers from St. Louis died 

on both sides in the Civil War, but their city 

achieved great fame and a lasting legacy as a 

humane refuge free of the chaos and cruelty 

that gripped the rest of the state. Confederate 

guerrilla cavalrymen under William Quantrill 

and “Bloody Bill” Anderson shot, and sometimes 

scalped, unarmed Union soldiers. In 

retaliation, federal troops attacked civilians 

merely suspected of Southern sympathies 

and expelled some 20,000 residents from 

“Little Dixie” counties. Many ragged refugees 

found their way to St. Louis—homeless slaveowners, 

a thousand or so German farmers 

whom General Sigel saved from death by 

ruthless outlaws, and African Americans, 

slave and free, from every location. 

St. Louis was the most compassionate 

and accommodating of all slave cities in 

the wartime treatment of blacks. By 1863, 

the number of Missouri slaves had declined 

35 percent, to about 74,000, since a large 

number had escaped to the “promised land” 

of Lincoln’s capital in the West. St. Louis’s 

African American population tripled during 

the Civil War, approaching 10,000 by 1865. 

The city provided farm plots for ex-slaves 

to grow crops and generously funded the 

Freedmen’s Relief Society. African American 

refugees were housed, fed, and even schooled 

at Benton Barracks, along Natural Bridge 

Road, which was also a recruitment and 

training center for “Colored Infantry.” Before 

the war’s end, some 8,000 Missouri blacks 

enlisted in the Union Army to fight for the 

liberation of other African Americans. 

Freedom truly triumphed when Missouri 

became the first slave state to abolish slavery. 

It passed an emancipation act in St. Louis on 

January 11, 1865, by a vote of 65-4, almost a 

year before the Thirteenth Amendment was 

ratified. To impart lasting value to that freedom, 

St. Louis created five “Colored Schools” for 

1,600 students, naming them for famous black 

heroes—including Haitian slave revolutionaries, 

Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques 

Dessalines, and American astronomer Benjamin 

Banneker. Sumner High School, honoring the 

notable abolitionist politician, opened in 1875 

as the first public secondary school for African 

Americans in the West. By 1900, Missouri had 

the largest percentage of black elementary 

school students in the South—a hopeful sign 

that a formerly enslaved population would 

enjoy unprecedented opportunities for equality 

in the new century. 


76

Another humanitarian contribution of 

St. Louis was providing medical treatment 

to wounded soldiers of both sides during 

the Civil War. Eliot joined businessman 

James G. Yeatman and many others in founding 

the Western Sanitary Commission. Staffing 

a 2,500-bed hospital at Jefferson Barracks and 

funding fourteen other medical facilities, the 

Commission had treated over 60,000 soldiers 

by May 1864, with an admirable mortality 

rate lower than 10 percent. St. Louisans were 

truly concerned about hospitalized soldiers, 

and city newspapers published weekly lists 

of those who had died. Typical was the first 

week of November 1862, in which 73 of the 

74 deaths among 25 Confederate and 49 

Union troops occurred from disease (measles, 

dysentery, typhoid fever, and pneumonia), 

rather than wounds. 

Venerable Jefferson Barracks, which will 

turn 200 in 2026, is the place from the Civil 

War that best symbolizes St. Louis’s special 

role in that conflict. Some 200 senior officers 

who had been stationed there fought in the 

war, and its national cemetery that opened in 

Above: “An Ordinance Abolishing Slavery 

in Missouri,” lithograph by 

Theodore Schrader, 1865. 


ST. LOUIS (21818). 

Left: “Jefferson Barracks,” an 1866 

lithograph by Gast, Moeller and Company. 

COURTESY OF MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (24694). 


7 7

Right: Title page of Our Nation’s Hero, 

a song honoring Ulysses S. Grant, with 

lyrics by Miss Ida Schott Taylor and music 

by Henry M. Butler, published by Balmer 

and Weber in St. Louis, 1885. 


Opposite: Pottery Booth at the Mississippi 

Valley Sanitary Fair at St. Louis, 1864. 

Stereographic photograph (half view) by 

J. A. Scholten. Shown next to the man 

with his back to the camera is Mrs. Adaline 

Couzins, an early local leader for female 

political equality. 

COURTESY OF MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (51041). 


78 

1863 reunited many of them from among the 

16,000 burials. While the base hospital offered 

help and hope for wounded troops, former 

St. Louis army officers, Grant and Lee, also 

chose compassion over carnage by negotiating 

an end to the horrific slaughter. 

St. Louis philanthropists expanded the 

reach of their generosity by distributing more 

than $4.5 million outside of the city to care 

for soldiers and needy civilians throughout 

the nation. Residents raised about $600,000 

alone at the city’s Mississippi Valley Sanitary 

Fair of 1864. That unprecedented three-week 

exposition attracted thousands of attendees—including 

many African Americans— 

who, in a notable departure from segregationist 

traditions, were served refreshments 

without prejudice. 

St. Louis women who had been inspired 

by work in Western Sanitary Commission 

hospitals emerged as political activists for 

female rights in the postwar period. 

According to historian Lee Ann White, in 

1867 Virginia Minor was “the first person to 

take a public stand for woman suffrage in 

the state,” becoming a leading advocate in 

St. Louis from 1879 to 1892. Equally passionate 

was Mrs. Adaline Couzins, who served 

as a Civil War nurse for the Ladies’ 

Union Aid Society of St. Louis and was 

wounded at the siege of Vicksburg. She 

founded the Female Guardian Home of 

St. Louis while campaigning for female 

suffrage. Her precocious daughter, 

Phoebe Couzins, was a Civil War nurse, 

the second American woman to earn a 

law degree in the nation, and the first 

female to serve as a U.S. marshal. At the 

American Equal Rights Association convention 

in May 1869, she delivered a 

rousing speech advocating the vote for 

white and black women, because they 

were as deserving of legal equality as 

black men. Couzins remained an outspoken 

suffragist until her death in 1913. 

Following the Civil War, St. Louis’s 

humanitarian citizens continued to 

resolve social crises without governmental 

assistance. In 1879 the St. Louis 

riverfront became the temporary home 

to more than 6,000 ex-slaves, known 

as “Exodusters,” who fled the South 

to begin new lives as free farmers in 

Kansas. Black churches provided them 

with shelter and charitable assistance. 

Lincoln’s city on the Mississippi also 

played prominent roles in national 

politics in the postwar period. Grant, the 

hometown hero, served two terms as the 

Republican president from 1869 to 1877, 

while another St. Louis resident, Carl 

Schurz—the first German immigrant to 

serve in the U.S. Senate—opposed his 

Radical Reconstruction policies as leader of 

the new Liberal Republican movement. 

Several St. Louisans also advocated sweeping 

reforms of the state constitution, highlighting 

the traditional tensions between urban 

intellectuals and rural conservatives. As 

Wendell Phillips wrote in 1870, “if Missouri 

would back up St. Louis with a liberal 

policy…[it] would soon become…one of the 

great cities of the world.”


7 9

“One asked one’s self whether this extravagance [the World’s Fair] reflected the Past or imagined the Future; 

whether it was a creation of the old America or a promise of the new one…. 

[O]ne seemed to see almost an adequate motive for power; 

almost a scheme for progress.” 

–Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, 1907 


EXPLORING THE WORLD’S FAIR CITY 

IN A RAILROAD ERA 

Train print from a nineteenthcentury 

newspaper. 


Between 1870 and 1920, St. Louis became a modern industrial metropolis—a rapidly 

expanding, technologically-sophisticated large city increasingly defined by its railroads, rather 

than its steamboats. River traffic did not end immediately or completely, however. St. Louis 

quickly restored its disrupted commerce with the Deep South soon after the Civil War, and in 

1878, the steamer Charles P. Chouteau set a Mississippi River record by transporting 7,818 bales 

of cotton, weighing some 2.5 million pounds, in a single trip. 

But the 737,000 tons of goods that reached the city by water in 1874 dropped to only 629,000 

tons in less than a decade. Twelve city companies owned 155 steamboats that continued to call at 

St. Louis after 1884, but the trend was to build bloated floating palaces for entertainment, rather 

than sleek, efficient commercial craft. One giant boat was 350 feet long and 101 feet wide, while 

a rival steamer had smokestacks 75 feet tall and side-wheels four stories high. Ironically the need 

for speed on the water, symbolized by the Robert E. Lee’s 1870 record-setting time of three days, 

eighteen hours, and fourteen minutes to cover the 1,200 miles from New Orleans, hastened the 

evolution of ever-faster trains. 


80

Once the Civil War ended, the energy of 

the nation was unleashed on westward 

expansion, thanks to congressional legislation 

that encouraged homesteading and the 

construction of railroads. The new Age of 

Locomotives transformed western landscapes 

with unbelievable speed; the first transcontinental 

railroad was completed in 1869— 

while the last surviving member of the Lewis 

and Clark Expedition was still alive! St. Louis 

had to act quickly to join that fast-moving 

transportation revolution or be left behind. 

Adventurous city entrepreneurs had 

invested in early railroads since the 1830s, 

and they were not long deterred by the 

shocking Gasconade Train Disaster of 1855. 

The renamed Missouri Pacific Railroad 

stretched to Sedalia by 1860, and it soon 

had tracks running to Pilot Knob, Macon, 

Hannibal, and St. Joseph. But the most lucrative 

routes had to connect to major eastern 

cities, and that required a bridge across the 

Mississippi—a daunting economic and 

engineering challenge for a city that still 

loved its steamboats. The St. Louis and 

Illinois Bridge Company was incorporated 

in 1864 with $1,000,000 in initial funding, 

but it was already too late. Chicago trains 

had been crossing the Mississippi River at 

Rock Island, Illinois, since the mid-1850s. 

Secure from the slavery controversies that 

“southern” St. Louis faced, Chicago benefited 

from a farming boom in northern Illinois 

and nearby Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. 

Train tycoons in New York and Boston 

assisted those farmers in reaching lucrative 

eastern markets by funding rail lines to 

Chicago. No matter what St. Louis’s capitalists 

did, they could not overcome the 

insurmountable geographical reality that 

had created an increasingly dominant rival 

“gateway to the West.” 

Nineteenth-century photograph of an overloaded 

cotton steamer. 



8 1

“Pont de Saint-Louis by H. Clerget and 

M. McAllister,” a nineteenth-century print 

of the Eads Bridge circulated in France. 



82 

Not even the big, beautiful, and brilliantlydesigned 

bridge of James Eads, which cost 

$10,000,000 and opened on July 4, 1874, 

could slow Chicago’s momentum. That 

formidable steel and iron structure stretched 

2,000 feet across the Mississippi, 55 feet 

above the high-water mark at mid-channel, 

and fourteen workers had died from decompression 

anchoring it into bedrock below 

25 feet of water and 80 feet of sand. That 

marvel of technological innovation achieved 

worldwide fame and has been an iconic 

St. Louis landmark ever since. But decades 

of delaying lawsuits between competing 

riverboat and railroad investors diminished 

its commercial impact at the time, leading to 

almost immediate bankruptcy. Bridge traffic 

increased St. Louis’s rail freight from 3,000,000 

tons in 1874 to almost 7,000,000 just nine 

years later. But Chicago had a large lead it 

never relinquished. 

That Midwestern urban competition has 

remained a distracting obsession in St. Louis 

ever since, but it was most intense in the half 

century after 1870. Among city leaders, the 

rivalry with Chicago led to both an excessive 

sense of inferiority and overly-exuberant 

expressions of superiority to compensate, 

often simultaneously! “In two decades,” 

wrote historian and shameless booster, 

Walter Stevens, “no other American city… 

adapt[ed] itself so quickly to such radical 

changes,” as St. Louis moved forward “with no 

loss of prestige to grasp new opportunities.” 

But there was lost prestige—and revenue— 

and to cure their city’s damaged pride, some 

St. Louis officials resorted to cheating. 

The Census of 1870 showed that Chicago’s 

population had increased 166 percent in one 

decade, but St. Louis waited to see the total 

for its rival and then topped it by 12,000 

fictitious people. St. Louis boosters trumpeted 

the news that their city of 312,963 was now 

the “fourth largest” in the United States, but 

an official investigation found those manipulated 

headcounts to be a “worthless fraud.” 

It was impossible to have gained 150,000 

new residents in a single decade, and 

St. Louis had a “nasty shock” in the Census 

of 1880, which added only 40,000 people—

dropping it to an accurate sixth place among 

American cities. “Such fraud and deception,” 

observed Arenson, “made St. Louis the butt of 

Gilded Age humor” and led some prominent 

residents to disassociate themselves from the 

embarrassed city. 

Despite, or because of, that scandal, a 

growing number of vocal locals initiated 

decades of exaggerated boasts about 

St. Louis. In 1870, the bombastic Logan 

Reavis published St. Louis: The Future Great 

City of the World, in which he argued that 

the national capital should be a dynamic 

commercial city at an ideal latitude in 

the center of America. In repeated editions 

over many years, he continued to argue 

that St. Louis was already the “undisputed 

metropolis of the Mississippi Valley,” having 

“grown from small beginnings to gigantic 

proportions” and was certainly capitalworthy 

as “one of the greatest, wealthiest, 

and most prosperous cities in the country.” 

Other St. Louisans promoted a “Million 

Population Club,” which projected a city 

population of at least 2,000,000 residents 

by 1890 and up to 12,000,000 by 1930! 

Not even the lowest estimate ever came close 

to being reached, but the city’s population 

did increase 29 percent between 1880-1890 

and by an additional 27 percent in 1900. 

Detail of the illustration, “Some Citizens 

of the ‘Future Great City’ of St. Louis,” 

published in the Every Saturday issue of 

October 28, 1871. Reavis appears at the 

top right margin. 


8 3

Below: Diagram of St. Louis City Limit 

Extensions and Population Growth, from 

Official Program of the Centennial 

of the Incorporation of St. Louis, 

October 3-9, 1909 (St. Louis, 1909). 

Opposite: Final stages in the destruction of 

the Great Mound. Daguerreotype, c. 1869, 

by Thomas M. Easterly. Giddy with a 

building boom that required the extension 

of downtown streets, St. Louisans destroyed 

the largest Indian mound, rendering that 

marvelous ancient landmark into fill dirt for 

the sake of “progress”—erecting equally 

expendable modern buildings. 


ST. LOUIS (17087). 

The 1880 Census was the first to separate 

St. Louis City’s population of 350,518 

from St. Louis County’s 31,888. The Missouri 

Constitution of 1875 authorized a division 

that would establish separate governments 

for each entity and define their boundaries. 

The controversial split with the county in 

1876 tripled the area of the city to 61.37 

square miles (39,276 acres), with 19 miles 

of north-south river frontage but less than 

seven miles stretching to the west. Those tiny 

boundaries have long been considered 

“a crippling deterrent to development.” But 

in 1876 residents were optimistic about 

how much larger their city was than before. It 

had annexed the Village of North St. Louis in 

1844 and experienced a growing population 

and booming prosperity in a mere 4.5 square 

miles until 1856. Even with the 1871 annexation 

of Carondelet, St. Louis occupied only 

17 square miles by 1875, so increasing its 

size 3.5 times in a single year seemed like a 

very generous windfall, giving the city plenty 

of room for expansion. 

Moreover, many St. Louisans relished the 

distinction of being one of a very few 

completely independent cities, free from 

county legislation, in the entire nation. 

Because those living outside the city had 

increased 410 percent from 1840 to 1850, 

St. Louisans wished to avoid the expense 

of administering a huge, rural county of 

558 square miles, which would dilute tax 

revenues for urban needs. By separating, 

proponents expected a lower tax rate, 

improved city services, and the acquisition 

of valuable county properties within the 

new city limits—especially the magnificent 

courthouse. There were risks either way, and 

the difficult task of composing ballot language 

required fifty-two planning meetings. Close 

election results led to charges of voter fraud, 

until a special commission finally ruled 

(some said arbitrarily) that the city-county 

divorce had passed by 1,253 votes and a 

home-rule city charter by 3,221 ballots. 

In a Gilded Age enamored of the 

Quantitative Ethic, in which bigger was 

better and more was better, St. Louisans 

invested heavily in a late nineteenth-century 

building boom worthy of a national capital, 

even if the prospects for that ambitious 

move were fading fast. St. Louis promoters 

forged ahead with internal optimism and 

external publicity to compensate for their 

wounded pride in not even being the 

economic and population capital of the 

Midwest. The city had not constructed a 


84


8 5

Above: The Exposition Building, from 

James Cox, St. Louis Through a Camera 

(St. Louis, 1893). 


Below: View of the Chamber of Commerce 

Building, from the New York Daily 

Graphic, January 21, 1880. 


major public building since the U.S. Custom 

House and Main Post Office opened in 1859, 

so the end of the Civil War provided an unrivaled 

opportunity to splurge on architectural 

and technological gems that expanded the 

city upward and outward. 

The 1871 Four Courts Building and City 

Jail was “one of the handsomest pieces of 

architecture in the West,” made of cream 

sandstone and “modeled after the Palace of 

the Louvre.” Occupying an entire city block 

bounded by Spruce and Clark and Eleventh 

and Twelfth Streets, it contained several criminal 

courtrooms, a grand jury chamber, and 

offices of the circuit attorney, chief of police, 

city marshal, and sheriff. That building also 


86

housed the Central Police Station, a gallows, 

a jail with a modern “shell of iron” (where 

visitors could gawk at the inmates), and the 

City Morgue (where “bodies of unidentified 

dead persons are exposed for three days”). 

The basement had a “Calaboose” for offenders 

rounded up in the “Hoodlum Wagon” for 

minor offenses: fast driving of carriages; 

placing bells or anything else on horses that 

could frighten them; public drunkenness; 

swimming in the river; serenading in the 

street; prostitution; indecent behavior near a 

church; or possession of deadly weapons, 

including slingshots. 

In 1874, the Merchants Exchange/Chamber 

of Commerce Building opened on Third Street 

and was immediately touted as “the finest 

structure in the world devoted to business.” 

Costing $1.5 million, that six-story edifice 

housed the Merchants Exchange Hall, a 

beautiful 221 foot by 62 foot room with a 

60 foot high ceiling, trimmed with walnut 

and mahogany. It was a popular location 

for many public events, including the Veiled 

Prophet’s Ball. Another business building— 

the Cotton Exchange Building on Main 

and Walnut—opened nine years later. 

Constructed of stone and pressed brick, that 

five-story structure cost $150,000 and was 

considered the “finest” such exchange in 

the country. 

In September 1884, the city opened the 

St. Louis Exposition Building and Music Hall, 

“one of the largest” such structures in the 

United States. Constructed of stone, 600 tons 

of iron, and 9,000,000 pressed bricks at 

a cost of $750,000, it occupied two city 

blocks between Olive and St. Charles along 

Thirteen and Fourteenth Streets. The building 

provided 280,000 square feet of exhibit 

space and had nine entrances to handle large 

crowds. Its Music Hall of 5,000 seats was 

cooled by “fresh air sent into the building 

by…an immense fan in the basement.” 

View of the Post-Office and Custom House 

Building, from the New York Daily 

Graphic, January 21, 1880. 



8 7


88

In 1890, the $3,000,000 Merchants Terminal 

Bridge became the city’s second railroad 

bridge, with a center span of 523 feet. By then, 

no steamboats could compete with St. Louis’s 

“18 railroads running an average of 200 passenger 

trains, carrying over 20,000 people—plus 

184 freight trains—daily,” with links to 25,000 

miles of tracks in all directions. The 1875 

Railroad Depot at Poplar and Twelfth—rendered 

obsolete in only fifteen years—was replaced in 

1894 by the massive Union Station, where 

32 rail lines converged. Modeled after a castle 

in southern France, the masterpiece of architect 

Theodore C. Link cost $6.5 million and was the 

largest and most modern such facility in the 

world, twice the size of Boston’s main railroad 

terminal. Farther down Market Street, the massive 

City Hall—in French Revival Renaissance style 

“similar to the Hotel de Ville of Paris”—opened 

in 1904 (not in time for the World’s Fair). 

Private entrepreneurs also constructed 

fourteen major buildings, costing $8,000,000, 

by 1892. The Security Building and the 

Equitable Building each reached heights 

of ten stories. But the most innovative 

“skyscraper” was Louis Sullivan’s gorgeous 

Wainwright Building of 1891, still regarded 

as an architectural masterpiece. The Chamber 

of Commerce claimed that St. Louis had 

“erected more buildings in 1891 than any 

other city on the continent and offers the 

safest and best investment to be found in any 

other large city in the world.” The number of 

building permits issued by the city revealed 

both quantitative and qualitative progress in 

only fifteen years: 

Opposite: Union Station as it appeared in a 

1904 photograph by A. W. Sanders. 

REPRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

Above: Skyscrapers, from Cox, St. Louis 

Through a Camera (1893). 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION 

Total Built Cost Brick or Stone Frame 

1876 1,825 $3.5 million 1,361 464 

1884 2,609 7.3 million 1,989 620 

1891 4,435 13.3 million 2,976 1,459 


8 9

Newspaper boy and businessman; print 

of early twentieth-century St. Louis 

street scene. 



90

W H O A C T U A L L Y B U I L T S T . L O U I S ? 

St. Louis in the late nineteenth century was praised as a “vast and busy workshop,” where the “products of industry are not only 

bought, sold and handled,” but were actually “made here.” Business tycoons and political leaders receive all of the credit for the 

productivity of industrialization, overshadowing the indispensable contributions of the men, women—and child—laborers of every age 

and race who actually performed the dirty, dangerous tasks that created modern cities. The success of steamboat commerce over many 

generations depended upon thousands of black “roustabouts” who did the heavy lifting along the St. Louis levee. Praise for the 

renowned Eads Bridge obscures the many workers who died in building it. In the early twentieth century, the United States had the 

highest rate of industrial accidents on the planet, with workplaces killing 11,000 employees and injuring (often maiming) another 

1.4 million in 1917 alone. 

In the Gilded Age of rapid industrial expansion, the richest one percent of Americans owned fifty percent of the nation’s wealth. 

In contrast, St. Louis’s 70,000 adult male factory workers earned an average annual wage of only $635, compared to the yearly salary 

of $1,000 for the policemen who arrested strikers. The 13,500 women older than fifteen who worked in manufacturing were only paid 

an annual average wage of $268, while 2,300 child factory workers averaged a meager $168 for twelve months of work. 

Like other large industrial cities, St. Louis “had not served the poor well” for decades, amid “wage cuts, chronic hunger and 

unemployment.” In contrast to the mansions of economic elites situated far from the inner city, unskilled workers lived in overcrowded, 

unhealthy, and crime-ridden tenements or “shanties” in “Clabber Alley,” “Wildcat Chute,” “Happy Hollow,” and other blighted 

neighborhoods, where smoky air, impure water, poor sanitation, and deficient diets shortened lives. 

Black levee workers portrayed in a late 

nineteenth-century Scribner’s Magazine 

article on St. Louis steamboats; from the 



9 1

F A S H I O N A B L E 

M A N S I O N S 

This page and opposite: Author’s composite of fashionable mansions, 

from James Cox, “St. Louis the Carnival City of America,” in 

Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, XXXIII No. 6 (June 1892).. 


92


9 3

T H E P L E A S A N T D I S T R A C T I O N S O F S P O R T S 

In the early twentieth century, most Americans associated the popular ditty, “First in Shoes, First in Booze, but Last in the American 

League,” with St. Louis’s famous beer, its world-leading manufacture of footwear, and the hapless “St. Louis Browns” baseball team, 

which finished at or near the bottom of the American League twenty-six times in fifty years. But as the previous “Brown Stockings,” 

under the ownership of beer baron Chris Von der Ahe, the original team won four successive pennants from 1885 to 1888. St. Louis 

was the center of the baseball world in 1886, when the Spink brothers founded The Sporting News here, the “Brown Stockings” won the 

pennant, and the “St. Louis Stars” were champions of the Negro League. 

“First in Shoes, First in Booze, and Last in 

the American League”—visualizing that 

famous slogan with early twentieth-century 

items photographed by the author from his 

collection: a woman’s high-top boot from the 

famous Brown Shoe Company, a bottle of 

“Columbia Weiss Beer,” with ceramic 

stopper, and a replica cap of the old 

St. Louis Browns Baseball Team. 

St. Louis’s population in 1890 reached 

451,770—an increase of 100,000 in a single 

decade to make it the fifth ranking U.S. city. 

It was now 3.5 times larger than any other 

Missouri municipality and had eclipsed the 

populations of much older cities, such as 

Boston and Baltimore; bested its Ohio River 

rival, Cincinnati; and dwarfed its “mother city” 

of New Orleans. St. Louis now had 250,000 

more residents than Washington, D.C., which 

defiant boosters loved to advertise. But with 

severely constricted boundaries, St. Louis 

would never catch Chicago, now the second 

largest city in America. It had recovered 

remarkably quickly from the devastating 

fire of 1871, which had destroyed 13,500 

buildings, worth $186,000,000, and left 

about 100,000 citizens homeless. By 1890, 

however, St. Louis’s northern rival had over 

1,000,000 residents living in 182 square 

miles—120 of them recently annexed from 

surrounding suburbs. 

Nonetheless, St. Louis was doing quite 

well in a much smaller space. By 1892, it 

had become a “vigorous and progressive 

modern city”—“cosmopolitan in every sense 

of the word,” according to contemporaries. 

Boosters claimed that in only three decades, 

its “manufacturing output showed a greater 

increase than any other city in America”: 

Year Factories Capital Invested Workers Value of Products 

(millions) 

(millions) 

1860 1,126 $12.7 11,737 $27 

1880 2,984 $50.8 41,825 $114.3 

1890 6,148 $141 82,911 $229 


94

But the desperate discontent of industrial 

laborers became evident in the Great Railroad 

Strike of 1877, as some 40,000 workers across 

the country protested layoffs and drastic 

wage reductions. According to Primm, “for 

four days in late July, St. Louis was the scene 

of the first true general strike in the nation’s 

history.” Some 5,000 workers seized railroad 

facilities and stopped all freight traffic; 

pledged solidarity with black levee workers; 

and marched through a downtown of 

shuttered stores as a brass band played the 

Marseillaise, evoking haunting memories of 

the bloody French Revolution. The strikers 

“ruled the city” temporarily, forcing the closure 

of “nearly every manufacturing plant, large or 

small.” But wishing to avoid the fatalities 

that had occurred in Chicago and other cities, 

73 strikers surrendered peacefully to a large 

police force on July 26, thus ending the strike 

without realizing their goals. 

Despite its problems of class inequality, 

St. Louis’s commercial expansion made contributions, 

literally and figuratively, to a sophisticated 

civic culture. Pierre Laclede would have 

marveled at the intellectual achievements of 

his city in 1890. Having pioneered public 

secondary education west of the Mississippi, 

the city four decades later was “acknowledged 

to have the best public-school system in the 

United States,” as readers across the country 

learned in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. 

St. Louis operated 106 public schools, employing 

1,254 teachers, who instructed 60,000 students. 

There were also 85 parochial schools, 

35 academies and colleges, 15 libraries, a new 

art museum, 61 artists, 225 music teachers, 

and 150 book printers. Residents kept abreast 

of current affairs in the city’s 37 newspapers, 

and alert, humane citizens supported a wide 

variety of public facilities to care for orphans, 

the poor, the blind, the elderly, and the insane 

in 47 different “asylums,” plus two “female 

night refuges” for abused or abandoned 

women. St. Louis was also home to 800 

physicians serving in 23 hospitals. 

Citizens supported charities as members 

of 850 civic organizations and fraternal 

societies. In 1892, St. Louisans worshipped 

in 51 Roman Catholic churches (up eight 

since 1884), as well as in 33 Presbyterian 

churches, 23 Congregational, 23 Methodist, 

22 African American, 18 “miscellaneous” 

(including a “Chinese Sunday School”), 17 

Baptist, 15 German Evangelical, 14 German 

Lutheran, 13 Episcopalian, three Unitarian, 

and two Mormon, plus 9 Hebrew synagogues 

(up four since 1884). 

Residents who liked sweets patronized 

325 bakeries and 165 confectioners, while 

smokers had 442 different cigar makers to 

choose from. There were over 1,400 clothiers 

of all types, from tailors and dressmakers 

to wholesale merchants and retail stores. The 

city could accommodate 16,000 visitors a 

day in 60 hotels and 166 boarding houses, 

and meals were served in 70 restaurants, 

7 beer gardens, and 1,333 saloons. St. Louis’s 

27 breweries produced 56 million gallons of 

beer in 1891, up from only 14 million in 1871, 

with the total volume over those fifteen years 

exceeding 587,000,000 gallons. 

Business and political leaders before 1900 

enhanced the urban experience with environmental 

and cultural improvements that are 

still beloved by St. Louisans. Joining earlier 

recreational areas—Lafayette Park (1851), 

Missouri Botanical Garden (1859), and Tower 

Grove Park (1868)—on June 24, 1876, the 

1,380-acre Forest Park opened one day before 

Custer’s defeat at the Battle of the Little 

“Custer’s Last Fight,” an 1896 

chromolithograph, forty-two inches by 

thirty-six inches, by F. Otto Becker. 

Copyright @ Anheuser-Busch, LLC. 

Used with permission of Anheuser-Busch, 

LLC. All rights reserved. Adolphus Busch 

distributed this wildly inaccurate view of 

the 1876 “Battle of the Little Bighorn” 

to advertise the Budweiser brand, which 

was introduced the same year. This popular 

illustration represented masterful marketing 

and was reputedly displayed in thousands 

of taverns nationwide. 


9 5

H E N R Y S H A W : P L A N T I N G A L I V I N G L E G A C Y 

Henry Shaw Mausoleum in the Missouri 

Botanical Garden, from the Library of 

Congress online collection. Free use through 

Wikimedia Commons as the work product 

of a federal employee. 

Like Robert Campbell, Henry Shaw (1800-1889) was born in the British Isles, emigrated to 

St. Louis as a teenager, made a fortune in the western fur trade, and invested heavily in his 

adopted city to make it a more beautiful and cultured place for generations. Born in Sheffield, 

the English city renowned for its cutlery, Shaw partnered with his father and factory-owning 

uncle to import the knives and axes that were indispensable to Indians and mountain men. 

Not surprisingly, he also invested in a steamboat named Thames to remind him of his birth 

country. But Shaw became an American citizen on July 4, 1843, and soon after enhanced Tower 

Grove Park, surrounding his impressive Italianate country house with fountains, statuary, and 

gardens. A generous philanthropist, he consulted with the famous Royal Kew Gardens of 

London, botany professor Asa Gray of Harvard, and Dr. George Engelmann, a noted German 

scientist in St. Louis, to create the incomparable Missouri Botanical Garden and to endow plant 

research in the School of Botany at Washington University. 

Bighorn. Ironically, the city most famous for 

daring adventures in the western wilderness 

provided residents with a tamer taste of natural 

beauty—free of attacks from Indians or grizzly 

bears—in a public space larger than New York’s 

Central Park. “On the first summer day,” wrote 

James Cox in 1893, “the luxurious electric and 

cable street cars running to Forest Park carried 

no less than 105,000 passengers, while the 

cars running to Tower Grove, Lafayette and 

other parks were all over-crowded.” 

Long before Lindbergh’s flight, the “Spirit 

of St. Louis” was best reflected in the city’s 

superb historic hospitality—from hosting 

Indians in the colonial era to entertaining 

masses of affluent tourists in the railroad age. 

By 1892, St. Louis was nationally known as 

a prominent and popular “Carnival City,” 

offering many year-round attractions to 

visitors from near and far. While some 

committed boosters still believed that 

“St. Louis will one day become the greatest 


96

commercial center on the face of the earth,” 

most residents thought that being the 

undisputed industrial, financial, commercial, 

and population capital of the “Show Me State” 

was good enough to generate some “Come 

See Us” publicity throughout the Midwest. 

A broad appeal was made to “seeker(s) after 

pleasure”—temporary tourists—rather than 

corporate tycoons wanting to buy buildings. 

St. Louis offered “fine hotels and theaters, 

elegant public and private edifices, fairs 

and expositions, festivals and pageants, 

picturesque parks, well-paved, tree-shaded 

streets,” a transit system that was “the best 

in the world,” and “a thousand other 

advantages” that will “draw to the city such 

crowds of visitors as will in time repay the 

cost of the embellishments.” 

As booster James Cox observed in 1892, the 

city “has for many years been famous for its 

Annual Fair, for its Exposition, for its brilliant 

street illuminations, and for its magnificent 

Veiled Prophet parade. Those attractions have 

drawn hundreds of thousands of people to 

visit every fall, and its progressive citizens 

have decided for 1893 to eclipse every former 

effort in the annual festivities, and will 

illuminate the streets with electricity and 

miles of gas lit arches and pyramids.” The 

first Veiled Prophet Pageant debuted in 1878, 

and only six years later, was attracting 

500,000 people, who attended a massive 

public parade with elaborate floats and fireworks, 

while sponsors and local elites held a 

formal ball, where one of their debutante 

daughters was crowned queen. In 1884, 

the city began sponsoring a more public 

“St. Louis Exposition” each September, which 

featured a “grand street pageant” and a massive 

trade association display of local products. 

Above: Fairgrounds Park during the annual 

fair in 1871, from Every Saturday issue of 

October 14, 1871; print in the author’s 

collection. The Agricultural and Mechanical 

Fair, which St. Louisans held annually from 

1856 to 1902, “gained a worldwide 

reputation as…the greatest exhibition of its 

character on the continent” and convinced 

city leaders that they could pull off a world’s 

fair. After all, the Prince of Wales in 1860 

was impressed when he visited, and 

Fairgrounds Park at Grand Avenue and 

Natural Bridge Road only grew grander in 

future years—eventually encompassing 143 

acres, with a mile-long race track and an 

amphitheater that seated 100,000 people. 

Left: Veiled Prophet Poster of 1883. 



9 7

Washington Avenue, c. 1917. 

ORIGINAL PRINT COURTESY OF THE 



98 

St. Louis also built several large facilities for 

hosting major conventions, which became 

popular with national political parties for 

nominating presidential candidates. In 1876, 

Democrats met at the Merchants’ Exchange 

Building to choose Samuel J. Tilden; in 1888, 

Democrats returned, meeting this time at the 

new Exposition Hall, selecting Grover Cleveland 

for reelection; in 1904, Democrats came to the 

Coliseum to pick Alton B. Parker; and in 1916, 

that building again hosted the Democratic 

Party, which nominated Woodrow Wilson, 

amid protests by women seeking the vote. In 

the summer of 1896, the city established a 

precedent by accommodating conventions 

that chose both the winning nominee 

(Republican William McKinley) and the losing 

one (William Jennings Bryan), who ran for the 

People’s Party as well as the Bi-Metallic Party. 

At the end of 1892, James Cox published 

a nationally syndicated article and a wellillustrated 

photo album promoting the 

superior attractions of St. Louis. And at the 

same time, Sylvester Waterhouse, a Washington 

University history professor, published a 

short pamphlet that predicted a great future 

for the city. Their timing was impeccable, 

coming just before the onset of the 

Depression of 1893-1897 and at the beginning 

of the campaign by local boosters to 

have St. Louis host a world’s fair. 

More than a decade of planning was 

required to make the 1904 Louisiana 

Purchase Exposition and Olympic Games a 

reality. A decade before, at the peak of their 

civic enthusiasm, St. Louis officials had 

applied to host the “Columbian Exposition” in 

1892 to commemorate the 400th anniversary 

of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to 

the Western Hemisphere. Italian St. Louisans 

from “La Montagna” (“The Hill”) had been 

celebrating their national hero annually since 

1886. But Chicagoans began lobbying for 

the 1892 fair in 1885, and they became 

so obnoxiously boastful that a New York 

journalist called Chicago the “windy city” 

(as in “hot air”), which had nothing to 

do with breezes from Lake Michigan. 

Congressional approval and federal funding 

were granted to Chicago in 1890, but soon 

after, St. Louis became the leading candidate 

to host a world’s fair commemorating the 

Louisiana Purchase—beating out New Orleans 

for that honor. (St. Louis also got later 

revenge against Chicago when Olympic 

officials cancelled the Games there and 

moved them to the Gateway City.) 

At the forefront of St. Louis’s fair planners 

and promoters was Charles Pierre Chouteau, 

great-grandson of Pierre Laclede. He helped 

former St. Louis mayor and Missouri governor, 

David R. Francis, and other civic leaders

to raise $10,000,000 locally and $15,000,000 

altogether—the latter being the exact amount 

paid to Napoleon in 1803 for the Louisiana 

Purchase Territory. 

Even before the Columbian Exposition 

opened in 1893 (a year late), Horace H. 

Morgan published a book in St. Louis that 

provided a detailed preview of the Chicago 

fair. That served as a template of sorts for the 

1904 fair, and it was no accident that both 

global expositions had similar ornate architecture, 

temporary plaster construction, and 

a fascination with fountains, basins, electric 

lights, popular carnival entertainments, and a 

huge Ferris Wheel. And during the Columbian 

Exposition, the Autumnal Festivities Association 

of St. Louis did some crowd-poaching. In 

widely-circulated ads, “those attending the 

World’s Fair…[were invited] to secure 

transportation reading ‘via St. Louis,’ in order 

that a few days may be spent here either 

going to, or returning from, the Fair” in 

Chicago. St. Louis enticed prospective tourists 

by appealing to “all seekers after the new, the 

beautiful, the grand, and the picturesque.” 

From May to December 1904, St. Louis’s 

Louisiana Purchase Exposition and Olympic 

Games received the national and international 

attention that the city had long craved— 

being the ultimate tourist attraction before 

the Gateway Arch was built. And some 

620,000 St. Louisans did not squander the 

opportunity to showcase “a most inviting 

city.” They were willing and able to welcome 

P R O G R E S S C A M E A T A P R I C E 

St. Louisans were shocked and ashamed in 1904 when Lincoln Steffens, 

the famous “muckraking” journalist, published his expose, The Shame of the Cities. 

Not since the negative publicity of the “Whiskey Ring” crooks in the 1870s had city 

residents faced such sobering revelations. According to Steffens, “the corruption of 

St. Louis came from the top”—the “best citizens”—whose appetite for “boodle” 

(bribes) and the “Big Cinch” (illegal collusion of power-brokers) had made city 

and state politics dishonest and incompetent over several decades. “Public 

spirit became private spirit, public enterprise became private greed,” he wrote, 

and “everything the city owned was for sale by the officers elected by the people.” 

Traitors to the trust of citizens had done more damage to the prestige and 

progress of St. Louis than the Depression of 1893-1897, which the city had 

survived as the fourth largest industrial center in the U.S. But public utilities and 

construction projects all cost more due to expensive kick-backs and bribes— 

which tore at the urban core just when the World’s Fair City was advertising 

its beauty and efficiency. The “Big Cinch” was evident in the 1900 transit strike, 

as angry, poorly-paid workers assaulted scab trolley drivers, cut electric wires, 

and even dynamited tracks, while clashes with armed company goons left three 

dead and fourteen wounded citizens. 

Tackling rampant corruption was “Holy Joe” Folk, the Democrat circuit attorney, 

whose reform agenda was supported by Mayor Rolla Wells and newspaper editors, 

Joseph Pulitzer and W. M. Reedy. Folk’s aggressive attacks on corrupt politicians 

and their business cronies produced thirty-nine indictments, many convictions, 

and positive publicity in addressing Steffens’s criticisms. As governor from 1904- 

1908, Folk promoted modern regulations that made Missourians safer, better 

educated, and empowered to keep politics honest and more responsive, while 

Mayor Wells created a “New St. Louis” that was finally worthy of being a fair city. 

the world because St. Louis had welcomed 

them from every corner of the globe. Twenty 

percent of St. Louisans were foreign born, 

and another 42 percent had foreign-born 

parents, while only 32 percent of residents 

The Grand Cascade of the 1904 

World’s Fair. 

ORIGINAL PRINT COURTESY OF THE 



9 9

Map of the 1904 fairgrounds of the 

Louisiana Purchase Exposition. 



100


1 0 1


102

were native Caucasians with U.S.-born parents 

and only 6.4 percent native African Americans 

with U.S.-born parents. Germans led the 

category of “second generation ethnics” with 

53 percent (fourth highest in the U.S.), 

while those of Irish descent represented 17.5 

percent of city residents (fifth nationally). 

Since 1870, 6,000 English, 5,000 Russian Jews, 

3,000 Poles, 2,700 Swiss, 2,600 Bohemians, 

1,800 Austrians, and 1,300 Canadians (more 

than at any time since the eighteenth century) 

had moved into the city. More recent immigrants 

had come from Sweden, France, Italy, 

and Scotland (at least 1,000 each), as well as 

former residents of Africa, Australia, Central 

America, Finland, India, and the Atlantic and 

Pacific islands. 

The 1904 World’s Fair was an incomparably 

massive, magical, and memorable celebration, 

with something to appeal to everyone. Its 1,270 

acres were fifty-nine times larger than London’s 

famous Crystal Palace Exposition of 1851; 

five times more extensive than Philadelphia’s 

Centennial Exposition of 1876; and exceeded 

the size of Chicago’s fair by 233 acres. Fortyfive 

states and U.S. territories, plus 43 foreign 

nations, constructed exhibit “pavilions.” The 

twelve huge themed “palaces” had 5,000,000 

square feet of interior space, while outside 

exhibits totaled over 6,000,000 square feet. 

The Fair also featured the “Inside Inn,” the 

first hotel operated by the famous Statler 

chain; an on-site hospital; a restaurant that 

could seat 5,000 people at a time; 1,200 

statues; 15 miles of track in a scenic railroad; 

448 concessionaires in the mile-long entertainment 

area known as the “Ten Million 

Dollar Pike;” and 70 miles of paved walkways 

connecting everything. Education was a 

major theme, which attracted 10,000 teachers 

from around the world. 

Like other expositions of the era, St. Louis 

celebrated the Progress, Power, Prosperity, and 

Prominence of sophisticated, industrialized 

Europeans and Americans when compared 

to the world’s “primitive dark-hued peoples.” 

St. Louisans had long forgotten their ancestors’ 

original opposition to the Louisiana 

Purchase, as they praised the benefits of 

“Manifest Destiny” from U.S. territorial 

expansion in the mid-nineteenth century to 

the current passion for international imperialism. 

The Fair appealed to self-confident, 

affluent whites who accepted the racial 

inequality inherent in Jefferson’s “Empire of 

Liberty” and embraced the more recent myth 

of Anglo-Saxon superiority then in vogue. As 

the Reverend Josiah Strong stated in his 1890 

book, Our Country, the “genius” of “superior 

Aryans,” who now dominated one-third of 

the Earth, was based on their Christianity; 

constitutional democracy; capitalism, and 

admirable aggression in “pushing into new 

countries.” That Methodist minister justified 

imperialistic conquests in Asia and Africa by 

assuming that it was “God’s plan to people 

the world with better material.” 

Given that ideology, Fair-goers were 

surprised to see the Apache war-chief, 

Geronimo, the indomitable guerrilla who had 

reluctantly surrendered his last thirty-six 

followers in 1886 even when surrounded by 

5,000 U.S. troops. He was temporarily 

released from prison to attend the Exposition 

because he now symbolized the “pacified 

Indian” and “behaved” accordingly. Whether 

he was sincere or not, the old and infirm 

“celebrity” Geronimo seemingly embraced 

capitalism by selling autographs and photographs, 

posing in an automobile, and even 

riding the huge Ferris Wheel. After viewing 

the “anthropological zoo” of so-called “savage” 

native peoples with “primitive” lifeways, 

the aged Apache rebel allegedly declared that 

many of them needed to learn “how to dress 

and how to behave.” 

Only about one percent of Exposition 

attendees were African Americans. The 

prevalence of segregated restaurants and the 

absence of exhibits about black progress 

made them feel unwelcome. A “Negro Day” 

or “Emancipation Day,” scheduled for 

August 1, 1904, when Booker T. Washington 

was to deliver an address, was canceled to 

placate white exhibiters and attendees from 

the Deep South. The Fair did employ large 

numbers of African Americans, and some 

black St. Louisans were pleasantly surprised 

that racial discrimination was not worse. 

The first Olympic Games held in the 

United States (only the third of the modern 

era) attracted 651 athletes—645 men and six 

Opposite: French Poster Advertising 

the St. Louis 1904 Exposition, 

1903 color lithograph by Czech artist, 

Alphonse Mucha. Circulated in France, 

this poster stimulated tourism by focusing 

on French St. Louis’s historic association 

with Indians. 

COURTESY OF THE SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM; GIFT OF 

ALICE P. FRANCIS IN MEMORY OF HER GRANDFATHER, 

DAVID R. FRANCIS, PRESIDENT OF THE LOUISIANA 

PURCHASE EXPOSITION (40:1969). 

Below: Silver Olympic medal from 1904. 

REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF THE 



1 0 3

women (all archers) from 12 nations. They 

competed in 18 sports between August 29 

and September 3. Americans comprised 523 

of the competitors and won 239 of the 

medals (78 gold, 82 silver, and 79 bronze); 

Germans won 13 medals, the second largest 

number. The St. Louis Olympics is most 

remembered for its oddities: a talented 

gymnast with a wooden leg, who won 6 

medals (3 golds) in one day; an all-Mohawk 

Indian lacrosse team; and a marathon won 

by a runner who received two doses of rat 

poison, brandy, and raw eggs during the 

race and beat a disqualified cheat who rode 

in a car for ten miles! More significantly, the 

St. Louis Games featured the first African 

Americans—hurdler George Poage and highjumper 

Joseph Stadler—ever to compete, and 

win medals, in any Olympics. 

Hosting a World’s Fair and the Olympic 

Games simultaneously was an unprecedented 

achievement for any city and has never happened 

since. Together, those events drew an 

official total of 19.7 million attendees, but 

that figure included only 12.8 million “paid 

admissions” and did not exclude employees 

who re-entered the fairgrounds each day. 

After exhaustive research, however, historian 

James Gilbert recently concluded that only 

4,000,000 “one-time different patrons” 

attended the St. Louis Exposition. (He also 

reduced the totals for the 1893 Chicago Fair 

from a claimed 27 million attendees to only 

5.5 million). While historians must challenge 

the self-serving totals supplied by sponsors 

(the man in charge of Fair publicity was 

called the “Director of Exploitation”), repeat 

visitors who were not employees or even 

St. Louis residents should be counted, since 

there were far too many attractions to see 

and things to do in a single day. 

Although critical about details, Gilbert’s 

book, Whose Fair?, concluded that the Louisiana 

Purchase Exposition was “the largest world’s 

fair ever held” and provided an “an immense 

and exhilarating experience for the city of 

St. Louis.” The patrician New England historian, 

Henry Adams, was less complimentary. He 

came to the Fair ten years after his last visit 

to St. Louis and found “everything new” in the 

city—except its “reeking smoke.” He thought 

the Exposition to be an “acutely interesting” 

creation of “a third-rate town” that lacked 

“history, education, unity, or art,” but “doing 

what London, Paris, or New York would have 

shrunk from attempting.” St. Louis “threw away 

thirty or forty million dollars on a pageant 

as ephemeral as a stage flat,” he wrote, and 

by holding that extravaganza in Forest Park, 

“the city had turned its back on the noblest 

work of nature”—the Mississippi River. 

Investments were far from wasted, however, 

since the Fair produced a profit of $600,000 

that the city used to construct the Jefferson 


104

Memorial Building as the home of the Missouri 

Historical Society; transform the Palace of Fine 

Arts into the Saint Louis Art Museum; build 

the World’s Fair Pavilion where the State of 

Missouri Building had stood; and cast the 

bronze Statue of Saint Louis. After the Fair was 

dismantled, the city also planted 75,000 new 

trees and shrubs and made other improvements 

in Forest Park. In addition, the Exposition’s 

massive and much-admired birdcage was later 

purchased from the Smithsonian Institution 

and remains a distinctive feature of the Saint 

Louis Zoo. The Fair also pumped millions of 

dollars into the local economy through wages, 

sales, the construction of twelve new hotels, 

and investments in city infrastructure, such as 

making Lindell, Skinker, and Kingshighway wellpaved 

modern streets. St. Louis finally cleaned 

up its infamous brown, gritty water—which 

Mark Twain quipped was too thick to drink and 

too shallow to plow—not for the health of longsuffering 

residents but to make the many 

Exposition fountains and other water features 

look better! But of all the legacies of that special 

season in the sun, the most beloved and enduring 

was the popular song, Meet Me in St. Louis. 

View of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition 

Grounds from the Ferris Wheel, 1904. 

STEREOGRAPH PRINT IN THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 


1 0 5

Above: Line of automobiles along Chestnut 

Avenue near Ninth Street as photographed 

in 1914. 

COURTESY OF THE SWEKOSKY COLLECTION, 

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS. 

Right: Vintage 1907 ad for the “St. Louis” 

brand automobile. 



106

“St. Louis is a city that outgrew its past, and added half a million to its population 

after its early reason for existence had almost vanished.” 

–WPA Guide to the Show Me State, 1941 


EXPLORING URBAN CHALLENGES 

IN AN AUTOMOBILE AGE 

The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a chronological mid-point between the optimism of 

booming growth in the 1800s and the pessimism of looming crises in the late twentieth century. 

In 1904 the automobile age had barely arrived, and the slow, primitive car that carried one 

runner around the Olympic marathon course could not compare with sophisticated vehicles 

transformed by transportation technology in the following decades. The increasing speeds of 

each new model symbolized the rapid pace of social changes, as traditional norms faded as 

fast as the mythical fantasies of the World’s Fair. 

St. Louisans created a monster in 1904, temporarily believing that their city was better than it 

was. But the World’s Fair represented only a brief compensatory overconfidence of citizens with 

a prolonged inferiority complex. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition overshadowed almost 

everything that followed it—and those shadows were dark, indeed, making each new urban 

initiative seem puny and petty by comparison. Memories of the 1904 Exposition grew more 

grandiose and misleading over time, as the city’s future crises prompted comforting nostalgia 

for the good old days, increasing exasperation with the present. Politicians and city planners 

committed to the “City Beautiful Movement” and subsequent “Model City” initiatives soon 

realized that a few fake plaster buildings on a mere 1,200-acre fairground could not be translated 

into realistic, sustainable solutions to the complex problems of a large modern metropolis. 


1 0 7

Opposite: Poster (printed broadside) 

advertising the Pageant and Masque of 

St. Louis in Forest Park, May 28-31, 1914. 


ST. LOUIS (AO 181-7060). 

S T . L O U I S A N S O N T H E T I T A N I C 

The shocking reports of the Titanic disaster on April 15, 1912 had many 

Americans searching newspapers for information on local deaths among the 

1,500 victims. Fortunately, no St. Lousians were among the fatalities, although a 

Daniel Keane of Limerick, Ireland, drowned on his way to visit the city. Residents 

who survived that harrowing ordeal included these passengers, all traveling in 

first class: 

Mr. Spencer Victor Silverthorne, aged 35 

Miss Georgette Alexandra Madill, 16 

Miss Elizabeth Walton Allen, 29 

Mrs. Elisabeth Walton Robert (nee McMillan), 43 

Miss Emilie Kreuchen, 29, maid of Mrs. Robert 

Smitten by spectacle, St. Louisans hosted 

other celebratory events related to the city’s 

history in the decade after 1904, often as 

an antidote of fantasy to harsh realities. 

In October 1909, the city commemorated 

the centennial of its incorporation as a 

town, presenting multiple events during 

“One Hundred Years in a Week.” More than 

$85,000 in private donations funded parades, 

a grand illumination, a multicultural ball, 

children’s activities on Art Hill, the public 

dedication of the new Municipal Courts 

Building, plane flights by Glenn Curtiss, 

balloon ascensions, a water pageant featuring 

several U.S. Navy torpedo boats, and a 

huge banquet for four hundred mayors from 

thirty states. Organizers hoped “to use the 

Centennial cerebration as a lever for the 

extension of the city’s reputation,” and by 

displaying over 1,000 cars—the most ever 

assembled in the Mississippi Valley—that 

reputation was now focused on modernity 

as much as history. 

Only five years later, St. Louisans in 1914 

celebrated the city’s 150th anniversary. There 

had been no recognition of the St. Louis 

Centennial in 1864, due to the Civil War, so 

boosters sought to throw the biggest birthday 

bash ever. They had much to celebrate. 

The 1910 census confirmed that St. Louis 

remained the nation’s fourth largest city, 

having increased its population over 19 

percent for a total of 687,029. Some 590,000 

residents were gainfully employed, and every 

category of workers had risen dramatically 

(31 percent for children, 42 percent for 

women, and 24 percent for adult males). 

In a single decade, industrial investments 

had increased 15 percent to $269 million, 

and the value of manufactured products 

($430 million) had grown by 79 percent. 

Such prosperity contributed to the success 

of several expensive and grandiose events in 

the 1914 commemoration. Nearly 8,000 

residents performed in two huge dramatic 

productions on Art Hill for audiences that 

totaled 455,000 in only five May evenings. 

A Pageant, written by Thomas Wood Stevens, 

was a historical play that chronicled the area’s 

evolution from ancient Cahokia to the Civil 

War. In a more mystical Masque by east coast 

playwright Percy MacKaye, poetic dialogue 

between Louis IX, a character called “Cahokia,” 

and other cast members focused more on 

the city’s recent history and future prospects. 

The script emphasized how a new “League 

of Cities” in the Progressive Era could overcome 

the evil influence of “Gold” if citizens 

cooperated in promoting beauty and order, 

democratic reforms and humane institutions. 

But that play also recognized the inevitability 

of urban decline: “We, too, like Cahokia, shall 

lie down, /And this our city be a silent mound.” 

While some St. Louisans were optimistic 

about transforming “the sordid world” into 

delightful “dreams,” the absence of blacks in 

speaking parts and promotional materials 

undermined “Brother with Brother” idealism. 

The only lasting impact of those sesquicentennial 

dramas was the creation of the 

Municipal Opera (MUNY) in 1919 as a 

permanent, popular outdoor theater experience 

on summer evenings in the park. 

However, racism lasted far longer. African 

Americans were not welcome at MUNY 

performances until 1954 and the recentlydeceased 

Pelagie Green Wren, a descendant 

of Jacques Clamorgan, became the first black 

dancer at the MUNY only in 1962. 

The years that followed the idealistic 

public performances in 1914 tested the 

private prejudices of St. Louisans with regard 

to a revolution in race relations. Economic 

depression and Jim Crow oppression in 

the Deep South created the “Great Black 

Migration” in the early twentieth century. 

St. Louis was a favorite destination of fleeing 


108


1 0 9

Above: Team photograph of the St. Louis 

Stars, 1928 World Champions of the 

National Negro Baseball League. 

Photograph by L. H. Beckman, 1928. 


ST. LOUIS (22514). 

Opposite: Cover of sheet music for the 

Tuskegee March, 1906, by Professor 

William Blue, whose fifty-piece Shrine Band 

performed concerts in the St. Louis area. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF DR. JOHN A. WRIGHT 

AND USED WITH HIS PERMISSION. 

African Americans, because it was the first 

major industrial metropolis they encountered 

traveling up the Mississippi, midway between 

the farms of the Deep South and the factories 

of the Far North. As the historic “Union city” 

located closest to Dixie, as well as a “Jim 

Crow” region farthest from the “real” South, 

St. Louis represented an agonizing disparity 

between its idealistic aspirations of the Civil 

War and pessimistic realities as of World War I. 

The city’s “polite racism” avoided the worst 

white supremacist violence and allowed 

integrated libraries and streetcars, but few 

other places, including schools. African 

Americans could vote for city officeholders, 

but not marry whites. 

Black St. Louisans increased from 35,000 

in 1900 to 80,000 by 1920, as African 

Americans doubled their percentage of the 

population to 9 percent by that latter date. 

In 1920, St. Louis had the eighth largest 

black population in the nation, and a decade 

later, the percentage of African Americans in 

the city reached 11.5—outnumbering foreignborn 

Caucasians for the first time. Increasing 

numbers of black migrants from different 

areas enriched St. Louis culture with new 

musical traditions, such as ragtime, jazz, 

blues, and later swing, that made the city 

famous. Old slave rhythms from cotton fields 

mingled with steamboat songs and creative 

piano playing to showcase the talents of Scott 

Joplin, Tom Turpin, Blind Boone, Joe Jordan, 

Louis Chauvin, Charlie Warfield, Roosevelt 

Sykes, Henry Townsend, and other entertainers. 

W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues and 

Bill Dooley’s Frankie Killed Johnnie were early 

musical “hits” nationwide. Charles Turpin’s 

Booker T. Washington Theater on Market 

Street featured famous performances by 

Eubie Blake, Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, and 

young St. Louisan, Josephine Baker, before 

she became a leading act at Les Folies Bergere 

in Paris. In James Weldon Johnson’s 1908 

song, Lift Every Voice and Sing, he expressed 

the optimism of fellow African Americans 

in the early stages of the Black Migration: 

“Sing a song full of the faith that the dark 

Past has taught us;/Sing a song full of the 

hope that the Present has brought us.” 

Such optimistic sentiments, however, did 

not reflect the despair of unfulfilled equality 

for blacks over the next century. The severe 

lack of available, affordable, and adequate 

housing, exacerbated by institutionalized racial 

segregation, became a perennial problem for 


110


1 1 1

Anti-Segregationist Voting Flyer, 1916. 



112 

throngs of African Americans over many generations. 

As early as 1911 white responses to 

the “negro invasion” led to zoning ordinances 

and collusions of exclusion by realtors and 

landlords. Historian Clarence Lang wrote that 

artificially restrictive housing patterns created 

a “Black Archipelago”—“islands of vibrant 

black social life surrounded by seas of white 

racism and hostility.” The situation worsened 

in 1916, when St. Louis became the first city 

in the nation “to pass a housing segregation 

ordnance through initiative petition and 

direct vote.” The segregationists won 52,220 

to 17,877 to further restrict blacks to only 

three areas of the city’s worst housing, even 

though 23 of 28 aldermen opposed the law. 

The U.S. Supreme Court struck it down, but 

restrictive covenants and private prejudices 

continued, leading to the creation of the 

Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis. 

Housing restrictions paled in comparison 

to the headline-grabbing massacre in East 

St. Louis. In 1917 that nearby Illinois 

community experienced “the most serious 

race riot of the century”—worse than 17 

other acts of wholesale violence in the U.S. 

from 1915 to 1919. White mobs slaughtered 

at least 100 people, almost all African 

Americans, and injured another 500 victims, 

young and old alike. Entire neighborhoods 

were ravaged, with 312 buildings destroyed. 

According to Ann Morris, “fires lit the 

night sky with a terrible glow as thousands 

[of black survivors] fled across the bridges 

to St. Louis, where city officials and the 

Red Cross provided help.”

World War I Red Cross Poster, 1917. 


While Americans had failed to solve 

interracial violence at home, they joined an 

overseas war in 1917 to curtail international 

violence abroad. Just as they had helped 

relieve the suffering of East St. Louis refugees, 

St. Louisans revealed their compassion in 

record-setting World War I food drives to 

help save starving Europeans. City residents 

managed to channel their patriotism in 

constructive ways, although there were some 

incidents of non-lethal hostility against 

citizens of German heritage. St. Louisans lost 

1,075 of their sons in the “Great War,” and 

city officials quickly planned to honor them 

with a permanent monument. But it took 

funding by the New Deal before the Soldiers’ 

Memorial on Chestnut Street finally opened 

in 1938. A monument across the street marks 


1 1 3

T H E H E A L T H O F T H E C I T Y 

Boosters in 1893 had declared that St. Louis was the “healthiest large city in America,” citing a below-average death rate of 21 people 

per thousand. But by 1900 fewer than 23 percent of St. Louisans owned their own residences, and the poorest households averaged 

seven people crammed into ramshackle, squalid tenements. They suffered disproportionately from tuberculosis, pneumonia, and other lung 

diseases exacerbated by the city’s perpetually smoky air from burning high-sulfur coal. According to historian Robbi Courtaway, in 1924 a 

new smoke detector at Shaw’s Garden revealed that “each St. Louisan inhaled fifteen table-spoons of soot every five days as a result of 

the soft coal used in most home furnaces” and factories. “After smoke killed off…the finest collection of evergreens in the United States 

[1923], Garden officials…[bought] land in Gray’s Summit on which they built eight greenhouses…for the garden’s precious orchids.” 

Citizens had to wait longer than those flowers, and downtown smoke worsened every year until it was abated by law in 1942. 

Right: “Black Tuesday,” November 11, 1939, 

when air pollution obscured the Civil Courts 

Building at mid-day. 



Opposite: In troubled times, St. Louisans 

opened the massive and magnificent 

Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis in 1917, 

after seven years of construction. As the 

mother church of the archdiocese, the 

“New Cathedral” occupied an entire city 

block on Lindell Boulevard, far from the 

riverfront, and broke with both French 

and American architectural traditions. 

Its 83,000 square feet of world-class 

mosaics made the cathedral a virtual art 

museum for non-believers and Catholics 

alike. Before the Gateway Arch became 

the world’s fourth most visited tourist site, 

souvenir pennants advertised the cathedral, 

the Central Branch of the Public Library, 

and the Nathan Frank Band Stand in 

Forest Park as the three “must see” 

attractions in St. Louis. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FAUSZ FAMILY. 


114

the site where St. Louis veterans founded the 

American Legion on May 8, 1919, and a nearby 

wall honors the city’s dead from several wars. 

The war was barely over when the devastating 

Spanish Influenza Epidemic struck the 

city in 1918. It killed 40,000,000 people 

worldwide and 675,000 in America, but 

because “St. Louis was the only city to institute 

community-wide business closures” 

quickly enough, the city enjoyed an enviably 

small death toll. Of the 32,000 residents who 

caught the flu, only 2,000 died, thanks to 

city-wide quarantines initiated by the talented 

health commissioner, Dr. Max C. Starkloff, 

with strong support from Mayor Henry Kiel. 

Significant changes came fast in postwar 

St. Louis. The many local women who had 

staged demonstrations for female voting 

rights from the post-Civil War era to the 

1916 Democratic convention here finally 

achieved their goal. After seventy years of 

struggle, the Nineteenth Amendment was 


1 1 5

atified in 1920. Building upon that victory 

for the full rights of citizenship, local 

women’s organizations became more 

politically influential, in the tradition of 

St. Louis’s pioneering female activists. A 

pamphlet, entitled An Aid to the Woman Voter 

in Missouri, was co-sponsored by the Missouri 

Federation of Women’s Clubs, Women’s 

Christian Temperance Union, Missouri Women’s 

Council of Defense, the Lady Maccabees, 

P.E.O., Missouri Equal Suffrage Association, 

the St. Louis Equal Suffrage Association, the 

St. Louis Equal Suffrage League, and the 

St. Louis Business Women’s Suffrage League. 

There was barely time to celebrate the 

female franchise, however, when Prohibition 

cast a dark shadow over the region. The 

Missouri Temperance Society had been headquartered 

in St. Louis for many decades, but 

neither pro- nor anti-alcohol supporters were 

prepared for the massive socio-economic 

changes that accompanied the enforcement of 

the Eighteenth Amendment in January 1920. 

The immediate impact of outlawing the manufacture, 

sale, and distribution of alcoholic 

beverages was devastating in St. Louis, which 

ranked fourth nationally in beer sales. The 

Anheuser-Busch Brewery occupied 150 buildings 

over seventy blocks in St. Louis prior to 

Prohibition, but the annual loss of $140 million 

to the local economy put 55,000 brewery 

and saloon jobs in jeopardy—causing a 


116

egional recession a decade before the Great 

Depression. Robbi Courtaway estimated that 

in 1919, local brewery workers received total 

wages in excess of $4 million, which a decade 

later, had fallen to less than $900,000. 

While a thousand beer companies went 

bankrupt (and some brewery owners killed 

themselves), Anheuser-Busch downsized and 

diversified to remain open and keep some 

2,000 workers on its payroll. For thirteen 

years, wrote William Knoedelseder, the iconic 

brewery “survived by making…rail cars, 

truck bodies, refrigeration cabinets, ice 

cream, a nonalcoholic form of Budweiser, a 

malt-based soft drink called Bevo, barley malt 

syrup, and baker’s yeast.” 

Equally disruptive was the related rise 

in crime, as citizens from every class sought 

to skirt the law in order to enjoy—or manufacture—illegal 

alcoholic beverages. On 

New Year’s Eve, 1922, over 2,000 wealthy 

St. Louisans were enjoying an expensive 

evening at the new Chase Hotel, when police 

burst into the ballroom searching for liquor 

violations. The genteel crowd of prominent 

citizens assaulted the officers with a variety 

of projectiles, and police gunfire wounded 

three patrons. National notoriety followed, as 

a front page headline in the New York Times 

on January 2, 1923 reported that “Bullets, 

Chairs and Tableware Fly in Riot As 

St. Louisans Run Dry Squad Out of Hotel!” 

Detail of a Charleston Dance Competition 

in front of City Hall, November 13, 1925, 

before they were banned as a health risk. 

FILE PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE ST. LOUIS 

POST-DISPATCH AND THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, 

ST. LOUIS (1603). 


1 1 7

Violent criminal bootleggers in area gangs, 

such as “Egan’s Rats,” the “Cuckoos,” and 

at least four others, made that incident 

pale in comparison, while the alwaysvicious 

Ku Klux Klan eagerly exploited 

anti-alcohol laws as an excuse to increase 

their traditional prejudicial attacks on blacks, 

Jews, and Catholics. 


118

Temporarily distracting St. Louisans from 

rampant crime, police raids, payroll reductions, 

and other problems with Prohibition was the 

world-famous 1927 flight of Charles Lindbergh 

in a plane named The Spirit of St. Louis. He 

was the first solo pilot to cross the Atlantic 

in a nonstop flight, covering the 3,614 miles 

between New York City and Paris in 33 hours, 

30 minutes, and 30 seconds. But his journey 

really started here. Lindbergh grew up in 

Minnesota, within the limits of Laclede’s 

original fur trade grant, and the twenty-five 

year-old flier reversed the itinerary of our city 

founder, who had traveled from France to 

America at the same age. Lindbergh honed 

his talents at Lambert Field—the 170-acre 

cornfield that Major Albert Bond Lambert 

purchased in 1920 with profits from his 

Listerine mouthwash. Due to its central 

location, Lambert Field quickly became, 

in the words of Lindbergh’s biographer, 

A. Scott Berg, “the logical intersection for the 

nation’s air traffic” in “the most exciting age 

of exploration in four hundred years.” 

Opposite, clockwise starting from the top: 

Anheuser-Busch Brewery in 1909, 

from the Official Program of the 

Centennial of the Incorporation of 

St. Louis Celebration, October 3-9, 1909, 

compiled by Walter B. Stevens 

(St. Louis, 1909). 

Federal agents conduct a Prohibition raid 

on December 6, 1922, on South Third 

Street, destroying two stills in an apartment 

building capable of producing 500 gallons 

of whiskey per day. 

FILE PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE 

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH. 

Prescription for “Medicinal Alcohol” during 

Prohibition; from the author’s collection. 

Physicians were legally allowed to prescribe 

alcoholic beverages for over thirty ailments, 

including poisoning, post-operative pain, 

senility, insomnia, and even baldness! 

Left: Charles Lindbergh beside his famous 

plane at Lambert Field on May 11, 1927, 

after arriving from San Diego and before 

flying to New York to begin his historic 

flight across the Atlantic. 




1 1 9

F O U L 

W I N D S 

Lindbergh exploited favorable winds in his famous flight, but foul winds ravaged St. Louis 

four months after he had safely landed at Paris. A massive tornado on September 29, 1927, 

cut a wide swath through the central city, killing 76 and injuring more than 1,500, while 

destroying or damaging many buildings in 300 blocks. It was the sixth tornado to hit St. Louis 

since 1852, but was not as severe as the May 1896 “cyclone” that claimed 306 lives in 

South City and destroyed the main hospital. Another tornado on February 10, 1959, followed 

the path of the 1927 one, killing 21, injuring over 200, and displacing more than 3,000 families. 

February 1917 price list for raw furs 

issued by the United States Fur Company, 

210 North First Street, St. Louis. 

Note values of house cats at the bottom. 

ORIGINAL DOCUMENT IN THE FAUSZ FAMILY COLLECTION 

OF FUR TRADE MEMORABILIA. 

Lindbergh solidified St. Louis’s reputation 

as the “City of Flight.” Its citizens had been 

fascinated by balloon races in 1836, 1859, 

and 1907, and Glenn Curtiss chose St. Louis 

to fly the first airplane west of the Mississippi 

in 1909. The next year, Teddy Roosevelt 

became the first president to take an airplane 

ride when he visited the city. St. Louis’s 

International Air Race in 1923 drew over 

100,000 spectators to see Curtiss set a world 

speed record of 243 miles per hour to win the 

Pulitzer Trophy. The true “Spirit of St. Louis” 

behind the painted letters was reflected in 

the nine local entrepreneurs who risked their 

resources to purchase a plane for the ultimate 

explorer of the early twentieth century. 


120

T H E P A S T W A S P R E S E N T F O R T H E F U T U R E O F F U R S 

The fur trade was one industry that actually prospered during the Great Depression, as millions 

of small mammal pelts trapped by rural families were mailed to St. Louis for much-needed 

cash. Long after generations of St. Louis traders and trappers left their names on maps 

throughout the Fur West, the city’s oldest industry continued to contribute to the local and 

national economy well into the mid-twentieth century. 

By leveraging Laclede’s ideal central location, city caves used for cold storage, and new 

transportation links by rail and air, St. Louis ranked with London and New York as the top 

three world market centers for fur sales. Under the leadership of Philip Bond Fouke III and 

experienced fur processors from the Fouke Company of London, St. Louis’s International Fur 

Exchange (IFE) dominated the grading, dressing, dyeing, and marketing of Alaskan sealskins 

for decades. Annual auctions of all mammal species produced sales of $5.3 million in 1916, 

rising to $35 million only four years later. 

The New International Fur Exchange Building, constructed in 1920 at Fourth and Market 

(now the Drury Plaza Hotel), further enhanced St. Louis’s reputation as a global fur capital— 

which now marketed skins from Russia, China, Canada, India, Persia, Australia, and New 

Zealand, as well as the U.S. Until the late 1950s, 75 companies in the Gateway City controlled 

65 percent of the American market, receiving more furs from a 600-mile radius “than all other 

cities in the United States combined.” 

When Lindbergh rewarded their faith so 

spectacularly, the city became “more than a 

gateway to the west. It came to symbolize 

the portal to the future,” wrote Berg. 

Lindbergh made a triumphant return to 

St. Louis on June 17, 1927. Half a million 

residents cheered him in a 7-mile downtown 

parade. He was honored at a banquet for 

1,300 people and performed aerial 

stunts over Forest Park for 100,000 

cheering fans before placing a wreath 

on the statue of Saint Louis. Lindbergh 

donated many artifacts associated with 

his famous flight to the Missouri History 

Museum, while city officials agreed to 

build a municipal airport at Lambert 

Field, which he visited in April 1933. 

Not even Lindbergh’s popular 

appearances, however, could solve 

the severe problems associated with 

Prohibition and the Great Depression. 

Between 1929 and 1933, the value 

of manufactured goods in St. Louis fell 

56 percent, and in the latter year, 30 percent 

of all residents (some 116,000 people) were 

unemployed. Blacks suffered more, with a 

jobless rate that reached 80 percent. Those 

figures were worse than the national average, 

refuting the myth that St. Louis suffered less 

than other cities in the Depression. Some 

5,000 homeless St. Louisans lived in the 

nation’s largest “Hooverville”—a “town” of 

driftwood and scrap lumber shacks located 

between the river and the railroad tracks— 

while the city fed 10 percent of the population 

in soup kitchens, preparing 36,000 

meals in August 1932 alone. 

Happy days returned in early 1933, when 

the taps reopened. The master of marketing, 

Anheuser-Busch publicly paraded its stunning 

new Clydesdales for the first time, as 

they pulled an old beer wagon that delivered 

Budweiser to President Roosevelt in the 

A “Hooverville” shack at river’s edge, 

November 1932. 




1 2 1

White House. By 1938 St. Louis’s premier 

brewery was producing 2,000,000 barrels a 

year, exceeding its pre-Prohibition volume, 

and sales had increased 173 percent. 

But that temporary return of prosperity 

in one industry could not begin to address 

more deeply-rooted socio-economic problems 

associated with racial prejudice. Deliberate 

racist decisions, rather than accidental 

circumstances, confined blacks to a few 

restricted neighborhoods and prevented 

their migration to white communities. In the 

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the 

United States, historian Kenneth T. Jackson 

revealed that local realtors and federal 

mortgage agencies in the 1930s considered 


122

ace a major factor in ranking residential 

areas. Ladue received the highest rating 

because it was “highly restricted,” occupied 

by “capitalists and other wealthy families,” 

without “a single foreigner or negro.” The 

lowest-ranked areas consisted of overcrowded 

working-class white tenements, 60 percent of 

which did not have indoor toilets—and the 

best black homes in segregated neighborhoods. 

Prejudiced inspectors regarded even 

new and well-maintained houses of African 

Americans as having “little or no value…due 

to the colored element now controlling the 

district.” The FHA granted 500 percent more 

mortgages to new county residences than 

older city properties from 1934 to 1960. 

Most African American residences were 

concentrated in a few segregated areas, most 

notably in Elleardsville—“The Ville” north of 

the Central West End. That self-sufficient 

community contained all classes and every 

type of black-owned businesses, such as the 

very successful Poro College of Annie Malone, 

a millionaire entrepreneur who marketed 

hair care products throughout the nation, 

trained and hired many African 

Americans, and funded several 

charities. Also critical to the success 

of Ville residents was the 

venerable and valuable Sumner 

High School, which educated 

notable leaders, both local and 

national. Henry Givens, Jr., 

former president of Harris-Stowe 

University, wrote that “Sumner 

was one of the greatest high 

schools in the nation! The school 

had black teachers who had 

graduated from Harvard, Yale, 

and Princeton,” some with Ph.D. 

degrees. But because segregation 

blocked them from becoming college 

instructors, “we had scholars 

teaching us in high school!” 

In her 2011 book, Groping 

for Democracy: African American 

Social Welfare Reform in St. Louis, 

UMSL history professor Priscilla 

Dowden-White emphasized the 

dynamic black leaders from 

1910 to 1949 who promoted the 

“common good” of the “community as a whole” 

by advocating “justice, neighborliness, and 

fair play” for residents from all classes. 

They used the Urban League, the Community 

Council, and the League of Women Voters 

to secure reforms in public policy that 

promoted social welfare before the more 

politically-focused national Civil Rights 

Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Pragmatic black activists accepted the 

location of Homer G. Phillips Hospital, 

which operated in The Ville from 1937 to 

1979, rather than to oppose that placement 

for its segregationist symbolism, because 

medical services and physician training were 

desperately needed by black residents. But 

Clarence Lang’s Grassroots at the Gateway 

found that African American politicians later 

pursued competing agendas based on class 

differences, as “the politics of black middleclass 

‘respectability,’ often contingent on the 

white gaze, collided with a black workingclass 

politics of ‘self-respect’ autonomous 

from both white approval and black middleclass 

assent.” 

Opposite, top: Budweiser beer wagon pulled 

by Clydesdales for the first time in public 

on the way to the White House in 1933, 

symbolizing the end of Prohibition. 

COPYRIGHT @ ANHEUSER-BUSCH, LLC. 

USED WITH PERMISSION OF ANHEUSER-BUSCH, LLC. 

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

Opposite, bottom: Famous entrepreneur 

Annie Malone (tenth from right) and friends 

in front of Poro College on April 25, 1927. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY W. C. PERSONS; COURTESY OF 

THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (21271). 

Below: Homer Phillips Hospital 

(now apartments for retirees) in The Ville. 

FAUSZ FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH, 2013. 


1 2 3


124

World War II brought massive, urgent 

changes to St. Louis. The “new normal” in 

everyday life included overcrowded housing, 

frequent blackouts and curfews, food 

rationing, war-bond sales, rubber- and scrapmetal 

collections, factories operating twentyfour 

hours a day, trains and river craft 

running at full capacity, and packed schools 

holding double shifts of teaching. The 

community pulled together, with citizens 

volunteering as 5,300 air-raid wardens, 5,500 

auxiliary firemen and policemen, and 3,373 

first aid workers, while another 32,000 

served in other roles, according to historian 

Betty Burnet. 

The city’s admirable array of heavy industries 

was indispensable in the global crusade 

to combat fascism, with 296 companies—a 

record 75 percent of all St. Louis manufacturers—engaged 

in defense work, which far 

exceeded the national average. The McDonnell 

Corporation, based in St. Louis since 1939, 

contributed excellent war planes; the 

International Shoe Company produced 35,000 

pairs of boots per day; and the St. Louis 

Ordnance District manufactured more medium-sized 

bombs than any other city. Five thousand 

St. Louisans worked on the Manhattan 

Project that created the atom bombs, including 

Dr. Arthur Holly Compton and other scientists 

from Mallinckrodt and Monsanto. The cyclotron 

at Washington University was essential for 

nuclear research, while the John Nooter Boiler 

Works made the huge tanks that produced 

life-saving penicillin B, developed by 

Dr. Edward A. Doisy of Saint Louis University. 

Opposite: Woman machinist at the Curtiss- 

Wright aircraft plant at Lambert Field. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY F. DALE SMITH, 1943-44; COURTESY OF 


Below: Navy Day Parade in downtown 

St. Louis on October 4, 1942. The U.S. 

only had a total of forty tanks in 1940, 

and several of St. Louis’s heavy industries 

worked overtime to make vehicles, 

munitions, and airplanes to achieve victory 

in WWII. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HANNGE COLLECTION 

AND THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (1151). 


1 2 5

Above: Doolittle Headline in the 

St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 20, 1942. 


Below: Huge rally of some 9,000 African 

Americans at Kiel Auditorium in August 

1942 to protest the lack of defense jobs for 

blacks (only one in forty-five hires). 



Ironically, many St. Louis companies did 

not take full advantage of even more talented 

employees anxious to contribute to the war 

effort. The 8,000 local African Americans 

who worked in defense industries represented 

only a tiny fraction of all positions available. 

In August 1942 some 9,000 blacks held 

a massive meeting to lobby for more warrelated 

employment, declaring that “Winning 

Democracy for the Negro Is Winning the War 

for Democracy.” Federal policies eventually 

alleviated segregated hiring, which helped 

advance civil rights in postwar America. 

Immediately after Pearl Harbor, almost 

81,000 St. Louis men, aged 18 to 44, registered 

for the draft. Too many St. Louisans 

never returned. The nearest thing to an 

official tally of city residents killed in World 

War II are the 2,753 names inscribed at the 

“Court of Honor” across from the Soldiers’ 

Memorial Building. A genealogy website 

lists 1,636 deaths (911 killed in action) of 

city residents who served only in the army 

and air force. Several noted pilots from the 

“City of Flight” died in the war, including 

Lieutenant Commander Edward H. “Butch” 

O’Hare, a Medal of Honor recipient for 

whom Chicago’s major airport is named; 

Captain Eliott Vandeventer, winner of the 

Distinguished Flying Cross; and Captain 

Wendell Oliver Pruitt, a much-decorated ace 

of the Tuskegee Airmen. They were inspired 


126

T R I U M P H A N T 

C A R D I N A L S 

As another welcome distraction from the grim news of war, the St. Louis Cardinals and 

the St. Louis Browns, which shared Sportsman’s Park as their home field, battled for 

baseball supremacy in the “Trolley” World Series of 1944. The Cardinals won in six games, 

adding to their championships with the popular “Gas House Gang” in 1931 and 1934. 

The Cardinals also won the Series in 1942 and 1946. By 1953 both the Browns and the 

Cardinals came to a critical crossroads. The Browns were sold to Baltimore, becoming 

the Orioles, while beer baron August A. “Gussie” Busch, Jr., purchased the Cardinals and 

stabilized the franchise. 

For many decades, three iconic organizations—the Cardinals, Anheuser-Busch Brewery, 

and KMOX radio station—made the “redbirds” a local treasure and a national “brand.” KMOX 

auspiciously began its baseball broadcasts with the Cardinals’ victory in the 1926 World 

Series—the city’s first championship since 1888. The hero was an aging, hard-drinking pitcher, 

Grover Cleveland Alexander, who won two games and saved a third. KMOX’s 50,000-watt 

signal reached most of the continent at night, making the Cardinals the broadcasting Gateway 

to West (and South), with legions of fans in distant states. 

Opening game of the 1944 all-St. Louis World Series at Sportsman’s Park, home field for both the Cardinals and the Browns. 

COURTESY OF THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH; FILE PHOTOGRAPH, OCTOBER 8, 1944. 

by the daring 1942 bomber raid on Japan 

by local hero, Colonel James Doolittle, who 

survived the war. St. Louis was perhaps 

the only U.S. city to lose its mayor 

(Republican William D. Becker) in a warrelated 

incident. On August 1, 1943, he and 

nine other civilians were killed at Lambert 

Field in the crash of a new glider they 

were testing. 

Returning veterans in 1945 encountered 

a rapidly changing city that would never be 

the same. The G.I. Bill and new employment 

opportunities lured many city residents into 

the county, seeking large single-family 

homes, with lawns and garages, on onceremote 

farmlands. Suburbanization had begun 

two decades before, as Kenneth Jackson 

noted, “when automobile registrations rose 


1 2 7

y more than 150 percent,” and outlying 

areas “of the nation’s 96 largest cities grew 

twice as fast as the core communities.” That 

trickle of urban depopulation became a flood 

in the postwar period, as “White Flight” 

would cause St. Louis City to lose over half 

of its population and suffer a 60 percent 

decline in business between 1950 and 2000. 

St. Louis City had only 15,348 new housing 

starts between 1950 and 1970, while St. Louis 

County had 102,298. Jobs in the city 

declined from 366,524 to 231,765 in those 

decades, while the county enjoyed an 

increase from 156,526 to 384,409. 

Progress came at a price. The removal of “derelict” warehouses and other structures (some deemed “architecturally significant”) destroyed what remained of the original colonial French 

city after the Great Fire of 1849. Just as bad as bulldozing was burying irreplaceable and rare archaeological remains under tons of earth needed to support the 900-ton Gateway Arch. 

That emptiness left a vacancy of vibrancy before the soaring steel was in place. The completion of the Gateway Arch took three decades. Mayor Bernard F. Dickmann and the leading local 

booster, Luther Ely Smith, got a bond issue passed and secured federal New Deal funding to clear the riverfront, but WWII halted progress. The architectural competition of the 1950s 

selected Eero Saarinen’s daring modernist design, and unprecedentedly complex construction challenges delayed completion of the nation’s tallest monument until the mid-1960s. 

COURTESY, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE AT THE JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL (V106-004838). 


128

Although African Americans comprised 

nearly 18 percent of the city’s population in 

1950, they were prevented from joining the 

migration to suburbia or even moving into 

St. Louis’s race-restricted neighborhoods. In 

the 1940s nearly 380 housing covenants still 

blocked blacks from living in most of the city, 

confining them to a ghettoized “donut hole” 

of escalating poverty and decaying property. 

Historian John A. Wright claimed that in 

1950, “the 95,000 blacks moving to St Louis 

would find only 100 new homes available for 

them.” The Shelley family at 4600 Labadie 

Avenue challenged restricted housing, and 

when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled favorably 

on Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, it ended 

segregationist covenants in nineteen states. 

Missouri, however, did not enact a fair 

housing law until 1972, and some prejudicial 

policies continued. 

According to Colin Gordon’s Mapping 

Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American 

City, restricted housing made St. Louis 

“hyper-segregated.” It was ranked as the 

eighteenth most racially-segregated city in 

the U.S. by 1960 and became “the patron 

saint of the nation’s urban crisis” when it was 

declared the tenth worst racially-divided 

urban area in 1980. In 1970, African 

Americans comprised 40 percent of the 

city’s population, with average incomes 

that were only 60 percent as large as a 

typical white household. Thus, St. Louis 

remained one of the nation’s most segregated 

cities to the present, based on color and/or 

class prejudices. 

Meet Me in St Louis movie poster showing 

Judy Garland and Margaret O’Brien; 

lithograph from Loew’s Incorporated, 1944. 

Near the end of World War II, many 

grieving local families took comfort in this 

nostalgic movie, based on Sally Benson’s 

1942 memoir of the same name. The film, 

like her book, evoked memories of the 

joyous World’s Fair in happier times. 


ST. LOUIS (21652). 


1 2 9

Above: Tenements in the Mill Creek Valley, 

near Leonard Avenue; 1948. 



Below: Black professionals protest at 

Jefferson Bank, October 10, 1963. 



Opposite: Black children peer from 

dilapidated public housing in the 

Mill Creek Valley, c. 1952. 



Black protesters from several civil rights 

organizations increasingly confronted those 

postwar crises with demonstrations in 

restaurants, department stores, theaters, and 

other businesses. As pressure and publicity 

increased, Saint Louis University in 1944 

became the first Missouri college to integrate 

its student body. Joseph Elmer Ritter, 

St. Louis’s dynamic Catholic Archbishop 

from 1946 to 1967 (elevated to 

Cardinal in 1961), enrolled black 

women at Webster University 

in 1946 and received national 

acclaim for desegregating all 

archdiocesan high schools and 

parish schools in 1947, seven 

years before the famous 

U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown 

decision. In 1952, Washington 

University admitted its first 

African American students. 

On August 30, 1963, local 

leaders of CORE (the Congress 

of Racial Equality) skipped the 

March on Washington and 

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous 

“I Have a Dream Speech” to 

begin a seven-month protest at 

the Jefferson Bank and Trust 

Company on Washington Avenue. 

Seeking employment for blacks, 

nineteen protesters were arrested, 

receiving a combined sentence of 

over eight years in jail and $11,000 in fines. 

But their demonstrations produced results, 

and most of the protest leaders became 

celebrities and consultants for justice in a 

variety of professional positions. 

When the Gateway Arch was under construction, 

it came to symbolize not only the 

nineteenth-century homesteaders who passed 

through St. Louis on their way west, but also 

twentieth-century black pioneers 

for employment equality who were 

determined to stay in St. Louis 

and improve the city. In a daring 

and dramatic demonstration on 

July 14, 1964, Percy Green II and 

Richard Daly chained themselves 

to one of the high legs of the 

Arch to protest the lack of black 

contractors and union workers 

on the federally-funded project. 

They received national attention 

and achieved reforms that conformed 

to the civil rights acts of 

1964-1966. Six African American 

aldermen (out of twenty-nine) also 

achieved a city public accommodations 

law in 1961 that ended 


130

job discrimination on local projects four 

years before the state legislature acted. Other 

signs of progress included the election of 

Alderman William L. Clay as Missouri’s first 

black Congressman in 1968, and, after 1993, 

two consecutive electoral victories of African 

Americans as mayor of St. Louis. In addition, 

blacks have served the city as police chief, 

circuit court clerk, city comptroller, and 

chairman of the Democratic Committee. 


1 3 1

Pruitt-Igoe Housing Complex after 

completion, February 8, 1955. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED MCCREA. COURTESY OF THE 

MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (22148). 


132 

But the contentious issue of segregated 

housing remained unsolved for several 

decades. Mayors Bernard Dickmann, Joseph 

Darst, and Raymond Tucker launched ambitious 

urban renewal projects in the 1940s and 

1950s, using generous federal funding to 

address neighborhood “blight.” The city 

cleared some 454 acres of slums in the Mill 

Creek Valley, creating a devastated area known 

as “Hiroshima Flats.” On that bombed-like 

landscape, some of the best architects in the 

country erected the Pruitt-Igoe Complex of 33

eleven-story buildings in 1954. Eleven years 

later, National Geographic author Robert Paul 

Jordan praised such destruction and construction 

for the “rejuvenation of a dying city.” He 

boasted that “by 1970 St. Louis will have torn 

down and rebuilt a fifth of its 61 square miles 

at a cost of more than a billion dollars.” Once 

regarded as “the best-designed” public housing 

project, Pruitt-Igoe was demolished in 

1976, after it had disillusioned residents by 

concentrating crime and poverty in rather 

drab concrete towers with no supportive community 

spirit or even adequate maintenance. 

According to Gordon, such massive, impersonal 

projects “almost always made things 

worse…. [B]oth the diagnosis (blight) and its 

prescription (urban renewal) were shaped 

by—and compromised by—the same… 

prejudices that had created the condition in 

the first place.” Bulldozing heavily populated 

neighborhoods to build commercial skyscrapers 

revealed that “racial segregation was 

a core goal from the outset…. Even the most 

progressive efforts destroyed more units than 

they created and displaced more families of 

ordinary means than they accommodated…. 

Over time, redevelopment trumped rehabilitation, 

and new housing…became less a goal 

of urban renewal.” 

Above: African American protester in front 

of the Dozier School, June 10, 1963. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY LESTER LINCK AND USED 



1 3 3

Busch Stadium II and the Gateway Arch, 

as photographed on September 21, 1967. 

A sense of excitement energized the 

entire metropolitan area, as those two 

monumental and long-anticipated projects 

were completed about the same time. 

Almost thirty years after a riverfront park 

was envisioned, the Gateway Arch was 

finished in October 1965, although the 

entire Jefferson National Expansion 

Memorial complex would not welcome 

tourists until 1967. The stadium, with 

architectural details inspired by the Arch, 

was ready for the 1966 baseball season. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY TED MCCREA. COURTESY OF 



134 

Living conditions for St. Louis City’s 

blacks would improve after the federal 

“Fair Housing Act” of 1968 prohibited 

discriminatory zoning based on race, color, 

religion, sex, or national origin. But that, 

too, had unintended consequences by eroding 

successful, traditional African American 

neighborhoods. Taking advantage of new, 

unrestricted housing options, many of the 

most affluent and accomplished black 

residents moved out of The Ville and other 

racially-cohesive communities. Left behind 

were disproportionally disadvantaged people 

with less support—political, economic, and 

even personal. Class divisions replaced 

monolithic racism, as concentrated poverty 

in selected areas resulted in decaying properties, 

declining schools, disappearing jobs, 

and increasing disillusionment. 

The principle of neighborhood schools 

lowered educational expectations and outcomes 

in areas with the worst incomes, 

and not even federal laws could compete 

with such territorial tyranny. Black-on-black 

crime further destabilized neighborhoods. 

As the Reverend Earl E. Nance, Sr., pastor 

of the Greater Mount Carmel Baptist Church, 

noted, African Americans were “not responsible 

for the way other folks treat us, but we 

are responsible for how we treat others.” 

In the midst of historic changes, the 

Bicentennial of the founding of St. Louis 

was officially celebrated over two years, 

1964 to 1966. It was the grandest commemoration 

ever, since St. Louisans had little 

to celebrate in 1939, when the city turned 

175 years old in the midst of the 

Great Depression. At that time, a local 

newspaper article proclaimed that the city’s 

founding date could not be determined 

and revealed the erroneous biases of the 

1930s: “In 1760 the wilderness stretched 

north from New Orleans to Canada, 

…[where] a few savages stamped around…. 

A French fort was built at Chartres to keep 

off the Spanish from Santa Fe,…[but] the 

rest of the Mississippi country was like the 

Congo in Africa”!

President Lyndon Johnson kicked off “the 

official birthday celebration on February 14, 

1964” (the wrong date) with an optimistic 

public address. “As the Gateway to the West,” 

he stated, “Saint Louis became one of the 

finest and most important cities in the 

world. But at the very summit of her glory, 

the blight that was to deface dozens of 

American cities struck Saint Louis. The 

incredible vitality of this proud queen of 

Mid-America began to erode.” In conclusion, 

the president declared to city residents: 

“You faced a hard choice and you made it. 

The people of Saint Louis chose progress— 

not decay. A new spirit of Saint Louis was 

born. And today you look forward to the 

future with new pride and new confidence.” 

Also making history was McDonnell Aircraft 

Corporation, Missouri’s largest employer, with 

35,000 workers constructing the world’s most 

sophisticated supersonic fighters that the military 

relied on in the Vietnam War. The engineering 

explorers at that corporation also made St. Louis 

the “gateway to the galaxy” by constructing the 

successful Mercury and Gemini space vehicles 

that propelled American astronauts into space 

and to ultimately land on the moon. 

Above: Official anniversary license plate. 

LICENSE PLATE IN AUTHOR’S COLLECTION. 

Left: President John F. Kennedy viewing 

the Mercury space capsule in St. Louis on 

February 23, 1962. The McDonnell-Douglas 

Corporation, which made notable airplanes, 

also played a significant role in NASA’s 

space program to land Americans on 

the moon. 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; PHOTOGRAPH IN THE PUBLIC 

DOMAIN AS A WORK PRODUCT OF A FEDERAL EMPLOYEE. 


1 3 5

“Gaslight Square” on the evening of July 29, 

1961. The three-block entertainment district 

lit by gas street lamps featured thirty-five 

music clubs, bars, and restaurants. Its 

equally rapid rise and fall symbolized the 

vulnerability of a new craze when beset by 

crime and changing generational trends in 

popular entertainment. 



Stars also appeared closer to home, as 

the Cardinals gave an additional boost to the 

confidence and pride of St. Louisans in the 

Bicentennial year by winning the 1964 World 

Series—their first championship in eighteen 

years. They added another one in 1967. 

Applauding the Bicentennial, 

the November 1965 issue of 

National Geographic Magazine 

published sixty-four pages on 

St. Louis, beginning with the 

headline: “New spirit soars in 

Mid-America’s proud old city.” 

Author Robert Paul Jordan 

praised the city’s “unique history” 

in “carving the trans-Mississippi 

West into 22 new states” and 

credited Joseph Pulitzer’s 1949 

“Progress or Decay” challenge 

for stimulating ambitious urban 

renewal. Jordan’s remarks, 

accompanied by superb photos, 

focused on new and future 

developments: the beautiful 

Aloe Plaza, slum removal, the $30,000,000 

Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, 

new interstate highways, and Saint Louis 

University’s $53,000,000 campus expansion 

that helped revitalize the city. Summarizing 

his positive impressions of the Bicentennial 

headed by “Gussie” Busch, Jordan observed 

that the city’s “birthday party really amounts 

to a family affair, with the whole metropolis 

participating” in “literally thousands of 

events, small and large.” 

Black members of the city “family,” however, 

did not share in such Bicentennial boosterism, 

being in no mood to “celebrate” racial prejudice 

and the other harsh realities of second-class 

citizenship. In 1964, St. Louis’s population 

stood at 711,000, down from almost 857,000 

in 1950, and the city would experience its 

greatest economic decline between 1970 and 

1990, when manufacturing jobs fell by 

82,000 and its poverty rate rose to 24 percent. 

Although suburbanization enticed residents 

to move out of St. Louis and cost the city 

its traditional stature as the engine of the 

regional economy, the explosive growth of 

the greater metropolitan area on former 

farmlands improved the lives of everyone. 

In Fall 1963, the University of Missouri- 

St. Louis (UMSL) greeted its first 673 

students, who crowded into the sole 

campus building—the old Bellerive Country 

Clubhouse. In only six years, with three 

new buildings, enrollment swelled to 10,000, 

with increasing numbers of African 

Americans, revealing that Saint Louis 

University and Washington University could 

not have accommodated so many students 

seeking an affordable education. Both UMSL, 

which now has over 62,000 alumni living in 

the metro area, and nearby Lambert 

International Airport demonstrated that their 

expansive growth in North St. Louis County 

could not have occurred in the spacestrapped 

city. 


136

S T . L O U I S ’ S L O N G E S T S E R V I N G M O D E R N M A Y O R S 

Not surprisingly, most of the mayors who served at least eight consecutive years brought 

the greatest changes to St. Louis, including: 

Rolla Wells Democrat (1901-1909) 

Henry Kiel Republican (1913-1925) 

Bernard F. Dickmann Democrat (1933-1941) 

Raymond Tucker Democrat (1953-1965) 

Alfonso Cervantes Democrat (1965-1973) 

Vincent C. Schoemehl Democrat (1981-1993) 

Francis G. Slay Democrat (2001-present), won record fourth election in 2013 

A decade ago, the Metrolink light rail 

system brought the inner city and the outer 

suburbs closer together with an efficient 

new transportation option. In its first two 

months, 1,000,000 passengers rode the 

initial 14 miles of track. Today, Metrolink has 

an annual ridership of 17,000,000 along 

46 miles of routes in two states. 

The Main Terminal Building 

at Lambert International Airport. 



1 3 7

The children of Dr. John A. Wright enjoy 

the combination of statuary, fountains, 

beautiful buildings, and surprisingly serene 

surroundings (at times) in a downtown 

plaza that is all too often taken for granted. 

In the 1980s, Mayor Vincent Schoemehl, an 

UMSL graduate, launched another building 

initiative to renew both the city’s infrastructure 

and the spirits of its citizens. He joined a long 

list of progressive Democratic politicians, 

allied with business leaders in Civic Progress 

since the 1950s, to realize the illusive World’s 

Fair dream of building a “Model City,” both 

beautiful and productive, that would stand 

the test of time. Bond issue after bond issue 

revealed the willingness of citizens to invest 

in a brighter future, but a repetitious pattern 

of destruction and construction in a nevercompleted 

cityscape eroded much of that 

confidence in addressing decline. 

City leaders sought bold solutions to stem 

urban blight and suburban flight, choosing 

activism over apathy. But not all such “explorations” 

succeed, and historians can provide 

20-20 hindsight to explain why. Too frequently, 

planners, politicians, and promoters proceeded 

without a complete or deep understanding 

of the city’s heritage. A case in point was the 

expensive relocation in 1969 of the “Spanish 

Pavilion”—and the replica ship, Santa Maria— 

from the 1964 New York World’s Fair. 

Although St. Louis was Spain’s eighteenthcentury 

capital of Upper Louisiana, that was 

250 years after Columbus sailed into the 

Caribbean, and few residents saw the 


138

elevance of having the Santa Maria docked 

along the Mississippi. Due to a lack of interest, 

the Pavilion went bankrupt in its first year. 

The creative re-use of the iconic Union 

Station as an indoor mall in 1985 was 

more successful—for a time. But like the 

architecturally-innovative St. Louis Centre 

(another indoor mall), shoppers proved to 

be fickle. Novelty, alone, attracts initial 

crowds, but long-term customer loyalty 

invariably declines among bargain-hunters, 

even in more conveniently-located suburban 

shopping malls with better parking facilities. 

Fickle owners, rather than indifferent fans, 

doomed several of the city’s professional 

sports franchises, such as the NBA Hawks, 

NFL Cardinals, and a variety of soccer teams. 

The St. Louis Hawks bolted to Atlanta in 

1968 after a dozen seasons, in which they 

won the NBA championship in 1958 and 

reached the finals three other years—including 

their last one here. From 1960 to 1988, 

the football Cardinals (“Big Red”) developed 

a fan following, despite mostly mediocre 

records and only one division title (in 1974). 

But ownership moved the team to Phoenix 

and renamed it the Arizona Cardinals, 

while negotiations were proceeding for a 

new stadium here. 

A dedicated football facility finally arrived 

to popular acclaim in 1993 to support the 

new St. Louis Rams franchise. Now known 

as the Edward Jones Dome, that indoor 

stadium became famous as the home of the 

“Greatest Show on Turf’ from 1999 to 2003. 

Quarterback Kurt Warner threw 41 touchdowns, 

and the team scored 526 points 

on the way to winning Super Bowl XXXIV 

in 1999. They lost the championship two 

years later on a late field goal by the New 

England Patriots and have never matched 

those successes. 

St. Louisans have had a love affair with 

amateur soccer since the 1880s. A Christian 

Brothers College High School team won 

the silver medal in the 1904 Olympic 

Games, and Saint Louis University is the 

national leader with 47 NCAA tournament 

appearances and 10 soccer championships. 

Six different amateur teams from St. Louis 

won the U.S. Open Cup between 1920 and 

1957, and five city players were on the 

American team that defeated England to win 

the 1950 World Cup. Twenty St. Louisans 

have been inducted into the National Soccer 

Hall of Fame, but a long list of professional 

soccer franchises—outdoor, indoor, and 

women’s—have come and gone without 

financial success. 

The St. Louis Blues was one of the National 

Hockey League expansion franchises in 1967, 

and the team has a secure, if not always abundant, 

fan base despite frequent changes in 

ownership and arena sites. The Blues reached 

the Stanley Cup Finals in each of their first 

three seasons (1968-1970), a spectacular 

debut, but remains the only expansion team 

not to have won the championship. A fan 

favorite, the Hall of Famer Brett Hull, recently 

rejoined the organization as a vice president. 

The unprecedented success and popularity 

of the St. Louis Cardinals make it hard 

for other professional teams to match the 

enthusiasm and loyalty of their fans. In 

general, St. Louis has better sports facilities 

than the quality of the teams that play 

in them. 

At the height of his success as the 

Rams Super Bowl quarterback, Kurt 

Warner marketed cereal to raise funds for 

his “First Things First Foundation,” 

as well as other charities. 

USED WITH PERMISSION, COURTESY OF THAT 

ORGANIZATION IN COOPERATION WITH PRIORITY SPORTS 

ENTERTAINMENT AND TY BALLOU OF PLB SPORTS, INC. 


1 3 9

Exhibition soccer match between 

Real Madrid and Inter Milan in the 

Edward Jones Dome, August 10, 2013. 

Such soccer matches, including one 

featuring the Bosnian national team, 

have become increasingly popular and 

attract large crowds. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE; 



140


1 4 1

“There is only one thing which St. Louis cannot do, and that is, fail.” 

–James Cox, St. Louis: The Carnival City, 1892 

E P I L O G U E 

INSPIRING COMMUNITY SPIRIT 

IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM 

Photographic blow-up of 1907 

City medallions. 


When St Louis’s population plummeted to 450,000 in the 1980 census—the lowest since 

1890—America’s formerly fourth-ranked city had fallen over twenty places. In 1988, native 

St. Louis novelist, Jonathan Franzen, wrote in The Twenty-Seventh City that the “Era of the Parking 

Lot” typified a barren and desperate downtown. “The local prophets were defensive. Where once 

they’d expected supremacy, they now took heart at any sign of survival.” Franzen asked the key 

question: “What becomes of a city no living person can remember, of an age whose passing no 

one survives to regret?” 


142

The human life cycle typically lasts about 

eighty years, so studying history is the only 

means of appreciating a distant past that no 

one alive actually experienced. A knowledge 

of the good ideas or big mistakes from earlier 

eras provides context for the present and may 

help improve the future. Realizing who or 

what “came before” is an essential component 

of citizenship for each generation. Laclede’s 

only son, Pierre Chouteau, wrote in 1847, 

that “honors rendered to the dead…serve to 

excite the living to emulate their virtues and 

their worth.” A century later, native St. Louis 

poet, Loyd Haberly, expressed a similar sentiment 

in his book, The City of the Sainted King: 

“Though nothing lives forever 

And nothing lasts for long, 

Yet the eternal river 

Of life runs clear and strong. 

Within our loins are nations, 

What we sow, they will reap, 

Building on all foundations 

That we lay firm and deep.” 

“Each event in St. Louis history is part of a 

continuing saga, building on what has gone 

before,” local author Ann Morris observed in 

1999. “History can inspire us to undertake 

impossible dreams” by “passing on to future 

generations stories of heroes, great and 

small.” A 1909 Globe-Democrat editorial stated 

that “every generation is too prone to 

think that all wisdom will die with them.” 

But if future citizens “smile at our rude and 

crude ways of doing things,” they may also 

“wonder at our achievement.” 

That becomes impossible, however, if the 

deeds of past leaders, both noble and nefarious, 

are forgotten or fabricated. A readers’ 

poll conducted by the Post-Dispatch in 

January 2000 sought to identify the “Most 

Influential St. Louisans of the 20th Century,” 

decade by decade. Wealthy beer barons 

topped the list for two different decades— 

Adolphus Busch (for 1900-1910), long after 

his greatest contributions, and his grandson, 

August A. “Gussie” Busch, Jr., (for 1960-1970), 

whose service as the Cardinals’ owner paled 

in comparison to significant political leaders. 

Lindbergh was the top vote-getter for the 

1920-1930 decade, even though he was not a 

St. Louisan and remained in town to pick up 

a free plane. Stan Musial was not a native, 

either, and he seems an odd choice for 1940- 

1950—a decade that produced so many 

national military heroes in World War II. 

Voters deficient in chronology picked James 

Smith McDonnell as the most illustrious 

The 2011 World Series Victory Parade in 

front of the latest Busch Stadium on 

October 30, 2011. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY HUY MACH. 



1 4 3

In Loving Memory of All Young People 

Who Die from Violence, a bronze statue 

by sculptor Rudolph Torrini (1997), 

located on the grounds of SSM Cardinal 

Glennon Children’s Hospital. This is a 

moving tribute to nine-year-old Christopher 

Harris, who was murdered in a June 1991 

gun battle on a city street. The interior of 

the statue is filled with melted handguns. 


non-St. Louisan for the 1930s, even though 

he did not open his aircraft company here 

until 1939 and achieved his greatest acclaim 

years later. Zoo director and TV personality 

Marlin Perkins (for 1950-1960), Robert 

Hyland, general manager of radio station 

KMOX (1970-1980), real estate developer 

Leon Strauss (1980-1990), who renovated 

the “Fabulous Fox Theatre” in 1982, and 

the Reverend Lawrence Biondi, president of 

Saint Louis University (1990-2000), seem 

trivial choices of current celebrities whose 

name-recognition in recent newspaper headlines 

prevented an accurate assessment of 

broader historical significance. That poll 

was a popularity contest that reflected such 

ignorance of the past as to minimize 

St. Louis’s authentic historic stature. Without 

memory, there can be no history, which 

depends on accurate recollections passed 

down through successive generations. 

In recent years, St. Louisans with more 

historical perspective have reevaluated how 

“successful” the World’s Fair and the 

Bicentennial were, considering the failed 

projects and fading hopes that followed 

those celebrations. It would be hard to 

match the optimistic mood of the 1964 

celebration, when the Gateway Arch and a 

new baseball stadium with its own unique 

arches were nearing completion only a 

few blocks apart. Progress was a tangible 

reality, as a building boom transformed 

the downtown core of an old city. The 

optimism of 1964, however, did not survive 

a series of national crises to come. In the 

past fifty years, local confidence in a bright 

future was deflated by escalating carnage 

in Vietnam, destructive race riots in major 

cities, assassinations of prominent leaders, 

the Watergate scandal, Iranian hostagetaking, 

oil embargoes, the shocking attacks 

on 9/11, simultaneous wars in the Middle 

East, a rash of school shootings, increasing 

street violence, and several economic 

recessions, with the latest being the most 

severe. And, unlike 1964, today it is much 

more difficult and expensive to have all 

citizens share equally and equitably in 

progress and prosperity, including a quality 

public education. 

The Census results in 2010 revealed that 

St. Louis’s population had reached a new low 

of only 318,000, as America’s former 4th 

largest city fell to 58th place. Since St. Louis 

has lost half a million people in only sixty 

years, residents may be more subdued in celebrating 

the 250th anniversary. The current 


144

ecession has worsened racial disparities in 

St. Louis, lowering white household income 

by 7 percent, but black households by 

17 percent. In 2013 median income in white 

households exceeded the national average by 

$3,000 and was 110 percent higher than 

black households, which fell $5,000 short of 

the national average for African Americans. 

In July 2013, the city had a total unemployment 

rate of 10.8 percent (3.4 percent higher 

than the state’s)—but 13 percent of blacks 

were jobless, twice the figure for whites. 

Based on those statistics, St. Louis ranked 

among the twenty most segregated major 

U.S. cities and was the 9th lowest for black 

income mobility. 

Poverty and joblessness, personal disillusionment 

and social alienation, are wellknown 

preconditions for violent crime, 

but for decades St. Louis City has failed to 

correct those root causes of its major crisis, 

which continues to tarnish its national 

reputation. Problem-plagued schools of 

class and racial inequality remain a ticking 

“time bomb” as incubators of violence, 

because they inhibit realistic opportunities 

for new generations to enjoy a better life as 

contributing citizens. The proactive inspiration 

of students is far cheaper and more 

productive than reactive incarcerations, 

which only perpetuate and exacerbate 

violence. Creating great schools is far wiser 

and more humane than erecting glamorous 

skyscrapers and sports stadiums, since crime 

threatens expensive investments even in 

affluent neighborhoods. As George Bernard 

Shaw observed, “for though the rich end of 

town can avoid living with the poor, it cannot 

avoid dying with it when the plague comes.” 

Rather than enticing out-of-town sports 

fans to stay for a weekend, city leaders 

should redirect their priorities and rescue 

the neediest residents who spend their 

entire lives here. St. Louis could achieve 

international acclaim by revitalizing its oncefamous 

city school system, perhaps in 

new partnerships with the area’s creative 

companies and famous universities. 

A quality education has always been 

the antidote to alienation and animosity, 

as students gain a deeper appreciation of 

themselves in developing their talents. 

James H. Buford, former head of the local 

Urban League, advised young people to 

“live your life so that whatever you’ve done 

leaves an example and a legacy for others 

to follow.” The well-educated civil rights 

activist, Percy Green, urged students 

“to develop a thirst for knowledge,” in order 

“to be aware of what is happening around 

them…. And then, of course, they need to 

challenge authority…to gain insight” until 

civic leaders “earn the respect of those 

they are directing.” Such sentiments echo the 

thoughts of nineteenth-century St. Louisan, 

Carl Schurz, whose words were chiseled on 

the Kiel Opera House in 1934 and remain on 

the newly-renovated Peabody Opera House: 

“Democratic government will be the more 

successful the more the public opinion ruling 

it is enlightened and inspired by full and 

thorough discussion. The greatest danger 

threatening democratic institutions comes 

from those influences which tend to stifle or 

demoralize discussion.” 

The great diversity of St. Louisans could 

produce a great destiny with a promising 

future for the city—if people of varied backgrounds 

worked together to solve common 

problems through multiple perspectives. 

In 1991, Henry Louis Gates observed that 

“our society won’t survive without the values 

of tolerance…. The challenge facing America 

will be the shaping of a truly common public 

culture, one responsive to the long-silenced 

cultures of color. If we relinquish the ideal of 

America as a plural nation, we’ve abandoned 

the very experiment America represents.” 

St. Louisans of many hues and multiple 

heritages today can fully appreciate the 

enlightened leadership of Laclede and his 

colonists. The early French settlers are 

relevant again, because those entrepreneurial 

explorers of global commerce enjoyed financial 

success in complex dealings with people 

of different colors, cultures, and countries— 

and shared profits with Indians, who were 

the most alien of all. 

The celebration of ethnic diversity behind 

great deeds is ever present on Delmar 

Avenue—recently named “One of the 10 

Great Streets in America” by the American 


1 4 5

The star of Chuck Berry along the 

“Walk of Fame.” 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE FAUSZ FAMILY. 

Planning Association. There, the “St. Louis 

Walk of Fame” honors 140 creative “stars” 

who have enriched our lives in a variety of 

successful careers. Beginning in 1988 with 

legendary Chuck Berry as the first honoree, 

the “Walk of Fame” has highlighted the 

significant accomplishments of truly remarkable 

St. Louisans that should inspire future 

generations of “explorers” in every field. 

Among them are 45 entertainers, ranging 

from Josephine Baker to Kevin Kline, Scott 

Joplin to Nelly; ten noted architects; five 

favorite broadcasters; 22 sports heroes; scientific 

researchers and prominent educators; 

and nearly 20 legends of literature. St. Louis 

has an enviable heritage of world-famous 

authors who achieved renown elsewhere, 

such as Maya Angelou, William Burroughs, 

T. S. Eliot, and Tennessee Williams, but 

the future promises great works from local 

writers with no intention of leaving. 

Businessman Joe Edwards, proprietor of 

the famous Blueberry Hill since 1972 and 

founder of several other successful enterprises, 

created the Walk of Fame. He believed 

that a greater appreciation for local history 

and inspiring biographies would enhance 

community pride and generate profits in the 

celebrated Delmar Loop that he was most 

responsible for rejuvenating. He joins other 

entrepreneurial “explorers” who continue to 

improve St. Louis with their visions. Among 


146

them was the late Bob Cassilly, who built the 

innovative City Museum with discarded 

materials and artistic creativity and now 

attracts some 600,000 paying visitors a year. 

Demonstrating the remarkable revitalization 

of the old city on a much larger scale 

have been thousands of Bosnian immigrants 

who achieved prosperity and stability in 

the Bevo Mill neighborhood the past two 

decades. Now numbering 70,000 in the 

metro area—equivalent to one-fifth of the 

city’s population—the Bosnians are inspiring 

and successful “urban explorers” who have 

discovered ways to rebuild lives in restored 

The century-old Bevo Mill landmark. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ANDREW WEIL 

OF LANDMARKS ASSOCIATION AND USED WITH 

HIS PERMISSION. 


1 4 7

neighborhoods with flourishing enterprises, 

despite tragedies in their homeland and language 

barriers here. Their distinctive culture 

has provided the cohesion in a community 

that has transformed St. Louis since 1993. 

They publish the only Bosnian language 

newspaper in the United States; founded a 

Bosnian Chamber of Commerce in 2009 with 

65 member businesses (the first opened in 

1997); and even hosted the president of 

Bosnia in 2004. The historic Bevo Mill, erected 

during World War I to reflect the charm of 

Old Europe, is a fitting symbol of the many 

Bosnians who live around it—new immigrants 

from an ancient culture who blend 

modern lifestyles with traditional values. 

Even with the massive Bosnian migration, 

St. Louis still ranks a dismal 24th among 

the 25 largest U.S. metropolitan areas in the 

percentage of immigrants in the total population. 

The “St. Louis Mosaic Project,” however, 

is trying to recruit more foreign-born entrepreneurs, 

who will energize the region with 

creative ideas; establish businesses that hire 

residents, old and new; and help occupy 

some of the 35,000 vacant houses in the 

city—the second-highest percentage among 

81 U.S. cities with at least 100,000 people. 

A youthful generation of native-born urban 

homesteaders has also been exploring city life 

in recent years. Of the 88,000 people who 

work in the business district nearest the river, 

an increasing number—roughly 14,000—are 

also living there, giving the old city a new 

vibrancy in the evening hours. In 2010, the 

median age for St. Louis City residents was 34, 

with 24 percent being 19 or younger and 

40 percent aged 20-44. Many of the new 

downtown dwellers are environmentally 

progressive “anti-suburbanites” concerned with 

the carbon footprints of air-polluting cars, 

so they walk or bike to work and nearby 

entertainment venues. Loft-living St. Louisans 

in a flyover city are taking cues from innovative, 

upscale neighborhoods on both coasts. 

The Mercantile Exchange/Laurel Apartment 

complex on Washington Avenue, for example, 

integrates grand traditional architecture with 

ultra-modern amenities, including access to 

cars rented by the hour and a movie theater 

that serves gourmet meals. 

In a recent front-page story in the Post- 

Dispatch, entitled “Eight Miles of Progress,” 

reporter Tim Bryant found that the long 

central corridor stretching from the Arch to 

the Delmar Loop between Lindell Boulevard 

and Forest Park Avenue was “where St. Louis 

succeeds as a city.” Some 60,000 people 

reside there (a 10 percent increase since 

2000), who, like earlier generations, believe 

that “cities are good places to live.” One 

of the most prominent and prosperous 

companies in that corridor is Cortex, a 

technology and bioscience research “hub” 

founded in 2002 by a consortium of 

Washington University, UMSL, SLU, BJC 

Healthcare, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. 

It has invested $155 million in midtown 

infrastructure and plans another $186 million 

to create a total of 2,400 well-paying high 

tech jobs over the next five years. The Cortex 

Research Park became better known locally 

when IKEA announced that it would open 

one of its popular retail stores there by 2015. 

Even though St. Louis has retained 

only half of the 18 “Fortune 500” company 

headquarters that were here in 1980, Express 

Scripts Holding achieved the highest ranking 

for a local firm in two decades, moving from 

60th place to 24th in a single year. It will 

build a new $56,000,000 office complex 

and add 1,500 employees in the near 

future. Monsanto, ranked 206th, plans to add 

$400,000,000 worth of expanded research 

facilities and some 700 new hires. In 2011, 

the area’s Gross Metro Product (GMP) was 

$133 billion—21st highest in the United 

States—and St. Louis had the largest concentration 

of elite financial management companies 

of any U.S. city outside of New York. The 

busy barge traffic on the Mississippi River 

maintains St. Louis’s rank as the nation’s 

second largest inland port by tonnage. 

Currently, health care leads all area industries 

with 34,000 employees, compared with 

21,000 jobs in manufacturing. But in 2013, 

the Post-Dispatch reported that the “job 

search site Dice.com this year ranked 

St. Louis as the fastest-growing tech job market 

in the nation.” Native St. Louis entrepreneurs 

with international reputations—Jack 

Dorsey, creator of Twitter, and Jim McKelvey, 


148

co-developer with Dorsey of “Square” (which 

enables hand-held electronic devices to 

facilitate mobile payments)—are seeking 

ways to train more tech-savvy St. Louisans 

for employment in such growth industries. 

Already paying higher salaries in the information 

technology field than most other 

American cities, St. Louis has been recruiting 

future job-creators among innovative entrepreneurs. 

Some thirty-five startup companies 

in the last two years have received $50,000 

“Arch Grants” in a local initiative to attract 

new firms and high-paying jobs to the area. 

Occupying office space in the Railway 

Exchange Building and receiving advice 

from seasoned business professionals, such 

companies promise exciting collaborations 

that will bring the vitality of cutting-edge 

research to the St. Louis region. Similarly, 

“SixThirty,” a local accelerator program 

that provides $100,000 startup grants to 

technology companies, has attracted new 

entrepreneurs to the city. 

Many other attributes make St. Louis 

the vibrant, vital core of some three million 

people in the nation’s 19th largest metropolitan 

area, living among 79 city 

neighborhoods, a hundred municipalities, 

and several rural counties in two 

states. While a few suburbs may have 

better shopping and gaudier homes, 

none of them has the impressive history 

and multicultural heritage of “The City.” 

St. Louis is indispensable as the undisputed, 

centrally-located capital of 

the region, dominating the economy, 

professional sports, and every type of 

entertainment. Most of those who 

moved out of the city still remain in 

the region, enjoying the best of both 

worlds. Suburbs are places to sleep, 

while the city is the place to party with 

the most diverse and intriguing people 

in eastern Missouri. Former residents 

regularly return to experience everything 

the suburbs lack, including 

major league baseball, football, and 

hockey, superb restaurants, outstanding 

entertainers, holiday celebrations, 

historic neighborhoods, and free 

world-class cultural institutions in the 

Zoo-Museum District. Almost monthly, St. 

Louis City sponsors parades or festivals 

focused on the ethnic diversity of its citizens, 

48 percent of whom are African Americans, 

3.6 percent Hispanics, 2.3 percent Asians, 

and 43 percent Caucasians. Of the latter, 

15 percent have German ancestry, 9 percent 

Irish, 3.7 percent Italian, and 2.4 French. 

In 2013, the city offered these wide-ranging 

activities for Labor Day weekend alone: 

• “LouFest,” featuring thirty bands on three 

stages in Forest Park 

• “Big Muddy Blues Festival” on Laclede’s 

Landing 

• The annual Japanese Festival at the Missouri 

Botanical Garden 

• St. Nicholas Greek Festival, along Forest 

Park Boulevard 

• The annual Polish Festival on St. Louis 

Avenue 

• The Greater St. Louis Hispanic Festival at 

Kiener Plaza 

• Art fairs at the Schlafly micro-breweries 

• And the City’s annual Labor Day Parade 

along Market Street. 

Fifteenth annual Komen Race for the Cure 

of Breast Cancer, June 15, 2013. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE S. CORDLE, 



1 4 9

Art Hill in Forest Park showing the huge crowd viewing a 

performance of the “Pageant and Masque of St. Louis,” 1914. 

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS (29560). 


150


1 5 1

Gone but not forgotten, the popular 

S. S. Admiral excursion boat is moored 

in front of the old levee warehouses and 

railroad tracks prior to the demolition of 

486 buildings over thirty-nine city blocks 

that began on October 9, 1939. As the 

world’s largest inland excursion steamer, 

the five-deck Admiral was 375 feet long 

and 92 feet wide, drawing only eight feet 

of water when fully loaded with over 4,000 

passengers, but outlived its usefulness in the 

new millennium. 

COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PARK SERVICE 

AT THE JEFFERSON NATIONAL EXPANSION MEMORIAL 

(VPRI 004556). 


152 

Despite the variety of backgrounds and 

beliefs in the city’s population, there are 

certain traditions common to our civic culture. 

It is inconceivable that St. Louisans would 

celebrate Mardi Gras anywhere but in Soulard; 

take out-of-town visitors anywhere but 

the Gateway Arch, Old Courthouse, and 

Anheuser-Busch Brewery; or enjoy a wide 

range of recreational and cultural activities in 

Forest Park. That beautiful 138-year-old, 

1,293-acre park “is the heart of our city.” 

Attracting over 12,000,000 visitors a year 

since it was substantially revitalized in a 

$125 million makeover a decade ago, 

Forest Park was honored in 2013 as one of 

the nation’s “Top 10 Great Public Spaces” by 

the American Planning Association. A laudable 

partnership between the city and the 

supportive citizens of “Forest Park Forever” 

will establish a $10 million endowment to 

fund future maintenance. 

McCune Gill must have had Forest Park 

in mind when he wrote in his 1952 

book, The St. Louis Story, that “places have 

souls, the same as individuals,” and their 

legacies become virtually immortal if they 

represent “the spirit of the people.” Following 

are some of those special “spirited” locales 

that serve as the social glue binding our 

community together with shared traditions 

and cherished memories: 

R E M E M B E R I N G A 

V A N I S H E D S T . L O U I S 

Cities are always changing, but rarely as 

quickly, dramatically, or as intentionally as 

St. Louis did in the mid-twentieth century. In 

2002, architectural historian James Kornwolf 

observed that ”St. Louis achieved the unique, 

if dubious, status in North America of entirely 

obliterating its original urban core in one 

fell swoop” when it demolished old riverfront 

buildings to build the Gateway Arch. The 

“Laclede’s Landing” development saved a 

few old warehouses in better shape for more 

popular uses, while the Admiral survived as a 

symbol of waterfront fun into the new millennium. 

But willful demolition, as in the case 

of the beloved Arena, is often more regretted 

than accidental destruction, like the fire 

that burned down the Highlands amusement 

park. In 1957 the removal of the beautiful, 

venerable Merchants’ Exchange Building led 

to the creation of Landmarks Association to 

protect and preserve other historic structures.

A M O D E R N B U I L D I N G B O O M 

When Missouri became a state in 1821, St. Louis already had 651 homes—232 built of 

stone or brick—with 108 new dwellings constructed in the previous six years alone. Anyone 

who doubted its meteoric rise as a commercial and industrial metropolis for the rest of that 

century should remember Mark Twain’s observations. He first saw St. Louis in 1853, as a 

lad of seventeen, and recalled thirty years later that he “could have bought it [then] for six 

million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.” 

N O T A B L E T R E N D S I N D O W N T O W N A R C H I T E C T U R E 

O F T H E L A S T C E N T U R Y 

S Municipal Courts Building, completed in 1911, next to City Hall, an equally massive 

limestone Beaux-Arts creation of local architect Isaac Taylor reflective of the then-current 

“City Beautiful” Movement; 

S St. Louis Public Library, another masterpiece by Cass Gilbert (who also designed the 

Saint Louis Art Museum), was opened in 1912 at a cost of $2 million and renovated a 

century later after a two-year $70 million restoration. 

S Skyscrapers have dominated the cityscape beyond the riverfront since 1914, when 

230-foot-tall Union Station was eclipsed by the Railway Exchange Building, then the 

world’s largest office building at 277 feet. But only a dozen years later, the Southwestern 

Bell Building of 399 feet surpassed it and was St. Louis’s tallest office skyscraper until 

1969. Topping it by a mere two feet was the Laclede Gas Building, which dominated the 

skyline only briefly between 1969 and 1976. 

S Although no structure could or would have eclipsed the 630-foot tall Gateway Arch—the 

highest monument in the United States—its completion in 1965 inspired ever-higher 

buildings in the private sector. Historians Selwyn K. Troen and Glen E. Holt also noted 

that the Arch “stimulated almost $503,000,000 in construction” between 1965 and 1977. 

The era of the behemoth skyscrapers began in 1976, when One U.S. Bank Plaza reached 

484 feet, only to be surpassed by One AT&T Center within a decade. The height of 

that building remained supreme for thirteen years, until One Metropolitan Square opened 

at 593 feet in 2000 and remains the city’s tallest building. Far shorter is the beautiful 

Thomas F. Eagleton U.S. Courthouse of 2000, which, at a height of 557 feet, is still the 

second tallest judicial building on earth. 

S Another distinction of recent St. Louis architecture was realized with the completion of 

the new National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Building in 2011. It is 

the largest governmental archive west of the District of Columbia and contains over 

600,000 cubic feet of fifty million U.S. military service records. 

Even though St. Louis City recently received a prestigious “World Leadership Award for 

Urban Renewal,” has all of that destruction and construction, both public and private, 

improved the lives of citizens? That continues to be debated. But no city can stand still or 

remain complacent, and St. Louis would not have a nationally recognizable media image 

without the Gateway Arch. Regarding the value of urban renewal for the poorest citizens, 

Mayor Schoemehl in 1985 said: “It was ‘cruel’ to pretend…that the construction boom would 

break the grip of poverty when it would not. All that the city could do was to try to leverage 

the opportunities…into further opportunities and try to skew some of those benefits toward 

some of the most needy.” 


1 5 3

Above: Some of the many beautifully 

restored homes in the Lafayette 

Square area. 


Opposite: Crown Candy Kitchen, founded in 

1913 by Harry Karandzieff, an immigrant 

from Macedonia, is now in the third 

generation of family ownership. Offering 

traditional food and soda fountain 

specialties, it is a popular anchor business 

in Old North St. Louis, the promising 

project of local preservationists since 1981. 



154 

P R E S E R V I N G T H E P A S T 

Having experienced such massive alterations 

of the cityscape, St. Louisans are now 

particularly protective of traditional neighborhoods. 

Spanning generations are the 

beautifully-restored residences in Lafayette 

Square, Soulard, and other locations with 

special character, unique features, and the 

added appeal of “walkability.” The eclectic 

variety of Cherokee Street shops and the 

creative re-use of buildings along Tower 

Grove Avenue—with the fashionable new 

wine bar, Olio, housed in a 1930s gas 

station—reveal ambitious entrepreneurs who 

see the advantages of entertaining customers. 

St. Louis needs to promote itself as a 

tourist mecca for architectural aficionados 

who would appreciate our many masterpieces 

from different eras: the Chatillon-DeMenil 

and Campbell House mansions of the 

nineteenth century; the Old Courthouse, 

recently restored; the massive Eads Bridge; 

Theodore Link’s incomparable Union Station; 

Louis Sullivan’s still-impressive Wainwright 

Building; Cass Gilbert’s beautiful Art Museum 

and Central Public Library, Eero Saarinen’s 

huge but graceful Gateway Arch; Minoru 

Yamasaki’s much-praised Main Terminal of 

Lambert International Airport; and Sir David 

Chipperfield’s innovative East Building of 

the Saint Louis Art Museum, opened in 2013. 

Another, even more delectable, means of 

appreciating the local past is to eat traditional 

specialty foods developed and devoured over 

many generations. Even though St. Louis offers

gourmet dining by noted chefs, natives still 

crave frozen custard “concretes” from Ted 

Drewes, wonderful Italian cuisine on The Hill, 

the weekly “Cocktail Museum” at The Royale, 

craft beers at Schlafly’s and newer neighborhood 

micro-breweries, Imo’s “St. Louis style” pizza, 

hamburgers at Blueberry Hill, toasted ravioli 

at Lombardo’s, and old-fashioned milkshakes 

and homemade Easter chocolates at Crown 

Candy Kitchen. 


1 5 5


156

Top, left: Balloon Glow in Forest Park, 

September 14, 2012, prior to the fortieth 

annual “Great Forest Park Balloon Race” 

the next day. That popular event regularly 

attracts crowds of 100,000 people. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIK M. LUNSFORD; 


Opposite, bottom left: Photograph of the 

“Spherical Balloon Races at Aero Club 

Grounds,” from Walter B. Stevens, ed., 

St. Louis: One Hundred Years in a 

Week—Celebration of the Centennial 

of Incorporation…(St. Louis Centennial 

Association, 1909). St. Louisans embrace 

selected elements of heritage that they 

personally remember but ignore a fuller and 

more meaningful history that requires some 

research to appreciate. Locals celebrated the 

“40th anniversary” of the St. Louis balloon 

race in 2012, without realizing that the 

city’s fascination with them began much 

earlier—in the mid-1800s—and had 

become a local tradition when this 

photograph was taken in 1909. 

H O N O R I N G 

T R A D I T I O N 

Left: The legacy of “the Rome of the West” 

remained strong when Pope John Paul II 

made a popular, thirty-one-hour visit to 

St. Louis in January 1999, during which 

he celebrated Mass for 104,000 people. 

SOUVENIR MEDALLION COURTESY OF LOGO-MASTERS, 

INC., OF ST. LOUIS. 


1 5 7

A P P R E C I A T I N G T H E A R T S 

St. Louisans also demonstrated their 

passion for living by strongly supporting 

artistic endeavors. Music of all kinds is 

still enjoyed in blues bistros, arena rock 

concerts, riverfront shows, and symphony 

halls. With the opening of the renovated 

and renamed Peabody Opera House, 

Market Street is again the site of worldclass 

stage shows for large audiences in 

sumptuous surroundings. All of the creative 

arts have been revitalized, as well, in the 

rejuvenated Grand Center Historic District 

in Midtown St. Louis, offering several 

popular institutions housed in architectural 

gems from every era of the twentieth 

century. They include the Fox Theatre, 


158

Powell Symphony Hall, The Contemporary 

Art Museum Saint Louis, Pulitzer 

Foundation for the Arts, Sheldon Concert 

Hall and Galleries, St. Louis Black Repertory 

Theater Company, Grand Center Arts 

Academy and its rehabbed Sun Theater, 

KETC—the PBS television station, and 

UMSL-owned KWMU, a National Public 

Radio station, which recently relocated 

from that campus. Opening at a different 

downtown location in 2014 will be the 

first National Blues Museum, thanks to 

$6 million from Pinnacle Entertainment, 

a casino operation that represents the 

region’s newest industry. Another enterprise 

that will enrich our cultural environment is 

the new International Photography Hall of 

Fame and Museum. 

Gala Opening Night of the new “Peabody 

Opera House” on September 19, 2011, 

following a $79 million renovation of the 

old Kiel Auditorium. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY EMILY RASINSKI; 



1 5 9

T H E M U S I A L M A G I C 

Stan Musial receiving the Medal of 

Freedom from President Barack Obama 

in the East Room of the White House on 

February 15, 2011. 

OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER SOUZA; 

FREE USE ALLOWED UNDER WIKIMEDIA COMMONS 

AS THE WORK PRODUCT OF A FEDERAL EMPLOYEE. 

“The greatest Cardinal ushered in an era of sustained 

success,” wrote the Post-Dispatch on January 20, 2013. 

“But it was his kindness and approachability that made 

him an enduring civic treasure.” 

The affable, unconceited Stan Musial was a perfect 

fit for an unpretentious, baseball-crazy city that 

appreciated natural talent and maximum effort. 

Although he was born elsewhere, he loved St. Louis and 

never left, preferring local affection over the national 

attention he would have received in a larger, more 

lucrative media market. Here, being “nice” was most 

appreciated as one of the traditional “hometown” values 

of the Midwest. 

St. Louisans embraced Musial as a humble hero—a 

person who inspired people to live better lives, or 

at least to make them feel better about their lives. While few mortals could match the incredible 

statistics he compiled between Pearl Harbor and President Kennedy’s assassination, all 

of us can follow his example of spreading some joy to others. The greatness and graciousness 

of Stan “the Man” Musial epitomized the best “Spirit of St. Louis.” Our city will remain a 

better place long into the future, if those who meet friends under the bronze Musial Statue 

remember that in life, too, he always brought us together. 

( R E ) S E A R C H I N G 

F O R A B E T T E R F U T U R E 

Laclede’s intellectual legacy remains 

stronger than ever in the twenty-first century. 

It is reflected in our major research universities 

and universally-respected medical facilities 

that have produced several Nobel 

Laureates, the Baby Tooth Research Project 

on Radioactivity, the Human Genome Project, 

and the Masters and Johnson studies on 

human sexuality, among other contributions. 

The Missouri History Museum Archives and 

Research Center, the Mercantile Library at the 

University of Missouri-St. Louis, and other 

public and private libraries in the area make 

our city the global center of research on the 

American West. In addition, Washington 

University owns several of Thomas Jefferson’s 

books, and Saint Louis University houses the 

largest collection of Vatican manuscripts in 

the Western Hemisphere. When the renovated 

Museum of Western Expansion at the 

Gateway Arch reopens in 2016, it will represent 

the most up-to-date educational exhibits 

on the American West. 

C O N T R I B U T I N G 

T O C I T I Z E N S H I P 

A N D C H A R I T I E S 

St. Louisans have long been described as 

compassionate and caring citizens with 

“old fashioned hometown” values, expressed 

by their generous support of many worthy 

causes. During the Great Depression in 1935, 

71 percent of voting St. Louisans approved 

a $7.5 million bond issue to support a 

national memorial along the riverfront. 

Again, in 2013, voters agreed to a 3/16 cent 

sales tax that will raise $780 million to 

fund parks and an extensive makeover of 

the Gateway Arch grounds. Statistics from 

2010 also revealed that St. Louisans’ per 

capita rate of online charitable contributions 

and volunteerism were among the highest 

of all major U.S. cities. In 2011, 60,000 

local runners set a national record for 

participation in the Komen Race for the Cure 

of breast cancer. St Louis City was also the 

“first U.S. community to honor returning 

vets of the Iraq War” on February 4, 2012, 

as reported by NBC Nightly News. The 


160

acclaimed humanitarianism of St. Louis 

native, Dr. Thomas Anthony Dooley III, in 

Southeast Asia has inspired his fellow 

citizens, such as the Reverend Larry Rice of 

the New Life Evangelistic Center, to help 

the disadvantaged here at home. Countless 

citizens worked for weeks to hold back 

the record-high flood waters in 1993 and 

assist the victims of that massive tragedy, as 

St. Louisans have always done for every 

tornado, earthquake, or other natural disaster. 

The same community-wide compassion 

resulted in a public outpouring of sympathy 

and respect when Stan Musial died in 

January 2013. 

Stan was the ultimate embodiment of the 

St. Louis Cardinals—the city’s most beloved 

institution. That franchise is the most 

successful in National League history, having 

won eleven World Series championships. 

But the Cardinals have lost eight other 

championships, and that, too, is worth 

remembering. Outspent by many other 

teams, the scrappy, underdog Cardinals have 

been the ultimate “explorers” in the search 

for success even with limited resources, and 

that resonates with a large fan-base that is not 

affluent. In a sort of apprentice system that 

recalls older mountain men training the 

younger in the keys to survival, the Cardinals 

recruit, train, and promote largely from 

within the organization, which places a 

premium on the special “redbird way,” referring 

to how players conduct themselves on 

and off the field to deserve the respect of 

passionate fans. 

All three “Busch Stadiums” have been 

places where warm people met on hot 

summer nights. In July 2013, Will Leitch 

ranked all of the major league baseball parks 

and declared that the current Busch Stadium 

was #7 due to its “general warm vibe.” He 

confessed that he would “rather be there than 

just about anywhere else in the world.” 

The 250th anniversary provides the best 

opportunity in the twenty-first century for 

the entire community to determine the 

identity and destiny of St. Louis. But we 

must first address the city’s long-standing 

inferiority complex, which began in the 

nineteenth-century competition with Chicago 

for railroad supremacy and continues today 

in using Tax Increment Funding as a 

defensive measure to keep lucrative local 

companies in town. St. Louis has the urban 

equivalent of low self-esteem, because 

officials have spent decades tearing down 

beloved buildings, while citizens have been 

tearing down the city’s reputation. Residents 

rarely boast but do bristle at every criticism 

from either coast and are amazed when a 

non-Midwesterner actually appreciates their 

politeness and friendliness. Aaron Perlut, who 

co-launched the “Rally St. Louis” website 

in 2012, reflected the low level of boosterism 

in his blog, “St. Louis Doesn’t Suck.” 

Borrowing the motto of Cahokia, Illinois, 

St. Louisans should have “Pride in the Past” 

and “Faith in the Future.” The two are linked, 

because a true appreciation of St. Louis as 

a special place worth praising must begin 

with a thorough, accurate knowledge of 

its history by enthusiastic residents who 

respect its achievements, while recognizing 

its deficiencies. In 2006, Richard Rosenfeld, 

UMSL criminology professor, wrote that 

“St. Louis’s best chance for a bright future 

depends on forging creative connections with 

the past.” In his 2010 book, Beyond Preservation, 

Andrew Hurley agreed that we must study 

history “to know what worked and what 

failed,…what was admirable and what was 

reprehensible” in the past, in order to “devise 

innovative ways of adapting existing infrastructures 

to new conditions so as not to 

create a rupture between past and present.” 

For two-and-a-half centuries, St. Louis 

has prospered from the confluence of rivers 

and the convergence of cultures, taking the 

lead in new commercial trends and always 

adapting to changing times. Ever since an 

exploring French businessman founded our 

city, a focus on transactions has helped our 

leaders adjust to transitions. Today, St. Louis 

is one of a very few premier “Legacy” cities, 

and is often compared to Boston for its significant 

contributions to American history 

across the centuries, as well as the current 

quality of life in its historic neighborhoods. 

“Few cities have had as colorful a history as 

St. Louis,” wrote three respected historians 

in Missouri: The Heart of the Nation (2004), 


1 6 1

Opposite: Fireworks from Fair St. Louis 

light up the night sky on July 3, 2010, above 

the iconic, popular Gateway Arch and 

Old Courthouse. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAWN MAJORS; 


and “today it remains one of the most 

interesting and distinctive of American 

cities.” The nationwide name-recognition of 

St. Louis is the main reason that suburban 

residents continue to use the city as their 

postal address. 

In 1909, the St. Louis Republic stated that 

“in the development of the United States, 

magnitude has been the dominant thought 

of its people.” But “Laclede pictured the city 

to grow on his selected site as something 

more and something better than merely big.” 

He “intended to ‘establish a settlement which 

might become thereafter one of the finest 

cities in America.’” By rejecting the old 

Quantitative Ethic, which has depressed 

St. Louisans with a drop in population nearly 

impossible to reverse in the era of interstate 

highways, residents should embrace a 

Qualitative Ethic represented by a smaller, 

less crowded, and more livable, city, with the 

room and resources to improve their lives. 

The city is definitely finer because it is not 

bigger. It has all the facilities of a major city— 

skyscrapers, international corporations, and 

a prestigious professional baseball team 

(fortunately founded when it was much 

larger)—but provides a moderately-sized 

population with rare opportunities for home 

ownership and one of the lowest costs of 

urban living in the nation. All St. Louisans 

are similar to a retired couple of “emptynesters,” 

living in a large comfortable “house” 

designed for many more people. Most city 

residents are spared the rat-race pace of daily 

living, as well as the hellish commutes found 

in major metropolises on both coasts and in 

Chicago, too. City dwellers regard St. Louis 

as half-full, rather than half-empty, with its 

greater livability contributing to its lovability. 

St. Louisans have the patience to practice 

their famous politeness and to laugh at 

things considered “silly” in less enjoyable 

cities—such as the 2011 World Series’ “rally 

squirrel” that scampered across home plate 

at Busch Stadium. 

At the end of his Lion of the Valley, James 

Neal Primm wrote that “St. Louisans could 

claim to have turned things around in the 

1980s, and they looked ahead to the 

next decade with more confidence than 

they had ten years earlier.” That proved to 

be too optimistic, of course, but now there 

is a growing momentum for a true renaissance—positive, 

progressive improvements 

embodied by the term “metromorphosis,” 

which was coined by UMSL professors 

Brady Baybeck and E. Terrence Jones in their 

2004 book. 

Currently, high-level discussions are taking 

place among city and county officials about a 

possible future “Great Reconciliation,” and 

two organizations—“STL: World Class City” 

and “Better Together”—see many positive 

developments from such a merger. With 

a substantial portion of the U.S. population 

living within a 500-mile radius of St. Louis, 

it can be America’s “Carnival City” again. 

It has the infrastructure and the attractions 

to please tourists, but the attitudes of 

residents must reflect a new optimism as they 

welcome visitors. 

As a city of explorers, St. Louis has always 

accepted the risks of searching for the new 

and different. Often such discoveries are not 

made or fully exploited, and the ways 

those disappointments are handled become 

discoveries themselves. Almost a century 

ago, Albert Ahern wrote a poem to honor 

The Trappers of North America, and this stanza 

seems most appropriate as an anniversary 

tribute for the old fur trade capital that 

has never stopped exploring for two-anda-half 

centuries: 

“It isn’t the size of the cabin you’ve built, 

Nor what you have won in pelts or fame, 

The thing that counts is the right to say: 

I have kept the faith—I have played the game.” 

For all you have been, and for all you can 

become, St. Louis—Happy 250th Birthday! 


162


1 6 3

City House and Jazz Bistro, among many 

venues in the popular Grand Center 

Entertainment District. 

OCTOBER 2010 PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVER C. SLICER, 

WHO RELEASED IT INTO THE PUBLIC DOMAIN THROUGH 

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS. 


164

SHARING THE HERITAGE 

H i s t o r i c p r o f i l e s o f b u s i n e s s e s , 

o r g a n i z a t i o n s , a n d f a m i l i e s t h a t h a v e 

c o n t r i b u t e d t o t h e d e v e l o p m e n t a n d 

e c o n o m i c b a s e o f S t . L o u i s 

Quality of Life ......................................................1 6 6 

The Marketplace ...................................................2 3 2 

Building a Greater St. Louis ...................................2 7 0 

S H A R I N G T H E H E R I T A G E 

1 6 5

The World Chess Hall of Fame, which relocated to the St. Louis area in 2011. 

PHOTOGRAPH BY SARAH CARMODY. PUBLISHED COURTESY OF THAT ORGANIZATION. 


166

QUALITY OF LIFE 

H e a l t h c a r e p r o v i d e r s , f o u n d a t i o n s , 

u n i v e r s i t i e s , a n d o t h e r i n s t i t u t i o n s t h a t 

c o n t r i b u t e t o t h e q u a l i t y o f l i f e i n S t . L o u i s 

Lindenwood University ...............................................................1 6 8 

Washington University in St. Louis ...............................................1 7 2 

SSM Health Care .......................................................................1 7 6 

The University of Missouri-St. Louis .............................................1 8 0 

St. Louis Mercantile Library and UMSL .....................................1 8 2 

Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center .............................1 8 3 

Bi-State Development Agency.......................................................1 8 4 

Archdiocese of St. Louis ..............................................................1 8 8 

St. Louis Community College .......................................................1 9 1 

Webster University ....................................................................1 9 2 

St. Luke’s Hospital .....................................................................1 9 5 

JCI ..........................................................................................1 9 6 

American Red Cross ...................................................................1 9 9 

The Muny .................................................................................2 0 0 

Fontbonne University .................................................................2 0 3 

World Affairs Council of St. Louis ................................................2 0 4 

BJC HealthCare .........................................................................2 0 6 

Delta Dental of Missouri ............................................................2 0 8 

Maryville University ..................................................................2 1 0 

The Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod ...........................................2 1 2 

Ascension .................................................................................2 1 4 

Missouri Botanical Garden ..........................................................2 1 6 

Saint Louis Science Center ..........................................................2 1 8 

Saint Louis Zoo .........................................................................2 2 0 

Mathews-Dickey Boys’ & Girls’ Club ............................................2 2 2 

Harris-Stowe State University .....................................................2 2 3 

Greater Saint Louis Community Foundation ...................................2 2 4 

St. Mary of Victories Church (1843) .............................................2 2 5 

Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet ................................................2 2 6 

Central Bureau of the Catholic Central Verein of America ................2 2 7 

Commemoration Committee for the Battle of Fort San Carlos ............2 2 8 

Mercy Health ............................................................................2 2 9 

Missouri Humanities Council .......................................................2 3 0 

St. Louis Public Library ..............................................................2 3 1 

SPECIAL 

THANKS TO 

Max Kaiser, Jr. 

St. Andrew’s Resources for 

Seniors System 

Webster University 

Q U A L I T Y O F L I F E 

1 6 7

LINDENWOOD 

UNIVERSITY 

Few schools anywhere have compiled 

a history as exciting—or inspiring—as 

Lindenwood University, a dynamic four-year 

liberal arts institution dedicated to excellence 

in higher education. Founded in 1827, 

Lindenwood took its name from the beautiful 

Linden trees that shade the historic 500-acre 

campus in St. Charles, a growing community 

just west of St. Louis. 

Lindenwood University offers more than 

120 undergraduate and graduate degree 

programs to more than 16,000 students from 

throughout the United States and ninety 

countries around the world. The faculty, 

staff and administration at Lindenwood are 

committed to an integrative liberal arts 

curriculum that focuses on the talents, 

interests and future of our students. 

In 1827, George and Mary moved to land 

he had purchased some years earlier near 

St. Charles in order to be near Mary’s family. 

Mary immediately began teaching the young 

women of St. Charles while George cleared 

the land and established a homestead. The 

Sibley’s property was named Linden Wood 

because of the many Linden (or basswood) 

trees that grew on the land. 

The Sibleys were strong supporters of 

education for women: they began their school 

at a time when formal education for women 

was uncommon in the United States. Mary 

commented that, “Our country will never 

prosper unless the people get knowledge.” 

In his writings, George said, “Woman is 

the most important sex; and if but half of 

our race can be educated, let it be woman

Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles