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This is a personality sketch of St. Louis and not a guide-book. If it were the latter, it would recount the superb commercial position of the city, each of the bulwarks of its financial fortresses. The river-trade is dead indeed; even the most optimistic of those who are most anxious to see it revived doubt, in their heart of hearts, if ever it can be revived. But commerce is not dead at St. Louis. As St. Paul and Minneapolis are gateways to the Northwest remember that she is one of the great gateways to the Southwest. To the man in Arkansas or Oklahoma or Texas she is another New York; she stands to him as London stands to the folk of the English counties. And this relation she capitalizes and so grows rich. She is solid and substantial—the old French town of the yesterdays has taken her permanent place among the leading cities of America.
15
THE OLD FRENCH LADY OF THE RIVERBANK
At the bend of the river she stands—this drowsy old French lady of the long ago. They have called her the Crescent City. But the Mississippi makes more than a single turn around the wide-spreading town. And the results are most puzzling, even to those steadyminded folk who assert that they are direction-wise. In New Orleans, east seems west and north seems south. It must almost be that the Father of Rivers reverses all the laws of Mother Nature and runs his course up-stream.
New Orleans is upon the east bank of the Mississippi. All the guide-books will tell you that. But in the morning the sun arises from over across the river, and in the cool of evening his reddish radiance is dying over Lake Ponchartrain, directly east from the river—at least, so your direction-wise intelligence seems to tell you. But east is east and west is west and Old Sol has made such a habit of rising and setting these many thousand years that his reliability is not to be trusted. As to the reliability of the Father of Waters—there is quite another matter.
Truth to tell, the Mississippi river is probably the most utterly unreliable thing within the North American continent. He has shifted his course so many times within the brief century that the white-skinned men have known him, that the oldest of them have lost all trace of his original course. And so to steer a vessel up and down the stream is a doubly difficult art. The pilot does not merely have to know his steering-marks—the range between that point and this, the thrust of some hidden and fearfully dangerous reef, the advantage to be gained between eddies and currents for easy running—he has to learn the entire thing anew each time he brings a craft up or down the river. Mark Twain has long since immortalized the ample genius of the Mississippi pilots. The stories of the river's unreliability, of its constant tendency to change its channel are apocryphal—almost as old as the oldest of the houses of old New Orleans. And this is not the story of the river.
Yet it must not be forgotten that the river almost is New Orleans, that from the beginning it has been the source of the French lady's strength and prosperity. Before there was even thought of a city the river was there—pouring its yellow flood down from an unknown land to the great gulf. Bienville, the real founder of New Orleans, saw with the prophetic sight of a really great thinker what even a river that came to the sea from an unexplored land might mean in years to come to the city of his creation. His prophecy was right. When the river, with the traffic upon its bosom, has prospered, New Orleans has prospered. And in the lean years when the river traffic has dwindled, New Orleans has felt the loss in her every fiber. There are old-timers in the city who shake their heads when they tell you of the fat river-boats crowding in at the levee, of the clipper-ships and the newer steam-propelled craft at the deeper docks, of the crowds around the old St. Louis and the St. Charles Hotels, the congested narrow streets, the halcyon days when the markets of the two greatest nations in the world halted on the cotton news from Factors Row. And New Orleans awaits the opening of the Panama canal with something like feverish anticipation, for she feels that this mighty nick finally cut into the thin neck of the American continents, her wharves will again be crowded with shipping—this time with a variety of craft plying to and from the strange ports of the Pacific. So much does her river still mean to her.
Factors Row still stands, rusty and somewhat grimed. No longer is it consequential in the markets of the world. In fact, to put a bald truth baldly, no longer is New Orleans of supreme consequence in the cotton problem of all nations. A great cotton shipping port she still is and will long remain. But the multiplication of railroad points and the rapid development of such newer cotton ports as Galveston, to make a single instance, have all worked against her preëminence.