CHAPTER III
A FEW days after his departure, La Bonté found himself at St. Louis, the emporium of the fur-trade, and the fast-rising metropolis of the precocious settlements of the West. Here, a prey to the agony of mind which jealousy, remorse, and blighted love mix into a very puchero of misery, he got into the company of certain rowdies, a class that every western city particularly abounds in; and anxious to drown his sorrows in any way, and quite unscrupulous as to the means, he plunged into all the vicious excitements of drinking, gambling, and fighting, which form the every-day amusements of the ris-. ing generation of St. Louis.
Perhaps in no other part of the United States—where, indeed, humanity is frequently to be seen in many curious and unusual phases—is there a population so marked in its general character, and at the same time divided into such distinct classes, as in the above-named city. Dating, as it does, its foundation from yesterday, *—for what are forty years in the growth of a metropolis?—its founders are now scarcely past middle life, regarding with astonishment the growing works of their hands; and whilst gazing upon its busy quays, piled with grain and other produce of the West, its fleets of huge steamboats lying tier upon tier alongside the wharves, its well-stored warehouses, and all the bustling concomitants of a great commercial depot, they can scarcely realize the memory of a few short years, when on the same spot nothing was to be seen but the miserable hovels of a French village—the only sign of commerce being the unwieldy bateaux of the Indian traders, laden with peltries from the distant regions of the Platte and Upper Missouri.
* He means as an American city. St. Louis was founded by the
French in 1764; transferred to the United States in 1804.
(Ed.) 1804. (Ed.)
Where now intelligent and wealthy merchants walk erect, in conscious substantiality of purse and credit, and direct the commerce of a vast and well-peopled region, there stalked but the other day, in dress of buckskin, the Indian trader of the West; and all the evidences of life, mayhap, consisted of the eccentric vagaries of the different bands of trappers and hardy mountaineers who accompanied, some for pleasure and some as escort, the periodically arriving bateaux, laden with the beaver-skins and buffalo-robes collected during the season at the different trading-posts in the Far West. *
* Written in 1848. (Ed.)
These, nevertheless, were the men whose hardy enterprise opened to commerce and the plow the vast and fertile regions of the West. Rough and savage though they were, they were the true pioneers of that extraordinary tide of civilization which has poured its resistless current through tracts large enough for kings to govern, over a country now teeming with cultivation, where, a few short years ago, countless herds of buffalo roamed unmolested, where the bear and deer abounded, and the savage Indian skulked through the woods and prairies, lord of the unappreciated soil that now yields its prolific treasures to the spade and plow of civilized man. To the wild and half-savage trapper, who may be said to exemplify the energy, enterprise, and hardihood characteristic of the American people, divested of all the false and vicious glare with which a high state of civilization, too rapidly attained, has obscured their real and genuine character, in which the above traits are eminently prominent—to these men alone is due the empire of the West, destined in a few short years to become the most important of those confederated States composing the mighty Union of North America.
Sprung, then, out of the wild and adventurous fur-trade, St. Louis, still the emporium of that species of commerce, preserves even now, in the character of its population, many of the marked peculiarities distinguishing its early founders, who were identified with the primitive Indian in hardihood and instinctive wisdom. Whilst the French portion of the population retain the thoughtless levity and frivolous disposition of their original source, the Americans of St. Louis, who may lay claim to be native, as it were, are as strongly distinguished for determination and energy of character as they are for physical strength and animal courage; and are remarkable, at the same time, for a singular aptitude in carrying out commercial enterprises to successful terminations, apparently incompatible with the thirst of adventure and excitement which forms so prominent a feature in their character. In St. Louis and with her merchants have originated many commercial enterprises of gigantic speculation, not confined to the immediate locality or to the distant Indian fur-trade, but embracing all parts of the continent, and even a portion of the Old World. And here it must be remembered that St. Louis is situated inland, at a distance of upwards of one thousand miles from the sea.