THE CITY OF ST. LOUIS.
The Mississippi River below the Moline Rapids at Rock Island passes various flourishing cities, including Muscatine and Burlington, the former having considerable trade in timber and food products, while Burlington, a much larger place, spreads back from the bluffs and is a busy railroad city, fronted by a beautiful reach of the river. About thirty miles below, on the Illinois shore, is Nauvoo, a small town chiefly raising grapes and wine, but formerly one of the leading settlements on the river. This town was originally built by the Mormons under the lead of their prophet, Joseph Smith, in 1838, after they had been driven from various places in New York, Ohio and Missouri. Nauvoo flourished greatly, reaching fifteen thousand population, but dissensions arose and the enmity of the growing population elsewhere caused riots, in one of which, in 1844, Smith, who had been arrested and taken to jail at Carthage, Illinois, was killed. Brigham Young then assumed leadership, and in 1845 removed the colony over to the Missouri River at Council Bluffs, finally migrating to the Great Salt Lake in Utah, two years later. Below Nauvoo are the Lower Rapids of the Mississippi, extending twelve miles to Keokuk, a beautiful city built partly along the river, but mostly on the summit of the bluffs, here rising one hundred and fifty feet. Keokuk was a noted Indian chief, his name meaning the "watchful fox." Des Moines River, forming the boundary between Iowa and Missouri, flows in at the lower edge of the city, having come down from the northwest and passing the Iowa State Capital, Des Moines, at the head of navigation, where there is a population of sixty thousand and extensive manufactures. This city has a magnificent Capitol, erected at a cost of $3,000,000, and its prosperity is largely due to the extensive coal measures of the neighborhood. It has grown around the site of the former frontier outpost of Fort Des Moines, built in the early days for protection against the Sioux. Below are Quincy, Hannibal and Alton, the latter being just above the confluence with the Missouri, and then the Mississippi River flows majestically past the levee at St. Louis, the chief city on its banks, having two great railway bridges crossing over to the Illinois shore.
When the French held Louisiana, a grant was made in 1762 to Pierre Ligueste Laclede and his partners to establish, as the "Louisiana Fur Company," trading-posts on the Mississippi. Laclede in that year came out from France to New Orleans, and in 1764, in order to open the fur trade with the Indians on the Missouri, he ascended the Mississippi, and on February 15th made the first settlement on the site of St. Louis, building a house and four stores and naming the place in honor of King Louis XV. of France. He had frequent journeys along the river, and died upon one of them near the mouth of the Arkansas in 1778. The post was made the capital of Upper Louisiana, but it grew very slowly, having only a thousand people when Louisiana was ceded to the United States in 1803. The development of steamboating and afterwards of the railway systems, all the great lines seeking St. Louis, gave it rapid growth subsequently, and its population now reaches seven hundred thousand. It spreads with its vast railway terminals for nearly twenty miles along the Mississippi, sweeping in a grand curve past the centre of the city, which rises in repeated terraces as it extends westward back from the river, the highest being two hundred feet above the water-level. It has an enormous trade and extensive manufactures, being the largest tobacco-making city in the world, and having one of the greatest American breweries, the Anheuser-Busch Company. Its Chamber of Commerce, of sandstone in Renaissance, is a noted building, and its grand Court House, erected as a Greek cross, is surmounted by a dome three hundred feet high. It also has a new and magnificent City Hall. St. Louis been singularly free from fires, but its great disaster was upon May 27, 1896, when a terrific tornado swept through the city, killing three hundred people and destroying property valued at $10,000,000.
The chief institution of learning is Washington University, which has fine new buildings in Forest Park on the western verge of the city, and cares for seventeen hundred students. The park system is very extensive, spreading partially around the built-up portions and embracing twenty-one hundred acres. The chief of these are the Forest Park, with fine trees and drives, the Tower Grove Park, Lafayette and Carondelet Parks, and in the northern suburbs O'Fallon Park, having adjacent the spacious Bellefontaine and Calvary Cemeteries. The gem of the system, however, is the Missouri Botanical Garden of seventy-five acres, the best of its kind in the country, which was bequeathed to the city by Henry Shaw, a native of Sheffield, England, who came to St. Louis, grew up with the city, and died there in 1889. The great attraction of St. Louis is its splendid bridge crossing the Mississippi, built by James B. Eads and completed in 1874 at a cost of $10,000,000, carrying a railway across, with a highway on the upper deck, being more than two thousand yards long, and resting on arches rising fifty-five feet above the water. The railway is tunnelled under the city for nearly a mile, and leads to the Union Station, which is one of the largest in the world. The Merchants' Bridge, which cost $3,000,000, brings another railway over, three miles above, and a third bridge is projected. The vast aggregation of railways centering at St. Louis also uses another bridge route north of the city, crossing the Missouri just above its mouth and then the Mississippi to Alton on the Illinois shore. The military post of St. Louis is Jefferson Barracks down the river, an important station of the United States army.
Bridge Crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis
DESCENDING THE MISSISSIPPI.
The scenery of the Mississippi River changes below St. Louis, and it loses much of the picturesqueness displayed by the bluff shores above. The mass of the waters is larger, the shores lower, and the adjacent regions more subject to overflow. There are many bends and islands, and the Ohio River comes in at the end of the long low peninsula of Cairo, further adding to the enormous current. The Southern Illinois lowlands have long been known as Egypt, and upon these bottom lands are grown prolific crops of corn. In one field in the great crop of 1899, covering over six thousand acres south of Ava, was raised six hundred thousand bushels, the banner American cornfield of that year. Twenty miles below Cairo is Columbus, on a high bluff upon the Kentucky shore, having Belmont opposite in Missouri, this having been the scene of General Grant's first battle in the Civil War. The Confederates in 1861 had fortified Columbus and placed twenty thousand men there to hold the Mississippi. Grant, in November, made an attack upon Belmont, and broke up and destroyed their outpost camp in spite of a heavy fire from Columbus, afterwards cutting his way out and returning to Cairo. When in the next spring Forts Henry and Donelson were captured, the Confederates found Columbus untenable and abandoned it without a contest. Fifty miles below is Donaldson Point, and off it the noted Island No. 10, for all these islands below Cairo were numbered. The Union gunboats attacked Island No. 10 in March, 1862, and carried on a bombardment and siege for a month, when it was captured with New Madrid on the Missouri shore several miles farther down, they being mutually dependent. The remains of earthworks are still visible on the island, and also the canal cut to assist in the investment. The Mississippi beyond, skirts the various bluffs of the Chickasaw region on the eastern bank, while on the western shore are broad alluvial lowlands, as the great river passes between Tennessee and Arkansas. On the first Chickasaw bluff is Fort Pillow, another Confederate stronghold, which, however, they were compelled to abandon in June, 1862, as the Union army had got in their rear. Here afterwards occurred the "Fort Pillow Massacre," in April, 1864, when the Confederates under General Forrest attacked and captured it.
All the region hereabout was inhabited by the Chickasaw Indians, who were so called in their language because they were "swamp-dwellers" and "eaters of the bog-potato." This tribe long ago removed to the Indian territory, where they are now in a prosperous condition and successful agriculturists. On the southwestern border of Tennessee is what is known as the fourth Chickasaw bluff, and here is the city of Memphis, the leading town between St. Louis and New Orleans. The bluff shore rises about eighty feet above the river at the ordinary stage of water, and is fronted by a wide levee extending for two miles and a broad esplanade bordered by warehouses. It was here that De Soto in 1541, with his band of adventurous explorers searching for gold, came and first saw the great river, their chronicler writing home "the river was so broad that if a man stood still on the other side, it could not be told whether he was a man or no; the channel was very deep, the current strong, the water muddy and filled with floating trees." Memphis is a handsome city, attractively laid out, the residential section having spacious lawn-bordered avenues, and there being an attractive park in the centre, the Court Square inhabited by numerous squirrels and adorned by Andrew Jackson's bust. Memphis has seventy thousand people, and a large trade both by river and railroad, being a leading cotton-shipping port, whence steamboats take vast amounts down to New Orleans for foreign export. Among its attractions are the cotton compresses and cotton-seed oil mills. In the Civil War, Memphis was captured by the Union gunboats in June, 1862, and held afterwards. On the outskirts, a grim memorial of the great conflict, is the National Cemetery, with fourteen thousand Union soldiers' graves.