The Rose of Old St. Louis

by Mary Dillon

"The rose that all are praising."

"And this is the village of St. Louis, sir?"

My discomfiture, my mortification, my rage, the vision of dainty beauty, the strange little savant—every remembrance of my brief visit to Cahokia had been swept away by the rushing waters of the great river of which I had read and heard so much.

My brain was teeming with tales of the Spanish adventurer De Soto; of the French trader Joliet; of the devoted and saintly Jesuit, beloved of the Indians, Père Marquette; and of the bold Norman La Salle, who hated and feared all Jesuits. I saw the river through a veil of romance that gilded its turbid waters, but it was something far other than its romantic past that set my pulses to beating, and the blood rushing through my veins so that I hardly heard my captain's answer, and hardly knew what I replied to him.

Through the months of my sojourn in Kentucky there had been one all-absorbing theme—the closing of the Mississippi to American boats by the Spanish, and their refusal to grant us a right of deposit on the Isle of New Orleans. Feeling had run so high that there were muttered threats against the government at Washington.

There were two factions, each acting secretly and each numbering thousands. One was for setting off at once down the river to capture New Orleans and take exclusive possession of both sides of the river; and if the government at Washington would not help them, or, still worse, forbade them the emprise, they would set up an independent government of the West. The other faction, inspired by secret agents of the Spanish government, was for floating the Spanish flag and proclaiming themselves subjects of Charles of Aragon. Spain's secret emissaries were eloquent of the neglect of the home government in the East, and its powerlessness to help the Westerners if it would, and it was said they clenched their arguments with chink of Spanish gold. Treason and patriotism, a wild indignation at wrongs unredressed, and a wilder enthusiasm for conquest sent the blood of Kentucky to fever-heat. Passions were inflamed until it needed but a spark from a tinder to set them ablaze.

With me, friend and distant kinsman of the Clarkes, there was no possibility of being touched by the taint of treason. But while it would be treason of the blackest dye, and most abhorrent to my soul, to submit to Spain's rule, to my young blood there could be no treason in compelling Spain at the point of the sword to submit to our demands. I was all for war, and when the cooler judgment of General Clarke and his brother, my captain, prevailed to calm for a time the wild tumult of war, I was bitterly disappointed.

Now for the first time I was beholding the river that had aroused the mighty tempest in Kentucky, and it was not the tales of De Soto and La Salle, of Joliet and Père Marquette, that sent the blood rushing through my veins, but the thought that this was the mighty river forbidden to our commerce, that the swirling brown water at my feet was rushing down to the Spanish city on the Gulf, and I longed to be one of an army rushing with it to secure our natural and inalienable rights by conquest.

I knew that Captain Clarke was visiting St. Louis to make some arrangements for his brother's debts—debts incurred principally to Mr. Gratiot and Mr. Vigo for no benefit to himself, but in rescuing and protecting the people of Illinois from the Indians and the British; debts belonging of right to the government, but repudiated by it, and left to be borne by the noble man who, almost alone, by a heroism and genius for war unparalleled had saved all that Western country to the Union.

I knew this was my captain's errand, yet I hoped there might be some touching on the question of the river navigation with the Spanish governor of St. Louis, and I had visions of returning to Kentucky and, amid the acclaims of our fellow-citizens, announcing that Captain Clarke, assisted by his young kinsman, had succeeded in convincing the Spanish governor Delassus of the wrongs inflicted upon American commerce by the unjust interdiction; that Delassus had thereupon remonstrated with the intendant at New Orleans, and, as a result, the river was thrown open to the Gulf, and a port of deposit granted on the Isle of New Orleans where our merchants might store the goods they brought down the river for sale.