Going north, Natchitoches on Red River, and Arkansas Post on the Arkansas, may be considered outposts of the country immediately dependent upon New Orleans. Each tapped the Indian trade of its river. The first was a thriving, the second a poor village. We next come upon a group of settlements, constituting what was known, under French and Spanish rule, as Upper Louisiana, with St. Louis for its emporium. Chief among these were New Madrid,[1] Cape Girardeau, St. Genevieve, Carondelet, and St. Charles. The population, all told, counting from the Arkansas to the Missouri, and including St. Louis, numbered about six thousand, of whom at least a thousand were slaves, with a sprinkling of half-breed French-Indian trappers besides.
St. Louis had arisen out of the transfer of the east bank of the Mississippi to Great Britain. Rather than live as aliens, under English laws, many French settlers went with Pierre Laclede,[2] across the Mississippi, to a place already nicknamed by them Pain Court, where, in February, 1764, they founded a new town with the name of St. Louis, in honor of Louis XV.
OLD CONVENT, NEW ORLEANS.
These people were mostly French Canadians,—either traders, trappers, or voyageurs, who still kept up their trading connection with Canada,—though a sprinkling of Spaniards and Americans became incorporated with them, so making St. Louis a city of many tongues like New Orleans. In both, an American could fancy himself in a foreign country, among foreigners. But while New Orleans had grown up under the worst conditions, in respect of situation and climate, St. Louis began her career under the best of both. At New Orleans people lived, as it were, on a floating island which the Mississippi might deluge with her floods. St. Louis was laid out on a spacious terrace, elevated above the united floods of the Missouri and Mississippi. Besides its high and healthy situation, the spot chosen by the founders of St. Louis for their future city was the best one to be found next south of the mouth of the Missouri River. That the whole Indian trade of the upper country was destined to be poured into the lap of the infant metropolis, was early foreseen and soon realized by its sagacious founders.
ST. LOUIS AND VICINITY.
Of St. Louis in its infancy we lack adequate description. It was a palisaded village of the pattern so often described in these pages. During the Revolutionary War (1780) it withstood the assault of a marauding party sent against it from the Lakes, but lost some of its inhabitants whom the enemy carried off into captivity. At this time it had one hundred and twenty houses with eight hundred inhabitants, who owned and bred many cattle. While a few houses were of stone, the major part were mean, and the streets narrow and dirty. With the cession it began to grow apace.