August 11, 1767, news came that Spain was making ready to take possession of the country. The transfer had been made by secret treaty in 1762. The people accepted the situation in a sort of dumb rage. The following year a body of troops arrived under the command of a man named Rios, acting under the authority of Don Antonio d'Ulloa, Governor of Louisiana. To the joy of the inhabitants, De Bellerive was not disturbed in his office, and the Spanish troops left in the summer of 1769.

It was the great distinction of De Bellerive that he was the friend of Pontiac, the Ottawa chieftain, and about the time of the departure of the Spaniards, Pontiac arrived at St. Louis. He represented all the poetry and nobility, the grandeur and genius of the Indian character. After Red Jacket, he was the greatest Indian the New World had known. Dreaming of driving the English into the sea he had confederated the tribes between the Allegheny and the Mississippi, the Ohio and the Lakes into a league against them. He had been known and beloved by the gallant but unfortunate Montcalm at Quebec. He had participated in the ambuscade in which Braddock with his life had paid the penalty of narrow-mindedness, and had planned the massacre of Michilimackinack, in which more than two thousand of the English had lost their lives. The French "loved him for the enemies he had made," and he was "fêted and caressed," says an early chronicler, "by many of the principal inhabitants of the village." St. Ange de Bellerive entertained the warrior at the house of Madame Chouteau, but Pontiac was now a broken man. His dream of driving back the English beyond the Cumberland had faded. His allies had been seduced from his support by presents and by firewater. He, too, had made the acquaintance of the fiery liquor, and drink was then such a passion with him that De Bellerive and his friends not only endeavored to prevent the sale thereof to him in the village, but tried to dissuade him from crossing the river to Cahokia in response to the invitations of certain of his friends there. Not to be dissuaded, Pontiac crossed the river in the uniform of a French officer, which had been given him by Montcalm. Wandering on the outskirts of the village of Cahokia, he was tomahawked by a Kaskaskia Indian, who had been given a barrel of whiskey to do the deed by an English trader named Williamson. His friend De Bellerive had the chief's remains brought to St. Louis, and they were buried somewhere in the vicinity of the site of the present Southern Hotel, in the corridor of which was placed, in 1901, a handsome tablet to the unfortunate warrior's memory. Whether Pontiac was assassinated in accordance with official English instructions, or met his death in consequence of a private grudge, was long a matter of dispute, but there is no doubt that the passionate and sympathetic Frenchmen believed for many long years that the chief was killed to relieve the English of the danger of his presence and a possible utilization of his undoubted abilities by the Power in possession of the west bank of the Mississippi. Pontiac's death, however, was promptly avenged upon the Illinois Indians by members of the tribes with which he had been in alliance.

Next came Don Alexander O'Reilly to take charge of the territory of Louisiana. He arrived at New Orleans at the head of three thousand men to enforce his authority. There was need for the soldiery, for though seven years had elapsed since the cession of the territory, the Spaniards had never actually taken possession. The people were still French to the core. When they heard that Don O'Reilly was coming they even conferred together upon the advisability of meeting him with force and preventing his landing. The head men of the town counselled against this, however, and their advice prevailed, but such was the spirit of insubordination, so many were the execrations heaped upon the Spaniards, so frequent were the threats of violence against them that Don Alexander had at once to adopt stern measures. He promptly arrested a dozen of the ringleaders, had five of them publicly shot, and the others, except one who committed suicide, sent as prisoners to Cuba. The Spanish code was put into operation throughout the territory, and O'Reilly's deputy, Lieutenant-Governor Piernas, arriving in St. Louis in 1770, took possession of St. Louis, with the help of De Bellerive, wisely conciliating the villagers. The village settled into peace. The church, for which ground had been set aside even before the founders of the town had prepared to build their own homes, was dedicated, June 24, 1770, with solemn ceremonies. Where that first church of flattened logs set on end with the interstices filled with mortar stood, there stands a church to-day, and, says Elihu Shepard, since that time "the worship of God on that block has not been suspended for a single day." All De Bellerive's acts were formally confirmed by Piernas, and the little settlement forgot its woes under a benign administration, which recognized village prejudices, and shut its eyes to the loyalty everywhere apparent to France.

[OLD FRENCH POST-HOUSE. BUILT IN 1770. INHABITED UNTIL 1870.]

Piernas narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of an Osage chieftain who thought himself insulted at a meeting at the Commandant's house. The Osage, while drinking with other Indians, divulged his intention to kill the Governor, whereupon a Shawnee warrior stabbed him to the heart. The slain chief was buried with honors in the big mound to the north of the village, an eminence that gave to St. Louis for many years the name of "The Mound City."

For twelve years the village was orderly and quiet. The people liked the Governor who succeeded Piernas, but the next, Don Fernando de Leyba,—"a drunken, avaricious, and feeble-minded man, without a single redeeming qualification," they did not like. He came upon the scene in 1778, at a critical time. The American Revolution was on. The French and Spaniards, hating the English, were inclined to sympathize with the colonists, so far as they knew or cared about things happening so far away. Fearing an attack of English and Indians, the villagers threw up a trench and stockade about the town, having three gates on the sides other than the one on the river, and built a fort in the centre of the city at what is now, approximately, Fourth and Walnut streets, and supplied it with four small cannon and one company of soldiers. The people were afraid to till the fields outside the trench and stockade, and the men who might have braved attack were busy building the defences. In the spring of 1780 fears of a famine forced the men into the fields to plant the spring seeds.

On the morning of May 26, 1780, the attack came. It was led by Canadian-French renegades, the main body being made up of about one thousand Upper Mississippi Indians. The attacking party came from the north, slew forty of the workers, carried fifteen up the river as prisoners, in their war canoes, while the rest made their way back to the fortifications, amid the booming of the cannon, which saved the fort. Leyba, who was drunk, appeared upon the scene, it is said, sprawling in a wheelbarrow and muttering incoherently, after the Indians had been repulsed. He died a month later, covered with ignominy.

The succeeding Lieutenant-Governor, Francisco Cruzat, thoroughly fortified the town, which was never afterwards molested by the savages. While the more extensive fortifications were in process of construction, indeed to the peace of 1783, the price of provisions in St. Louis was high, and visitors from New Orleans, Ste. Geneviève, Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and other settlements nicknamed the place "Pain Court," or "short of bread." Still, it was a time of prosperity. The town grew, and nothing alarming happened until, in 1785, when the people were terrified by their first sight of the "June rise" of the Mississippi. They saw the great yellow stream spread out over the American Bottoms on the east bank and the Columbia Bottom on the west bank to the north, until it became a vast lake reaching farther than the eye could distinctly see. They saw the mighty flood go raging past, black with the trunks of mighty trees torn up by the wild waters, the villages of Cahokia and Kaskaskia submerged, crops ruined, cattle drowned, and houses melting into the yellow sea. St. Louis was flooded to what is now Main Street, and part of the people were preparing to move farther up the high bank that ran back from the stream, when the waters began to recede, and the anxiety of the town was relieved. The people called this "l'année des grands eaux,"—"the year of the great waters." There have been many such floods since, but none more awe-inspiring than this, seen in a setting of virgin wilderness. The flood increased the population of the city, however, for the settlers in the bottoms went to town and joined in its upbuilding. In those days, notwithstanding all the dangers of war and flood, St. Louis seems to have been a gay place. Society was simple, yet retaining an indefinable air of elegance that bore the flavor of old France. Even if they were "short of bread," the people were hospitable, a trait which still persists characteristic and conspicuous. The French element has almost wholly disappeared in newer elements, but there yet lingers, somehow, the atmosphere of deliberate ease among the people, even in the pressure of modern business. So orderly was this frontier town that during the entire period of the French and Spanish dominations but one murder was reported.

[OLD MOUND, ST. LOUIS, REMOVED IN 1869. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTION.]

Following the annalists we learn that the city's commerce in those early days was much hampered by a band of pirates that infested the river at a place called Grand Tower, midway between the mouths of the Missouri and Ohio. Lurking at this point, where the stream is very swift, the pirates would dart out and attack the boats plying between New Orleans and St. Louis, kill the boatmen and seize the goods. They secured rich spoil of hides from the down trade, and many luxurious articles from the up trade—treasures even from distant France. One voyageur north bound escaped the pirates through the strategy and courage of a negro who won the confidence of the captors of the barge and the sympathy of two negro slaves of the pirates. At a signal the negroes hurled the buccaneers off the barge, and either shot them or left them to drown. The barge crew then took the boat once more, went back to New Orleans, and told their story to the Governor, who issued an order that all boats leaving for St. Louis should go in company. In obedience in the spring of 1788 ten barges started up the river with crews well armed. Arrived at the rendezvous of the robbers they found none, but they recovered, however, much of the plunder that had been stored away and brought it to St. Louis. The year of their arrival was known for generations as "l'année des dix bateaux,"—"the year of the ten boats."