[ST. LOUIS IN 1854. FROM A PRINT IN MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY COLLECTION.]

Following in quick succession, events too numerous to be recapitulated marked the history of the town. In spite of floods and cholera and a great fire, which swept away the business portion of the city, the community went steadily ahead. The gold-fever helped St. Louis, for the Argonauts going overland outfitted here, as in very recent years their fellows bound for the Klondike and Cape Nome outfitted at Seattle. As the West built up St. Louis builded too. Something substantial from the westward-moving stream always found its way into the coffers of the St. Louis merchants. The prosperity and power of the South lent prestige to the city. The city was a great cotton market. It had a vast trade up and down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, up and down the Ohio and the Tennessee. The fleets of steamboats at the wharves grew in size, until, old inhabitants say, there were three or four miles of them at the river front at one time, being loaded and unloaded day and night by singing negroes. As agriculture grew in importance, St. Louis became a great wheat market, a great market for cattle and swine, horses and mules. Its manufactures in every line throve, as well they might, for it was the great depot of the West, with a straightaway water route to the sea. There was plenty of work, plenty of money, and more than plenty of pleasure. The society of St. Louis was exclusive and magnificent. The ante-bellum balls were gorgeous affairs. The women were beautiful, of the Southern type, and when it was desired to say of one of them that she was royally bejewelled, a common phrase used was "She wore a nigger on every finger." Steamboatmen, planters, slave-traders, merchants dealing in cotton or in sugar, spent money like water. The town was, as we say in these days, wide open, and of a perilous liveliness, for the incoming Northerners and Easterners were never equal to the task of suppressing what the New England American regards as vices not to be temporized with. The brightness and gayety, however, did not wholly conceal the dread of the sorrow that was to come. St. Louis was, for the most part, intensely Southern; but the Revolution of 1848 had brought to this country and to St. Louis a great number of Germans, who were set against slavery and secession. The storm broke, and the breaking was a severe setback to St. Louis, whose prosperity was founded chiefly on that of the South. Its sympathies, through social, political, business ties, were mainly with the South. The war destroyed business. St. Louis, if not the enemy's country, was strongly suspected of disloyalty, and for a time it seemed as if war would smite the city itself, while there hung in the balance the decision of the alternative of Governor Claiborne Jackson of Missouri that he would "take Missouri out of the Union or into hell." Feeling ran high in the community. Almost a battle was fought on its outskirts. St. Louis had bitter experiences of martial law, while its commercial activities seemed to be mostly controlled by people who had government contracts. Here, where Grant had been known as a none too tidy farmer, his name was loathed, as was Lincoln's, by the larger element, while the Germans were profoundly loyal. The misfortunes of the South were unfortunate for St. Louis in every instance, and when the scourge of war passed, the region whence St. Louis had drawn most of its wealth was devastated, and the sceptre of trade passed to the North. As the fortunes of St. Louis

[EADS BRIDGE AT ST. LOUIS.]

declined from these causes, they and other causes operated to push Chicago to the front, even though, when Chicago had been twice visited by fire, St. Louis, as the greater city, made large contributions to the relief of the sufferers. St. Louis did not go backward, but the country to the north recovered from the war and improved more rapidly than that to the south and southwest, and the northern and western trade went to Chicago. St. Louis managed, in the face of such obstacles, to hold its own. The work of expansion and extension of improvement went steadily ahead, though with great conservatism. The boom idea, that grew after the war, was never hospitably entertained in St. Louis, though the manufacturers and merchants found a new trade and strenuously developed it in the new Southwest. The southwestern railway systems began to take shape, and the prosperity of St. Louis came back in great measure late in the eighties. The great St. Louis bridge had been opened in 1874, and the city was put in touch with the East, but the greater movement of the country's wealth and energy was being felt in the territory that was out of trade touch and political sympathy with the

[FOREST PARK, ST. LOUIS.]

field in which St. Louis was once supreme. Nevertheless St. Louis added to her beauties steadily. She acquired Forest Park, the greatest natural public city park in the country, after Fairmount in Philadelphia, also O'Fallon Park, but little less magnificent. Through the philanthropic generosity of Henry Shaw she acquired Tower Grove Park, which is perhaps the finest specimen of the park artificial to be found anywhere. Later, Mr. Shaw left to the city by will his botanical garden, an institution famous the world over for its collection of plants of almost every species. The city paved all its downtown streets with granite, and later its outlying streets with asphalt, erected a new custom house, a Four Courts Building, stupendous water-works, and constructed a gigantic extension of the sewer system. The development of the system of street railway transportation in St. Louis was more rapid and more perfect than in any other city in the world. A new mercantile library was built and the public-school library was made free. Churches increased in great numbers. Schools multiplied and were overcrowded in places where within twenty years had been quarry ponds and cow pastures. The growth of business, the multiplication of banks, the overspreading of the population since 1880, has been bewildering in its progress, and remains so, in spite of the fact that there has been all this time in process of building, directly across the river, a sort of overflow city of sixty thousand people. The city lost its river trade but has made up for it in utilization of the railroads, and is now preparing again to use the mighty, free, natural highway for the transportation of products to the world at large. St. Louis, so often thought of as slow, has really grown with phenomenal rapidity. It is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, a city of homes, and a city of perhaps more beautiful homes widely distributed in different sections than are to be found elsewhere. The wealthy men of St. Louis are almost all young men. The greater fortunes in St. Louis, with but few exceptions, have been made within the past twenty years, and many of them in the last ten years, and these now utterly eclipse the fortunes that have been handed down from the earlier days. The city has to-day a population of 575,000. In the suburban territory there are over 700,000 more people in close relationship daily and almost hourly with the business and social life of the city. The "slow old town" is not so slow when it is remembered that within one year after a cyclone swept it in May, 1896, there was not a trace of the visitation. Its conservatism is very real, but it is not stagnation. St. Louis has gone on with its work, even though war and the industrial tendencies consequent on war, and the political and social drift growing out of war have been in opposition to the city's progress. The city has built steadily but well, passing through the panic of 1893 without a single failure. The earlier history of the town shows how the conservatism so thoughtlessly derided came to be ingrained in the life of the city. It shows, too, the pertinacity which has made St. Louis the fourth city in the Union, in defiance of the disaster that befell its prestige in the great war, and in defiance too of the circumstance that the new popular national activities generated after that great conflict found their most congenial field in regions practically out of reach of, and wholly antipathetic to the interests of the chief city of Missouri. The new South and the new Southwest mean a new St. Louis. And we shall see what the new St. Louis means when the city expresses its higher and better self in the Exposition with which its people purpose to celebrate the purchase, by the United States, in 1803, of the Louisiana Territory.

[UNION STATION, ST. LOUIS.]