Peculiarities of American Cities

by Willard W. Glazier

In many respects the business rival of Chicago to-day, it has a history reaching half a century further back. While Chicago was still a howling wilderness, its only inhabitants the warlike Pottawatomies, who sometimes encamped upon the shores of its lake and river, St. Louis had a local habitation and a name. On February fifteenth, 1764, Pierre Laclede Siguest, an enterprising Frenchman, established at this point a depot for the furs of the vast region watered by the Mississippi and Missouri, and gave it the name of St. Louis. This was done by permission of the Governor General of Louisiana, which was then a French province. In the course of the year cabins were built, a little corn planted and the Indians placated. The Frenchmen seemed to have gotten along with the Indians tolerably well in those days. They had no hesitation in marrying squaws, even though they already possessed one lawful wife; they were good tempered and merry, and attempted no conversion of the Indians with a Bible in one hand and a sword in the other. So the two races got along nicely together.

The peace of 1763 gave the country east of the Mississippi to the English, and the Frenchmen who had settled upon the Illinois made haste to remove to St. Louis, to avoid living under the rule of their "natural enemy." This was scarcely accomplished when the more terrible news reached them that Louis XV had ceded his possessions west of the Mississippi to Spain. For the next thirty years the town was a Spanish outpost of Louisiana, in which province no one not a Catholic could own land.

To go to New Orleans and return was a voyage of ten months; but in that early day, and under such surprising difficulties, St. Louis began its commercial career. It exported furs, lead and salt, and imported the few necessaries required by the settlers, and beads, tomahawks, and other articles demanded by the Indians in exchange for furs. In 1799 the inhabitants numbered 925, a falling off of 272 from the previous year. In 1804, St. Louis passed to the United States, together with the whole country west of the Mississippi. In 1811 the population had increased to 1400, and there were two schools in the town, one French and one English. In 1812 the portion of the territory lying north of the thirty-fifth degree of latitude was organized as Missouri Territory. In 1813 the first brick house was erected in St. Louis. In 1820 its population was 4,928. In 1822 it was incorporated as a city.

After the cession of Louisiana to the United States, the law forbidding Protestant worship, and requiring owners of land to profess the Catholic faith, was repealed, and men American born but of English descent began to pour into the town. In 1808 a newspaper was established, and in 1811 many of the old French names of the streets were changed to English ones. In 1812 the lead mines began to be worked to better advantage, on a larger scale, and agriculture assumed increasing importance. In 1815 the first steamboat made its appearance.

In 1820 St. Louis cast its vote for slavery, and settled the question for Missouri. The population then was 4,928, which in 1830 had increased to 5,852; 924 additional inhabitants in ten years! From 1830 to 1860 its population trebled every ten years, the census returns of the latter year giving it 160,773. In 1870 it had nearly doubled again, the number being 310,864 inhabitants. According to the United States Census report of 1880, the population was 350,522, which made St. Louis the sixth city in the Union. Since that time it has been rapidly on the increase.

St. Louis is among the first of our cities in the manufacture of flour, and is a rival of Cincinnati in the pork-packing business. It has extensive lumber mills, linseed-oil factories, provision-packing houses, manufactures large quantities of hemp, whisky and tobacco, has vast iron factories and machine shops, breweries, lead and paint works. In brief, it takes a rank second only to New York and Philadelphia in its manufactures, to which its prosperity is largely due. In 1874 the products of that year were valued at nearly $240,000,000, while it furnished employment to about 50,000 workmen. Great as are Chicago's manufacturing interests, St. Louis excels her in this respect, while she rivals the former city in her commercial interests. The natural commercial entreport of the Mississippi Valley, the commerce of St. Louis is immense. It receives and exports to the north, east and south, breadstuffs, live stock, provisions, cotton, lead, hay, salt, wool, hides and pelts, lumber and tobacco.

St. Louis is perched high above the river, so that she is beyond the reach of all save the highest floods of that most capricious stream. She is built on three terraces, the first twenty, the second one hundred and fifty, and the third two hundred feet above low-water mark. The second terrace begins at Twenty-fifth street, and the third at Côte Brillante, four miles west of the river. The surface here spreads out into a broad, beautiful plain. The highest hill in the neighborhood of the city was the lofty mound on the bank of the river, a relic of prehistoric times, and from which St. Louis derived its name of the "Mound City." Greatly to the regret of antiquarians a supposed necessity existed for the removal of this mound, and now no trace of it is left.

In 1842 Charles Dickens published his American Notes, in which is found the following description of St. Louis:

"In the old French portion of the town the thoroughfares are narrow and crooked, and some of the houses are very quaint and picturesque, being built of wood, with tumble-down galleries before the windows, approachable by stairs, or rather ladders, from the street. There are queer little barber shops and drinking houses, too, in this quarter; and abundance of crazy old tenements, with blinking casements, such as may be seen in Flanders. Some of these ancient habitations, with high garret gable windows perking into the roofs, have a kind of French spring about them; and, being lopsided with age, appear to hold their heads askew, besides, as if they were grimacing in astonishment at the American improvements."

There is nothing of this now seen in St. Louis, except in the narrower streets along the river, which remain a lasting relic of the ancient city. Yankee enterprise has obliterated, in the appearance of the city at least, all trace of its French and Spanish origin. The work of renovation must have commenced soon after Dickens' visit, for Lady Emeline Wortley, visiting St. Louis in 1849, describes it as follows:—