"natural enemy." No sooner had they arrived, than news still more terrible reached them: Louis XV. had ceded all his possessions west of the Mississippi to Spain! For the next thirty years the village was an outpost of Spanish Louisiana, in whose broad extent no one could own land who was not a Catholic. The Frenchmen submitted to the easy sway of the Spanish commandant, and the settlement slowly increased in numbers and wealth. To go to New Orleans and return was a voyage of ten months. Furs, lead, and salt were sent down the river in barges; which, returning in the following year, brought back the beads, tomahawks, and trash coveted by the Indians, as well as the few articles required by the settlers. As the village grew, the range of its business extended, and parties of trappers and of traders ascended the Missouri, and laid its upper waters under contribution. From the Mississippi to the Pacific, there was a territory two thousand miles broad, all alive with Indians, with buffalo, beaver, deer, bears, and every kind of game. From 1764 down to the year 1815, when the first steamboat ascended the river, St. Louis gained the chief part of its livelihood by hunting, trapping, and trading over that wondrous, illimitable park, of which it was the principal entrance. There was no fur-producing region, between the river and the Rocky Mountains, which was not embraced in the system of which St. Louis was the controlling power. St. Louis was the metropolis of the hunting-shirt. Slow is the growth of cities which have no civilized population behind them. The following table shows the population of St. Louis at different periods: The great event in the history of St. Louis was its transfer, with all that was once called Louisiana, to the United States. This occurred in 1804, forty years after Pierre Laclede Liguest had blazed the trees on the site of St. Louis. The entire province of "Upper Louisiana" then contained nine thousand and twenty whites and one thousand three hundred and twenty blacks. St. Louis consisted of one hundred and eighty houses, nearly all of which were one-story cabins made of upright hewn logs, roofed with shingles. Many of the inhabitants had married squaws, and some of the trappers had an Indian wife in the town, and another in the hunting-grounds. On one occasion, a Frenchman and his Indian wife presented their eight children for baptism all at once. The old records contain various indications that, in this French village of St. Louis, neither the wife nor the community saw anything very censurable in a married man having illegitimate children. There is a joint will, for example, in the archives, in which husband and wife express the utmost fondness for one another, and beg to be buried as near one another as possible. The clause following these affectionate expressions bequeaths five thousand francs to an illegitimate daughter of the fond and beloved husband. There was one Catholic church in the place, built of logs; of course, no other than a Catholic church would have been permitted by the Spanish bigots who ruled the province. The people were gay, good-humored, and polite, but totally destitute of the force, the spirit, the ambition, the enterprise, which made the people of cold and bar ren New England fish for cod off Newfoundland, and open a profitable commerce with the West Indies, while they were still warring with the Indians. A St. Louis merchant of 1790 was a man who, in a corner of his cabin, had a large chest which contained a few pounds of powder and shot, a few knives and hatchets, a little red paint, two or three rifles, some hunting-shirts of buckskin, a few tin cups and iron pots, and perhaps a little tea, coffee, sugar, and spice. There was no postoffice, no ferry over the river, no newspaper. No one could post a bill in the town for a lost horse without a permit from the Governor; no Protestant could own a lot. But, as we have before observed, the people enjoyed existence in their way. There was a pleasant, social life in the place. On occasions of festivity, each family brought its quota of provisions, paid its share of the fiddler's fee, came together in some convenient place, and danced till the sun went down. And thus they would have lived and danced to the present hour, but for the cession of the province to the United States. That glorious event changed everything. See how the system of freedom works when it supplants the system of restriction. The post-office was, of course, immediately established. The laws forbidding Protestant worship, and requiring owners of land to profess the Catholic faith, being abolished, vigorous men (not many, but enough for propelling force) moved in from the East and South, and began the work of creating what we now call St. Louis. In 1808, there was a newspaper. In 1809, there were fire-companies. In 1810, there were road masters, who had power to compel the requisite labor on the highways. In 1811, there were two schools in the town, one French and one English. In the same year a market was built; and already the streets had changed their names from La Rue Principale, La Rue Royale, La Rue des Granges, to such as Walnut and Chestnut; and La Place d'Armes had also become plain Centre Square. In 1812, by the formation of the great Missouri Fur Company, the power of combined capital and labor was brought. to bear upon the hitherto wild, precarious business of collecting furs, and expeditions were sent out upon a scale and with resources that insured suocess. The trappers and hunters were organized, disciplined, and directed by able men, who could stay at home and form part of a stable community. The lead mines began to be worked to better advantage on a larger scale. Above all, agriculture, which the French settlers had only regarded as a means of obtaining food, assumed increasing importance. In 1815, the era of the steamboat began. But though there was enough vigorous brain in the town, after the cession, to give it impetus and organization, there was not enough to prevent its falling into an error that retarded its progress for forty-five years. In 1820, after a long and most animated discussion, St. Louis cast its vote for slavery, and led Missouri to the same de cision. The population then was 4,928. In 1830, it had increased to 5,852! An increase of 924 inhabitants in ten years! If Missouri had chosen the better part in 1820, St. Louis would at this moment be a city of a million inhabitants, and Missouri a State of four millions. The rapid growth of St. Louis dates from 1833, when the prairie world began to attract the attention of emigrants. Every family that settled upon the banks of the Missouri, the Mississippi, or upon their tributaries, contributed its quota of business to a city which is the natural capital of the Mississippi Valley, and which is the natural centre of the great steamboat interest of all that wonderful system of rivers. From 1830 to 1860, the population of St. Louis trebled every ten years, and, from being the narrow and ill-favored town described by Charles Dickens, expanded into the spacious, elegant, tranquil, and solid metropolis we find it now. Who can describe how bitterly St. Louis expiated, during the Rebellion the mistake of 1820? The wealth, the social influence, the planting interest, and much of the cultivated brain of the city and the State, were in the fullest sympathy with the Secessionists. The Governor of the State was a Secessionist, and nearly every other man whose official position would render him important in a crisis. In all Missouri, there were in 1860 about 20,000 Republicans, but nowhere in the State was there any considerable body of them in one place, except at St. Louis among the "Damned Dutch." The United States Arsenal in the city, filled with arms and ammunition, was commanded by an officer bound to the South by every tie that usually influences men. And yet the arsenal and the city were promptly saved from the clutch of treason. We talk of erecting monuments to the saviours of the country, but we shall never erect a monument to its real saviours, the Secessionists themselves, whose madness came so often to the rescue of the gasping Union. If they had only been, at critical moments, a little less foolish, a little less blindly arrogant, ignorant, cruel, or ridiculous, -just a little, how could we, with so many enemies among us, and with every power in Christendom except one on their side, how could we have put them down? They lost St. Louis by their headlong precipitation. When Frank Blair and his friends returned from nominating Mr. Lincoln at the Chicago Convention of 1860, a ratification meeting was held at St. Louis, which was assailed and broken up by a mob of "Democrats." Some of the speakers were struck with stones, all were insulted by blasphemous yells and hellish imprecations. That riot saved St. Louis, for it led to the formation of the Wide-Awake Club, which issued, in due time, in sixty-six regiments of loyal Missouri volunteers. Readers remember the Wide-Awakes of 1860. With us, they were only the decoration of the "campaign," the material of which its torchlight processions were com posed; but at St. Louis they were necessary for the maintenance of freedom and order. They attended every Republican meeting, armed with a loaded club and a flaming lamp of camphene, and assailed disturbers of the peace with club and fire. Disbanded after the election, they reorganized in the following February, when traitors began to cast inquiring eyes upon the arsenal; but now they appeared in another guise, as regiments of militia, armed through the exertions of Frank Blair, and led, at length, by that alert and valiant soldier, Nathaniel Lyon. These were the men who saved the arsenal, broke up the traitors' camp in the suburbs, and kept the enemy's troops always a hundred miles from the city. We in the North can but faintly realize the desolation and misery of the war in Missouri and St Louis. The blockade of the river reduced the whole business of the city to about one third its former amount; and yet nothing could prevent refugees from the seat of war from seeking safety and sustenance in the impoverished town. Famlies were terribly divided. Children witnessed daily the horrid spectacle of their parents fiercely quarrelling over the news of the morning, each denouncing what the other held sacred, and vaunting what the other despised. In the back counties, whole regions were absolutely depopulated. "No quar ter," was the word on both sides. "In counties," says a well-informed writer, "where the Rebels had control, no Union man dared to remain; in counties where Union men were dominant, no Rebel was permitted to reside. As the wave of war flowed or ebbed across the State, it carried on its surface the inhabitants in one direction or the other. As the Rebel armies advanced, Union citizens retired, taking with them their families and household goods; when the enemy retrograded, followed up by the Federal armies, the Union men returned and the Rebel families receded. The whole population was at war. There was no neutrality, and could be none. In this way those sections of the State which were debatable ground became uninhabitable, were depopulated, and turned into a wilderness." During the last two years of the war, the prodigious expenditures of the government in the Southwest enriched many citizens of St. Louis, and employed some thousands of them. It is, nevertheless, a decisive proof of the solidity of the business men of the city, that they bore the long stagnation so well, and came out of the war generally prepared to resume business at the point and on the scale at which the interruption occurred. St. Louis is, in every sense, herself again, with the absence of the black incubus that weighed her down. All is hopefulness and energy there now. It is but two years since the war ended, and yet the city did more business in 1866 than in any other year of its existence. The article of corn may be considered as representative in those Western cities. In 1860, St Louis received and disposed of a little less than four and a quarter millions of bushels of corn. In 1863, the quantity was less than one million and a half of bushels. In 1865, it was a little more than three millions. In 1866, the quantity mounted to the unprecedented number of 7,233,671 bushels! An examination of Mr. George H. Morgan's "Statement of the Trade and Commerce of St. Louis," for 1866, will show that there is scarcely any branch which did not do a larger amount of business in 1866 than in any other year since the foundation of the city. The war inflicted wounds which are not so easily healed. We heard much in St. Louis of the ill-temper of the defeated Secessionists; but they seemed to us more sad than bitter, more anxious than resentful. If, in their intercourse with strangers, they were reserved, it appeared to be because the only topic upon which they have been accustomed to converse is utterly exhausted. And really, after thirty years of talk, and four of war, they may weli pause, fatigued, and try a little meditation. In mingling with those polite and reticent men, we could feel for them nothing but good-will. We could not but remember that for thirty years they had been severed, intellectually and morally, from the rest of the human race, and had not shared in the new light and better feeling of recent times. We could not but remember, that, during the war, they were as sure that they were right as we were sure that we were right. We could not but remember, that they dared more, sacrificed more, suffered more than we did. And then these Southern brethren of ours are, in all intellectual matters, such children, that it is impossible, while you are among them, to feel otherwise than tenderly towards them. Judging from the Southern literature that may be found in great variety on the counters of St. Louis bookstores, we should say that the reading people of the South are still subsisting upon the novels and poems of Sir Walter Scott. They appear to have taken Scott seriously, as though Sir Walter had really thought Ivanhoe was a more admirable personage than James Watt, and wanted people to stop making steam-engines and go back to chivalry! Let the middle-aged reader recall the time when he read Scott's novels with the passion so proper and natural to youth, then let him endeavor to imagine what sort of person he would now be if he had read nothing else since; and he wili be able to form a conception of the kind of people who litter the bookstores of St. Louis with "Cavalier" newspapers and "Southern Lyrics." Nothing is so amusing as the gravity, nay, the solemnity, with which they treat the most trivial topics. While we were at St. Louis, a band of negro minstrels performed a burlesque of a "tournament " which had been recently held in the city. One of these amiable writers discoursed on this topic in a manner to draw tears. "This sooty band of harmonists, who have stolen their complexion from the negro and their character from the same individual, — if, indeed, they have any, are engaged just now in entertaining the public with a burlesque of the Tournament lately held at the Fair Grounds. These mountebanks, emboldened by the laugh of the rowd, and having no knowledge of the proprieties of social life to restrain them, have presumed to push their insolence beyond all limit of reason or decency, and to present the actions of private persons in scenes of the broadest caricature upon the stage. They have gone further, and made, as well, the incidents and personages of the social gathering that followed that event the subject of their noisy mirth and coarse buffoonery." --- Imagine two columns of this eloquence, all on the subject of a little piece of harmless fun by a "sooty band of harmonists." A heap of such clippings lies before us, cut from all sorts of periodicals; but in the heap there are one or two that contain a gleam of sense. The following is more than a gleam: it is a burst of light it solves the whole problem of reconstruction. The conversation is supposed to have taken place on board of a Red River steamboat, among a group of Arkansas planters : "First Planter. I have made up my mind to sell half of my farm, and I shall sell it to a Yankee. "Second Planter. You are joking. You could n't endure a Yankee neighbor. "First Planter. No, I am not joking; I swear I am in earnest. I want an enterprising Yankee neighbor. I think he can teach me a good many things, and that I can teach him a good many things, and that together we can double the value of my lands, and improve the condition of my county. We have n't a school in the county, We have good water power, but no machinery. Our lands are as rich as the banks of the Nile, but they will not bring to-day twenty-five dollars an acre, and we are head over ears in debt. Gentlemen, we need a Yankee element to develop Arkansas. not one. "Second Planter. But his politics. "First Planter. Damn politics! We have followed abstractions until we are wellnigh ruined." We greatly fear that this conversation originated in the inventive mind of a Yankee; but its publication in a Southern newspaper was something. Would that it could be "cut out" and stuck up in every Southern post-office ! At present the Yankee is usually spoken of in the South as per specimen, copied from the opening lines of "The Saints' Jubilee, a Satire," published recently at St. Louis: "To Saints and Pilgrims now we bawl, From whence doth spring such wild confusion, Consider the feelings of a people saturated with Scott, and regarding Hudibras as a classic model, at being "conquered," as they delight to term it, by the saints of Faneuil Hall. One of the many surprises of St. Louis is the smallness of the negro population, not more than three thousand in all. At Chicago and other Northern cities, the waiters at the hotels are generally colored men; at St. Louis, generally white. Most of the coachmen, grooms, porters, and female servants are white. Along the Levee there is a fringe of negroes, loading and unloading the steamboats, and negroes are employed in other rough work; but they play as unconspicuous a part in the life of the city, as in that of Boston or New York. There is a vast difference between a Chicago negro and a St. Louis negro. At St. Louis the shadow of slavery rests still upon their countenances, and cows their souls. So imitative and sympathetic is man, that the negroes will never believe much in themselves, until white men believe a little in them; and the Southern portion of the St. Louis people are still |