The St. Louis of To-day.
By Edward King
LOOKING down upon the St. Louis of to-day, from the high roof of the superb temple which the Missourians have built to the mercurial god of insurance, one can hardly believe that the vast metropolis spread out before him represents the growth of only three-quarters of a century. The town seems as old as London. The smoke from the Illinois coal has tinged the walls a venerable brown, and the grouping of buildings is as picturesque and varied as that of a continental city. From the water side, on ridge after ridge, rise acres of solidly built houses, vast manufactories, magazines of commerce, long avenues bordered with splendid residences; a labyrinth of railways bewilders the eye; and the clang of machinery and the whirl of a myriad wagon-wheels rise to the ear. The levee is thronged with busy and uncouth laborers; dozens of white steamers are shrieking their notes of arrival and departure; the ferries are choked with traffic; a gigantic and grotesque scramble for the almost limitless West beyond is spread out before the vision. The town has leaped into a new life since the war; has doubled its population, its manufactures and its ambition, until it stands so fully abreast of its wonderful neighbor, Chicago, that the traditional acerbity of the reciprocal criticism for which both cities have so long been famous is latterly much enhanced. The city, which now stretches twelve miles along the ridges, branching from the watershed between the Missouri, the Merrimac and the Mississippi rivers, flanked by rolling prairies richly studded with groves and vineyards; which has many railroad lines pointed to its central depots, and a mile and a half of steamboats at its levee, a thousand miles from the sea; whose population has increased from 8,000, in 1835, to 450,000, in 1873; which has a banking capital of nineteen millions; which receives hundreds of thousands of tons of iron ore monthly, has bridged the Father of Waters, and talks of controlling the cotton trade of Arkansas and Texas,—is but little like the St. Louis of the days when Col. Stoddard had his headquarters in a rude cottage, and the United States, in his person, had just adopted the infant city. In those days the houses were nearly all built of hewn logs, set upon end, and covered with coarsely shingled roofs. The town extended along the line of what are now known as Main and Second streets; a little south of the square called the Place d’Armes, Fort St. Charles was held by a tiny garrison, and in the old stone tower which the Spaniards had built, debtors and criminals were confined together. French customs and French gaiety prevailed; there were two diminutive taverns, whose rafters nightly rang to the tales of hairbreadth escapes told by the boatmen of the Mississippi. The Chouteaus, the Lisas, and the Labadies were the principal merchants; French and English Schools, flourished; peltry, lead, and whisky, were used for currency, and negroes were to be purchased for them; the semi-Indian garb of the trapper was seen at every street corner; and thousands of furs, stripped from the buffalo and the beaver, were exported to New Orleans. The mineral wealth lying within a hundred miles of St. Louis had hardly been dreamed of; the colonists were too busy in killing Indians and keeping order in the town to think of iron, lead, coal, and zinc.—Edward King; Scribner’s for July.