h steamboats puffing black
smoke, and the city glittering in the morning sun, beholds one of the
most striking and animating spectacles which this continent affords.

Go back one hundred and twenty years. That bend was then covered with
the primeval forest, and the only object upon it which betrayed the hand
of man was a huge green mound, a hundred feet high, that had been thrown
up ages before by some tribe which inhabited the spot before our Indians
had appeared. All that region swarmed with fur-bearing animals, deer,
bear, buffalo, and beaver. It is difficult to see how this continent
ever could have been settled but for the fur trade. It was beaver skin
which enabled the Pilgrim Fathers of New England to hold their own
during the first fifty years of their settlement. It was in quest of
furs that the pioneers pushed westward, and it was by the sale of furs
that the frontier settlers were at first supplied with arms, ammunition,
tools, and salt.

The fur trade also led to the founding of St. Louis. In the year 1763 a
great fleet of heavy batteaux, loaded with the rude merchandise needed
by trappers and Indians, approached the spot on which St. Louis stands.
This fleet had made its way up the Mississippi with enormous difficulty
and toil from New Orleans, and only reached the mouth of the Missouri
at the end of the fourth month. It was commanded by Pierre Laclede
Liguest, the chief partner in a company chartered to trade with the
Indians of the Missouri River. He was a Frenchman, a man of great energy
and executive force, and his company of hunters, trappers, mechanics,
and farmers, were also French.

On his way up the river Captain Liguest had noticed this superb bend of
land, high enough above the water to avoid the floods, and its surface
only undulating enough for the purposes of a settlement. Having reached
the mouth of the Muddy River (as they called the Missouri) in the month
of December, and finding no place there well suited to his purpose, he
dropped down the stream seventeen miles, and drove the prows of his
boats into what is now the Levee of St. Louis. It was too late in the
season to begin a settlement. But he "blazed" the trees to mark the
spot, and he said to a young man of his company, Auguste Chouteau:--

"You will come here as soon as the river is free from ice, and will
cause this place to be cleared, and form a settlement according to the
plan I shall give you."

The fleet fell down the river