been stolen, a chief, whose friendship had
been won in this manner, would continue to scold the tribe until the
horse was brought back. The Indians, too, were delighted with the
Frenchman's fiddle, his dancing, his gayety of manner, and even with the
bright pageantry of his religion. It was when the settlement was six
years old that the inhabitants of St. Louis, a very few hundreds in
number, gathered to take part in the consecration of a little church,
made very much like the great council wigwam of the Indians, the logs
being placed upright, and the interstices filled with mortar. This
church stood near the river, almost on the very site of the present
cathedral. Mass was said, and the Te Deum was chanted. At the first
laying out of the village, Captain Liguest set apart the whole block as
a site for the church, and it remains church property to this day.

It is evident from Chouteau's diary that Pierre Laclede Liguest, though
he had able and energetic assistants, was the soul of the enterprise,
and the real founder of St. Louis. He was one of that stock of Frenchmen
who put the imprint of their nation, never to be effaced, upon the map
of North America--a kind of Frenchman unspeakably different from those
who figured in the comic opera and the masquerade ball of the late
corrupt and effeminating empire. He was a genial and generous man, who
rewarded his followers bountifully, and took the lead in every service
of difficulty and danger. While on a visit to New Orleans he died of one
of the diseases of the country, and was buried on the shore near the
mouth of the Arkansas River.

His executor and chief assistant, Auguste Chouteau, born at New Orleans
in 1739, lived one hundred years, not dying till 1839. There are many
people in St. Louis who remember him. A very remarkable coincidence was,
that his brother, Pierre Chouteau, born in New Orleans in 1749, died in
St. Louis in 1849, having also lived just one hundred years. Both of
these brothers were identified with St. Louis from the beginning, where
they lived in affluence and honor for seventy years, and where their
descendants still reside.

The growth of St. Louis was long retarded by the narrowness and tyranny
of the Spanish government, to which the French ceded the country about
the time when St. Louis was settled. But in 1804 it was transferred to
the United States, and from that time its progress has been rapid and
almost uninterrupted. When President Jeffers