"You will excuse me if I do not strictly confine myself to
narration, but now and then interpose such _reflections_ as
may offer while I am writing."--NEWTON.
"Each was a giant heap of mouldering clay;
There slept the warriors, women, friends, and foes;
There, side by side, the rival chieftains lay,
And mighty tribes swept from the face of day."
FLINT.
More than three weeks ago I found myself, one bright morning at
sunrise, before the city of St. Louis on descending the Illinois; and
in that venerable little city have I ever since been a dweller. A
series of those vexatious delays, ever occurring to balk the designs
of the tourist, have detained me longer than could have been
anticipated. Not the {115} most inconsiderable of these preventives to
locomotion in this bustling, swapping, chaffering little city,
strange as it may seem, has been the difficulty of procuring, at a
conscionable outlay of dollars and cents, a suitable steed for a
protracted jaunt. But, thanks to the civility or _selfism_ of a
friend, this difficulty is at an end, and I have at length succeeded
in securing the reversion of a tough, spirited little bay, which, by
considerate usage and bountiful foddering, may serve to bear me, with
the requisite quantum of speed and safety, over the prairies. A few
days, therefore, when the last touch of _acclimation_ shall have taken
its leave, and "I'm over the border and awa'."
The city of San' Louis, now hoary with a century's years, was one of
those early settlements planted by the Canadian French up and down the
great valley, from the Northern Lakes to the Gulf, while the English
colonists of Plymouth and Jamestown were wringing out a wretched
subsistence along the sterile shores of the Atlantic, wearied out by
constant warfare with the thirty Indian tribes within their borders.
Attracted by the beauty of the country, the fertility of its soil, the
boundless variety of its products, the exhaustless mineral treasures
beneath its surface, and the facility of the trade in the furs of the
Northwest, a flood of Canadian emigration opened southward after the
discoveries of La Salle, and the little villages of Cahokia,
Kaskaskia, Prairie du Po, Prairie du Rocher, St. Phillipe, St.
Ferdinand, Peoria, Fort Chartres, Vuide Poche, Petites Cotes, now St.
Charles, Pain Court, now St. Louis, and others, successively sprang up
in {116} the howling waste. Over nearly all this territory have the
Gaul, the Spaniard, the Briton, and the Anglo-American held rule, and
a dash of the national idiosyncrasy of each may be detected.
Especially true is this of St. Louis. There is an antiquated,
venerable air about its narrow streets and the ungainly edifices of
one portion of it; the steep-roofed stone cottage of the Frenchman,
and the tall stuccoed-dwelling of the Don, not often beheld. A
mellowing touch of time, which few American cities can boast, has
passed over it, rendering it a spot of peculiar interest to one with
the slightest spirit of the antiquary, in a country where all else is
new. The modern section of the city, with its regular streets and
lofty edifices, which, within the past fifteen years, has arisen under
the active hand of the northern emigrant, presents a striking contrast
to the old.
The site of St. Louis is elevated and salubrious, lying for some miles
along the Mississippi upon two broad plateaux or steppes swelling up
gently from the water's edge. Along the first of these, based upon an
exhaustless bed of limestone, which furnishes material for building,
are situated the lower and central portions of the city, while that
above sweeps away in an extensive prairie of stunted black-jack oaks
to the west. The latter section is already laid out into streets and
building-lots; elegant structures are rapidly going up, and, at no
distant day, this is destined to become the most courtly and beautiful
portion of the city. It is at a pleasant remove from the dust and
bustle of the landing, {117} while its elevation affords a fine view
of the harbour and opposite shore. Yet, with all its improvements of
the past few years, St. Louis remains emphatically "a little _French_
city." There is about it a cheerful village air, a certain _rus in
rube_, to which the grenadier preciseness of most of our cities is the
antipodes. There are but few of those endless, rectilinear avenues,
cutting each other into broad squares of lofty granite blocks, so
characteristic of the older cities of the North and East, or of those
cities of tramontane origin so rapidly rising within the boundaries of
the valley. There yet remains much in St. Louis to remind one of its
village days; and a stern _eschewal_ of mathematical, angular
exactitude is everywhere beheld. Until within a few years there was no
such thing as a row of houses; all were disjoined and at a
considerable distance from each other; and every edifice, however
central, could boast its humble _stoop_, its front-door plat, bedecked
with shrubbery and flowers, and protected from the inroads of
intruding man or beast by its own tall stoccade. All this is now
confined to the southern or French section of the city; a right Rip
Van Winkle-looking region, where each little steep-roofed cottage yet
presents its broad piazza, and the cosey settee before the door
beneath the tree shade, with the fleshy old burghers soberly
luxuriating on an evening pipe, their dark-eyed, brunette daughters at
their side. There is a delightful air of "old-fashioned
comfortableness" in all this, that reminds us of nothing we have seen
in our own country, but much of the antiquated villages of which we
have {118} been told in the land beyond the waters. Among those
remnants of a former generation which are yet to be seen in St. Louis
are the venerable mansions of Auguste and Pierre Chouteau, who were
among the founders of the city.[100] These extensive mansions stand
upon the principal street, and originally occupied, with their
grounds, each of them an entire square, enclosed by lofty walls of
heavy masonry, with loopholes and watch-towers for defence. The march
of improvement has encroached upon the premises of these ancient
edifices somewhat; yet they are still inhabited by the posterity of
their builders, and remain, with their massive walls of stone,
monuments of an earlier era.
The site upon which stands St. Louis was selected in 1763 by M.
Laclede, a partner of a mercantile association at New-Orleans, to whom
D'Abbadie, Director-general of the province of Louisiana, had granted
the exclusive privilege of the commerce in furs and peltries with the
Indian tribes of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. By the
treaty of that year France had ceded all her possessions east of the
Mississippi to Great Britain, and there was on the western shore only
the small village of Ste. Genevieve. This was subsequently deemed too
distant from the mouth of the Mississippi to be a suitable depôt and
post for the fur-trade; and Laclede, having surveyed all the
neighbouring region, fixed upon the spot where St. Louis now stands as
a more eligible site. Whether this site was selected by the flight of
birds, by consultation of the entrails of beasts, or the voice of an
oracle; whether by accident {119} or design, tradition averreth not.
Yet sure is it, that under the concurrence of all these omens, a more
favourable selection could not have been made than this has proved. It
_is related_, however, that when the founder of the city first planted
foot upon the shore, the imprint of a human foot, naked and of
gigantic dimensions, was found enstamped upon the solid limestone
rock, and continued in regular succession as if of a man advancing
from the water's edge to the plateau above.[101] By a more
superstitious age this circumstance would have been deemed an omen,
and, as such, commemorated in the chronicles of the city. On the 15th
of February, 1764, Colonel Auguste Chouteau, with a number of persons
from Ste. Genevieve, Cahokia, and Fort Chartres, arrived at the spot,
and commenced a settlement by felling a splendid grove of forest-trees
which then reared itself upon the bank, and erecting a building where
the market-house now stands. The town was then laid off, and named in
honour of Louis XV., the reigning monarch of France, though the
settlers were desirous of giving it the name of its founder: to this
Laclede would not consent. He died at the post of Arkansas in 1778;
Colonel Chouteau followed him in the month of February of 1829, just
sixty-four years from the founding of the city. He had been a constant
resident, had seen the spot merge from the wilderness, and had become
one of its most opulent citizens.
For many years St. Louis was called "_Pain_ {120} _Court_," from the
scarcity of provisions, which circumstance at one period almost
induced the settlers to abandon their design. In 1765 Fort Chartres
was delivered to Great Britain, and the commandant, St. Ange, with his
troops, only twenty-two in number, proceeded to St. Louis; and
assuming the government, the place was ever after considered the
capital of the province.[102] Under the administration of St. Ange,
which is said to have been mild and patriarchal, the _common field_
was laid open, and each settler became a cultivator of the soil. This
field comprised several thousand acres, lying upon the second steppe
mentioned, and has recently been divided into lots and sold to the
highest bidder. Three years after the arrival of St. Ange, Spanish
troops under command of Don Rious took possession of the province
agreeable to treaty;[103] but, owing to the dissatisfaction of the
inhabitants, no official authority was exercised until 1770. Thirty
years afterward the province was retroceded to France, and from that
nation to the United States. In the spring of 1778 an attack was made
upon the village by a large body of the northern Indians, at the
instigation of the English. They were repulsed with a loss of about
twenty of the settlers, and the year was commemorated as "_L'annee du
grand coup_."[104] In the spring of 1785, the Mississippi rose thirty
feet above the highest water-mark previously known, and the American
Bottom was inundated. This year was remembered as "_L'annee des
grandes eaux_."
At that period commerce with New-Orleans, for {121} the purpose of
obtaining merchandise for the fur trade, was carried on exclusively by
keel-boats and barges, which in the spring started upon their voyage
of more than a thousand miles, and in the fall of the year slowly
returned against the current. This mode of transportation was
expensive, tedious, and unsafe; and it was rendered yet more hazardous
from the murders and robberies of a large band of free-booters, under
two chiefs, Culburt and Magilbray, who stationed themselves at a place
called Cotton Wood Creek, on the Mississippi, and captured the
ascending boats. This band was dispersed by a little fleet of ten
barges, which, armed with swivels, ascended the river in company. This
year was remembered as "_L'annee des bateaux_."[105] All the
inconvenience of this method of transportation continued to be
experienced until the introduction of steam upon the Western waters;
and the first boat of this kind which made its appearance at the port
of St. Louis was the "General Pike," in 1814. This boat was commanded
by Captain Jacob Reed, and, at the time of its arrival, a large body
of a neighbouring Indian tribe chanced to have an encampment in the
suburbs of the city. Their astonishment, and even _terror_, at first
sight of the evolutions of the steamer, are said to have been
indescribable. They viewed it as nothing less than a living thing; a
monster of tremendous power, commissioned by the "Great Spirit" for
their extermination, and their humiliation was proportional to their
terror. Great opposition was raised against steamers by the boatmen,
some thousands of whom, by their introduction, would {122} be thrown
out of employment; but this feeling gradually passed away, and now
vessels propelled by steam perform in a few days a voyage which
formerly required as many months. A trip to the city, as New-Orleans,
_par excellence_, was styled, then demanded weeks of prior
preparation, and a man put his house and household in order before
setting out: now it is an ordinary jaunt of pleasure. The same dislike
manifested by the old French _habitans_ to the introduction of the
steamer or _smoke-boat_, "bateau à vapeur," as they termed it, has
betrayed itself at every advance of modern improvement. Erected, as
St. Louis was, with no design of a city, its houses were originally
huddled together with a view to nothing but convenience; and its
streets were laid out too narrow and too irregular for the bustle and
throng of mercantile operations. In endeavouring to correct this early
error, by removing a few of the old houses and projecting balconies,
great opposition has been encountered. Some degree of uniformity in
the three principal streets parallel to the river has, however, by
this method been attained. Water-street is well built up with a series
of lofty limestone warehouses; but an irretrievable error has been
committed in arranging them at so short a distance from the water. On
some accounts this proximity to the river may be convenient; but for
the sake of a broad arena for commerce; for the sake of a fresh and
salubrious circulation of air from the water; for the sake of scenic
beauty, or a noble promenade for pleasure, there should have been no
encroachment upon the precincts {123} of the "eternal river." In view
of the miserable _plan_ of St. Louis, if it may claim anything of the
kind, and the irregular manner and singular taste with which it has
been built, the regret has more than once been expressed, that, like
Detroit,[106] a conflagration had not swept it in its earlier days,
and given place to an arrangement at once more consistent with
elegance and convenience.
From the river bank to the elevated ground sweeping off in the rear of
the city to the west is a distance of several hundred yards, and the
height above the level of the water cannot be far from an hundred
feet. The ascent is easy, however, and a noble view is obtained, from
the cupola of the courthouse on its summit, of the Mississippi and
the city below, of the broad American Bottom, with its bluffs in the
distance, and a beautiful extent of natural scenery in the rear. Along
the brow of this eminence once stood a line of military works, erected
for the defence of the old town in 1780 by Don Francois de Cruzat,
lieutenant governor "_de la partie occidentale des Illinois_," as the
ancient chronicles style the region west of the Mississippi.[107]
These fortifications consisted of several circular towers of stone,
forty feet in diameter and half as many in altitude, planted at
intervals in a line of stoccade, besides a small fort, embracing four
demilunes and a parapet of mason-work. For many years these old works
were in a dismantled and deserted state, excepting the fort, in one
building of which was held {124} the court, and another superseded the
necessity of a prison. Almost every vestige is now swept away. The
great earthquakes of 1811 essentially assisted in toppling the old
ruins to the ground. The whole city was powerfully shaken, and has
since been subject to occasional shocks.[108]
It is in the northern suburbs of the city that are to be seen those
singular ancient mounds for which St. Louis is so celebrated; and
which, with others in the vicinity, form, as it were, a connecting
link between those of the north, commencing in the lake counties of
Western New-York, and those of the south, extending deep within the
boundaries of Mexico, forming an unbroken line from one extremity of
the great valley to the other. Their position at St. Louis is, as
usual, a commanding one, upon the second bank, of which I have spoken,
and looking proudly down upon the Mississippi, along which the line is
parallel. They stand isolated, or distinct from each other, in groups;
and the outline is generally that of a rectangular pyramid, truncated
nearly one half. The first collection originally consisted of ten
tumuli, arranged as three sides of a square area of about four acres,
and the open flank to the west was guarded by five other small
circular earth-heaps, isolated, and forming the segment of a circle
around {125} the opening. This group is now almost completely
destroyed by the grading of streets and the erection of edifices, and
the eastern border may alone be traced. North of the first collection
of tumuli is a second, four or five in number, and forming two sides
of a square. Among these is one of a very beautiful form, consisting
of three stages, and called the "Falling Garden." Its elevation above
the level of the second plateau is about four feet, and the area is
ample for a dwelling and yard; from the second it descends to the
first plateau along the river by three regular gradations, the first
with a descent of two feet, the second of ten, and the lower one of
five, each stage presenting a beautiful site for a house. For this
purpose, however, they can never be appropriated, as one of the
principal streets of the city is destined to pass directly through the
spot, the grading for which is already commenced. The third group of
mounds is situated a few hundred yards above the second, and consists
of about a dozen eminences. A series extends along the west side of
the street, through grounds attached to a classic edifice of brick,
which occupies the principal one; while opposite rise several of a
larger size, upon one of which is situated the residence of General
Ashley, and upon another the reservoir which supplies the city with
water, raised from the Mississippi by a steam force-pump upon its
banks. Both are beautiful spots, imbowered in forest-trees; and the
former, from its size and structure, is supposed to have been a
citadel or place of defence. {126} In excavating the earth of this
mound, large quantities of human remains, pottery, half-burned wood,
&c., &c., were thrown up; furnishing conclusive evidence, were any
requisite farther than regularity of outline and relative position, of
the artificial origin of these earth-heaps. About six hundred yards
above this group, and linked with it by several inconsiderable mounds,
is situated one completely isolated, and larger than any yet
described. It is upward of thirty feet in height, about one hundred
and fifty feet long, and upon the summit five feet wide. The form is
oblong, resembling an immense grave; and a broad terrace or apron,
after a descent of a few feet, spreads out itself on the side looking
down upon the river. From the extensive view of the surrounding region
and of the Mississippi commanded by the site of this mound, as well as
its altitude, it is supposed to have been intended as a vidette or
watch-tower by its builders. Upon its summit, not many years ago, was
buried an Indian chief. He was a member of a deputation from a distant
tribe to the agency in St. Louis; but, dying while there, his remains,
agreeable to the custom of his tribe, were deposited on the most
commanding spot that could be found. This custom accounts for the
circumstance urged against the antiquity and artificial origin of
these works, that the relics exhumed are found near the surface, and
were deposited by the present race. But the distinction between the
remains found near the surface and those in the depths of the soil is
too palpable and too {127} notorious to require argument. From the
_Big Mound_, as it is called, a _cordon_ of tumuli stretch away to the
northwest for several miles along the bluffs parallel with the river,
a noble view of which they command. They are most of them ten or
twelve feet high; many clothed with forest-trees, and all of them
supposed to be tombs. In removing two of them upon the grounds of Col.
O'Fallon,[109] immense quantities of bones were exhumed. Similar
mounds are to be found in almost every county in the state, and those
in the vicinity of St. Louis are remarkable only for their magnitude
and the regularity of their relative positions. It is evident, from
these monuments of a former generation, that the natural advantages of
the site upon which St. Louis now stands were not unappreciated long
before it was pressed by the first European footstep.
It is a circumstance which has often elicited remark from those who,
as tourists, have visited St. Louis, that so little interest should be
manifested by its citizens for those mysterious and venerable
monuments of another race by which on every side it is environed. When
we consider the complete absence of everything in the character of a
public square or promenade in the city, one would suppose that
individual taste and municipal authority would not have failed to
avail themselves of the moral interest attached to these mounds and
the beauty of their site, to have formed in their vicinity one of the
most attractive spots in the West. These ancient tumuli could, at no
considerable expense, have been {128} enclosed and ornamented with
shrubbery, and walks, and flowers, and thus preserved for coming
generations. As it is, they are passing rapidly away; man and beast,
as well as the elements, are busy with them, and in a few years they
will quite have disappeared. The practical utility of which they are
available appears the only circumstance which has attracted attention
to them. One has already become a public reservoir, and measures are
in progress for applying the larger mound to a similar use, the first
being insufficient for the growth of the city. It need not be said
that such indifference of feeling to the only relics of a by-gone race
which our land can boast, is not well in the citizens of St. Louis,
and should exist no longer; nor need allusion be made to that
eagerness of interest which the distant traveller, the man of literary
taste and poetic fancy, or the devotee of abstruse science, never
fails to betray for these mysterious monuments of the past, when, in
his tour of the Far West, he visits St. Louis; many a one, too, who
has looked upon the century-mossed ruins of Europe, and to whose eye
the castled crags of the Rhine are not unfamiliar. And surely, to the
imaginative mind, there is an interest which attaches to these
venerable beacons of departed time, enveloped as they are in mystery
inscrutable; and from their origin, pointing, as they do, down the dim
shadowy vista of ages of which the ken of man telleth not, there is an
interest which hallows them even as the hoary piles of old Egypt are
hallowed, and which feudal Europe, with all her {129} time-sustained
battlements, can never boast. It is the mystery, the impenetrable
mystery veiling these aged sepulchres, which gives them an interest
for the traveller's eye. They are landmarks in the lapse of ages,
beneath whose shadows generations have mouldered, and around whose
summits a gone _eternity_ plays! The ruined tower, the moss-grown
abbey, the damp-stained dungeon, the sunken arch, the fairy and
delicate fragments of the shattered peristyle of a classic land, or
the beautiful frescoes of Herculaneum and Pompeii--around _them_ time
has indeed flung the silvery mantle of eld while he has swept them
with decay; but _their_ years may be _enumerated_, and the
circumstances, the authors, and the purposes of their origin, together
with the incidents of their ruin, are chronicled on History's page for
coming generations. But who shall tell the era of the origin of these
venerable earth-heaps, the race of their builders, the purpose of
their erection, the thousand circumstances attending their rise,
history, desertion? Why now so lone and desolate? Where are the
multitudes that once swarmed the prairie at their base, and vainly
busied themselves in rearing piles which should exist the wonder of
the men of other lands, and the sole monument of their own memory long
after they themselves were dust? Has war, or famine, or pestilence
brooded over these beautiful plains? or has the fiat of Omnipotence
gone forth that as a race their inhabitants should exist no longer,
and the death-angel been commissioned to sweep them from off the face
of {130} the earth as if with destruction's besom? We ask: the inquiry
is vain; we are answered not! Their mighty creations and the tombs of
myriads heave up themselves in solemn grandeur before us; but from the
depths of the dusky earth-heap comes forth no voice to tell us its
origin, or object, or story!
"Ye mouldering relics of a race departed,
Your names have perished; not a trace remains,
Save where the grassgrown mound its summit rears
From the green bosom of your native plains."
Ages since--long ere the first son of the Old World had pressed the
fresh soil of the New; long before the bright region beyond the blue
wave had been the object of the philosopher's revery by day and the
enthusiast's vision by night--in the deep stillness and solitude of an
unpeopled land, these vast mausoleums rose as now they rise, in lonely
grandeur from the plain, and looked down, even as now they look, upon
the giant flood rolling its dark waters at their base, hurrying past
them to the deep. So has it been with the massive tombs of Egypt, amid
the sands and barrenness of the desert. For ages untold have the
gloomy pyramids been reflected by the inundations of the Nile; an
hundred generations, they tell us, have arisen from the cradle and
reposed beneath their shadows, and, like autumn leaves, have dropped
into the grave; but from the deep midnight of by-gone centuries comes
forth no daring spirit to claim these kingly sepulchres as his own!
And shall the dusky piles on the plains of distant Egypt affect so
deeply our reverence for the {131} departed, and these mighty
monuments, reposing in dark sublimity upon our own magnificent
prairies veiled in mystery more inscrutable than they, call forth no
solitary throb? Is there no hallowing interest associated with these
aged relics, these tombs, and temples, and towers of another race, to
elicit emotion? Are they _indeed_ to us no more than the dull clods we
tread upon? Why, then, does the wanderer from the far land gaze upon
them with wonder and veneration? Why linger fondly around them, and
meditate upon the power which reared them and is departed? Why does
the poet, the man of genius and fancy, or the philosopher of mind and
nature, seat himself at their base, and, with strange and undefined
emotions, pause and ponder amid the loneliness which slumbers around?
And surely, if the far traveller, as he wanders through this Western
Valley, may linger around these aged piles and meditate upon a power
departed, a race obliterated, an influence swept from the earth for
ever, and dwell with melancholy emotions upon the destiny of man, is
it not meet that those into whose keeping they seem by Providence
consigned should regard them with interest and emotion? that they
should gather up and preserve every incident relevant to their
origin, design, or history which may be attained, and avail themselves
of every measure which may give to them perpetuity, and hand them
down, undisturbed in form or character, to other generations?
The most plausible, and, indeed, the only plausible argument urged by
those who deny the artificial {132} origin of the ancient mounds, is
_their immense size_. There are, say they, "many mounds in the West
that exactly correspond in _shape_ with these supposed antiquities,
and yet, from their _size_, most evidently were not made by man;" and
they add that "it would be well to calculate upon the ordinary labour
of excavating canals, how many hands, with spades, wheelbarrows, and
other necessary implements, it would take to throw up mounds like the
largest of these within any given time."[110] We are told that in the
territory of Wisconsin and in northern Illinois exist mounds to which
these are molehills. Of those, Mount Joliet, Mount Charles, Sinsinewa,
and the Blue Mounds vary from one to four hundred feet in height;
while west of the Arkansas exists a range of earth-heaps ten or twelve
miles in extent, and two hundred feet high: there also, it might be
added, are the Mamelle Mountains, estimated at one thousand
feet.[111] The adjacent country is prairie; farms exist on the
summits of the mounds, which from their declivity are almost
inaccessible, and _springs gush out from their sides_. With but one
exception I profess to know nothing of these mounds from personal
observation; and, consequently, can hazard no opinion of their
character. The fact of the "gushing springs," it is true, {133}
savours not much of artificialness; and in this respect, at least, do
these mounds differ from those claimed as of artificial origin. The
earth-heaps of which I have been speaking can boast no "springs of
water gushing from their sides;" if they could, the fact would be far
from corroborating the theory maintained. The analogy between these
mounds is admitted to be strong, though there exist diversities; and
were there _none_, even Bishop Butler says that we are not to infer a
thing true upon slight presumption, since "there may be probabilities
on both sides of a question." From what has been advanced relative to
the character of the mounds spoken of, it is believed that the
probabilities strongly preponderate in favour of their artificial
origin, even admitting their _perfect_ analogy to those "from whose
sides gush the springs." But more anon.
_St. Louis._