CHAPTER III. 



A FEW days after his departure, La Bonte found himself at St. 

 Louis, the emporium of the fur trade, and the fast-rising metrop- 

 ohs of the precocious settlements of the west. Here, a prey to 

 the agony of mind which jealousy, remorse, and blighted love mix 

 into a very puchero of misery, he got into the company of certain 

 "rowdies," a class that every western city particularly abounds 

 in ; and, anxious to drown his sorrows in any way, and quite un- 

 scrupulous as to the means, he plunged into all the vicious ex- 

 citements of drinking, gambling, and fighting, which form the 

 every-day amusements of the rising generation of St. Louis. 



Perhaps in no other part of the United States, where indeed 

 humanity is frequently to be seen in many curious and unusual 

 phases, is there a population so marked in its general character, 

 and at the same time divided into such distinct classes, as in the 

 above-named city. Dating, as it does, its foundation from yester- 

 day — for what are thirty years in the growth of a metropolis ? — 

 its founders are now scarcely passed middle Ufe, regarding with 

 astonishment the growing works of their hands ; and while gazing 

 upon its busy quays, piled with grain and other produce of the 

 west, its fleets of huge steamboats lying tier upon tier alongside 

 the wharves, its well-stored warehouses, and all the bustling con- 

 comitants of a great commercial depot, they can scarcely realize 

 the memory of a few short years, when on the same spot nothing 

 was to be seen but the miserable hovels of a French village — the 

 only sign of commerce being the unwieldy bateaux of the Indian 

 traders, laden with peltries from the distant regions of the Platte 



