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SKETCH 



or 



THE EARLY HISTORY OF ST. LOUIS 



[The ioUowing " sketch of tlie early hiistory of St. Louis '' was prepared by Mr. Nicollet as 

 a part of his report; bat as he died without assigning lo it the place he desired it to have in the * 

 report, it is here published immediately after Pan I.] 



If I may be permitted to speak of the city of St. Louis as of an imperson- 

 ated existence, I would say that she was born French ; but, put under the 

 charge of a step-mother, her cradle was hung up in the forest, her infancy 

 stinted by its unavoidable privations, and her maturity retarded by the terror 

 of the Indian yell. Her youth was more calm, but still not prosperous ; for 

 the exercise of undue constraints in youth sickens and retards the develop- 

 ment of manhood. Abandoned subsequently by her Castilian guardians, 

 she found herself reclaimed by her old parent, only to be once more repu- 

 diated. She had then, however, attained her majority, and had herself be- 

 come a parent ; whose children, born under the asgis of Liberty, opened for 

 her a new destiny, and vowed that she should become the metropohs of a 

 new empire. 



In 17(52, Mr. d'Abadie, then director general as well as civil and military 

 commander of Louisiana, granted to a company of merchants of New Or- 

 leans the exclusive privilege of the fur-trade with the Indian nations of the 

 Mississippi and Missouri rivers. This company bore the title of the firm of 

 Pierre Ligueste Laclede, Antoine Maxan, &- Co. Thus commissioned, the 

 company lost no time in fitting out an expedition, well supplied with all the 

 necessary articles for Indian trade, and which were to aid in forming new 

 and permanent establishments on both rivers. 



Mr. L^clede, the principal projector of the company, and withal a man of 

 great intelligfience and enterprise, was placed in charge of the expedition. 

 Leaving New Orleans on the 3d of August, 1763, he arrived at St. Gene- 

 vieve three months afterwards — namely, op the 3d of November. 



At this period the French colony, established sixty years before in the 

 Illinois, was in a prosperous condition. It had increased in importance 

 since the year 1732, at which time France was beginning to realize the 

 great idea, so long conceived, of uniting Canada to Louisiana by an exten- 

 sive line of military posts, to be supported by several principal forts, the 

 strategic positions of which were admirably selected. Fort Chartres, built 

 on the flat now known by the name of the America7i bottom, was one of 

 these main fortified places. But when Mr. Laclede arrived in the country, 

 Louis XV had already signed the everlastingly shameful treaty of peace, 

 by which was most inconsiderately ceded to Great Britain one of the finest 

 regions on the habitable globe, the possession of which had been obtained 

 after nearly a century of efforts and discoveries, and at the sacrifice of much 

 blood and money. This region of country, embracing what are now the 

 two Canadas, the immense watery expanse of the northern lakes, and the 



