Part I. A False Start — The Western 
Academy Of Natural Sciences Of 
St. Louis, 1836-1843 
St. Louis in the 1830s and 1840s grew from a frontier settlement 
into a bustling town well on its way to becoming a major American 
city. Ideally located for the distribution of manufactured goods to the 
developing hinterlands of the Midwest and for the transhipment of furs, 
ore, and produce to the East, St. Louis became a boomtown. Its wealth 
and population rapidly expanded, and the town reaped both the rewards 
and the penalties of incipient urbanization. Its prosperity, epitomized 
by frenetic steamboat traffic on the river and by the commodities piled 
high on the levee, was easy to see. But the town’s ailments were just 
as obvious: rampant disease, frequent fires, shortages of housing and 
drinking water, streets made impassable by mud and overcrowding, 
creeping sandbars that threatened to choke the river harbor, and insuf- 
ficient drainage that created slime-covered pools in the numerous 
garbage-choked sinkholes around town. 
To visitors and immigrants from the East and abroad, St. 
Louis appeared raw and uncouth. The drovers, rivermen, and trappers 
who came to town seemed inordinately predisposed to drunkenness, 
brawling and gambling—even by frontier standards. These vices ex- 
tended also to St. Louis’ more settled and respectable residents, many 
of whom, for example, frequently rowed to ‘‘Bloody Island,’’ a sand- 
bar in the middle of the Mississippi River, to settle questions of honor 
with a brace of pistols.! 
Although St. Louis deserved its rough-and-ready reputation, the 
youthful city showed signs of becoming a center for education and the 
arts and sciences in the expanding Midwest. Science gained a foothold 
on the western bank of the Mississippi in 1836 when a group of amateur 
scientists, most of them recent arrivals from the East and foreign coun- 
tries, established a private society for the advancement of science on 
what one of them termed ‘‘the verge of civilization.’’? They christened 
the infant organization the ‘‘St. Louis Association of Natural Sciences”’ 
but soon changed the name to ‘‘Western Academy of Natural Sciences 
of St. Louis.’’ This was the forerunner of the Academy of Science of 
St. Louis. 
The group that founded the Western Academy of Natural Sciences 
consisted of seventeen learned St. Louis men. Seven had medical degrees 
or practiced medicine. Benjamin Boyer Brown, C.J. Carpenter, George 
Engelmann, F. Johnson, Henry King, Phillip A.M. Pulte, and G.A.V. 
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