Hidden History of Downtown St. Louis

adventure.

Introduction

FORWARD (AND BACKWARD)

The lay of the land makes it just possible to stand at the southeastern edge of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park (the Arch Park) near Poplar Street and be able to visualize ancient downtown St. Louis in relation to its modern counterpart and the wider Mississippi Valley.

The first orthotropic bridge in the United States, engineered by Sverdrup & Parcel, sweeps away immediately to your right with an almost constant flow of heavy traffic. It’s known locally as the Poplar Street Bridge.

Directly behind you, skyscrapers and the ruddy face of Busch Stadium (home to baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals) mark the city’s southern skyline, while a newly sculpted park space covering what remains of the first two natural limestone terraces that front the Mississippi at St. Louis, shaped by glaciers and a great sea in an earlier age, sweeps northward.

In the near distance to your left, you can see St. Louisan James Eads’s magnificent, triple-arched bridge spanning the Mississippi, the first primarily steel bridge in the world and one of the great engineering feats of the nineteenth century.

Below you, on the mighty Mississippi, there is a continual stream of tugboats, barges, excursion boats and the occasional riverboat heading north to Minneapolis or south to Memphis or New Orleans.

But if you had stood in this very spot in about the year 1000, the view would be very different except for the great river. You would find yourself in the heart of ancient North America and see the Mississippi and its valley teeming with thousands of the mysterious people who built the first metropolis north of Mexico and were going about their daily lives on both sides of the river.

You’d be standing at the edge of a thickly wooded bluff. Directly behind you, the land continues to rise to the top of a third terrace that reaches westward in rolling prairie, while across the Mississippi, the lowland of the Great American Bottom is dotted with curious earthen mounds of varying shapes and sizes that stretch east and north to the horizon line as far as you can see.

Turning to your left on this side of the Mississippi, you can see another succession of mounds in the distance, beyond timber houses with grass roofs. One of them stands head and shoulders above the others, with a timber structure on its level top.

If you turn to the right, you can barely make out in the distance a conical mound, strategically perched atop a river bluff like a lookout. Small and large river craft move along the Mississippi’s rapid current below you, transporting trade goods from the north and the south.

Downtown St. Louis is today the historic and cultural heart of the St. Louis metropolitan area. Established as a French fur trading post in 1764 by Pierre Laclede Liguest, entrepreneur and former soldier of France, long after the Mississippian culture had disappeared, it would evolve into the Gateway to the West.

This book covers approximately a one-thousand-year period and a geographic area primarily bounded by the Mississippi River on the east, Jefferson Avenue on the west, Chouteau Avenue a little south of the Poplar Street Bridge and roughly Carr Street on the north. The focus of this hidden history is downtown St. Louis, where in the vicinity of Poplar Street early levels of the city’s civilization have come to light in the twenty-first century and fragments of our colonial and Civil War past have been revealed. Whether anything at all of the Mississippian culture still lies hidden in this area remains to be seen.

This book is an exploration of some of the highlights of hidden downtown St. Louis over the past millennium, including its inhabitants, landmarks and rich stories. It’s small enough to carry around with you as you walk the area on your own or visit it virtually from the comfort of your favorite chair.

I hope that you will enjoy this journey through time and that it will pique your interest to read and explore more deeply the dramatic history of St. Louis as it has been recorded at length in the works listed in the bibliography of this book.

Chapter 1

THE MOUND CITY

Sometime between the years AD 1050 and 1400, an amazing culture with deep roots in Louisiana—and, later, the Ohio and Tennessee River Valleys—reached its zenith on the fertile, alluvial floodplain of the mid–Mississippi River Valley, at the present site of Cahokia Mounds,¹ Illinois, across the river just north and east of downtown St. Louis. Sometime during that same period, its people also constructed a mounded, sister city above the labyrinth of caves on this, the west bank of the Mississippi, that would give St. Louis an early nickname, the Mound City.

These people—who came to be known as Mississippians for the great river along which they raised thousands of earthen mounds from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes—built the largest pre-Colombian earthwork in the Americas. It was a huge, truncated pyramid, rectangular in shape² and approximately one thousand feet long and seven hundred feet wide, rising in four terraces to a height of one hundred feet. A platform mound with a wooden temple at its summit overlooked the ceremonial plaza of their capital and the first city north of Mexico.³

Today Monk’s Mound is preserved with roughly another 79 of the possible 109 to 120 earthworks that once covered a six-mile area centered at the Cahokia Mounds site (later named for an Illini tribal nation residing in the area). Time and weather have altered the original sizes and caused the once sharply delineated edges of many to slump, but a remarkable number survive as reminders of the people who ruled the Mississippian kingdom from the mid–Mississippi River Valley for several hundred years.

Effigy Pot of the Mississippian Culture. Courtesy of the photographer, Herb Roe, and the Hampson Archaeological Museum State Park, Wilson, Arkansas.

What we know of the Mississippians comes primarily from the decadeslong archaeological work carried on at Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, and from much broader excavation and research in the area of the lower Mississippi River and its tributaries.

Mississippians buried their royal dead in aboveground earthen mounds that were often conical in shape. They constructed platform mounds leveled at the top for the homes of their chieftains and still higher temple mounds. At Cahokia, they also built wooden enclosures for defense and wood henges to mark the movement of the sun.⁴

Although their language is lost to us, and no evidence of a written language has been found, artistic symbols that illustrate a reverence for the sun and other elements of nature survive. At the height of their culture, they were an agrarian people who harvested enormous quantities of corn, beans and squash. There is also evidence to suggest that they practiced human sacrifice.

These Mississippians hunted game and fished the rivers along which they settled, trading with other Native Americans over a vast area—from the Great Lakes in the North to the Gulf of Mexico in the South and from the Appalachian Mountains in the East to the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains in the West.

During the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), they moved into the mid–Mississippi River Valley and perfected a method of clay construction distinguished by the use of ground mussel shells to produce thinly shaped walls that were watertight. Among their artisans were highly skilled metalworkers who sculpted and incised images of them and their spirit gods onto jewelry even as their potters did in clay. These Mississippians were the first known architects of the Greater St. Louis landscape.

In 1673, Jesuit missionary Jacques Marquette and explorer Louis Joliet drew a map of the upper Mississippi River where it intersects the Grand River, identifying numerous tribal people whom they encountered on their banks. On this map they sketched several earthen mounds that they observed along the rivers.

But it’s Vincenzo Coronelli’s 1688 Map of Western New France, including the Illinois Country that illustrates how St. Louis gained the early nickname of Mound City. If you follow the line of the Mississippi south to near the bottom of Coronelli’s map, you will see just below its confluence with the Missouri River a widened area of mounds that encircle the river. They are but a suggestion of the more than one hundred man-made, mountain- and hill-like structures that dotted this area.

There is no record of the French and Creole founders of St. Louis disturbing or leveling the earthworks on the west bank of the river, but later settlers would build on them and eventually demolish all but Sugar Loaf Mound, south of downtown St. Louis. Had it not been for a happy accident of fate, there would be no visual record or scientific survey of the Ancient Mounds at St. Louis, Missouri, as T.R. (Titian Ramsey) Peale, chief examiner of the United States Patent Office, named them when he published the map he had made with Thomas Say in 1819.⁵

Peale and Say were young officers on an exploratory expedition under the command of Major Stephen Long of the U.S. Topographical Engineers, headed for the upper Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, when their steamer, the Western Engineer, had an accident; they needed to return to St. Louis for repairs. The ancient mounds just above the town captured their interest, and with time on their hands, Titian Peale and Thomas Say surveyed the St. Louis Mound Group shown. Within about fifty years, all of them would be erased from the St. Louis landscape.

Map of Western New France, including the Illinois Country, by Vincenzo Coronelli, published in 1688. From the National Archives in Canada.

In 1861, Peale came upon his beautifully drawn map in an old portfolio and offered it to the Smithsonian, which promptly published it along with the measurements and description of twenty-seven structures. Numbered from 1 through 27, they represent the remains of the bastion of St. Louis’s old Spanish stockade and all or parts of twenty-six mounds: shape, height, length of longitudinal and transverse bases, distance from one to another and, in the case of Mound 2, distance from the bastion of the Spanish stockade.⁶

They also indicated the distance of the mounds from the edge of the bluff, all of them having been constructed on the second terrace facing the