Alton, the latter being just above the confluence with the Missouri, and then the Mississippi River flows majestically past the levee at St. Louis, the chief city on its banks, having two great railway bridges crossing over to the Illinois shore. When the French held Louisiana, a grant was made in 1762 to Pierre Ligueste Laclede and his partners to establish, as the "Louisiana Fur Company," trading-posts on the Mississippi. Laclede in that year came out from France to New Orleans, and in 1764, in order to open the fur trade with the Indians on the Missouri, he ascended the Mississippi, and on February 15th made the first settlement on the site of St. Louis, building a house and four stores and naming the place in honor of King Louis XV. of France. He had frequent journeys along the river, and died upon one of them near the mouth of the Arkansas in 1778. The post was made the capital of Upper Louisiana, but it grew very slowly, having only a thousand people when Louisiana was ceded to the United States in 1803. The development of steamboating and afterwards of the railway systems, all the great lines seeking St. Louis, gave it rapid growth subsequently, and its population now reaches seven hundred thousand. It spreads with its vast railway terminals for nearly twenty miles along the Mississippi, sweeping in a grand curve past the centre of the city, which rises in repeated terraces as it extends westward back from the river, the highest being two hundred feet above the water-level. It has an enormous trade and extensive manufactures, being the largest tobacco-making city in the world, and having one of the greatest American breweries, the Anheuser-Busch Company. Its Chamber of Commerce, of sandstone in Renaissance, is a noted building, and its grand Court House, erected as a Greek cross, is surmounted by a dome three hundred feet high. It also has a new and magnificent City Hall. St. Louis been singularly free from fires, but its great disaster was upon May 27, 1896, when a terrific tornado swept through the city, killing three hundred people and destroying property valued at $10,000,000.