The fur trade also led to the founding of St. Louis. In the year 1763 a great fleet of heavy batteaux, loaded with the rude merchandise needed by trappers and Indians, approached the spot on which St. Louis stands. This fleet had made its way up the Mississippi with enormous difficulty and toil from New Orleans, and only reached the mouth of the Missouri at the end of the fourth month. It was commanded by Pierre Laclede Liguest, the chief partner in a company chartered to trade with the Indians of the Missouri River. He was a Frenchman, a man of great energy and executive force, and his company of hunters, trappers, mechanics, and farmers, were also French. On his way up the river Captain Liguest had noticed this superb bend of land, high enough above the water to avoid the floods, and its surface only undulating enough for the purposes of a settlement. Having reached the mouth of the Muddy River (as they called the Missouri) in the month of December, and finding no place there well suited to his purpose, he dropped down the stream seventeen miles, and drove the prows of his boats into what is now the Levee of St. Louis. It was too late in the season to begin a settlement. But he "blazed" the trees to mark the spot, and he said to a young man of his company, Auguste Chouteau:-- "You will come here as soon as the river is free from ice, and will cause this place to be cleared, and form a settlement according to the plan I shall give you." The fleet fell down the river to the nearest French settlement, Fort de Chartres. Captain Liguest said to the commander of this fort on arriving:-- "I have found a situation where I intend to establish a settlement which in the future will become one of the most beautiful cities in America." These are not imaginary words. Auguste Chouteau, who was selected to form the settlement, kept a diary, part of which is now preserved in the Mercantile Library at St. Louis, and in it this saying of Captain Liguest is recorded. So, the next spring he dispatched young Chouteau with a select body of thirty mechanics and hunters to the site of the proposed settlement. "You will go," said he, "and disembark at the place where we marked the trees. You will begin to clear the place and build a large shed to contain the provisions and tools and some little cabins to lodge the men." On the fifteenth of February, 1764, the party arrived, and the next morning began to build their shed. Liguest named the settlement St. Louis, in honor of the patron saint of the royal house of France--Louis XV. being then upon the throne. All went well with the settlement, and it soon became the seat of the fur trade for an immense region of country, extending gradually from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains.