His executor and chief assistant, Auguste Chouteau, born at New Orleans in 1739, lived one hundred years, not dying till 1839. There are many people in St. Louis who remember him. A very remarkable coincidence was, that his brother, Pierre Chouteau, born in New Orleans in 1749, died in St. Louis in 1849, having also lived just one hundred years. Both of these brothers were identified with St. Louis from the beginning, where they lived in affluence and honor for seventy years, and where their descendants still reside. The growth of St. Louis was long retarded by the narrowness and tyranny of the Spanish government, to which the French ceded the country about the time when St. Louis was settled. But in 1804 it was transferred to the United States, and from that time its progress has been rapid and almost uninterrupted. When President Jefferson's agent took possession, there was no post-office, no ferry over the river, no newspaper, no hotel, no Protestant church, and no school. Nor could any one hold land who was not a Catholic. Instantly, and as a matter of course, all restricting laws were swept away; and before two years had passed there was a ferry, a post-office, a newspaper, a Protestant church, a hotel, and two schools, one French and one English. ISRAEL PUTNAM. It is strange that so straightforward and transparent a character as "Old Put" should have become the subject of controversy. Too much is claimed for him by some disputants, and much too little is conceded to him by others. He was certainly as far from being a rustic booby as he was from being a great general. Conceive him, first, as a thriving, vigorous, enterprising Connecticut farmer, thirty years of age, cultivating with great success his own farm of five hundred and fourteen acres, all paid for. Himself one of a family of twelve children, and belonging to a prolific race which has scattered Putnams all over the United States, besides leaving an extraordinary number in New England, he had married young at his native Salem, and established himself soon after in the northeastern corner of Connecticut. At that period, 1740, Connecticut was to Massachusetts what Colorado is to New York at present; and thither, accordingly, this vigorous young man and his young wife early removed, and hewed out a farm from the primeval woods. He was just the man for a pioneer. His strength of body was extraordinary, and he had a power of sustained exertion more valuable even than great strength. Nothing is more certain than that he was an enterprising and successful farmer, who introduced new fruits, better breeds of cattle, and improved implements.