History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River, Volume 2 (of 2): Life and Adventures of Joseph La BargeChittenden, Hiram Martin
History
History of Early Steamboat Navigation on the Missouri River, Volume 2 (of 2): Life and Adventures of Joseph La Barge
Chittenden, Hiram Martin
La Barge, Joseph, 1815-1899; Missouri River -- History; Steam-navigation -- Missouri River
The speaker drew an interesting picture of the changes that had taken
place in the city of St. Louis and in the great West within the span
of this man’s life. In his infancy he had actually been in peril from
the Indians in what are now the outskirts of the city. Then luxury and
plenty, as we now know them, had no existence. The mother cared for
her children and did the work of the house. The candle and not the
incandescent furnished light at night. Water was pumped from the well
and people did not ride to and from their business in swift electric
cars. In the words of a local paper, commenting upon the Captain’s
career, “He passed through all the gradations and progressive steps
of the century until in its very last year the sun of his life set
forever, and his expiring gaze beheld a little village grown to a great
metropolis, enmeshed in a perfect tangle of railways, factories, and
furnaces, teeming with busy activity, converting the crude material
into every possible contrivance imaginable for the use of man; palatial
mansions where, in his youth, was a wilderness; in short, every
improvement that the brain of man had wrought.”
Father Hill illustrated this marvelous growth by a reference to the
growth of his own Church in St. Louis: “As I stand here to-day,” he
said, “to pay the last sad tribute of respect to the memory of the
friend of my early youth, I cannot help thinking of the marvelous
changes that have been wrought in the last eighty-four years. On the
evening of October 22, 1815, a mother entered a little frame church
on the banks of the Mississippi, bearing an infant in her arms. The
parent had come to have the child baptized. Tallow candles lighted her
way through the aisle to the rude altar where the ceremony was to be
performed. To-day the remains of that babe, grown to manhood’s estate
and full of years, lie before me. The spirit now dwells in his Father’s
house. At the christening were only the most primitive conveniences;
at the burial services his remains rest in a magnificent granite
structure; hundreds of electric lights glare upon the dead; hundreds of
heads are bowed in silent prayer. Which of us can ponder for an instant
upon the span of this life and not be bewildered at the contemplation?”
[Sidenote: A FIT RESTING PLACE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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