These people were mostly French Canadians,—either traders, trappers, or voyageurs, who still kept up their trading connection with Canada,—though a sprinkling of Spaniards and Americans became incorporated with them, so making St. Louis a city of many tongues like New Orleans. In both, an American could fancy himself in a foreign country, among foreigners. But while New Orleans had grown up under the worst conditions, in respect of situation and climate, St. Louis began her career under the best of both. At New Orleans people lived, as it were, on a floating island which the Mississippi might deluge with her floods. St. Louis was laid out on a spacious terrace, elevated above the united floods of the Missouri and Mississippi. Besides its high and healthy situation, the spot chosen by the founders of St. Louis for their future city was the best one to be found next south of the mouth of the Missouri River. That the whole Indian trade of the upper country was destined to be poured into the lap of the infant metropolis, was early foreseen and soon realized by its sagacious founders. [Illustration: ST. LOUIS AND VICINITY.] Of St. Louis in its infancy we lack adequate description. It was a palisaded village of the pattern so often described in these pages. During the Revolutionary War (1780) it withstood the assault of a marauding party sent against it from the Lakes, but lost some of its inhabitants whom the enemy carried off into captivity. At this time it had one hundred and twenty houses with eight hundred inhabitants, who owned and bred many cattle. While a few houses were of stone, the major part were mean, and the streets narrow and dirty. With the cession it began to grow apace. [Illustration: CHOUTEAU'S POND, ST. LOUIS.] When Father Charlevoix, the Jesuit historian of New France, descended the Mississippi in 1721, he found some miners at work on the Meramec, under authority of Law's Company. While searching for silver the miners struck galena ore which from that time began to be a source of wealth to the province, the lead product mostly going down the river to New Orleans. [Illustration: ROCK TOWERS NEAR DUBUQUE.] In that part of the Louisiana purchase comprised within the States of Iowa and Minnesota, the North-west Company[3] of Montreal continued to monopolize the Indian trade till after the cession. It had posts on Sandy Lake and Leech Lake. Prairie du Chien had grown to a hamlet. Julien Dubuque, a French trader, who had first gone there from Canada, obtained permission to work the lead-mines where the city of Dubuque now stands, and had settled there. FOOTNOTES