By the side of this middle-class (_bourgeois_) aristocracy stood the Catholic clergy, with its traditions of the old _régime_ in Canada, its proud record of discovery and missionary work among the barbarians of these Western wilds, whose every stream and fountain had its story of zeal and heroism to tell. This was society at the core. The clergy was its rock of support. Boys were taught in the parish school, and girls in a nunnery. So education was as much in the keeping of the Church as religion itself. Nations may change, but the Roman Church never abandons its people or its objects. Around this foundation was grouped the community of French Creoles, whom the great fur companies employed and who were their dependants. And around them clustered again an increasing population of American adventurers, coming mostly from the Southern States in search of a living, for whom St. Louis was the magnet which attracts to itself the scattered atoms of society far and near. Outside of St. Louis, Missouri owed her rapid growth to the in-coming of actual settlers. In 1816 only thirty families were found on the left bank of the Missouri, above Callaway County. In three years the number had increased to eight hundred families. Here was the real bone and sinew of the State. Mr. Benton found the American Fur-Trading Company sending forth its yearly caravans over the great plains to the mountains, and from the mountains, through passes known only to the Indians and fur-traders, into Sonora, New Mexico and Oregon. Since the way was beset by hostile Indians, these caravans went armed to the teeth. The same Indians might fight them one day and trade the next. In time, the passing to and fro of these traders had marked out well-beaten paths up the Arkansas and the Platte, which presently came to be known on the frontier as the Santa Fé Trail and Oregon Trail.[1] At bottom the St. Louis fur-traders were not more friendly to colonization than the English fur-traders, but they were quite as eager to push their business into Oregon, conceiving they had the best right there, as the English companies were to keep them out of it so that they themselves might reap all the profit; and so there was rivalry and ill blood between them. [Illustration: STATUE OF BENTON.] Mr. Benton was energetic, ambitious and self-reliant, qualities which soon identified him with the thought and interests of the people among whom he had cast in his lot in life. Thoroughly Southern in his feelings, he had borne an active part in making Missouri a slave State, and when that result was accomplished the people sent him to the United States Senate as a reward for his zeal in their behalf.