Historical interpretive essay by Ray Breun, September 1981. Period terminology and historical claims are preserved as the author’s account. The printed date for Pontiac’s death and other claims require independent verification before factual reuse.
Last year’s articles were sort of a sampler of some of the many small and large topics bound up in the history of St. Louis.
This year’s series will feature some of the national background of the area: French, Spanish, African, Irish, German, English, American, Italian, Mexican and Indian. Actually it is more of a national confusion if only because many of those who came to the area were in the process of abandoning their previous national background to find another.
Obviously the Indians were here first.
In fact, about 100 years before the French came down the river, the Mississippian Indians were abandoning their city at St. Louis.
Some consider the Osage Indians descendants of the Cahokian urbanites, but they have no tribal memory that far back. What the ground reveals is the remains of scores of mounds built over a period of 600 years (900-1500 A.D.) upon which stood structures ranging from temples to butcher shops.
With a central city perhaps four times the size of ancient Babylon, the Mississippians controlled the river from Wisconsin to the Gulf.
It may be hard to imagine but 1000 years ago the largest native urban center in North America was beginning to flex its muscle. Unfortunately, nearly all of the archaeological remains west of the Mississippi are gone.
The World’s Fair destroyed 17 mounds in Forest Park when it destroyed the River Des Peres.
The remains of these mounds are at the Peabody Institute of Harvard University.
The 26 mounds which were downtown north of Laclede’s Landing were destroyed early in the last century. Only Mound Street remains to mark where the largest of these was along Broadway.
At its height, the Mississippian Indians had about 40-50,000 people in a city without parallel in North America.
By the second half of the eighteenth century when the French came to St. Louis to stay, the mound builders were not even a memory.
The Piasau Bird, made by Indians after the Mound City died, was without a root in the memory of the nomads who came down the river. Marquette describes it in his journal, but the Illini Indians he contacted knew nothing of its origin and feared it as an ill omen of the river. Pierre Laclede came 100 years after Marquette and the Indians knew even less of their past by that time. Laclede had a monopoly to trade with the Osage Indians granted by the governor of New Orleans. Those early French had dealings with the Mini, Osage, Fox, Sacs and various other tribes.
In 1780 when an Illini Indian shot Chief Pontiac for the reward offered by the British, the erstwhile revenger received the only full dress funeral given an Indian chief in North America.
The Spanish buried Pontiac approximately near the corner of Broadway and Walnut, with full military honors.
The reason was military too.
The Indians of the northeast swore revenge upon the entire Illini tribe because of the act of one of their men.
The Spanish did not need a vendetta, they had enough to do with the British.
The latter attacked St. Louis on 26 May 1780 with a double contingent of Indians to punish the Spanish for aiding George Rogers Clark and the colonists in their rebellion.
The Indians were Sac, Fox and some Iowa. None of them could agree on battle timing, so the people of St. Louis repulsed the raid.
Sometimes referred to as the Battle of Fort San Carlos, it is the only military action of the Revolutionary War west of the Mississippi. Clark’s younger brother, William, later became Governor of Louisiana Territory as well as Indian agent for the entire West during the period of 1806 to his death.
He held his meetings with the Indians where the old Chevrolet plant is now, at Union and Natural Bridge. That area was referred to as the Indian campground for generations.
The first museum west of the Mississippi was Clark’s Indian Museum located on the corner of First and Vine Streets, now part of the Arch grounds. Indian chiefs and spokesmen came to Clark’s property on the riverfront for some 24 years. Eventually whole tribes would come to the St. Louis area and camp at the campground while negotiations were underway. Clark kept the gifts he received from the Indians in his museum and many of them later became part of the St. Louis Academy of Science eventually located at the corner of Fourth and Chestnut Streets.
The Academy, founded in 1858, had a huge collection gathered from the personal collections of many explorers, guides, trappers and government staff in St. Louis.
When fire destroyed their building shortly after the Civil War, nearly all these things were lost.
The Indians and the French got along quite well.
The same cannot be said of any other national group.
The French intermarried, raised the offspring and included them in property settlements.
There are numerous descendants of early St. Louis French included among the Indians of the Plains.
The Indians founded the first city at St. Louis and started what has been over 1000 years of nearly continuous urban development at this site.
The Indians left no written record, however, and thus their settlement is often referred to as the pre-historic period of St. Louis.
Yet this sounds like history begins when the whites came and clearly, the Indians are part of the history of St. Louis.
Originally published in The Paper, September 1981.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: The original dates Pontiac’s death to 1780. This and other archaeological and population claims require independent verification before factual reuse. Period terminology and interpretation are preserved without endorsement.
Original source: SD_Times1981_09.pdf, printed page(s) 7; PDF page(s) 7.
