Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/90



, more than a hundred years before these States had an existence on the map. These pioneers acquired their first knowledge of the lakes and rivers from the Indians with whom they traded. Rude maps were made from the information thus gained.

In 1762 a fur company was organized in New Orleans for the purpose of extending the profitable traffic among the Indians of the region lying between the upper Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. Pierre Laclede was one of the projectors and took charge of establishing trading posts. He stopped at St. Genevieve, where a French colony settled in 1755. He also landed on the west shore of the Mississippi, about eighteen miles below the mouth of the Missouri, to establish a trading station. While here he was impressed with the spot as a favorable site for a town, and on the 15th of February, 1764, he caused a plat to be made, naming it St. Louis in honor of Louis XV, then king of France, little suspecting that his trading post was destined to become one of the great cities of America.

Louisiana had already been ceded to Spain by that weak monarch for whom the new town was named, but the disgraceful act had not been made public. England was extending its settlements in the Illinois country lately wrested from the French. The French settlements in that region were largely confined to the east side of the upper Mississippi, and the Illinois rivers.

The acquisition of this country by the English was very distasteful to its French inhabitants. When Captain Stirling of the British army took command of Fort Chartres in 1765, in order to extend the government of Great Britain over the country, many of the citizens abandoned their homes and moved to the French settlements of St. Genevieve and St. Louis. The French population of the whole Illinois country at the time it passed under English rule, was about five thousand. Nearly one-half of this number refused to become British subjects and joined their own countrymen on the west side of the