Page:History of Southeast Missouri 1912 Volume 1.djvu/118

 58 HISTORY OP SOUTHEAST MISSOURI whole country with shot was about 15 leagues distant. He further saj's: "The village of St. Louis is supplied with salt and other pro- visions from here. An ofScer appointed by the French Commandant as the entire regu- lation of the police here, is a company of militia commanded by a Mons. Vallet, who resides at this place and is the richest in- habitant of the country of the Illinois; he raises great quantities of corn and provisions of every kind, he has a hundred negroes be- sides hired white people constantly employed. The village is about one mile in length and contains about seventy families. Here is a very fine water mill for corn and plants be- longing to Mons. Vallet."* It is possible that the Vallet mentioned was a member of the family afterwards known as Valle. In 1803 Paul Alliot visited Ste. Genevieve and says of it : "It is inhabited by twelve hundred people who are especially engaged in the cultivation of wheat and in the chase ; they own lead mines from which they derive great profits. In their forests they find bears prodigiously fat and large, the oil from which is much sought after by the inhabi- tants, even by those of New Orleans. They raise good vegetables and make excellent but- ter and cheese. That city is large enough and rich enough to support a priest, yet it does not have any and the people are dying. They are governed by a Commandant who always terminates in a friendly manner the quarrels which arise among them.t Peck, who visited the place in 1819, gives the following account of the place. Ste. Genevieve is the oldest French Villasre in Missouri. When Laclede and the Chouteaus t Eobertson, "Louisiana," Vol. I, p. 103. came from New Orleans to establish a trad- ing-post at St. Louis, in 1763, they stopped at Ste. Genevieve, which contained about twelve or fifteen families, in as manj^ small cabins, but finding no warehouse or other building in which they could store their goods, they went on to Port Chartres and wintered. We date the commencement of Ste. Genevieve as a village from the period of the erection of Port Chartres, the second, about 1756. Very probably there were pre- vious to this, as there were in the lead- mining districts, what are called in patois French, cabanes, a term expressing the idea of "shanties," a cluster of shelters for tem- porary purposes. Such cabanes were in the lead-mining district when Philip Francis Renault had his exploring parties out at va- rious points in the upper valley of the Mis- sissippi. And, by the way, I find no evidence that lead-mining was followed in the mining country after Renault, disappointed, and a "broken merchant," quit the business about 17-40, until the possession of Illinois by the British about twenty-five years thereafter. Many of the French inhabitants who held slaves left the Illinois countrj' ; some went to the newly established town of St. Louis; others to Lower Louisiana. ]Iany families also went to the lead mines in Missouri, while others stopped at Ste. Genevieve and New Bourbon with their servants. This gave an impulse to the former town, which before 1770 became the depot and shipping-port for the lead business. The French at St. Louis, as a nom-de-nique, called Ste. Genevieve Misere, as they did Cardondelet, Vide Poche ; and in their turn received the nick-name of Pain Coui't, to indicate they were short of bread. The old town of which I am writing was near the Mississippi, and about one mile be-
 * Pittman, "Jfississippi Settlements," p. 96.