Page:History of Southeast Missouri 1912 Volume 1.djvu/198

 138 HISTORY OF SOUTHEAST MISSOURI the seminary which he had iu mind. Accord- ingly, six hundred and forty acres of land in Perry county near the site of Perryville was bought for the suin of eight hundred dollars. This was to be the site of the new seminary. The first structures located upon it were sim- ply log cabins. In 1819 the first students were received for instruction. Father De Andreis was the first president of the seminary and conducted the work of organizing and equip- ping it. He served in this position until his death, when he was succeeded by Father Jo- seph Rosati. It is somewhat difficult to avoid getting an incorrect notion of these people. It must not be supposed that all of them were rude or rough and turbulent. There were among them many excellent people. Sparks, on his biography of Daniel Boone, says that to avoid falling into this error people should remember that the west received emigrants of various sorts. ' ' Small numbers of them had fled from the scene of crime," he continues, "but a large majority were peaceable, industrious, moral and well disposed, who, for various mo- tives, had crossed the great river, some from love of adventure, some from that spirit of restlessness which belongs to a class of people, but a much larger number with the expecta- tion of obtaining large tracts of land which the government gave to each settler for the trifling expense of surveying and recording. "Under the Spanish government the Ro- man Catholic faith was the established re- ligion of the province and no other christian sect was tolerated by the laws of Spain. Each emigrant was required to be wn ho7i Catho- lique, as the French express it, yet bj' the con- nivance of the commandants of Upper Lou- isiana and by the use of a legal fiction in the examination of Americans who applied for land, toleration in fact existed. Many Protestant families, communicants in Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and other churches, settled in the province and remained undisturbed in their religious prin- ciples. Protestant itinerant clergymen passed over from Illinois and preached in the log cabins of the settlers unmolested, though they were occasionally threatened with im- prisonment ; these threats were never exe- cuted. (Spark's Biography, Vol. 23, p. 166.)