Page:Hugh Pendexter--Kings of the Missouri.djvu/15



T. LOUIS with its strange hodge-podge of humanity bustled feverishly under the late April sun. The permanent inhabitants were respectable and progressive, yet the first impression a stranger was apt to receive was an atmosphere of recklessness, if not lawlessness. This because the city with its seven thousand people was the center of the fur trade and the temporary haven for desperate characters from east of the Mississippi. Located a scant score of miles below the mouth of the Missouri—the white man's first path to the Rockies and the key to the trans-Mississippian territory—the city yielded nothing to