Page:The Conquest.djvu/314

 ch children were claiming as their own, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.

Just opposite the Chouteau mansion was the old Spanish Government House, the house where George Rogers Clark had met and loved the dazzling Donna.

Aaron Burr had lately been there, feted by the people, plotting treason with Wilkinson in the Government House itself; and now his disorganised followers, young men of birth and education from Atlantic cities, stranded in St. Louis, were to become the pioneer schoolmasters of Upper Louisiana.

New houses were rising on every hand. In the good old French days, goods at fabulous prices were kept in boxes. Did Madame or Mademoiselle wish anything, it must be unpacked as from a trunk. Once a year goods arrived. Sugar, gunpowder, blankets, spices, knives, hatchets, and kitchen-ware, pell-mell, all together, were coming out now onto shelves erected by the thrifty Americans. Already new stores stood side by side with the old French mansions.

"Alas! te good old quiet times are gone," sighed the French habitants, wiping a tear with the blue bandana.

And while they looked askance at the tall Americans, elephantine horses, and Conestoga waggons, that kept crossing the river, the prices of the little two-acre farms of the Frenchmen went up, until in a few years the old French settlers were the nabobs of the land.

Already two ferry lines were transporting a never-ending line through this new gateway to the wider West. Land-mad settlers were flocking into "Jefferson's Purchase," grubbing out hazel roots, splitting rails, making fences, building barns and bridges. Men whose sole wealth consisted in an auger, a handsaw, and a gun, were pushing into the prairies and the forests. Long-bearded, dressed in buckskin, with a knife at his belt and a rifle at his back, the forest-ranging backwoodsman was over-running Louisiana.

"Why do you live so isolated?" the stranger would ask.

"I never wish to hear the bark of a neighbour's