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MISSOURI. to four years of high school work. In 1900 there were 16,201 teachers, of whom 10,104 were females. The State maintains normal schools at Kirksville, Warrensburg, Cape Girardeau, and at Lincoln's Institute in Jefferson City. The public school fund was begun with the Congressional donation to the State of saline funds in 1812. The original sum has been increased by additions from various sources until, in 1900, the total school fund amounted to $12,548,963. The total receipts for school purposes in 1900 were $9,554,384, over two-thirds of which was from railroad district, back taxes, and tuition fees. The amount paid for teachers' wages for that year was $4,684,250. the incidental expenses amounted to $1,294,784, and the money used for building purposes $1,837,014. The average State levy upon $100 valuation for school purposes was 51 cents. Higher education is afforded by the State at the University of Missouri, located at Columbia. This institution includes among other departments those of law, medicine, agriculture, and mechanic arts, and mines and metallurgy. There are within the State also a very large number of private and denominational institutions which bear the name of college or university, but the enrollment at most of these is very small. Washington University, at Saint Louis (non-sectarian), has the benefit of a large endowment, and the Saint Louis University (Roman Catholic) also has a large endowment. Lincoln Institute is a well-equipped manual training school for the colored.

The state maintains insane hospitals, located respectively at Farmington, Saint Joseph, Fulton, and Nevada. There is also a colony for feeble-minded at Marshall. A State Federal soldiers' home is located at Saint James, and a State Confederate home at Higginsville. The State school for deaf and dumb is at Fulton, and the school for the blind at Saint Louis. A boys' reform school is located at Boonville, a girls' reform school at Chillicothe, and the State prison, for both men and women, at Jefferson City. A large number of prisoners are employed under the contract system, but their work is confined within the prison walls. In some of the counties male prisoners within the county jails are worked on the public roads or at quarrying stone.

Missouri was part of the vast area of Louisiana claimed by the French on the ground of the discoveries of La Salle, who descended the Mississippi to its mouth in 1681-82. A few years before La Salle, in 1673, Marquette and Joliet had sailed down the river as far as the mouth of the Arkansas. The territory included within the present State was traversed before 1720 by parties of French explorers in search of mines of lead and silver, and in 1723 a certain Lieutenant Renaud received the grant of a large tract of land in that region. The foundation of Sainte Genevieve is sometimes placed in the year 1735. The second settlement within the State was Saint Louis, established as a trading-post in 1764, a year after the cession of Louisiana to Spain by the Peace of Paris. Many French residents removed from the villages east of the Mississippi to Saint Louis, which became under the French and the Spanish, a prosperous little capital. The colonization of the region was greatly accelerated by the ordinance of 1787, which, in excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory, diverted the stream of southern immigration to Missouri. The Spaniards also encouraged immigration by the offer of liberal bounties to settlers. In 1800 Louisiana was retroceded to France, which, however, retained it only three years. After the acquisition of Louisiana by the United States, in 1803, the entire territory was divided into two by the line of the 33d parallel of latitude, the northern part being known as the District and Territory of Louisiana till 1812, and subsequently as the Territory of Missouri. At that time the population was over 20,000, and the chief occupations of the inhabitants were agriculture, fur-trading, and mining. The mass of the people were sturdy and unrefined; the rough backwoodsman and the fighting Mississippi boatman were picturesque types of the society of the period. After 1815 the volume of immigration increased markedly. In 1820 there were 66,000 inhabitants within the present limits of the State, of whom about 10,000 were slaves. The Indian titles to the land were extinguished rapidly. Between 1800 and 1824 the Osages and Sacs and Foxes ceded almost all their lands, though it was not till 1837 that the area of the State was rounded out by the so-called Platte Purchase.

In 1817 the Territorial Legislature applied to Congress for permission to prepare a State Constitution. (For the struggle in Congress concerning Missouri, see and .) In June, 1820, a convention framed a Constitution which sanctioned slavery and forbade any free negro or mulatto to take up his residence in the State; but Missouri was admitted (August 10, 1821) only after the Legislature had taken a pledge that the anti-freedmen clause should never be enforced. The period after 1820 was one of rapid, if not entirely sound, development. An era of wild speculation in lands set in, accompanied by the usual inflation of the currency (the Bank of Saint Louis had been established in 1816), and the inception of an elaborate system of internal improvements. Within twenty years after 1835 the State pledged its credit for $28,000,000 to various railroad companies, and found itself saddled with a debt of over twenty millions. The system of public education was quite inefficient before the Civil War, though Saint Louis University had been incorporated in 1832, and the State University at Columbia eight years later. Respect for the law was often sadly wanting in the western part of the State, as was shown in the history of the Mormons. They had settled at Independence in Jackson County, and had made the beginning of a prosperous community, when they were driven out by mob violence, for which it is probable they were less responsible than their enemies. They established themselves anew in Caldwell County; but there, too, they came into conflict with the authorities and the inhabitants, who forced them to depart once more in a destitute condition, leaving valuable farms and other property behind them. See .

In the first half of the nineteenth century Missouri, though a slave State, was not an ardent defender of slavery, and a very large proportion of its citizens were interested in movements looking toward the gradual emancipation of the slaves. With the rise of the abolitionists, however, Missouri became decidedly a pro-slavery