V A Bride in St. Louis
“An Américaine bride, General Clark haf brought! She haf beeutiful eyes! She haf golden hair!” The Creole ladies were in a flutter.
“Merci! She haf a carriage!” they cried, peeping from their lattices. Governor Lewis himself had met the party at the shore, and now in the first state coach St. Louis had ever seen, was driving along the Rue de l’Église to Auguste Chouteau’s.
“Merci! She haf maids enough!” whispered the gazers, as Rachel, Rhody, Chloe, Sarah, brought up the rear with their mistress’s belongings. Then followed York, looking neither to the right nor the left. He knew St. Louis was watching, and he delighted in the stir.
The fame of the beauty of General Clark’s American bride spread like wild-fire. For months wherever she rode or walked admiring crowds followed, eager to catch a glimpse of her face. Thickly swathed in veils, Julia concealed her features from the public gaze, but that only increased the interest.
“She shall haf a party, une grande réception,” said Pierre Chouteau, and the demi-fortress was opened to a greater banquet than even at the return of Lewis and Clark.
Social St. Louis abandoned itself to gaiety. Dancing slippers were at a premium, and all the gay silks that ever came up from New Orleans were refurbished with lace and jewels.
“They are beautiful women,” said Julia that night. “I thought you told me there were only Indians here.”
Clark laughed. “Wait until you walk in the streets.”
And sure enough, with the arrival of the beautiful Julia came also certain Sacs and Iowas who had been scalping settlers within their borders. With bolted handcuffs and leg shackles they were shut up in the old Spanish martello tower. From the Chouteau house Julia could see their cell windows covered with iron gratings and the guard pacing to and fro.
At the trial in the old Spanish garrison house on the hill the streets swarmed with red warriors.
“How far away St. Louis is from civilisation,” remarked Julia. “We seem in the very heart of the Indian country.”
“The Governor has organised the militia, and our good friend Auguste Chouteau is their colonel,” answered her husband, reassuringly.
“Why these fortifications, these bastions and stone towers?” inquired Julia, as they walked along the Rue.
“They were built a long time ago for defences against the Indians. In fact my brother defended St. Louis once against an Indian raid.”
“Tell me the story,” cried Julia. And walking along the narrow streets under the honey-scented locusts, Clark told Julia of the fight and fright of 1780.
“And was that when the Spanish lady was here?”
“Yes.”
“And what became of her finally?”
“She fled with the nuns to Cuba at the cession of New Orleans.”
Trilliums red and white, anemones holding up their shell-pink cups, and in damp spots adder’s tongues and delicate Dutchman’s breeches, were thick around them as they walked down by the old Chouteau Pond. Primeval forests surrounded it, white-armed sycamores and thickets of crab-apple.
“This is the mill that makes bread for St. Louis. Everybody comes down to Chouteau’s mill for flour. It is so small I am not surprised that they call St. Louis ‘Pain Court’—’short of bread.’ To-morrow the washerwomen will be at the pond, boiling clothes in iron pots and drying them on the hazel bushes.”
As they came back in the flush of evening all St. Louis had moved out of doors. The wide galleries were filled with settees and tables and chairs, and the neighbourly Creoles were visiting one another, and greeting the passers-by.
Sometimes the walk led over the hill to the Grand Prairie west of town. The greensward waved in the breezes like a wheatfield in May. Cabanné’s wind-mill could be seen in the distance across the prairie near the timber with its great wings fifty and sixty feet long flying in the air like things of life.
Cabanné the Swiss had married Gratiot’s daughter.
St. Louis weddings generally took place at Easter, so other brides and grooms were walking there in those May days a hundred years ago. Night and morning, as in Acadia, the rural population still went to and from the fields with their cattle and carts and old-style wheel ploughs.
In November Clark and his bride moved into the René Kiersereau cottage on the Rue Royale. The old French House of René Kiersereau dated back to the beginning of St. Louis. Built of heavy timbers and plastered with rubble and mortar, it bade fair still to withstand the wear and tear of generations. With a long low porch in front and rear, and a fence of cedar pickets like a miniature stockade, it differed in no respect from the other modest cottages of St. Louis. Back of the house rushed the river; before it, locusts and lightning bugs flitted in the summer garden. Beside the Kiersereau house Clark had his Indian office in the small stone store of Alexis Marie.
Into this little house almost daily came Meriwether Lewis, and every moment that could be spared from pressing duties was engrossed in work on the journals of the expedition. Sometimes Julia brought her harp and sang. But into this home quiet were coming constant echoes of the Indian world.
“Settlers are encroaching on the Osage lands. We shall have trouble,” said Governor Lewis. Under an escort of a troop of cavalry Clark rode out into the Indian country to make a treaty with the Osages. The Shawnees and Delawares had been invited to settle near St. Louis to act as a shield against the barbarous Osages. The Shawnees and Delawares were opening little farms and gardens near Cape Girardeau, building houses and trying to become civilised. But settlers had gone on around them into the Osage wilderness.
“I will establish a fort to regulate these difficulties,” said the General, and on his return Fort Osage was built.
“Settlers are encroaching on our lands,” came the cry from Sacs, Foxes, and Iowas. Governor Lewis himself held a council with the discontented tribes and established Fort Madison, the first United States post up the Mississippi.
But there were still Big White and his people not yet returned to the Mandan country, and this was the most perplexing problem of all.