USA > Missouri > Encyclopedia of the history of Missouri, a compendium of history and biography for ready reference, Vol. II > Part 13
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67
COMMERCE OF ST. JOSEPH.
For years the tide of immigrationrolled west- ward into the new lands, so that by 1860 St. Joseph had a population of 11,000 people. After the completion of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad, Russell, Waddell & Majors inaugurated the Pony Express from St. Joseph to Sacramento, California. This required sixty agile riders, 100 station helpers, and 420 strong wiry horses. The company was organized in 1859, and the first courier set out from St. Joseph, April 3, 1860, at 5:30 p. m., after the arrival of the Hannibal & St. Joseph train. The tariff for carrying a letter to San Francisco was five dollars. During the decade many improvements were made, such as macadamizing streets and building bridges, all of which were a stimulus to business. During the Civil War the city retrograded, but after the war closed a tide of prosperity again set in and a number of houses were built and the population rapidly increased. Prosperity continued up to the panic of 1873 when the board of trade was organized, but was not chartered until 1878. About this time pork- packing began to be carried on briskly. The Tootle Opera House was built in 1873, and a new cra in building began. From 1880 to 1884 was a period of steady progress. The building of large business houses was begun at Fourth and Francis Streets. The J. W. Bailey building, Hax's furniture store, and the Bergmann & Stone buildings filled the block between Fifth and Sixth Streets. R. L. McDonald built on Fourth and Francis Streets, and the imposing block of wholesale
houses on Fourth Street followed. The Turner-Frazer and the Nave-McCord build- ings were erected in 1882. The Tootle building. the Union Station, the Chamber of Commerce building and the gen- eral offices of the Burlington Railroad were built during this period. While
a the erection of new buildings was pressing need, it was also the precursor of enlarged business. In 1886 a wave of real estate speculation swept over the country, but St. Joseph suffered less from the re- action than her neighbors. Energy, progress and confidence displaced lethargic methods, values advanced, and outside capital was at- tracted. Real estate speculation was at its height. Such new additions to the city as the St. Joseph Eastern Extension. Saxton Heights, Wyatt Park, and McCool's and Walker's Additions were laid out. The
boom proved a blessing. Prior to this there were not fifty houses east of Twenty-second Street, while now these new portions of the city are populous. From 1885 to 1893 the Rock Island, the Chicago Great Western, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, and the St. Joseph Terminal Railroads were built. These new means of transporation required new business facilities, and such large buildings as the following were built : The Y. M. C. A., the Commercial Block, Center Block, Carbry Block, the Zimmermann buildings, the Irish- American Building, the German-American Bank, the Ballinger building, the C. D. Smith building, the Van-Natta-Lynds building, the Wyeth building, the Crawford Theater, the Podvant and Donovan buildings, the Coulter Manufacturing Company's building, Central Police Station, the Rock Island building, Turner Hall, the Moss building. the Samuels Block, the Saxton & Hendrix building ; also, those massive piles of archi- tecture occupied by the Richardson-Roberts- Byrne Dry Goods Company, Tootle, Wheeler and Motter, and the Wood Manufacturing Company, to which may be added the Michau Block, the Hughes building, and the block on the north side of Felix east of Sixth Street. During this period the Blacksnake and Mitch- ell Avenue sewers were built and the drain- age of the city perfected. The electric light plant was put in, and the entire street railway system was placed upon an electric basis. During 1888-90, the bureau of statistics did much to attract Eastern capital. The panic of 1893 checked the growth of the city. A fresh impetus, however, was given in 1897 by the revival on a gigantic scale of the live- stock and meat-packing interests. The wholesale and jobbing business which was started in 1856 by Tootle & Farleigh has grown to vast proportions. There are now four very large dry goods houses, doing bus- iness throughout the territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast. The boot and shoe business is carried on by five first-class houses, the wholesale millinery business is a large interest, three large firms being engaged in it. Agricultural imple- ments, hats, hardware, saddlery, harness, crockery, queensware, paper, drugs, gro- ceries, crackers, rubber goods, carpets, cloth- ing, notions, liquors, candies, furniture, and other articles needed on the farm or in the household, or needed for the equipment of
68
COMMERCE OF ST. LOUIS.
offices, stores, hotels or factories, are largely supplied through the wholesale houses of St. Joseph. The trade reaches the enormous sum of $60,000,000 annually. The retail stores are large and capable of supplying the local and transient trade. The hotels furnish ample accommodations for the traveling . public.
F. W. MAXWELL.
Commerce of St. Louis .- A com- mercial motive founded St. Louis. That metropolis owes its origin to the far-reaching enterprise of New Orleans merchants. The early prosperity of the post which they established was due to the fur trade of Upper Louisiana. Indeed, the chase was the pio- neer of Western colonization. In the valleys of the Mississippi and Missouri, many a vil- lage proudly boasts of a situation whose superiority the keen eye of a hunter was the first to observe. American civilization is largely indebted to the animals that once roamed the forests of the Western wilder- ness. The death of the wild beasts almost as actively promoted Western settlement as the life of wild men retarded it. The scantiness of authentic facts renders necessarily imper- fect any account of the primitive commerce of St. Louis. The early traffic was almost exclusively restricted to barter for peltries. The fur trade of the Missouri Valley was the richest in the country. The commodities des- tined for the Indian trade were mostly im- ported by way of the St. Lawrence and the Lakes. Quebec and Mackinaw were impor- tant distributing points. With the limited facilities for transportation that existed in those days, the importation of goods over vast ranges of country was slow, difficult and costly. The very small quantity of freight that could be carried at one time across the portages increased the delay and expense of transit. It sometimes took four years to for- ward an assortment of furs to Europe and procure a stock of goods in return. The freight on foreign merchandise was not infre- quently 100 per cent, but this enormous charge did not discourage importation, for even then the average profit of the Indian traffic was more than 50 per cent, and an oc- casional gain of 200 or 300 per cent inspired the trader with hopes of speedy wealth. St. Louis was the center of the fur trade of Upper Louisiana. The bulk of the peltries of this great region was brought to this
mart. From 1789 to 1804 this fur trade amounted to more than $200,000 a year. The proportionate value of peltry which different animals contributed to this aggregate was as follows: Beavers, $66,820; deer, $63,200 : otters, $37,100; bear, $12,200; fox, raccoon and wild-cat, $12,280; buffalo, $4,750; mar- tins, $3,900; lynx, $1,500. In the first years of St. Louis the wealth of private individuals was very limited. Consequently associations of capital became necessary to conduct the extensive and costly operations of the fur trade. Companies were formed. The influ- ence of these compact and energetic organi- zations was wide-spread. Their agents penetrated the passes of the Rocky Moun- tains, and extended their trade even to the Pacific Coast. The hundreds of men engaged in their service were scattered over all the Northwest. To the explorations undertaken in the prosecution of their business, most of our early knowledge of the physical geogra- phy of the far West is due. In 1808 the Mis- souri Fur Company was organized. Its chief members were Pierre Chouteau, Sr., Manuel Lisa, William Clark, Sylvester Labadie. Pierre Menard, Auguste P. Chouteau, Ber- nard Pratte, J. P. Cabanne and B. Berthold. Its capital stock was $40,000. The expedi- tions of this company explored the Yellow- stone, crossed the barriers of the Rocky Mountains, and established a trading-post on the banks of the Columbia River, in Oregon. This company was dissolved in 1812, but sev- eral of its members still continued in the fur trade. Berthold and Chouteau, M. Lisa, Bernard Pratte and J. P. Cabanne established peltry houses of their own. From 1813 to 1823 less activity prevailed in this branch of business. In 1819 John Jacob Astor founded in St. Louis a branch house, of which Samuel Abbott was the manager. It was called the Western Depot of the American Fur Com- pany. Without mention of the year, Nicollet states that "this company once employed from 400 to 500 trappers and hunters, nearly 1,000 horses, from 2,000 to 3,000 traps, and bartered off annually from $15,000 to $20,000 worth of merchandise." These figures, which illustrate the trade of only one company, vividly suggest the magnitude of the West- ern fur trade. The operations of the Astor company extended over all the Northwest as far as the Rocky Mountains. Six or eight years after its dissolution, the old Missouri
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COMMERCE OF ST. LOUIS.
Fur Company was reorganized. The most prominent men in this partnership were Cap- tain Perkins, Manuel Lisa, Joshua Pilcher and Thomas Hempstead. This company was unfortunate. The disaster in which several of its expeditions terminated exhausted its resources. Under its auspices, Immel and Jones, in 1823, led a party, equipped with a costly outfit and laden with rich goods, to the valley of the Yellowstone. Defeated in an attack by the Blackfeet Indians, the leaders themselves and several of their men were slain, and all their valuable stores fell into the hands of the savages. The company sur- vived this catastrophe but a short time. Its brief life was a succession of misfortunes. In 1823 General William H. Ashley led a force of hunters beyond the Rocky Mountains to revive a trade that had been languishing for ten years. Assailed by the Indians, fourteen of his men were killed and ten wounded. Un- dismayed by this calamity, General Ashley still prosecuted his enterprise. In his explo- rations he discovered Green River and traced the Sweetwater to its sources. His energy was richly rewarded. Large profits on the extensive stock of peltries which he secured repaid him for his hardships. The next year General Ashley increased still further the range of his commercial transactions. In command of a second expedition, he pene- trated to Salt Lake, and built a fort on the borders of another lake, which, by right of discovery, he named Ashley. In 1826 a six- pound cannon, brought from Missouri, was mounted in this fort. It had been drawn by oxen 1,200 miles. The route then opened was never afterward closed. In 1828 many teams heavily loaded with merchandise traversed the plains, to this remote destina- tion. From 1824 to 1827 the value of the peltries brought to St. Louis by the agents of General Ashley was more than $180,000. At length the wealth amassed by General Ashley enabled him to retire from business, and his interest was sold to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. William L. Sublette, J. S. Smith and David E. Jackson were members of this partnership, and Robert Campbell was clerk. The aggressive activity of these men invaded new fields and rendered California and Ore- gon tributary to their mercantile enterprise. The commercial influence of the early fur companies is incalculable. The trade of the Northwest was chiefly in their hands. The
transaction of their business peopled the wil- derness, founded posts and villages, and gave employment and competence to a pioneer population. The prosperity of St. Louis owes its first powerful impulse to the energy of these companies. But the life of the agents who so effectively promoted the early com- merce of the West was full of peril. The hunters and fur traders were never exempt from hardships or safe from the stealthy at- tack of murderous savages. It is stated that two-fifths of the wood-rangers, even as late as 1825, were either killed by the Indians or perished from the exposures incident to the life of a hunter. It must not be supposed that there was no fur trade in Upper Louisi- ana prior to the establishment of St. Louis. Even before this event, Canadian hunters had extended their search for peltries to the headwaters of the Yellowstone. The French at Fort de Chartres carried on an active trade with the Osage Indians. They con- veyed goods to this tribe in canoes by the Mississippi, Missouri and Osage Rivers. But when the Indians visited the fort they took the shortest overland route, and crossed the Mississippi at Wood Island, just above Ste. Genevieve. In those days Ste. Genevieve was a point of commercial importance. It was the center of the lead trade of Upper Louisiana. In 1810 it had twenty large stores, and was still the source from which St. Louis derived a portion of its supplies. But prior to 1764 Fort de Chartres con- trolled the trade in oil and peltries, and se- cured the profits of a large Indian patronage. At first, supplies for the St. Louis market were obtained chiefly at Mackinaw and New Orleans. Exchanges between places so re- mote from each other, with means of com- munication so imperfect, were limited to a few trips a year. The route to Mackinaw was by way of the Illinois River and a por- tage to Lake Michigan. The foreign goods intended for the Indian trade were bought at Mackinaw, and groceries and heavy merchan- dise were purchased at New Orleans. Coffee was then worth about two dollars a pound, and tea was a rare luxury until after the transfer. Salt was six dollars a bushel, but after the cession the erection of new salt works reduced the cost to one-half of this price. In the course of a few years the trade of St. Louis had extended to Pittsburg, Phil- adelphia, Baltimore and Quebec. Merchants
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COMMERCE OF ST. LOUIS.
usually went to Philadelphia by way of the Ohio River and Pittsburg. They carried their peltries with them and brought home the merchandise which they purchased. The round trip commonly occupied about four months. The vast wilderness that lay be- tween the Atlantic cities and the settlements on the Mississippi precluded frequent inter- course. During the Colonial period the traders of St. Louis dealt but little with New York. Philadelphia, being the seat of the government, was then far better known than its commercial rival, and possessing the only good road that crossed the Alleghanies, en- joyed a virtual monopoly of the Western trade which sought an Eastern market. Many of the early commercial houses of St. Louis were established by Philadelphia mer- chants. It was not much before 1830 that the patronage of St. Louis traders was largely diverted from Philadelphia to New York. Under French and Spanish domina- tion the Indian traffic embraced a vast area. Hunters had visited the St. Francis, White, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, Osage and Yellowstone Rivers, and the rich furs from this boundless territory had become partially tributary to St. Louis. The Mandan villages were more than 1,600 miles from the market to which they sent their peltries. The traders who visited the valley of the Yellowstone generally started from St. Louis in April, but seldom reached their destination before Sep- tember or October. To insure success in the Indian trade, a perfect knowledge of the habits, tastes and caprices of the different tribes was necessary. The Indians of those days were blind adherents to traditional usages. The example set by their fathers was followed with a Chinese fidelity. If a blanket differed from the conventional pat- tern in size, color, quality, number of stripes, or length of fringe, an Indian would sooner freeze than wear it. If a knife varied from the prescribed form in length of blade or fashion of handle, it would not be accepted as a gift. If a rifle deviated from the favorite style, the savage would resort to his primi- tive bow and arrow sooner than use it. Con- sequently caution and expertness in selecting commodities to suit the peculiar tastes of the various tribes were essential to success in the Indian trade. In the infancy of St. Louis, a "store" was a room of very humble preten- sions. In some instances it was scarcely
larger than a modern closet. The goods were generally kept in a box and were only taken out at the request of a customer. Specie was rare. The skins of wild animals were legal tender. As a medium of exchange, the stand- ard value of shaved deer skin was twenty cents a pound, and of otter and beaver skins forty cents a pound. In the absence of spe- cific agreement, notes were payable in pel- tries. The law enforced a literal observance of the terms of a contract. When money was mentioned as the consideration in a commer- cial transaction, the Spanish milled dollar was meant. Its value was $1.50 in peltries. Re- mittances were ordinarily made in salt, lead, provisions and furs. In exchange for these things, whisky, iron, steel and dry goods were brought down the Ohio River to St. Louis. The bills which were drawn on the treasury at New Orleans to pay the civil and military officers of St. Louis were frequently ex- changed for foreign merchandise. "Peltry bonds," based on the personal responsibility of the merchants who issued them, were in active circulation. The measure of value was a given number of pounds of shaved deer skins. This currency was good not only for local uses, but also for remittances from bus- iness men whose credit was well established. In the early times hundreds of hunters, fur traders, Indian agents and military officers were scattered through the boundless region lying west of the Mississippi. Most of these pioneers purchased their outfit at St. Louis. The sale of these supplies materially in- creased the traffic and resources of the young settlement. From its humble beginning the commerce of St. Louis rapidly expanded to important proportions. In 1821 the proxi- mate value of the fur trade of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers was $600,000 a year, and the annual imports of St. Louis were esti- mated at more than $2,000,000. Even as early as 1821 sagacious minds had already predicted the construction of a highway to the Pacific which would bear across the con- tinent the rich freights of Oriental com- merce.
PROF. S. WATERHOUSE.
The period from 1830 to 1865 may be regarded as marking the transition from the early primitive trade of St. Louis to its mod- ern commerce. What existed before this period was barter, traffic and trade, and that which followed was the development into the
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COMMERCE OF ST. LOUIS.
marvelous phenomenon of commerce. The old state of things had little to do with trans- portation and distribution, for these features can not be said to have had an existence ; the present state of things has everything to do with them-for internal commerce has come to mean not only exchanging, but car- rying, collecting and distributing. In the old era freight rates were hardly thought of, ex- cept to make them as high as possible; but in the new era, they are computed and con- sidered down to a fraction of a cent on the hundredweight. St. Louis prospered when it had little less to thrive on except the fur trade, for the fur trade was a source of great wealth, and it supported a considerable local force of persons engaged in conducting it- keel-boatmen, cordellers, hunters, trappers and wood-rangers; and the going and com- ing of its expeditions imparted an animation and excitement which were lacking in the other Western towns of that day. But pull- ing and poling loaded boats and barges up stream, and floating with the mere force of the current downstream on our great rivers, was slow locomotion, even at the best, and it is no wonder that the advent of stean- boats should make the prodigious change that it did make, and prepare the way for that transformation of business which took place in the last three score years of the nineteenth century in St. Louis. Before the appearance of steamboats the regular charge for bring- ing freight up the river from New Orleans was fifty cents a pound, and when, twenty years after the landing of the first steamboat at the St. Louis wharf, in 1817, these river carriers had so multiplied and the competi- tion between them became so great as to reduce the rate to one twenty-fifth of this figure, some idea may be formed of the won- derful effect which the introduction of steam in navigation had, not only in St. Louis, but in the entire Mississippi Valley. In the year 1897 a citizen of St. Louis was still living who was a clerk in the Citizens' Insurance Company in 1837, and remembered a conver- sation in the office of the company between Captain Aleck Scott and other steamboat- men, in which the decline of freight rates be- tween St. Louis and New Orleans to $2 a hundred was sadly lamented as presag- ing the doom of the river business; hoats could not do the work at such a rate and live, and unless it could be brought hack to what
it was ten years before, the good times of steamboating might be considered as gone forever. It was some years after this-from 1845 to 1860-that the steamboat era may be considered to have reached its climax, and it was a time in which a fierce rush of busi- ness and an unaccustomed prosperity disre- garded all such things as commissions, costs and rates, provided only the articles needed were supplied-when the increasing volume of trade pressed so strongly upon the means of accommodating it that recklessness and extravagance were the order of the day. There was profit in anything and everything, for immigration was pouring into Missouri, Illinois, and the adjacent States, both from Europe and the Atlantic region; the gold mines of California and Nevada were yield- ing their stream of treasure; and that vast overland trade and travel which preceded the building of the first railway to the Pacific Coast was at its height. It was the steamboat era, and it was the transition era between the primitive age of keelboats, which ended about 1830, and the railroad era, which began about 1865. In 1827, only ten years after the ap- pearance of the first steamboat at St. Louis, there were six steamboats, besides a number of keels, engaged in the trade between St. Louis and Ferre River, Illinois, at that time the seat of an active lead business, and the "Republican" of April 19th, of that year, speaks of a show of business at the wharf the past week, greater than had ever been wit- nessed before, and of an "unprecedented" number of arrivals. Five years later there were eight steamboat arrivals reported for the year 1832, and the whole number of steamboats on the Mississippi and its tribul- taries was given at two hundred and thirty. A merchant of Portland. in Callaway County, who kept a record of steamboats that passed that place in 1852, had the names of one hun- dred and five different boats that had gone up and down the Missouri River in that year. One day in April, 1837, it was proudly an- nounced that there were thirty-three steam- boats receiving and discharging at the St. Louis levee. In the following year-1838- there were one hundred and fifty-four steam- boats entered at the port of St. Louis. In 1842 there were four hundred and fifty steamboats employed on the Mississippi and its tributaries-nearly double the number re- ported ten years before; and in 1843 there
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COMMERCE OF ST. LOUIS.
were six hundred and seventy-two, among them the "J. M. White," whose famous trip from New Orleans to St. Louis that year, in three days twenty-three hours and nine min- utes, remained the climax of steamboat achievement for nearly thirty years after- ward. That this steamboat era which bridged over the period between 1830 and 1865, or between the primitive trade and the modern railroad era of commerce, was amazingly prosperous, is demonstrated by the enor- mous growth of population in St. Louis. In 1830 it was less than 5,000; in 1840 it was over 16,000, an increase of 230 per cent in ten years. But the next decade showed a still more marvelous growth-from 16,469 to 77,860-an increase of over 372 per cent. And in the following decade, from 1850 to 1860, there was an increase from 77,860 to 185,587, or more than a doubling. In the thirty years from 1830 to 1860 the increase was thirty-six fold. St. Louis has been the center of a prosperous business of exchange in all its conditions-in the keelboating days, from 1780 to 1820, when the freight rate was fifty cents a pound; in the steamboat age which followed, from 1830 to 1865, when the bulk of its annual commerce was one million tons ; and in the railroad age in which we are now-1898-living, when its annual com- merce is estimated at $600,000,000. But while its colossal proportions as a great man- ufacturing and commercial city are due, in a great measure, to the vast railroad systems that converge within its limits, history will always point to the transition period, or steamboat age, as the days of its most ex- uberant growth.
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