Wicked St. Louis

By Janice Tremeear

Watch a duel on Bloody Island from the stern of a river pirate's ship and be glad that Abraham Lincoln did not have to keep his appointment. Venture into a brothel where a madam's grin was filled with diamonds or where "Ta Ra Ra Boom de Ay" was hummed for the first time. Witness children forced into labor and aristocrats driven to suicide. Keep company with the gangsters who were a little too "cuckoo" for Al Capone. Visit Wicked St. Louis.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Aug 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781614233435

Janice Tremeear

Born in St. Louis, Janice has lived most of her life in Missouri. She is a second-generation dowser. In tune with the paranormal from an early age, she now directs her interest and research into investigating the unknown with her team Route 66 Paranormal Alliance. She has three grown children and four grandchildren. She currently lives in Springfield, Missouri.

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Introduction

The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.

—Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don’t tell them he’s a damned fool, they’ll never find out.

—Mark Twain

What can I say about St. Louis? Personally I think it’s great; it’s my birthplace, after all. St. Louis is one of those cities with a colorful, bigger-than-life past. So many things went on during its history, and many cultural influences are still present. When you read the history of St. Louis, you get the feeling that the move west stopped at this river town and then gained steam to explode onto the middle and western portion of the United States. During that time of expansion and growth, St. Louis was a major player between the East and West Coasts.

While it may be easy to ignore St. Louis these days and focus on the much larger cities, any search of its history shows enough novel and movie material to rival New York or Los Angles. So many stories of the city’s history didn’t make this account of St. Louis’s history; so many more characters walked the streets of this old city and made a mark, good or bad, in the formation of the culture and life of the city.

Mississippi River

Orator S.S. Prentiss said of the mighty Mississippi River, When God made the world he had a large amount of surplus water, which he turned loose and told to go where it pleased. It has been going where it pleased ever since and that is the Mississippi River.

Dubbed by Mark Twain as the crookedest river in the world. He stated, It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing. And again on the great waterway, The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.

Backbone of the Rebellion was the term used by Abraham Lincoln for the river.

The section between Cairo, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, earned the name the graveyard in the 1850s due to the number of steamboats lost on the river. More than three hundred sank in the muddy waters.

Known today as Ol’ Man River, Moon River, Old Blue, the Father of Waters, the Gathering of Waters, the Big Muddy (more commonly associated with the Missouri River), Big River, the Great River, Body of a Nation, the Mighty Mississippi, El Grande (de Soto) and the Muddy Mississippi, the name Mississippi comes from either the Ojibwe or Algonquin word misi-ziibi, meaning Great River. Before being called the Mississippi by Europeans, the river had been named Rio de Espiritu Santo (Holy Ghost River) by Hernando de Soto (the first European explorer of the river, in 1541) and Rivière Colbert (by French explorers de la Salle and de Tonty, in 1682).

Admiral on the Mississippi.

The river begins in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, and runs 2,341 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Waters leaving the river’s origin take ninety days to flow to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Combined with its Jefferson and Missouri tributaries, the Mighty Mississip river system is the largest in North America and fourth longest in the world. Significant tributaries are the Ohio River from the east and the Arkansas River from the west.

The Mississippi is 3.734 kilometers (2.320 miles) long and has a watershed of more than 3.2 million square kilometers (1,245,000 square miles), the third largest in the world (preceded only by the Amazon and Congo Rivers). However, the Missouri River is North America’s longest river.

The course and deltaic channels of the Mississippi and its tributaries have been determined and changed over the millennia due to glaciers, earthquakes along the New Madrid Fault and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ infrastructures.

The Mississippi’s effluent of fresh water is massive (7,000 to 20,000 m³/sec, or 200,000 to 700,000 ft³/sec). A plume of fresh water is detectable from outer space, even as it rounds Florida and snakes up the coast of Georgia.

In American music history, the river inspired songs such as Johnny Cash’s Big River, Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927, Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks and Moon River from the 1961 movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley drowned in the river in 1997, as he was swept away by the undertow of a passing boat. The main literary figure associated with the river is Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, mainly via Huckleberry Finn (which is basically a river journey tale) but also through earlier work such as Life On the Mississippi.

Original inhabitants along the river were the Ojibwa, Cheyenne, Chickasaw and other Native Americans. Later, the French claimed the entire Mississippi River Basin as theirs, calling it La Louisiane. In 1763, the Treaty of Paris transferred the watershed’s eastern drainage to Great Britain and western drainage to Spain while forever guaranteeing free navigation rights of the Mississippi River to citizens of the United States and Great Britain. In 1803, under Thomas Jefferson, the United States purchased the western watershed from France, which had repossessed it from Spain

The Mississippi was originally narrow and deep. During the time of the early French ownership, a man in Cahokia, Illinois, could yell across the river to request the ferryboat to come pick him up. The port at St. Louis was once one hundred feet deep. Trees cut down along the riverbank allowed the land to fall away into the river. With the banks deteriorating, the river widened and became shallow. Holes exist in the riverbed, with some pools being fifty to one hundred feet deep. The dam at Chain of Rocks, St. Louis, is natural, deposited by the river and not the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as some might think. The Corps built a canal to go around the rocks, as passage over them was available only during high water.

In 1851, Hungarian Louis Kossuth rode a steamboat on the Mississippi River. He wanted to know why the people of St. Louis didn’t bother to filter the dirty water before drinking it. He was told, Because we are such go-ahead people we don’t have time to filter our water. When a female traveler asked a similar question, she was told, Because it [the sand and mud] scours out your bowels.

The Mississippi has been dredged, walled in, reshaped and fixed. Turned into a gigantic navigation canal, or the world’s largest industrial sewer, it hasn’t run wild as a river does in nature for more than one hundred years.

Almost 70 percent of the U.S. agricultural products travel up and down the Mississippi River.

Pierre Laclede Liguest discovered the perfect place for a trading post on a high bluff of the Mississippi River in 1763. The next year, Laclede sent his stepson and thirty men to begin clearing the heavily forested land for a new town. Laclede declared, This settlement will become one of the finest cities in America.

The first structures included a large house for the fur company’s headquarters, along with cabins and storage sheds. A post house was completed in September 1764, becoming the focal point of the new village. From here, streets and buildings soon expanded as trappers and traders populated the settlement. Its new residents referred to it as Laclede’s Village, while Laclede himself pronounced the settlement St. Louis in honor of King Louis IX of France.

Before the Civil War, the river regularly ran amok. In February 1856, the Mississippi at St. Louis froze into one big ice floe, clobbering every vessel in its path. On the same note, people living along the riverbanks also tended to run amok—drinking, gambling, whoring and brawling. St. Louis became the Gateway to the West.

The Hopewell Indians settled the land as early as 400 BC and built earthen mounds for their homes. These mounds still remain in Cahokia, Illinois. They are huge—the Midwest’s own version of Mayan grounds or pyramids. Gazing up in awe at the mounds, I’ve marveled at their construction.

The Mound City, as St. Louis is called, saw a fire that burned four hundred buildings and fifteen city blocks in 1849. In the same year, the cholera epidemic killed nearly 10 percent of the population. On May 27, 1896, the third-deadliest tornado in American history touched down six miles east of Eads Bridge, moving from the northwest edge of Tower Grove Park into East St. Louis and leaving hundreds dead and at least one thousand injured; it also caused about $ 10 million in damage.

On September 29, 1927, the twenty-fourth-deadliest and second-costliest tornado struck, with 79 dead and 550 injured. On February 10, 1959, 21 died and 345 were injured from the sixty-sixth-deadliest tornado.

Native Americans

Missouri has been home to many nations of Indians. The Missouri, Osage, Delaware, Kickapoo, Shawnee and Cherokee are the major nations. Wea and Piankashaw, divisions of the Miami, also lived in the state for a while. The Sauk and Fox made frequent incursions into northern Missouri, but most of those two nations did not live in the state. During the Ice Age, the Clovis culture Indians hunted mastodons and other prehistoric animals in the swampy land near Kimmswick, Missouri.

The Cahokia Mound civilization is documented to have been functioning from AD 700 to 1400 (estimated date, some sources say 800, some say 600) and represented the largest urban concentration of people in North America north of the ancient Aztec cities in central Mexico. Cahokia grew from the eastern side of the Mississippi River to the western shores of the river.

Osage ancestors built the mounds in the St. Louis area, including the extensive mound complex across the river at Cahokia. The Osage people and their society governed a vast area covering Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas and Oklahoma for thousands of years prior to the formation of the United States. The current Osage Reservation is located in northeastern Oklahoma, but Osage beginnings are traced back through historical and oral traditions to the Ohio River Valley, to the Cahokia area and to Missouri, where the Osages were first contacted by French explorers in 1673.

While St. Louis and the surrounding area are notorious for tornadoes, the Native Americans perceived tornadoes as a cleansing agent, sweeping away the ragged and negative things of life or as a form of revenge for dishonoring the Great Spirit. Today, only the myths about the protection of towns by rivers and hills linger in modern American culture.

Meramec River. Courtesy Charlene Wells.

The Osage Indians, native to Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri, passed on tornado legends to the early settlers. One such legend has it that tornadoes will not strike near the point where

Reviews for Wicked St. Louis

[tloeffler_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This sounded intriguing, but only some of the stories were "wicked" and most were old hat. The writing was bad--it jumped willy-nilly from subject to subject and would have benefitted from some SERIOUS editing. A grave disappointment.