Fur-trade outpost under the Gateway Arch's shadow
St. Louis, a freestanding Missouri city where the Mississippi meets the Missouri, began on 14 February 1764 as a French fur post. The 2020 municipal count was 301,578, while the wider metro generated about 226.6 billion dollars in GDP during 2023.
Long before the French, this was Mississippian country. Mound builders raised temple and house platforms on both banks, their great centre at Cahokia thrived from about 900 to 1500, and so many earthworks stood inside today's limits that St. Louis was nicknamed Mound City, though most were levelled as it grew. Osage and Illiniwek peoples lived here when Europeans arrived; Jolliet and Marquette passed through in 1673, and La Salle claimed the region for France five years later.
The city itself grew from a business deal. In late 1763 Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent bankrolled an expedition by Pierre Laclède to find a fur-trading base less flood-prone than Ste. Genevieve. Laclède chose high ground just south of where the Missouri and Illinois rivers meet the Mississippi, with good drainage and nearby timber, and with his stepson Auguste Chouteau laid out a town modelled on New Orleans, with blocks of 240 by 300 feet and three long avenues parallel to the river. France had just lost the Seven Years' War, and its lands west of the Mississippi passed to Spain, which held them until 1803; a British-allied Native assault in 1780 failed.
The United States gained the town through the Louisiana Purchase in 1804, and river trade made it the nation's fourth-largest city from 1870 until the 1920 census. The city proper now counts about 301,600 residents, but its metro, reaching into Illinois, tops 2.8 million and ranks 23rd nationally.
St. Louis is home to fourteen Fortune 1000 firms, seven of them in the Fortune 500, plus the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Its landmarks include the 630-foot Gateway Arch, Forest Park, the zoo and the Missouri Botanical Garden, while Washington University's medical centre anchors research. Sports fans follow the Cardinals, the Blues, St. Louis City SC and the Battlehawks.
Source: St. Louis
