The Rose of Old St. Louis | Page 7

its
romantic past that set my pulses to beating, and the blood rushing
through my veins so that I hardly heard my captain's answer, and
hardly knew what I replied to him.
Through the months of my sojourn in Kentucky there had been one
all-absorbing theme--the closing of the Mississippi to American boats
by the Spanish, and their refusal to grant us a right of deposit on the
Isle of New Orleans. Feeling had run so high that there were muttered
threats against the government at Washington.
There were two factions, each acting secretly and each numbering
thousands. One was for setting off at once down the river to capture
New Orleans and take exclusive possession of both sides of the river;
and if the government at Washington would not help them, or, still
worse, forbade them the emprise, they would set up an independent
government of the West. The other faction, inspired by secret agents of
the Spanish government, was for floating the Spanish flag and
proclaiming themselves subjects of Charles of Aragon. Spain's secret
emissaries were eloquent of the neglect of the home government in the
East, and its powerlessness to help the Westerners if it would, and it
was said they clenched their arguments with chink of Spanish gold.
Treason and patriotism, a wild indignation at wrongs unredressed, and
a wilder enthusiasm for conquest sent the blood of Kentucky to
fever-heat. Passions were inflamed until it needed but a spark from a
tinder to set them ablaze.
With me, friend and distant kinsman of the Clarkes, there was no
possibility of being touched by the taint of treason. But while it would

be treason of the blackest dye, and most abhorrent to my soul, to
submit to Spain's rule, to my young blood there could be no treason in
compelling Spain at the point of the sword to submit to our demands. I
was all for war, and when the cooler judgment of General Clarke and
his brother, my captain, prevailed to calm for a time the wild tumult of
war, I was bitterly disappointed.
Now for the first time I was beholding the river that had aroused the
mighty tempest in Kentucky, and it was not the tales of De Soto and La
Salle, of Joliet and Père Marquette, that sent the blood rushing through
my veins, but the thought that this was the mighty river forbidden to
our commerce, that the swirling brown water at my feet was rushing
down to the Spanish city on the Gulf, and I longed to be one of an army
rushing with it to secure our natural and inalienable rights by conquest.
I knew that Captain Clarke was visiting St. Louis to make some
arrangements for his brother's debts--debts incurred principally to Mr.
Gratiot and Mr. Vigo for no benefit to himself, but in rescuing and
protecting the people of Illinois from the Indians and the British; debts
belonging of right to the government, but repudiated by it, and left to
be borne by the noble man who, almost alone, by a heroism and genius
for war unparalleled had saved all that Western country to the Union.
I knew this was my captain's errand, yet I hoped there might be some
touching on the question of the river navigation with the Spanish
governor of St. Louis, and I had visions of returning to Kentucky and,
amid the acclaims of our fellow-citizens, announcing that Captain
Clarke, assisted by his young kinsman, had succeeded in convincing
the Spanish governor Delassus of the wrongs inflicted upon American
commerce by the unjust interdiction; that Delassus had thereupon
remonstrated with the intendant at New Orleans, and, as a result, the
river was thrown open to the Gulf, and a port of deposit granted on the
Isle of New Orleans where our merchants might store the goods they
brought down the river for sale.
It was because my brain was teeming with such sweet dreams of glory
that I answered my captain so absent-mindedly and so little to the point.
It was still so early that the low morning sun at our backs had just

begun to gild the bluffs before us. We could not have had a finer first
view of the Spanish town of which we had heard so much. High and
dry on its limestone bluffs, where no floods for which the great river is
so famous could ever reach it, it extended in a straggling line for a mile
and a half. Its dwellings, some of them of imposing size, were
embowered in trees, and, at that distance, seemed to stand in the midst
of large gardens. Behind the village rose another hill, on the summit of
which stood a fort, and from the fort, in either direction, palisades
curved around the town,