St. Louis was founded by a Frenchman named

Pierre Laclede; he was in the beaver pelt business,

and the confluence of the Missouri and Missippi

rivers provided a copasetic locale for a trading post.

St. Louis became a great riverboat town, and it

looked to be a great railhead, too; but to keep

the trains as far from the front lines as possible

during in the Civil War, the big railroads ran

north through Chicago instead. Ulysses Grant

(above) had a farm here he called Hard Scrabble.

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