ng admixture of unprogressive Indian blood"--tended always to
relapse into utter indolence.

Some of these French towns, however, were seats of culture; and none was
wholly barren of diversions. Kaskaskia had a Jesuit college and likewise
a monastery. Cahokia had a school for Indian youth. Fort Chartres, we
are gravely told, was "the center of life and fashion in the West." If
everyday existence was humdrum, the villagers had always the opportunity
for voluble conversation "each from his own balcony"; and there
were scores of Church festivals, not to mention birthdays, visits of
travelers or neighbors, and homecomings of hunters and traders, which
invited to festivity. Balls and dances and other merrymakings at which
the whole village assembled supplied the wants of a people proverbially
fond of amusement. Indeed, French civilization in the Mississippi and
Illinois country was by no means without charm.

Kaskaskia, in the wonderfully fertile "American Bottom," maintained its
existence, in spite of the cession to the English, as did also Vincennes
farther east on the Wabash. Fort Chartres, a stout fortification whose
walls were more than two feet thick, remained the seat of the principal
garrison, and some traces of French occupancy survived on the Illinois.
Cahokia was deserted, save for the splendid mission-farm of St. Sulpice,
with its thirty slaves, its herd of cattle, and its mill, which the
fathers before returning to France sold to a thrifty Frenchman not
averse to becoming an English subject. A few posts were abandoned
altogether. Some of the departing inhabitants went back to France; some
followed the French commandant, Neyon de Villiers, down the river to
New Orleans; many gathered up their possessions, even to the frames
and clapboards of their houses, and took refuge in the new towns which
sprang up on the western bank. One of these new settlements was Ste.
Genevieve, strategically located near the lead mines from which the
entire region had long drawn its supplies of shot. Another, which was
destined to greater importance, was St. Louis, established as a trading
post on the richly wooded bluffs opposite Cahokia by Pierre Laclede in
1764.

Associated with Laclede in his fur-trading operations at the new post
was a lithe young man named Pierre Chouteau. In 1846--eighty-two years
afterwards--Francis Parkman sat on the spacious veranda of Pierre
Chouteau's country house near the city of St. Louis and heard fro