St. Louis

Pierre Laclède Liguest chose a limestone bluff on the Mississippi in 1764, and his fourteen-year-old stepson Auguste Chouteau supervised the clearing of trees that February. The site sat just south of the Missouri confluence, which made it the natural hub of the interior continent's fur trade. Laclède named it Saint Louis in honor of Louis IX, the thirteenth-century French king who died of plague in Tunisia in 1270 while on his second crusade.

Louis IX was born in Poissy in 1214 and ruled France from 1226 until his death at Carthage. He built the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris between 1242 and 1248 to house relics he purchased at extraordinary expense from the Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Pope Boniface VIII canonized him in 1297, and from that point 'Saint Louis' traveled wherever French Catholic culture spread, from Loire valley chapels to North American river towns.

The name arrived in Louisiana as French colonial authority was already collapsing. By the time Laclède returned to confirm the settlement's location, news had arrived that France had secretly ceded the territory to Spain by the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau. Choosing 'Saint Louis' was a declaration of Franco-Catholic identity in a land already slipping to another empire; the Spanish kept the name, filing deeds as 'San Luis,' and the Americans, who received the city via the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, kept the French spelling.

The Gateway Arch, completed in 1965, rises 630 feet above the waterfront in stainless steel. But the city's name runs deeper than that monument. Saint Louis, pressed into the landscape by a fur trader in 1764, still carries the weight of a medieval French crusader-king who never came within five thousand miles of the Mississippi.