History
The area that would become St. Louis was a center of Native American Mississippian culture, which built numerous temple and residential earthwork mounds in the region, giving the city its early nickname, the "Mound City". European exploration of the area began in 1673, when French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette traveled through the Mississippi River valley. Five years later, La Salle claimed the region for France as part of French Louisiana.
The earliest settlements in the area were built in Illinois Country (also known as Upper Louisiana) during the 1690s and early 1700s at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Fort de Chartres. Migrants from the eastern French villages founded Ste. Genevieve, Missouri, across the Mississippi River from Kaskaskia, and in early 1764, Pierre Laclède and his stepson Auguste Chouteau founded the city of St. Louis.
From 1764 to 1803 European control of the area west of the Mississippi to the northernmost part of the Missouri River basin, called Louisiana, was assumed by the Spanish as part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. In 1780, St. Louis was attacked by British forces, mostly Native Americans, during the American Revolutionary War.
Read more about this topic: St. Louis
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“Every literary critic believes he will outwit history and have the last word.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)