Travel

The guide pointed to one of a dozen pelts on a table. “That there’s not a skunk. That’s genuine Alaskan sable.” It was a skunk, the guide admitted, but to the European fur market in the early 1800s, the term Alaskan sable sold better.

“See that coonskin cap over there,” the guide continued. “Nobody around here wore coonskin caps, but they were sold back east as genuine frontier wear.”

Those furry fables are among several unexpected lessons when visitors enter Missouri’s First State Capitol building in St. Charles. After all, when Missouri’s first legislators came to this frontier capitol, they walked into a dry goods store, with skins and hats, powder and pelts and fabrics. On the way upstairs to the capitol, they might stop to buy a brick of tea, the way they sold it around here.

Upstairs, the tiny governor’s office and the senate chamber flank the not-much-larger house of representatives, with its rows of benches and an 1804 King James Bible. Legislators stayed warm beside a stove at one end of the room and a fireplace at the other. Beef tallow candles offered dim light in these chambers, the cradle of democracy in a frontier state that would launch a million ships west. If your ancestors migrated west, it’s a good bet they passed through St. Charles, whether they were traveling by boat or overland trail.

The old customs house stands proudly on Main Street, just as it did when all westward travelers were obliged to stop to register. Sometimes they would spend the night in the customs house, especially on Saturday night, since the law prohibited traveling on Sunday.

Borromeo, Wherefore Art Thou?

Before there was a state of Missouri or a capitol or a customs house, or even a United States of America, a French Canadian fur trader named Louis Blanchette arrived by river to a spot he named Les Petits Cotes, the little hills. He and a group of French Canadian hunters and farmers established a settlement there that began to thrive. Because the French had earlier ceded the land to the Spanish crown, Spanish officials renamed the tiny town San Carlos Borromeo to honor King Carlos IV.

When Thomas Jefferson engineered the Louisiana Purchase, he sent William Clark and Meriwether Lewis on a mission to map America’s new western addition and find a water route to the Pacific Ocean. Lewis and Clark arrived in San Carlos Borromeo in 1804. Shortly after they pressed onward into the wilderness, the town’s French and English inhabitants began calling the town St. Charles. During the decades of America’s westward expansion, St. Charles was the launching point for expeditions and dreams. It shows in the facades of its lovingly preserved buildings, in the faces of its famous inhabitants, and the pathways that led from St. Charles to a new world.

A Succession of Superhighways

St. Charles began as a Crossroads of America. It still is. The first mile of federal interstate highway system started right here. And Lambert-St. Louis International Airport sits only seven miles away. Of course, the river was the first highway for trappers, traders, explorers, and settlers, but overland trails evolved quickly. In 1825, President John Quincy Adams authorized a bill by Senator Thomas Hart Benton to survey the road called the Highway Among Nations. You know it as the Santa Fe Trail, but locals called it the Boonslick Road, because it led past a central Missouri salt lick operated by the sons of St. Charles county judge Daniel Boone. In 1850, the Boonslick Road was planked for about ten miles, from downtown St. Charles over what is now Route N in St. Charles County.