Ladies and gentlemen, would you care to take a little trip down history with me? We are not going far--just up to February 1764, to a small limestone bluff on the west bank of the mighty Mississippi, where Pierre Laclede Liguest’s (a French fur trader) men are erecting the first structures of a settlement, which is called Laclede’s Village for now. Although his French style village is small, Laclede sees “one of the finest cities in America” there. The population of the village steadily grows over the years, aided by the French-Spanish-French-American ownership of the land. Let’s move on to 1804 and be there to flag off the epochal Lewis and Clark expedition from Camp Wood, just outside our town. They are setting out to explore the land beyond the “great rock mountains” of the West, as decreed by President Thomas Jefferson. The nation’s westward expansion has officially begun. Our town, now called St. Louis, becomes the last post before setting off to the wild west. By the 1820...