Photograph by Thomas M. Easterly, courtesy of the Missouri History Museum, St. Louis
The imprints of fox paws in mud are tracks, a natural thing. Not so pigment blown around a human hand on a cave wall, or the scar of a brand on an animal’s withers. One says I go; the other, I own. Chouteau’s Pond was artificial, a made thing, but not by René Auguste Chouteau. In 1766, Joseph Taillon dammed La Petite Rivière—Mill Creek—to run the paddle wheel of his gristmill. They say the water was very clear and cold, bordered by trees and rough prairie grass and fat-headed pink clover. Farmers drove cattle there to graze and water, and though the pond was created to power the grinding of flour, it was best loved as a fishing hole, a place to nap or drink wine or escape into the woods for a tryst. By 1849, its banks were stitched with railroad tracks, and the city overflowed with poisons and disappearances. Down on North Broadway, men with shovels picked away at Big Mound until it was just a rise in the road; in the cemeteries, men in black suits dug a hundred graves a day for people dead from cholera. It’s the miasma, people said. Bad air. No wonder they pegged Chouteau’s Pond as the source, its waters stewing with household ashes, chemical slurry, and runoff from the slaughterhouses. And so they drained it, the waters’ recession paralleling St. Louis’ final, weird transition from village to city. As in this daguerreotype: Collier White Lead and Oil Company, juxtaposed with a herd of cows hipping over the muddy hills of what was once the pond floor, their blurred bodies seeming to evaporate into puffs of factory smoke.
