Lithograph by Thomas Moore, courtesy of the Library of Congress Photographs and Prints Division, LC-DIG-pga-07688 DLC
It’s the late 1830s. Life is still lived by, not in spite of, topography. Rivers and skies are destiny: The fast water of the Mississippi makes fortunes. The fast air of tornadoes undoes them. And quickly changing technology does both. Here, one lonely voyageur glides by on a flatboat while dozens of steamboats cluster at the shore. Crowds of people and horses on First Street (rendered by the artist as dots and smudges) throng around brick taverns and dry-goods stores far sturdier than the wooden houses of the first French settlers. Make no mistake, the river still had the upper hand; when it flooded in 1844, it ran 12 miles wide past St. Louis. In the summer of 1879, the federal government created the Mississippi River Commission, which, tellingly, reported to the Secretary of War. Since that time, no artist has been able to draw a portrait of the river in which, as here, it flows as easily and freely as the sky above it.
