Louis had flourished. Even though the Frenchmen were soon to learn that the surrounding region had recently been ceded to Spain, it made little consequence. Their trading post would prove to be the start of a very French community on Spanish soil. It wasn’t but a matter of months before the settlement had gained its broad-shouldered reputation as word spread up and down the river systems of frontier North America. Soon the muddy streets bustled with not only the French fur men and a few Spanish governing officials, but British traders, Indians in from the prairies, Creoles and Acadians, as well as black slaves, and of course American frontiersmen. Almost from the start the waterfront was a colorful cluster of keels and flats, canoes and dugouts from the Ohio, the Missouri, the Illinois, and both ends of the great Mother of Waters. By the time Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana, the town could boast more than two hundred homes, most constructed of native stone. Soon thereafter Ohio flatboat merchant Moses Austin visited the city, stating that many of the homes were “large but not elegant.”
