Look off to the north there — past the trees, past the bridge, out to where the plain old city street grid takes over. Ranger Boone Merrick's the name. I want to tell you about a city that stood right here a thousand years before the first French boat ever tied up at this bank. And the strange part of it is, you can't see a trace of it. That is the whole tale.
Long before anybody called this place the Gateway to the West, folks called St. Louis by another name — Mound City. And it earned that name honest. All across these bluffs and the bottomlands, and bigger still just over the river in Illinois, the people we call the Mississippians raised earthworks by the hundred — flat-topped pyramids of packed earth, broad plazas, mounds for their dead. Their great capital across the water, Cahokia, was the largest city anywhere north of Mexico in its day. This was a built world, friend, going back around a thousand years, and St. Louis stood square in the middle of it.
The grandest one on this side of the river was known plainly as the Big Mound — a ridge of earth longer than a football field and the better part of three stories tall, rising up over the water a little north of where your boots are planted.
And here is where the tale turns hard. The very city that took its name from those mounds is the same city that carted them off. In eighteen sixty-eight and sixty-nine, men with shovels and mule carts cut the Big Mound down flat. Not for a monument. For dirt. The earth those people had carried up basket by basket, by hand, got sold off to a railroad and packed down under the tracks as common fill. And as the diggers worked, they turned up what the mound had been holding all those centuries — the bones of the dead laid to rest inside it, hauled off with the rest of the load. By the turn of the century, near every last mound in St. Louis was gone.
But don't you walk off from this spot thinking it's only loss. South of here, up on the high ground over the river, one mound still stands. Sugarloaf, they call it — the last one left in this whole city. And it is no relic behind glass. The Osage Nation bought that ground back, and the Osage care for it today — a living people, standing watch over the last hill, with the city grown up all around it. So when you look north and see nothing at all, hold this in your mind: one mound, still standing, still tended. St. Louis forgot its first name. Somebody out there has not.