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expected.
    Delgado grimly folded the newspaper, put it under his arm, and returned to his stateroom, wondering what the future held for Taos, his home, and his family.

Chapter Two
    "If there is no cure, one must endure
. . ."
    1
    S t. Louis was a thriving city of more than seventy thousand souls on that summer day in 1846 when Delgado McKinn arrived on the magnificent
Sultana
. The town was both cosmopolitan and frontier, American as well as French in character. At least fifty steamboats were moored to its mile-long docks, taking on or discharging cargoes and passengers, the serried ranks of their ornamented smokestacks looming against the azure sky. The levee was covered as far as the eye could see with merchandise just landed or ready to be shipped—hundreds of barrels of flour, hogsheads of tobacco, piles of lead harvested from nearby mines, hundreds of head of livestock of every description. Boatman, draymen, factors, and laborers went about their business with that hustle and bustle that seemed, to Delgado, so American. Beyond the levee, the vigorous and ever-expanding city sprawled across a long limestone bluff and spilled onto the plateau beyond.
    In thirty short years St. Louis had grown a thousandfold. It had been founded in 1764 by a French soldier and adventurer named Pierre Laclede Ligueste, leader of a commercial enterprise that enjoyed the royal monopoly of trade with the Indians along the Missouri and upper Mississippi.Where these two mighty rivers met, Laclede established an outpost, named St. Louis in honor of the enterprise's patron, Louis XV, King of France. Early on, St. Louis became the jumping-off point of most expeditions into the uncharted western country, as well as the center of the fur trade.
    Even after France ceded all of the Louisiana Territory to Spain, St. Louis remained predominantly French. But when Louisiana was purchased by the United States in 1803, numerous New England speculators materialized. With the advent of the steamboat, St. Louis boomed, her wealth and population and importance soaring, and she was soon the undisputed river capital of the West. The fact that she stood at one end of the Santa Fe Trail only added to her phenomenal growth.
    Delgado had never visited St. Louis before, although the city had played a pivotal role in his life. His father had embarked from here on his first bold venture down the Santa Fe Trail. In 1822 Angus McKinn had outfitted in the Vide Poche district, the old, French section of town, putting every penny he had to his name into all the merchandise that two dozen Missouri mules could carry, and which he subsequently sold at a tremendous profit in Santa Fe. Though rich in silver and wool, Santa Fe was starved for the simplest manufactured goods, since vast deserts separated it from the metropolitan centers of Mexico proper. On his third trip Angus met Delgado's mother, married her, and made his home in Taos. Yet he still maintained his St. Louis connections and prospered as a result of them. The Santa Fe trade was still going strong. Angus had written his son that in the year 1843, by his calculations, a halfmillion dollars worth of goods had been transported from St. Louis to Santa Fe.
    Delgado still vividly remembered his father's description of St. Louis in the old days. A raw frontier village of less than ten thousand back then, just beginning to flex her muscles and contemplate her prospects. Already the warehouses of gray and yellow stone, erected on a flat bench between the levee and the limestone bluff, were filled with the pelts for which the fur trappers had risked life and limb in the great unknown of the Shining Mountains—pelts bound for New York, London, Paris, Canton, Athens, and Constantinople. Today, the fur trade was in decline. The silk hat had replaced the one made of beaver, and the China trade had surpassed the fur trade. But the sturdy old warehouses still stood, along with others of more recent construction, all chock full of