He was called “the chief,” or simply, “Mack.”  In his day he was one of the country’s top war correspondents.  In time he presided over his publishing world, never an empire, from a building he called The Temple of Truth.  He once said, “The great art of running a newspaper is the art of guessing where hell is liable to break loose next.”  Here’s an example:

Commodore Andrew Foote was in charge of the Mississippi fleet the day Union gunboats assaulted Fort Donelson, one of the key Confederate installations on the river.   But Foote was ill and was lying on a couch in the pilot’s cabin of the fleet flagship.  Standing near the wheel was a young war correspondent describing the approach to the fort and watching the exchange of shells.  Suddenly a shell crashed into the pilot house, killing the pilot and shattering the wheel.  Foote and the other men were wounded.  But the young correspondent was unscathed.  Joseph McCullagh had again been where hell broke loose, and reported it graphically.

AUDIO

Frequently when Daniel Boone was a judge in the Femme Osage District in eastern Missouri, he held court under the “judgement elm” near his home at Defiance.  A man found guilty would be punished on the spot, often tied to a hickory tree in Boone’s yard and whipped.  That usually ended the trouble and the culprit  was allowed to return to life in the community.  He’d paid his debt to society on the spot and that was that.  The whipping post and the pillory were common items in Missouri towns.  Their day eventually passed when methods of punishment considered more modern came along – putting people behind bars.  However, not even the construction of a state penitentiary made local punishment obsolete.

Audio

The famous minister Henry Ward Beecher said, “Laws are not masters, but servants, and he rules them who obeys them.”

President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1904, “No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.”

And Chief Justice John Marshall once told an audience that justice continues to be “the greatest (civil) quest of man on earth.”

One organization, the Missouri Bar, keeps an eye on those who administer the laws.  Its motto is “Equal Justice Under Law.”  Every Missourian has felt the work of this group which began when lawyers decided it would be good to know about activities in one another’s courts.  They also grew concerned about handling the steadily increasing docket of the Missouri Supreme Court.

AUDIO

The St. Louis Academy was a small school founded by Bishop DuBourg in a stone building at the corner of Third and Market Streets three years before Missouri became a state.  It was expanded into a college in 1820.  Dubourg had trouble finding faculty members but finally convinced the Jesuit order to send a dozen priests from Maryland in 1823.  He gave them his college in 1828, the first university in the Louisiana Purchase, the first university established west of the Mississippi River.  Today it is nationally-respected, St. Louis University.

AUDIO

When Richard Jesse announced he would have to resign as president of the University of Missouri late in 1907, the curators immediately looked to a former university faculty member to take over.  When they selected Albert Ross Hill, they picked a man who only eight months earlier had left his job as dean of the university’s teacher’s college to become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University.  Hill was a reformer whose influence is still felt in our educational system.

Listen to program
audio

St. Louis was still a quarter century away from its founding when Father Sebastian Louis Meurin came to the Louisiana Territory.  Disappointed many times, he nonetheless forfeited almost everything to work with the people in the sparsely populated areas that would become western Illinois and eastern Missouri.  He even had to make a deal in New Orleans to return to the area.

audio

The Mexican military commander, accused of cowardice, had been taken from the battle area to the capital at Chihuahua.  There he was shown the fortifications at Sacremento Pass designed to stop the devil-Americans of Alexander Doniphan.  The Mexican officer was impressed with the defenses.  But he told his fellow officers, “Those Americans will roll over them like dogs.  They do not fight as we do.”  A few days earlier he had met those Americans.  And a few days later, it turned out, he was right.

audio

He was a teenager when he ran away from home, and the saddle maker to whom he had been apprenticed, to go West.  His brother had joined a caravan bound for Santa Fe, and young Christopher decided to go too.  So he borrowed a neighbor’s mule and rode the 100 miles to Independence to meet with the wagon train.  His brother told him to go back home.  He rode a mile or so before he turned the mule loose and walked back to camp.  He was then allowed to join the caravan.  It was October 1826.

He was missed, but not much.  His employer, David Workman, offered a one-cent reward for his return.  A year later Workman headed west, too.

Kentucky and North Carolina disagree about which state was the birthplace of Christopher Carson.  Neither can claim him, however, because his longing to go “a-westering” was nurtured in Missouri, and this laid the foundation for his entire life.  New Mexico claims him because he spent most of his life there.

audio

He was old, eighty-three, but said the visit to the land of his birth had added five years to his life.  He was stopping in Ireland on his way to Rome where the Pope would formally confer on him the office of Cardinal.  The trip to Ireland, however, did not add five years to his life – it cost him his life.  He was the first man from west of the Mississippi to be named a Cardinal.  His name was John Joseph Glennon.

audio

When Wild Bill Hickock killed a man on the town square in Springfield, the man called on to defend him was John Smith Phelps.  Phelps, a Union general, got Hickock, a former Union spy, acquitted.  Public sentiment eventually ran Wild Bill out of town, but public sentiment a few years later would make Phelps  governor of Missouri.

audio