From the category archives:

Across Our Wide Missouri

Church Founder

by Bob Priddy 12/26/07 9:16 AM

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 [...]

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Christmas Frolic

by Bob Priddy 12/25/07 4:55 PM

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 [...]

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Kit

by Bob Priddy 12/24/07 4:54 PM

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 [...]

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St. Louis Cardinal

by Bob Priddy 12/23/07 4:52 PM

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 [...]

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Governor Phelps

by Bob Priddy 12/22/07 4:51 PM

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 [...]

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