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Show 1836- 1837] Flagg's Far West * SS parallel with the river, a noble view of which they command. They are most of them ten or twelve feet high; many clothed with forest- trees, and all of them supposed to be tombs. In removing two of them upon the grounds of Col. O'Fal-lon, lw immense quantities of bones were exhumed. Similar mounds are to be found in almost every county in the state, and those in the vicinity of St. Louis are remarkable only for their magnitude and the regularity of their relative positions. It is evident, from these monuments of a former generation, that the natural advantages of the site upon which St. Louis now stands were not unappreciated long before it was pressed by the first European footstep. It is a circumstance which has often elicited remark from those who, as tourists, have visited St. Louis, that so little interest should be manifested by its citizens for those mysterious and venerable monuments of another race by which on every side it is environed. When we consider the complete absence of everything in the character of a public square or promenade in the city, one would suppose that individual taste and municipal authority would not have failed to avail themselves of the moral interest attached to these mounds and the beauty of their site, to have formed in their vicinity one of the most attractive spots in the West. These ancient tumuli could, at no considerable expense, have been [ 128] enclosed and ornamented with shrubbery, and walks, and flowers, and thus preserved for coming generations. As it is, they are passing rapidly away; man and beast, as well as the elements, are busy with them, and in a m Colonel John O'Fallon ( 1791- 1865), a nephew of George Rogers Clark, born near Louisville, served his military apprenticeship under General William Henry Harrison during the War of 1812- 15. Resigning his position in the army ( 1818), he removed to St. Louis where he turned his attention to trade and accumulated a large fortune. He endowed the O'Fallon Polytechnic Institution, which was later made the scientific department of St. Louis University, contributed liberally to Washington University, and built a dispensary and medical college. It is estimated that he gave a million dollars for benevolent purposes.- ED. |