Saint Louis

Saint Louis was laid out in 1764 by French fur traders and named for the crusading king Louis IX, and it was Catholic before it was American. A log church went up within a few years, and the parish became a diocese in 1826 as settlement pushed west. The Old Cathedral of 1834 still stands beside the river, the oldest cathedral west of the Mississippi and now dwarfed by the arch built around it.

Its bishops used the city as a base for missions. Jesuits arrived in 1823 and worked among the nations of the plains, and the best known of them, Pierre-Jean De Smet, travelled tens of thousands of miles, established missions in the northern Rockies, and was repeatedly used by the federal government as an intermediary in treaty negotiations, including a journey to Sitting Bull's camp in 1868. He is remembered by some as an advocate and by others as an instrument of a policy that dispossessed the people he lived among, and both readings draw on the same record. Rose Philippine Duchesne came from France in 1818 and founded the first free school west of the river.

Saint Louis University, founded in 1818, was the first university west of the Mississippi. The newer Cathedral Basilica, begun in 1907 and finished eight decades later, is lined with mosaic covering some eight thousand square metres, one of the largest such installations anywhere.

After the Latter-day Saints were driven out of Nauvoo in 1846, thousands moved through Saint Louis rather than straight across the plains, working in the city for a season or a winter to earn outfitting money, and a branch of the church operated there for years. The city was a staging point for the migration rather than a destination, which is why it appears in Latter-day Saint history without appearing on its map of holy places.

German immigration made it something else as well. Saxon Lutherans who had emigrated to keep a confessional Lutheranism they felt was being dissolved at home settled in Missouri, and the synod they helped form in 1847 built its seminary and its publishing house in Saint Louis. That body, the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, has been the conservative pole of American Lutheranism ever since, and in 1974 it tore itself apart over the authority of scripture when most of the faculty and students walked out of Concordia Seminary and set up a seminary in exile, a rupture whose consequences reshaped Lutheranism in the United States.

The city's Catholic archdiocese made a decision of a different kind in 1947, when Archbishop Ritter ordered the desegregation of its schools ahead of any court or legislature and told organised objectors that opposition would carry the penalty of excommunication. The order held. Black Protestant congregations in the metropolitan area have carried much of the city's civil rights organising since, including during the protests in Ferguson in 2014.