The oldest settlement in this region is Cahokia, a pre-Columbian Native American metropolis hundreds of acres wide, with twenty- to thirty-thousand people, just off old Route Route 66 on Collinsville Road in East St. Louis. This was the second-largest Indian settlement in North America, with a walled city and 83 separate mounds and temples. Trading activity stretched from the Southeast to Spiro, Oklahoma, a hundred miles south of Route Route 66’s path. Tribes like the Creek and the Choctaw share ancestry with this culture. In the year 1000, Cahokia was bigger than London.

St. Louis was founded by explorers from Canada in 1721. French language and culture dominated the city until 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase brought the region into the U.S. The next year, Louis and Clark started their expedition west to map the Louisiana Territory.

In the 1920’s, as 66 was built, St. Louis experimented with road building. Alternate Route 66 passes under Kirkwood Boulevard, in one of the first cloverleaf interchanges west of the Mississippi.

St. Louis had the largest and busiest railway station in the world in the 1880s. In its heyday, 22 railroads converged on Union Station.

The railroads cut a steel trail to St Louis from Chicago, joining the great lake and the great river. There was another kind of railroad here, the Underground Railroad. Though Missouri entered the union as a slave state, St Louis, because of its major role in Mississippi traffic, became a turning point for slaves escaping North and West, according to Missouri’s Black Heritage, where I also read that African-Americans fled conservative Southwest Missouri; I make a note to try to find out why.