The Rose of Old St. Louis

Mary Dillon’s 1904 novel sends a young Philadelphian down the Ohio and the Mississippi to St. Louis, a French-speaking village about to pass into American hands. He falls at once for Pelagie, the girl the town calls its rose, and the pursuit carries him from the river settlements to Paris, where Napoleon, Talleyrand, Livingston, Marbois, and Monroe are bargaining over the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and the Clark brothers pass through the story beside the invented characters. Dillon was careful about her history. Her foreword grants that the book is not history, but claims the Congressional debate and the negotiators’ words verbatim from the record, and she built old St. Louis out of Scharf, Billon, and Brackenridge. It reads best as a period piece, a picture of how Americans of 1904 imagined the purchase that made them continental.