It is curious to note in this connection that there are eight colleges or universities in the United States in which the name of "Washington" appears; among them, Washington University at St. Louis; Washington College at Chestertown, Md.; George Washington University at Washington, D. C.; Washington State College at Pullman, Wash., and the University of Washington at Seattle.
[Illustration: The skins are handled in the raw state ... with the result that the floor of the exchange is made slippery by animal fats, and that the olfactory organs encounter smells not to be matched in any zoo]
Before making my transcontinental pilgrimage I used to wonder, sometimes, just where the line dividing East from West in the United States might be. When I lived in Chicago, and went out to St. Louis, I felt that I was going, not merely in a westerly direction, but that I was actually going out into the "West." I knew, of course, that there was a vast amount of "West" lying beyond St. Louis, but I had no real conception--and no one who has not seen it can have--of what a stupendous, endless, different kind of land it is. St. Louis west? It is not west at all. To be sure, it is the frontier, the jumping-off place, but it is no more western in its characteristics than the city of Boulogne is English because it faces England, just across the way. From every point of view except that of geography, Chicago is more western than St. Louis. For Chicago has more "wallop" than St. Louis, and "wallop" is essentially a western attribute. "Wallop" St. Louis has not. What she has is civilization and the eastern spirit of laissez-faire. And that of St. Louis which is not of the east is of the south. Her society has a strong southern flavor, many of her leading families having come originally from Kentucky and Virginia. The Southern "colonel" type is to be found there, too--black, broad-brimmed hat, frock coat, goatee, and all--and there is a negro population big enough to give him his customary background.
Much negro labor is employed for the rougher kind of work; colored waiters serve in the hotels, and many families employ colored servants. As is usual in cities where this is true, the accent of the people inclines somewhat to be southern. Or, perhaps, it is a blending of the accent of the south with the sharper drawl of the west. Then, too, I encountered there men bearing French names (which are pronounced in the French manner, although the city's name has been anglicized, being pronounced "Saint Louiss") who, if they did not speak with a real French accent, had, at least, slight mannerisms of speech which were unmistakably of French origin. I noted down a number of French family names I heard: Chauvenet, Papin, Vallé, Desloge, De Menil, Lucas, Pettus, Guion, Chopin, Janis, Benoist, Cabanné, and Chouteau--the latter family descended, I was told, from Laclede himself. And again, I heard such names as Busch, Lehmann, Faust, and Niedringhaus; and still again such other names as Kilpatrick, Farrell, and O'Fallon--for St. Louis, though a Southern city, and an Eastern city, and a French city, and a German city, by being also Irish, proves herself American.