We were almost going to take the train into St. Louis but the Amtrak train schedule left us too little time to explore the city - so we rented a car at Enterprise to take the 30 minute ride to downtown St. Louis. We drove directly to the Gateway Arch - which can be seen in its magnificence from quite a distance as you cross the Mississippi. A lot of the parking lots near the Gateway Arch were closed due to the flooding of the river.

After finding a dry parking lot, we walked to the park surrounding the Arch. Much work has taken place in recent years to make the park an attractive venue - now a jewel of the National Park system. The entrance to the Arch is on the town side and you go underground to view a very interesting museum/exhibit for the site and to buy tickets to take the rail car up to the top of the Arch. If you ever go, see the movie about the construction of the Arch in 1963 - an amazing story with step by step footage of the team of workers assembling this extremely complex piece of engineering to achieve the simple beautiful Eero Saarinen design. The ride to the top is not for the squeamish and not for those prone to claustrophobia - there are 8 cars in the tram and 5 seats in each very small pod. You ride to the top and can walk on the very narrow passage inside the arch, and, yes, the floor is curved up there. The windows are small but the yield a fascinating, if not dizzying, view of the city and the river.

The project to build the Arch began in the Franklin Roosevelt administration as the Jefferson National Expansion Park - a commemoration of the Louisiana Purchase by President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 from Napoleonic France and the site of the departure/landing of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition up the nearby Missouri River to explore the newly acquired western territories. St. Louis has a complex history - founded by French settlers in the 1690's from New Orleans who needed a further hub for the fur trade - a network which extended up to Mackinaw Island and Montreal - all places we visited on this Loop. The French lost Lousiana (and St. Louis) after the French & Indian War in 1763; and it was ceded to Spain. Forty years later, Napoleon reacquired the Louisiana territory from Spain in exchange for settling wars in southern Europe, and then promptly turned around and sold it to the US.

Part of the National Park encompasses the Old Courthouse directly to the west of the Arch. The Courthouse is a stunningly beautiful building with a dome that made it the highest building in St. Louis until the modern era. It was also the site of the original Dred Scott case where a slave sued for his freedom in Missouri, a non-slave state at the time, and was denied. The decision was eventually affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in an opinion denounced by historians as unquestionably its "worst decision ever" holding that slaves were not citizens and that the federal government had no power to regulate slavery - a decision that indirectly pushed the country to civil war less than 5 years later.

It is interesting that so many events of enormous consequence occurred on this small stretch of the rivers we are traveling on - the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Ottawa and Alton, Illinois that propelled Abraham Lincoln to political viability and the Dred Scot decision that toppled the Missouri Compromise on slavery - all propelling the 80 year old United States to civil war.