St. Louis, Southern Vandalia.
St. Louis is the largest city in the Confederation of Southern Vandalia. It was founded in 1764 by the French fur traders Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau, who named it after King Louis IX. The settlement attracted a growing population of French Roman Catholics from British North America who preferred living under Catholic rule. By the terms of the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau, French Louisiana came under Spanish control in 1764, but due to slow travel times and an anti-Spanish uprising in New Orleans in 1768, Spain did not take control of St. Louis until May 1770. A 1772 census of the settlement counted a population of 444 whites and 193 Negro slaves.
After the outbreak of the North American Rebellion in 1775, Spanish governors in New Orleans assisted the American rebels with weapons and ammunition. However, the American defeats at the Battles of New York, Saratoga, and Germantown made it clear that the Rebellion was doomed, and covert aid to the Americans ceased. After the Confederation of North America was established in 1782, the nearby settlement of Kaskaskia was renamed Fort Radisson and made the capital of the Confederation of Indiana.
During the Trans-Oceanic War, a combined force of Southern Confederation militia and the Royal Navy under General Edward Curtis and Captain Horatio Nelson took New Orleans on 1 October 1797. The combined force then traveled up the MIssissippi River to take St. Louis later that month. By the summer of 1798, all of Louisiana north of the Arkansas River was under British control. The newly-conquered territory was organized into the Confederation of Vandalia, with St. Louis presumably the first capital.
Sobel states that the white population of Vandalia was only 2,000 in 1810; most of these would have been farmers and fur traders living in and near St. Louis. By 1830, Sobel says that St. Louis resembled a smaller, less sophisticated version of New Orleans. However, like most of the cities in the C.N.A. western confederations, St. Louis was fortified against potential Indian attacks.
St. Louis, Vandalia on the eve of the Rocky Mountain War.
The discovery of silver in the Broken Arrow region of western Vandalia in early 1844 attracted 20,000 prospectors from the eastern confederations, who would have set out for the silver fields from St. Louis. The outbreak of the Rocky Mountain War brought several North American armies through St. Louis on their way west to the campaigns in Mexico del Norte and California. It may have been at this time that the capital of Vandalia was moved from St. Louis to Galloway.
The end of the war in 1855 brought a steady stream of settlers from the eastern confederations, including a growing number of freed Negro slaves from the Southern Confederation. Growing conflicts between southern Negroes and northern whites in the 1870s led to the separation of Vandalia into Northern and Southern sections, with St. Louis included in the latter. St. Louis remains the largest city in Southern Vandalia, mostly due to the failure of other large cities to develop there.