The Battle of Saint Louis, 1780

Almost no one knows that Saint Louis was attacked during the American Revolution. But on May twenty-sixth, seventeen eighty, this city fought for its survival, and the outcome shaped the entire Mississippi Valley.

At the time, Saint Louis was a Spanish colonial town, having passed from France to Spain in seventeen sixty-three. It had about seven hundred residents, mostly French-speaking fur traders and their families, living in wooden houses along the western bank of the Mississippi. Lieutenant Governor Fernando de Leyba governed in the name of the Spanish Crown.

The British, fighting to suppress the American rebellion, had allied with dozens of Native nations in the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi regions. In the spring of seventeen eighty, a British commander assembled a force of more than a thousand warriors: Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Dakota, along with Canadian fur traders and militia. The plan was to seize Saint Louis and cut off Spanish support for American forces operating east of the river.

Leyba had wind of the attack weeks before it came. He had almost no money, almost no soldiers, fewer than thirty Spanish regulars, and no time to wait for reinforcements from New Orleans. He did what he could. He asked the townspeople to fund and dig their own defenses. They dug more than a mile of trenches in front of the village, and Leyba ordered construction of a thirty-foot stone tower overlooking the river, which he named Fort San Carlos after King Charles III of Spain. Five cannon were mounted in the tower.

When the attack came, those cannon and the determined militia held. The British-led force killed or captured dozens of settlers and enslaved people, most of them civilians, but they could not break through. They withdrew. The American position east of the river at Cahokia held as well.

The failure ended British attempts to control the Mississippi. Spain's stand here helped keep the great river in allied hands for the remainder of the war.