Mound City was this place's earlier name, given for the dozens of earthen mounds the Mississippian culture raised here. When French traders arrived in the 1760s, they found this landscape punctuated by dozens of earthen mounds built by the Mississippian culture, a sophisticated pre-Columbian civilization that flourished here between approximately 700 and 1400 CE. At its peak, the city of Cahokia, just across the river in modern-day Illinois, housed an estimated 20,000 people — larger than London at the time.
The mounds served as ceremonial platforms, burial sites, and status markers for a hierarchical society with long-distance trade networks stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes. As St. Louis grew in the 19th century, its residents demolished nearly all of the mounds for fill dirt and construction material. One mound, Big Mound, which stood 30 feet tall and 300 feet long near today's Riverfront, was destroyed in 1869.
Only Sugarloaf Mound remains in the city today, in South St. Louis. These were not curiosities. They were someone's sacred places.
Remember that.