Earlier this year, our Founder visited St. Louis, Missouri—the Gateway to the West. On this trip, we visited the Gateway Arch’s museum and learned a bit about the westward expansion of the US in the 1800s and how existing sanitation contributed to its progress.
A small hint – it made it really crappy.
The Westward Expansion & St. Louis
European settlers started moving to the St. Louis area in the late 18th/early 19th centuries as a popular trading post, though Native Americans had been in St. Louis for longer than white settlers. The French were the first to claim the area, though they sold it to the Americans in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase.
Immediately afterward, Americans started to move westward in earnest, hoping to find more space to build homes or luck out in the gold rush. St. Louis was a central place for those wanting to head west - its position on the Mississippi River helped bring supplies to travelers and easily move people through steamboats.
While many trails west popped up from Missouri, one famous trail was the Oregon Trail, which spread 2,000 miles from Missouri to (you guessed it) Oregon. The Oregon Trail started with fur traders and trappers and was further fueled by the gold rush.
Sanitation challenges
The westward expansion was dangerous. Most of the danger came from fecal contamination in water that made people sick.
St. Louis was hit hard by diseases. The westward expansion made the city's population grow quickly in the 1840s, but the reliance on outhouses and cesspools near its main water sources created ample opportunities for diseases to spread. In 1849, the city lost about 7% of its population to cholera. It spurred the city to vote on building sewers to eliminate the bad smells because people still believed in miasma back then and wouldn’t believe in germ theory for several more decades. The city voted to build a combined sewer system, which opened in the 1850s and is still in use.
Sadly, while the city worked to improve people’s health, gold rush pioneers carried cholera and other deadly diseases on their trek west.
People from Generation X and Millennials may remember playing the old video game Oregon Trail….and how easy it was to die of dysentery. That wasn’t just a fun way to make the game hard—it was reality. The most common killers on the westward trails were disease—dysentery, cholera, typhoid, smallpox, or the flu – from poor sanitation circumstances. Sadly, doctors weren’t typically much help - equipment was limited, knowledge was ancient, vaccines were hard to come by, and odd approaches to treatment that wouldn’t work were common.
The westward expansion's sanitation woes also hurt the environment along its path, hurting river ecosystems further downstream.
Unfortunately, not just European settlers died from these diseases – the migration brought these diseases to Native American communities along the way. According to the Kiowas tribe, they lost half of the tribe due to cholera in the 1840s, and even more Comanches and Apache during the time, reducing indigenous populations to much smaller numbers.
Disease didn’t just spread because of St. Louis – the trails were known for being dangerous and gross. The trails had popular camping spots with no sanitation systems like sewers to keep travelers safe. People would use the nearby rivers for three major purposes: (1) to get drinking water, (2) to wash things, and (3) to dispose of waste – from poo to animal carcasses and food scraps. This meant that if one person was sick, everyone else became sick.
When a river wasn’t available, people dug holes to make pit toilets—outhouses. Their outhouses were used by many and not known to smell particularly sweet. Sadly, this means they may not have had water to wash their hands afterward—not like they knew they should have done that back then.
Reflection
The sanitation challenges of westward expansion helped shape how we approach water management today. St. Louis's 1850s response to cholera represents one of America's first systematic attempts at urban water management, a system that both helped and haunted the city as it grew. The deadly consequences of mixing drinking water sources with waste disposal along the western trails taught us the crucial importance of source water protection, leading to modern practices of designating and safeguarding drinking water sources.
These historical lessons directly influenced the development of separate storm and sanitary sewers, water treatment facilities, and watershed protection regulations that we rely on today. Cities now carefully zone their water infrastructure, test water quality regularly, and maintain a strict separation between drinking water sources and waste disposal—all practices born from the harsh lessons of our westward expansion. As water utilities face new challenges from aging infrastructure and climate change, these historical examples continue to inform how we adapt our water management systems for a sustainable future.
Comentarios