Karl Bodmer     Print   In no small way, St. Louis was forged on the anvil of Manifest Destiny; its earliest library - the Mercantile - took advantage of this circumstance so much so that by the 1870's its Head Librarian could proudly remark that "the history of our country's early and aboriginal past claims our special attention." The leaders of the Mercantile Library clearly understood the historical moment which they seized. They documented this epoch on their new library's shelves. Because of that, almost from its inception, St. Louis possessed a national library which collected the heritage of the new nation. Its greatest achievement has been that from that early impulse the Library has continued to create one of the most respected and comprehensively developed public collections of Western Americana.