St. Louis was founded near the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers because of the advantage this location offered for transportation and commerce. As the “Gateway to the West” it was a natural stopping-off point for the artists who set out to explore the new frontier via steamboat and overland travel.

Artists were not alone in recognizing the need to document the frontier. In 1847, an art critic writing for The Literary World urged artists to preserve the vanishing wilderness, saying;

"The axe of civilization is busy with our old forests. What were once the wild and picturesque haunts . . . where the wild deer roamed in freedom, are becoming the abodes of commerce and the seats of manufactures . . . Yankee enterprise has little sympathy with the picturesque, and it behooves our artists to rescue from its grasp the little that is left, before it is too late."