00:12The St. Louis Bears are a set of provisional stamps issued by the St. Louis Post Office in 1845-46
00:22to facilitate prepayment of postal fees at a time when the United States Post Office
00:28had not yet issued postage stamps for national use.
00:34St. Louis, whose postmaster, John M. Wymer, who instigated the production, was one of 11 cities to produce such stamps.
00:44Bears were offered in three denominations, 5 cent, 10 cent, and 20 cent.
00:50The earliest known postmark date on a stamp of the issue is November 13, 1845.
00:57The stamps owe the name Bears to the image that appears upon them, a drawing of the Great Seal of Missouri,
01:03on which two standing bears hold a heraldic disc rimmed with the slogan, United We Stand, Divided We Fall.
01:11The drawing is meant to suggest that the bracketed final Ds are covered by the bear's paws,
01:17but fails in this aim because artists miscalculated the letter spacing.
01:23A third bear is discernible within the disc, in the bottom left quadrant, which also contains a crescent moon and a sketch of the U.S. coat of arms.
01:33A ribbon beneath the bear's feet contains the state of Missouri's motto,
01:39Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto.
01:42Let the well-being of the people be the highest law.
01:46The bears were printed from a copper plate of six images, arranged in two vertical rows of three,
01:53made by a local engraver, J.M. Kershaw.
01:57The plate was of the type intended to produce visiting cards,
02:00and another improvisatory aspect of the production is that each of the six stamps on the plate was engraved individually,
02:07with the result that no two are identical.
02:11Each denomination exists in distinctive variants.
02:15This is quite different from the state-of-the-art technique used for the New York Postmaster's provisional,
02:20printed from a plate containing identical images replicated from a single die.
02:26The use of these stamps of the St. Louis Postmaster was entirely optional,
02:31and they never became very popular.
02:33The writer has examined a number of files of letters written from St. Louis in 1845, 1846, and 1847,
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