The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade

The Chouteaus

Frontispiece: Upper Missouri and Platte River country, pre-1857.

THE CHOUTEAUS

First Family of the Fur Trade

STAN HOIG

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8263-4349-9

© 2008 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2008

Printed in the United States of America

13  12  11  10  09  08        1  2  3  4  5  6

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Hoig, Stan.

The Chouteaus : first family of the fur trade / Stan Hoig.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8263-4347-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Chouteau family.

2. Pioneers—Missouri—Saint Louis—Biography.

3. Fur traders—Missouri—Saint Louis—Biography.

4. French Americans—Missouri—Saint Louis—Biography.

5. Businessmen—Missouri—Saint Louis—Biography.

6. Saint Louis (Mo.)—Biography.

7. Missouri River Valley—Biography.

8. Fur trade—Missouri River Valley—History.

9. Frontier and pioneer life—Missouri River Valley.

10. Missouri River Valley—History.

I. Title.

F474.S253A245 2008

977.8’6600922—dc22

[B]

2007041680

In memory of Chouteau patriarch

and founder of St. Louis

Pierre Laclède, whose bones rest:

"By the lone river,

where the reeds quiver, and

the woods make moan."

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1: Threshold to an Empire

Chapter 2: Beyond the Great River

Chapter 3: War and Peace on the Missouri

Chapter 4: In a Spanish Dungeon

Chapter 5: Scions to the Fore

Chapter 6: Amid an Indian War

Chapter 7: A Frontier in Havoc

Chapter 8: The Osage Outfit

Chapter 9: VIPs at the Verdigris

Chapter 10: Probing the Plains

Chapter 11: To the Prairies Unknown

Chapter 12: Debt unto Death

Chapter 13: Steamboats to the Mountains

Chapter 14: A Mile Wide and Six Inches Deep

Chapter 15: Deadly Cargoes: Whiskey and Cholera

Chapter 16: Charles Chouteau at the Helm

Chapter 17: Passions of War

Chapter 18: Requiems in Retrospect

Addendum: The Chouteau Women

Appendix A: Chouteau Families and Osage Offspring

Appendix B: Chouteau-Related Trading Posts

Appendix C: Chouteau-Involved Indian Treaties

Notes

Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

Figure 1.1:   Fort Union, North Dakota

Figure 1.2:   Auguste Chouteau

Figure 2.1:   Prairie du Chien

Figure 2.2:   Bellevue trading post

Figure 3.1:   George C. Sibley

Figure 3.2:   Indians attack a fur-trader’s barge

Figure 4.1:   A frontier robe press

Figure 6.1:   Auguste Pierre Chouteau as a youth

Figure 6.2:   A. P. Chouteau’s La Saline home

Figure 7.1:   Fort Gibson restoration

Figure 9.1:   Sam Houston

Figure 9.2:   Washington Irving

Figure 10.1: George Catlin

Figure 12.1: Pierre Chouteau, Jr. (Cadet)

Figure 13.1: Kenneth McKenzie

Figure 13.2: The steamboat Yellowstone

Figure 13.3: Fort Pierre

Figure 14.1: Crossing the Platte River

Figure 14.2: Steamboat and railroad from St. Louis

Figure 14.3: Fort Laramie, Wyoming

Figure 15.1: The rise of St. Louis

Figure 16.1: Father Pierre Jean De Smet

Figure 20.1: Madame Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau

Figure 20.2 Mohongo and child

MAPS

Frontispiece: Upper Missouri and Platte River country, pre-1857

Map 2.1:   Western North America in 1743

Map 5.1:   Chouteau trading posts below the Missouri

Map 6.1:   The Three Forks

Map 10.1: Area of trade and Indian affairs

Map 16.1: Chouteau posts on the Missouri River

PREFACE

ALTHOUGH CLEARLY ITS ANCESTRAL BASE is St. Louis, Missouri, the Chouteau story is prefatory to the early histories of many western states. It traces much of the fur trade and speaks to the awakening of the American West to the outside world. It is in part a personality and character story, but also much more in a larger sense. For whatever their ethical purpose, the Chouteaus were significant players in the initial exploitation of the vast lands that lay so mysteriously inviting beyond the Mississippi River during their day. At the very least, their era represents a truly grand adventure of American history, worthy of remembrance.

To a large degree, the saga of the Chouteau family is the story of two sets of brothers. The elders, Auguste and Pierre, were instrumental, along with Pierre Laclède, in founding the city of St. Louis; in the development of the important fur trade along the Mississippi and lower Missouri rivers; and in providing critical aid to the young, still tentative United States in establishing its claim to the lands of the Louisiana Purchase and winning the friendship of Indian tribes of the region. The two were intimate advisors to Thomas Jefferson, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark, as well as acquaintances of many other notable men of America’s early history.

Pierre’s eight sons in particular left their mark on the American West through their adventures in the fur trade and their close relationship with Indian tribes beyond the Mississippi. Most notable were Auguste Pierre (Col. A. P.), participant in numerous western adventures—among them, imprisonment in a Spanish dungeon at Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Battle of Arikara Village; and the Battle of Chouteau’s Island, Kansas—and his younger brother Pierre Jr. (Cadet), who administratively brought steamboats to the Upper Missouri and established numerous trading posts on the frontier. He became the namesake of Fort Pierre and Pierre, South Dakota, and heir to John Jacob Astor’s monumental American Fur Company.

Auguste sired five girls and four boys, who led varied careers. His attempt to formally educate the oldest son, Auguste Aristide, was a painful failure until the boy escaped back to the Indian frontier he loved, serving there as a treaty interpreter. Gabriel Sylvestre (Cerré or Seres), another early Kansas trader, later moved on to operate at Fort Union, North Dakota. Henry Pierre, a St. Louis railroad entrepreneur, perished in a train that crashed into the flooded Gasconade River while crossing over a weakened trestle bridge. Little is recorded of Auguste’s son, Edward René. Of the girls, Marie Thérèse and Catherine Emilie died young; Marie Thérèse Eulalie and Marie Louise married brothers René and Gabriel Paul; and Emilie Antoinette married Capt. Thomas F. Smith.

Auguste Pierre and Pierre Jr., Pierre’s elder sons, were born of the same mother, Pelagie Kiersereau. They were reared in much the same fashion by Pierre and stood with one another as brothers. But fate brought them to far different ends. In contrast to Eugene O’Neill’s brothers in Beyond the Horizon, the adventurous one went afield while the less robust one stayed home and ran the family business. Col. A. P. won high respect for his courage and fairness with the Indians, but died in the western wilderness amidst financial ruin. Pierre Jr., though hated by competitors for his unscrupulous dealings, made a fortune, becoming one of the richest men of his day.

But they were not the only sons of Pierre Chouteau who were active on the western frontier. Pierre’s third son, Paul Liguest—also by Pelagie Kiersereau—became a fur trader in the wilds of Kansas at the age of fifteen, an Indian agent for the Osages, and a government emissary to the tribes of Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

Pierre’s half brothers François, Cyprien, and Frederick, born of Brigitte Saucier, were also active Indian traders and pioneers in presettlement Kansas. Their full brother Pharamond worked for Auguste Pierre at Fort Gibson, Indian Territory, and served briefly as Creek Indian agent before his untimely death there at age twenty-five. Even Pierre’s daughter Pelagie wedded into fur-trade fame with her marriage to Bartholomew Berthold, whose name is remembered by Fort Berthold, North Dakota.

As is the case with most historical studies, this book is much indebted to other historians and scholars. Though this work presents additional material and perspective on the Chouteau family, it draws upon the historical resources and information provided by those predecessors who have researched and studied the Chouteau family and the era of early American history in which the Creole traders so fully participated. Principal among these writers was the illustrious historian and Chouteau family descendant John Francis McDermott.

McDermott left behind not only a body of published literature on the Chouteaus and their St. Louis environs but also his most useful collection of research material. This latter is held by the Lovejoy Library University Archives, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. The McDermott Collection was made available through the willing and generous assistance of archivist/specialist Amanda Bahr Evola and Steve Kerber.

The numerous writings of historians William E. Foley and C. David Rice are vital contributions to the history of the Chouteau family. The translation and presentation of the letters of François and Berenice Chouteau by Dorothy Brandt Marra, translator Marie-Laure Dionne Pal, and editor David Boutrous were invaluable. Shirley Christian’s well-presented study of the Chouteaus is both comprehensive and thorough.

Each of these scholars has drawn heavily on the extensive holdings of the Missouri Historical Society Archives at St. Louis. This writer was assisted there by Chris Gordon and Dennis Northcott. A large body of MHS material—The Papers of the St. Louis Fur Trade—is available to researchers on microfilm.

For this and other research material, this book is also indebted to the National Archives in Washington, the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma, the Archives and Manuscript Division of the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the Interlibrary Loan Department and Archives of the University of Central Oklahoma. Of particular use among the latter’s holdings are the Western American microfilm series and early-day newspaper collections.

As ever, I wish to acknowledge the dedicated editorial help of my wife, Patricia Corbell Hoig.

CHAPTER 1

THRESHOLD TO AN EMPIRE

IN THE YEAR 1763, the Mississippi River marked the eastern shore of a half continent that was, despite Spanish inroads into the Southwest, little known to the outside world. The only settlements of note between that great river and the Pacific Ocean were Santa Fe, New Mexico, founded c. 1610; El Paso, Texas, 1659; Natchitoches, Louisiana, 1714; and San Antonio, Texas, 1718. Locations now known as San Diego and Los Angeles on the far-off Pacific Coast of New Spain were still Indian villages.

Between the river and the ocean stretched a vast, mysterious landscape of nameless streams, sparkling lakes, unbounded prairies, virgin forests, majestic mountains, defiant deserts, and bastions of badlands. This pristine empire that is today’s American West was inhabited by a multitude of diverse-speaking Native tribes, whom Christopher Columbus in a monumental error of geography had caused to be misidentified collectively as Indians.

Two centuries prior to the birth of St. Louis, the Spanish conquistadors had marched north from present Mexico to explore the Southwest, Far West, and mid-Plains of North America. In the main they searched for gold and silver, but their principal achievements beyond discoveries of new lands were made by Franciscan friars who sought to introduce Christianity to the Native tribes. The French pushed westward from the Mississippi Valley and Canada to claim territory for the crowns of Louis XIV and Louis XV. As early as 1579, English sea explorer Sir Francis Drake left a brass plate on the north shore of San Francisco Bay claiming the land for the British crown.

These early visitations first opened the windows of world awareness to the lands beyond the Mississippi, but they had little permanency. During the late eighteenth century, French and English frontiersmen began pushing forth from settlements along the Mississippi to reap a different source of wealth—the furs offered by the region’s abundance of animal life. Independent hunters and trappers worked their way up the southeast-wardly flowing rivers, making social contact with the many Native tribes and unlocking the mysteries of a beautiful and spacious land. From this sprang the vigorous, colorful, but often unprincipled and intrinsically brutal fur trade of the American West.

Frenchman Celeron de Bienville had established a village at the mouth of the Mississippi River as early as 1718. He named it New Orleans. Here evolved an unorthodox French Creole family known to history as the Chouteaus.

This family would feature energetic, adventurous men destined to play significant roles in the advance of the United States and Euro-American civilization westward from the Mississippi River. In seeking their own personal fortunes, the Chouteau family would achieve far more than mere personal wealth. Though driven primarily by enterprise, these merchants of the fur trade were nonetheless men who dared to forge beyond the comforts of hearth and home to endure the privations and the dangers of the frontier. They and their numerous kith and kin were among the avant-garde who paved the way for commercial exploitation, and exploration, of the American West.

In a twist of fate, the family’s namesake proved to be a man of small consequence, while the rise to fame of the Chouteau name is traced to another man, whose resourcefulness and daring set the family’s course. René Auguste Chouteau had migrated from France to New Orleans, where he operated a tavern and inn. There he married Marie Thérèse Bourgeois. Born in 1733, she was still a child when her father died. While her early life is far from clear, it is believed that Marie and her three siblings were raised by her mother and stepfather.

It is said that as a young girl, she received her schooling in a New Orleans convent. Marie was only fifteen years of age when she married René Chouteau, then twenty-five. To them a son, Auguste, was born in New Orleans on a disputed date—either September 7, 1749, or September 26, 1750.¹ René’s harsh mistreatment of his young wife caused her to flee back to the convent. Sometime after 1752, René Chouteau returned to France, deserting Marie and Auguste.²

Little is known of Marie Thérèse’s life for the six years following René’s abandonment. She emerges into record again in 1758 when she gave birth to a second male child, Jean Pierre. This son was sired out of wedlock by Pierre de Laclède Liguest (known commonly and historically as Laclède), with whom she had joined in cohabitation. The two would also produce three girls, Marie Pelagie in 1760, Marie Louise in 1762, and Victoire in 1764. Indications are that Marie Thérèse evolved from girlhood into a stoutly determined woman with considerable fortitude, resourcefulness, and intensity of family pride, all of which she passed on to her two sons.

Laclède, a graduate of France’s University of Toulouse, had arrived in New Orleans in 1755 with credentials from the court of France and, supported by an inheritance, took up the life of a planter. Marie was prevented from divorcing the absent Chouteau by her Catholic faith, as well as by New Orleans statutes. Thus she and Laclède never married, though they lived together as man and wife.³

Laclède stood five foot eleven and possessed a dark olive complexion, broad forehead, prominent nose, and black, expressive eyes. The Frenchman proved himself to be a resolute man of courage and enterprise, as well as loving and kind to both Marie and his informally adopted stepson, Auguste. Unusually, the four children produced by Laclède and Marie, as well as their descendants, all came to bear the surname, not of Laclède Liguest, but of Marie’s estranged but still legal husband, René Chouteau.⁴

At the time of Laclède’s arrival in America, the French and English were locked in the armed struggle that came to be known as the French and Indian War. Becoming more inspired by the French cause in the war than in planting, he joined the French army, eventually becoming an officer on the staff of Col. Gilbert Antoine de Maxent. With the French losing badly by 1762, Laclède retired to New Orleans to look for new opportunities to support Marie and his family of five. When Maxent secured from Spain the exclusive right of trade with the Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River, Laclède joined him and eagerly began organizing an expedition to carry out that mission. His plan was to advance well up the Mississippi and establish a settlement from which he could conduct trade with the Indian tribes. In doing so, he committed himself to the proposition of constructing and operating one of the first franchised trading operations in the barely explored wilderness of the Mississippi Valley.⁵

Accordingly, in August 1763 Laclède set about loading his keelboats with trade merchandise, camp goods, equipment, and supplies. At the same time, he recruited a company of boatmen and hunters who were willing to participate in the daunting venture. It would be a very long, very difficult, and very dangerous undertaking.

The seven-hundred-mile, three-month voyage by keelboat of Pierre de Laclède Liguest, his thirty engagés, and fifteen-year-old Auguste Chouteau up the Mississippi River from New Orleans in the fall of 1763 was nothing less than daring. The powerful river itself, flowing almost totally through raw wilderness, presented a potent, ever present peril. Anyone who fell overboard would almost surely be drowned and swept away to a watery grave by the merciless current.

Keelboats of that day offered few amenities. They featured a cargo box at the center, often windowless, topped by a mast pole and surrounded by a narrow deck with low sides, while aft the long rudder stem reached upward to the steersman atop the box. When the wind was southerly, the boats employed sail—though more often, cordelling was required, with men ashore straining at a rope hawser to tug the boat forward. Occasionally, the crew made use of oars or poles to maneuver the boat around snags and other impediments. At best, the vessel averaged only seven or eight miles per day. The steamboat was yet to be invented.

The river voyage saw the beginnings of the Mississippi River keelboatmen, thirty or more strong, who proclaimed themselves to be half horse and half alligator. They trudged along the stream’s erratic bank, sometimes on shore and sometimes through brush-clogged, snake-infested swampland and entangled riverside drift, at times engulfed in swarms of mosquitoes, struggling at the rope hawser to tow the craft upstream.

But the river was not the only peril; the threat of an attack by Indians threw a pall over the camps they made ashore. All knew: one of the bloodiest massacres within North America had occurred at the river port of Natchez, Mississippi, in 1729 when the Natchez Indians revolted. The French still held at Natchez, but the only other military post existing along the river below the Missouri was Fort de Chartres. This limestone rampart stood atop a bluff along the river’s east bank, far to the north in the Illinois country. But even now, these forts were being readied for British forces as agreed upon by the Treaty of Paris that had ended the American French and Indian War.

Though no account of Laclède’s voyage exists, it is quite likely that his party rested and refitted at Natchez. This French fort on the river’s east bank had been first occupied in 1716. When Laclède and his men arrived, the post was even then preparing for British occupancy. Beyond Natchez there was no Memphis yet, nor even a United States. Though England now possessed territory westward to the Mississippi, traders from its colonies along the coast of North America had just begun to arrive among the Indian tribes beyond the Appalachians.

Laclède was determined and steadfast in his plan. He carried a Spanish license giving his company—Maxent, Laclède and Company—the sole right to conduct trade with the Indian nations located west of the Mississippi River and along the Missouri River for a period of eight years.⁶ To accomplish this, he intended to find a choice place along the Mississippi and establish a settlement and fur-trading post from which he could conduct his trade. He had already chosen a name. He would call the new city St. Louis in honor of Spain’s King Louis XIV.⁷

The first fledgling river port above Natchez was Kaskaskia, a French settlement located on the east bank of the river near present Chester, Illinois. A short distance above, the town of Ste. Geneviève, founded twenty-nine years earlier by Canadian Frenchmen, overlooked the river’s west bank.

Laclède hoped to store his trade goods there while he searched for a permanent location, but Ste. Geneviève’s small clutter of rude buildings offered little warehousing accommodations. He was forced to move on north to Fort de Chartres, a stone rampart erected on the east bank of the river by the French in 1720.

Upon his arrival at Fort de Chartres in December, Laclède discovered that the French garrison was making ready to surrender the post, though the English forces had not arrived to raise the British Union Jack. The fort commander was gracious, and Laclède was permitted to unload and store his goods while he and a few men scouted on northward up the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Missouri. From there, he turned his boat back downstream some twenty miles to a location on the west bank he had favored when passing. The men disembarked and walked the forested site, all being very pleased with it. Laclède ordered some of the tree trunks blazed. Later he took aside the fourteen-year-old Auguste, who served as his clerk. The boy’s intelligence, energy, and exceptional maturity had won his confidence. Auguste later recalled that Laclède told him: You will come here as soon as navigation opens, and will cause this place to be cleared, in order to form our settlement after the plan I shall give you.⁸

The party returned to Fort de Chartres, and when ice on the river had broken enough to permit boats to pass, Laclède fitted out a boat with thirty men. Placing young Auguste in charge, he said:

You will proceed and land at the place where we marked the trees; you will commence to have the place cleared, and build a large shed to contain the provisions and the tools and some small cabins, to lodge the men. I give you two men on whom you can depend, who will aid you very much; I will rejoin you before long.⁹

The party returned to Fort de Chartres, resting there and waiting for the ice on the Mississippi to begin breaking, which it did during February 1764. Eager to get started, Laclède sent Auguste with the men he had brought from New Orleans, some from the fort and a few from Ste. Geneviève. Then, as they passed by the small French town of Cahokia (then called Notre Dame des Kahokias), they were joined by a few families who wished to make homes at the new site.¹⁰

The party reached the selected place on March 14, 1764, and on the following morning began their work with great enthusiasm—clearing away brush, felling trees, and selecting building sites. As ordered, the men erected a storage shed and several small structures for shelter.¹¹

Laclède arrived at the site in early April, drew up a plan for the settlement, and chose the place he wanted his house built. This done, he pronounced that the settlement would be named St. Louis in honor of Louis XV and ordered Auguste to follow the plan to the best of his ability. Laclède then returned to Fort de Chartres to remove his goods before the British arrived.

Auguste and his men resumed their work of clearing the land and marking out streets around a center marketplace. The French settlers from Cahokia began selecting lots and erecting cabins with walls constructed of upright logs set in the ground. This activity was interrupted by the appearance of a large body of Missouri Indians—men, women, and children, including some 150 warriors. Some of the Cahokia people fled back to their homes in fear.

The Indians were friendly, however. Still, they were hungry, and their demands for food and pilfering of the workmen’s tools became bothersome. When the chief insisted that his people wished to form a village around the house being built for Laclède, Auguste decided he should send for the Frenchman. Laclède arrived from Fort de Chartres and met with the Indians. They told him that they were very poor and had come there much like the ducks and bustards, birds who sought open water in order to rest and replenish themselves. Laclède answered:

I will say that if you followed the example of the ducks and bustards in settling yourselves, you followed bad guides, who have no foresight; because if they had any they would not have put themselves into open water, so that the eagles and birds of prey could discover them easily, which would never happen of them if they were in a woody place covered with brush . . . I warn you as a good Father that there are six or seven hundred warriors at Fort de Chartres who are there to make war against the English . . . if they learn that you are here, beyond the least doubt, they will come to destroy you.¹²

By this the Missouris were persuaded that they would do well to return to their ancient homeland. Laclède issued them food provisions along with gunpowder, balls, and knives with which they could hunt and defend themselves. Before they departed, however, Auguste enterprisingly made use of them. He hired the Indian women and children to excavate a cellar for Laclède’s trading house, they doing so by carrying the removed soil off in baskets and on wood platters atop their heads. Auguste rewarded them with vermillion and verdigris dyes, and awls to punch holes in their leather.¹³

Madame Chouteau and her children had not accompanied the expedition. Baptismal records at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans show that the fourth child of Marie and Laclède, Victoire, was baptized there on May 9, 1764.¹⁴ She, five-year-old Jean Pierre, four-year-old Marie Pelagie, and two-year-old Marie Louise arrived at infant St. Louis the following September. The family resided in the trading house for a time. When Spanish officials arrived, Laclède leased the building to them and moved the family into a new stone building he had erected fronting the river. Eventually, a masonry wall featuring portholes for small cannon and guard towers to provide protection from Indian attack would be constructed around the house. Madame Chouteau lived in the residence, known as the Chouteau Mansion, until her death on August 14, 1814, at the age of eighty-one—as did Auguste Chouteau until his death at age seventy-five in 1825.¹⁵

Much credit goes to Laclède for his development of the fur trade along the river. Within a year of the founding of St. Louis, an English Indian agent noted Laclède’s commercial impact, telling the London office of a Frenchman who carries on a vast Extensive Trade, and is acquiring a great influence over all the Indian Nations. Still another Englishman of that time observed that Laclède had cornered the entire trade of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers north to Lake Michigan.¹⁶

But St. Louis was still a struggling infant community, far flung from centers of support. At a St. Louis celebration in 1847, a banquet orator, speaking for an aging Pierre Chouteau, told how trade in the early years of the city had been

. . . limited to a few trips with a keelboat to New Orleans, and a few trips to the north, up the Illinois river, and by a portage from there to Michigan and up to Mackinaw. At New Orleans the groceries necessary for the inhabitants of the colony were purchased, and there they sold the shaved deer skins. At Mackinaw, they purchased goods needed for the Indian trade.¹⁷

At the start, Laclède had visualized a settlement which might become hereafter one of the finest cities of America.¹⁸ In his report on Louisiana in 1804, Maj. Amos Stoddard, whom Jefferson had sent to manage the transfer of Louisiana from France to the United States, observed that the city had been conceived in a position where the trade of the Missouri, Mississippi, and the other rivers, was most likely to center; and since that period, St. Louis has been the emporium of trade in upper Louisiana.¹⁹ Indeed, the location emerged not only as a major trade metropolis but as a dominant midcontinent passageway to the American West.²⁰

By their bold move up the Mississippi and establishment of a base of operations, Laclède and the Chouteaus set the fur trade of western America in motion. The garnering and marketing of furs and skins in North America had first blossomed under Canadian Frenchmen at Hudson Bay around 1630 and expanded into the Great Lakes and upper Mississippi River country of Wisconsin and Minnesota under the Hudson’s Bay Company. Laclède had first established the industry at St. Louis, but Auguste and Pierre Chouteau advanced its development.

It was the day of furs. With printed textiles not yet developed, there was a great demand in the eastern United States and Europe for animal furs as coats, robes, stoles, hats, along with other uses. The American West was nothing less than a gigantic emporium filled with an endless supply of wildlife whose hides offered a trapper or hunter opportunity for income. For a trader-wholesaler who could warehouse the products and deliver them to market, there was money to be made.

The French Creoles (that is, the American-born Frenchmen who developed their own special culture and spoke a mixture of French and corrupted English) of the Mississippi Valley were among the first to ply the rivers and forests of western North America. They searched out the first trails through uncharted wilderness, locating the habitats of animal life; trapping the beaver, muskrat, and other small prey; hunting the deer, bear, wolves and larger animals; skinning and preparing the pelts and hides; and transporting them downriver by pirogue or keelboat, or overland by horse to a frontier trader’s post.

Always there were the hardships and challenges presented by the raw environment and the potential danger of Indian attack. But for many Creoles there was comfort in the solitude and beauty of the wilderness, warmth and pleasures to be found in the Indian lodges, and a rebellious satisfaction in being removed from the Eastern presence that came to reign in St. Louis.

They [the St. Louis Creoles] were hunter-trappers who went into the wilderness for pelts. Most of these engagés came down-river to St. Louis in the fall and set out again with the fur company boats in the spring. But some of the mountain men rarely came nearer civilization than the forts which the Chouteaus and Lisa built far up the Missouri, or the big rendezvous held once a year in the Indian country. . . .

St. Louis all Yankee . . . countree belong to Yankee doodle and we have freedom, bidam, wis’ de constable and de jury, and tax . . . I stay way hunt and nevare come back.²¹

At other times, the fur trader-entrepreneur would arrive at an Indian camp, win himself a friendly welcome with gifts, and barter for furs with Native hunters. He offered trinkets, foodstuff, weaponry, and other manufactured products the tribesman could not obtain otherwise. Far more than the Englishmen or the Spaniards who came early to America, the Frenchmen melded into Indian culture and learned the tribal ways and customs. Often they intermarried within the tribe.

Such men filled the ranks of the fur trade. They were the engagés who performed whatever labors were assigned them, among them being the voyageur boatmen who muscled the fur-laden canoes and barges up and down the rushing streams; the coureurs de bois message carriers who, always daringly, served the needs of communication in the wilds; and the mangeurs de lard who cooked and kept the field camps. As the fur trade grew, it embodied a large corps of trappers, hunters, traders, clerks, carpenters, blacksmiths, boat builders, interpreters, and others who performed requisite assignments under the direction of bourgeois managers according to the wishes of corporate entrepreneurs, most of whom maintained offices in St. Louis.²²

Creoles were involved in exploring much of the vast lands of western America.²³ The ranks of the early fur men abounded with names such as Robidoux, Leroux, Provost, Lajeunesse, Archambault, Laramee, St. Vrain, Chatillon, De Lisle, Bissonette, Philibert, Larpenteur, Fontenelle, Sanguinette, Valle, Clermont, Papin, Godin, and a host of others.²⁴

While not explorers by purpose, the Chouteaus were dominant participants in the westward movement. Auguste and Pierre both possessed the demeanor and readiness to associate with tribal leaders as well as political heads of state. These attributes served them well in their profession as fur merchants, as well as in their participation in local, regional, and national affairs.

Through their apprentice years in the fur trade, the Chouteau half brothers filled many of the primary fur-trade roles themselves, traveling the rivers, meeting and bartering for furs with the Indians, and transporting them to their St. Louis warehouse. Additionally, they taught themselves the formal bookkeeping and written communication skills (primarily in French) so necessary to their business, conducting trade with the outside world even as they trod the precarious paths of political favor and market demands.

Figure 1.1: Fort Union, North Dakota, by Karl Bodmer. Used by permission, State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia.

In 1777, the Spanish government granted Auguste and sixteen other traders sole permission to trade among the Indians. Auguste was licensed to conduct operations with the Grand Osages, an earlier split of the Osage people having created the Grand (or Great or Big) Osage and the Little Osage divisions. The value of Auguste’s merchandise was listed at a sizable 10,000 librae of deerskins. In the trade of the frontier, deerskins often served as the medium for business transactions.²⁵

For the two Chouteaus and their brood of male offspring, the new settlement would serve as a base from which the