Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

Lush “Garden of Bearn” landscape near
Bedous, 2011.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PHOTOGRAPHER IAN STOKES
OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM.
H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S
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Generations of Lacledes had enough property
to qualify as landed gentry or even
aristocrats, but they achieved greater local
distinction as industrious and talented public
servants, scholars, physicians, lawyers, merchants,
and priests. Laclede’s paternal grandfather
was a merchant and royal officeholder
under Louis XIV, who was respected for his
personal integrity and public generosity.
Pierre’s uncle, Jean Joseph Laclede, was a
celebrated author and close friend of Voltaire,
the famous philosopher. And Pierre’s older
brother, Jean (heir to the family fortune) was
an attorney and pioneering botanist, named
by King Louis XV as the “Master of Waters
and Forests in Bearn.”
The Lacledes of Bedous lived in a fertile
farming region known as the “garden of
Bearn,” where numerous conical mounds and
surrounding mountains made the landscape
distinctive. It was a region as productive as
it was picturesque, where the main food
crop was maize, farmed by women as in
Native America. Pierre grew up eating
“Indian corn” and learned how his family’s
water mill operated long before he owned
one in St. Louis. Most importantly, Laclede
lived along rivers his entire life and feared
devastating floods in deep mountain gorges
before he built St. Louis on a limestone ledge
high above the “American Nile.” His boyhood
also may have influenced his insistence on
living in the first stone home built in St. Louis,
then very rare in that region, because it was
the traditional housing material for all classes
in Bearn.
Six other small villages within a few miles
of Bedous offered additional lessons for a
curious boy. In Accous, the popular pastoral
poet, Cyprien Despourrins, wrote verses
during Laclede’s lifetime that praised poor
shepherds who valued personal pride above
wealth. In Osse, Calvinism had flourished
since the 1500s, and the Catholic Lacledes
were notably tolerant in respecting and
protecting those Protestants during frequent
religious wars. Across the river from Bedous,
the Laclede family forest supplied masts
for the French Navy. Jean-Jacques Blaise
d’Abbadie, a Bearnais nobleman and naval
official, met young Pierre in the 1740s when
he came to select the trees he needed. They
would meet again—in 1763 New Orleans—
when d’Abbadie, as the new Director-General
of Louisiana, confirmed Laclede’s fur trading
monopoly that helped get St. Louis started.