Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

Map of French Illinois settlements in the
mid-1760s by British military surveyor/
cartographer Thomas Hutchins; from a
1904 facsimile of his 1778 book in the
author’s collection.
H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S
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a business partner of Colonel Gilbert Antoine
de St. Maxent, his commander in the Louisiana
Militia. Maxent was a leading merchant and
the government’s supplier of diplomatic
gifts to dozens of allied native nations.
He probably introduced Laclede to his Conti
Street neighbor—Marie Thérèse Bourgeois
Chouteau—whose husband had abandoned
her and their young son, Auguste. Under the
laws of Catholic France, she could neither
divorce an absent husband nor remarry until
his death. Considering herself “widowed,”
she began a twenty-year liaison with Laclede
that produced four children, all baptized with
the Chouteau name for propriety’s sake.
After the fall of Quebec and the surrender
of Montreal, by 1760 New Orleans was
France’s last unconquered capital in mainland
North America. Officials there knew that
Great Britain was certain to win the French
and Indian War and control all lands east
of the Mississippi River—including several
French Illinois villages and the administrative
capital at Fort de Chartres. Count Kerlérec,
the Governor-General of Louisiana, had built
that huge fortress and installed his brotherin-law,
Major Pierre-Joseph Neyon de Villiers
as Commandant of Illinois. Those two military
heroes, who wore the coveted medal of
the Royal and Military Order of Saint Louis,
along with leading New Orleans merchants
and Director-General d’Abbadie, planned to
build a new French regional capital on
the west bank of the Mississippi to replace
Fort de Chartres. The company of Maxent and
Laclede received an official six-year monopoly
on the furs of the Upper Mississippi and
Missouri River valleys for privately funding
several public projects at the new settlement.
With a quarter share in that daring venture
1,200 miles upriver, Laclede promoted Indian
trade alliances to obtain the furs that would
alleviate an economic depression in New
Orleans; provided a new home for the
Illinois French who refused to live under
a military occupation by British Protestants;
and protected the trans-Mississippi West
from English invasion.
Laclede headed upriver from New Orleans
on August 10, 1763, with his teenaged
stepson, Auguste Chouteau, while pro-French
Indians were still battling British troops in
Pontiac’s War. The partnership of the affluent,
intellectual 34-year-old European and the
poor, barely-educated 14-year-old Louisiana
Creole represented a complementary convergence
of different backgrounds and varying
generations that provided unbroken continuity
in the successful development of St. Louis until
Chouteau died sixty-five years later! Those
entrepreneurs did not take other residents of
New Orleans with them as potential settlers,
since the ideal founding families of St. Louis
already lived in Illinois—veteran Canadians