Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

L A C L E D E ’ S L A S T I N G L E G A C I E S
He was an entrepreneur and an explorer who made business the priority of St. Louis
He co-founded the Chouteau Dynasty that remained influential for many generations
He commanded the expedition that founded St. Louis
He selected an incomparably strategic town site, significant for commerce ever since
He gave his town a name of fame, which has never changed
He laid out a grid system of streets considered “modern” in 1764
He linked the destinies of New Orleans and St. Louis as river capitals
He established a very successful, long-term fur trade for economic stability
He was a master of Indian diplomacy, achieving a key and long-lasting Osage alliance
He created a tolerant, enlightened “Indian Capital” for multi-tribal diplomacy
He helped keep the British out of the trans-Mississippi West
He assisted Spanish officials, earning their trust by speaking their language
He recruited the perfect settlers for a multicultural trading town
He promoted unprecedented freedoms and self-governance among residents
He recruited diverse immigrants, while making St. Louis a “refuge of all the French”
He promoted French culture, civility, literacy, and affluent consumerism
He made St. Louis a bookish, intellectual frontier city of great libraries and avid readers
He invested a fortune in city buildings, amenities, merchandise, and loans to residents
He encouraged confidence by his steady, consistent, and rational decision-making
Walnut Armoire made in St. Louis,
c. 1765 to 1790, by Jean Baptiste Ortes
(from Laclede’s hometown of Bedous).
PHOTOGRAPH BY CARY HORTON; COURTESY OF
THE MISSOURI HISTORY MUSEUM, ST. LOUIS
(OBJ:1905 013 0001).
The highly successful boom town of buckskins
disproved the Jeffersonians’ belief that
“primitive” Indian hunting “only afforded a precarious
subsistence” and could never support
a sophisticated society. The alliance between
astute merchants and accomplished Indian
allies had made St. Louis the most prosperous,
peaceful frontier city in America long before the
Louisiana Purchase. That “center of manners,
urbanity, and elegance” supported full employment
and even cultivated “the fine arts,” as
a Parisian intellectual noted. The affluence of
St. Louis’s consumer society in the last decade of
the eighteenth century challenged the frontier
stereotypes of crude cabins, deficient diets,
and scarce schooling, as increasing numbers of
distinguished Europeans, with excellent educations,
expensive tastes, and enormous talents,
moved to that remote little center of “refinement
and fashion” funded by mammal skins.
Increasing numbers of Anglo-American
backwoodsmen also moved near the St. Louis
area in the late 1700s, including Daniel Boone
and his extended family. They came from a
violent trans-Appalachian frontier that contradicted
the tolerant, Indian-friendly conduct of
St. Louisans. Elite French families feared
“brawling” Kentuckians, as “too Numerous
[and] too Lawless…ever to be restrained”—
loathing that “plague of locusts” determined
to “gain all the vast continent occupied by the
Indians.” But Anglo-Americans have always
loved their frontier fighters. A hero-worshipping
writer in 1829 characterized Boone as
one of the prominent “riflemen of the west,
the daring sons of the forest, to whom danger
was sport, hardship was pastime, death was
nothing, and glory everything.” Such mythmaking
has never died. Historian R. Douglas
Hurt recently wrote that Boone “epitomized
the frontiersman” as “an excellent hunter
and trapper,” who led western pioneers to
“a dangerous frontier” and protected them
with “his rifle, courage, and leadership.”
But killing Indians was a cruel and uncreative
solution to intercultural conflicts, compared
to St. Louis’s alternative frontier policies
that generated lucrative exports in partnership
with Indians, while never profiting from
genocide. Laclede and other Catholic businessmen
demonstrated all of the capitalistic
achievements erroneously believed to be
exclusive to the “Protestant Ethic.” They also
shared the stereotypical “frontier traits” of
Anglo-Americans—self-reliance, individualism,
and personal freedom—without slaughtering
their native neighbors. Rather than venerating
buckskin-wearing baby-killers of the backwoods
as national heroes, citizens in today’s
complex and increasingly dangerous multicultural
world could learn some lessons
from Laclede. He may have been the ideal
frontiersman, because he promoted interethnic
commerce while rejecting blood-thirsty
prejudices that destroyed Indians and dispossessed
them of their homelands. That talented,
tolerant French explorer was more insightful,
progressive, and compassionate than the
“American heroes” who practiced “wilderness
savagery” from sea to sea. While Americans
then and now have typically ranked the success
of our society based on its victories, colonial
French St. Louisans took a more humane
approach and judged a society by its victims.
While Boone’s brawn epitomized the heritage
of rural Missouri, Laclede’s brain created
a civilized, non-violent, and economically
advanced city in his century that remains a
marvel of creativity and compassion to this day.
H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S
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