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Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

An Illustrated history of St. Louis, Missouri, paired with profiles of local companies and organizations that make the city great.

An Illustrated history of St. Louis, Missouri, paired with profiles of local companies and organizations that make the city great.

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Detail from the John Mitchell Map of 1755,<br />

one of several versions in the Library of<br />

Congress; pictorial editing of a reprint in the<br />

author’s collection. That British cartographer<br />

anticipated the Paris treaties of 1763, 1783,<br />

and 1803 in which “Greater Virginia”<br />

expanded aggressively westward into<br />

French and Spanish territory according to<br />

its early seventeenth-century sea-to-sea<br />

royal charters.<br />

“The time is not far distant…when the uncultivated wilds of the interior part of the continent,<br />

which is now only inhabited by the tawny sons of the forest, …will be exchanged for…<br />

agriculture…[and] turn those sterile wildernesses into rich, cultivated…fields.”<br />

–American William Fisher, 1812<br />

C H A P T E R 2<br />

EXPLORING ST. LOUIS AS<br />

CAPITAL OF THE AMERICAN WEST<br />

On the evening of August 6, 1803, <strong>St</strong>. <strong>Louis</strong>ans received sudden and shocking news when an<br />

American courier arrived from Vincennes and delivered a dispatch to Carlos Dehault Delassus,<br />

the last Spanish lieutenant governor of Upper <strong>Louis</strong>iana. It was a note from General William<br />

Henry Harrison, the Virginia-born governor of the Indiana Territory, announcing “the entire<br />

cession of <strong>New</strong> Orleans and the whole of <strong>Louis</strong>iana to the United <strong>St</strong>ates.” As darkness descended<br />

on that distressful evening, the Chouteau clan feared that their extensive fortune and expansive<br />

family had reached the twilight of their dominance under Bourbon administrators.<br />

H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S<br />

32

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