Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

Meeting the Cajaux, June 8, 1804,
painting by Michael Haynes
(www.mhaynesart.com) and used with
permission. As Lewis and Clark headed up
the Missouri River, they passed several
French fur convoys on their way to St. Louis
in a variety of vessels, including the lashed
together canoes seen here and another boat
paddled by an Indian woman—all loaded
with animal skins from a thousand
miles away.
H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S
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were accomplished by Virginians to benefit
Virginia, which claimed sea-to-sea sovereignty
via royal English charters to the Jamestown
founders. Two centuries of westward expansion
followed, as land-hungry Virginia frontiersmen
invaded Indian homelands and created terrortories
of terrible atrocities to procure the
fresh, fertile lands needed to grow their soildestroying
tobacco. By 1774, Spanish Louisiana
was already called the “Western Parts of
Virginia,” and after George Rogers Clark’s
invasion of British Illinois four years later,
there was a “Fort Jefferson” on the Ohio River
and a Randolph County (named for the family
of Jefferson’s mother) across from St. Louis.
Despite old animosities and continuing
misgivings, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau were
determined to remain rich and relevant by
demonstrating their usefulness to President
Jefferson and his fellow Virginia “Sovereigns
of the Country” who administered St. Louis.
By 1803, Virginia was being called a “new
Rome.” It was already the largest state in area
(117,000 square miles) and population, with
514,000 whites and 346,000 black slaves,
and its leading aristocratic revolutionaries
were on their way to monopolizing the U.S.
presidency for 32 of the first 36 years of the
new nation.
Accepting the reality that numerical
superiority, military supremacy, and commercial
indispensability had shifted from the Osages
to the Americans, Laclede’s heirs volunteered
their services as city leaders, political advisors,
multilingual diplomats, treaty negotiators,
and liaisons with other French residents.
The potential to exert greater influence on
a grander scale convinced the pragmatic
capitalist, Auguste Chouteau, to write his
famous “Narrative of the Founding of
St. Louis” in 1804—informing U.S. officials
about the indispensable role his founding
family should continue to play. According to
historian Jay Gitlin, those “French founders
are still celebrated today,” because they
literally “earned a place in the city they had
created,” allowing St. Louis to avoid “the
marginalization that was the fate of other
non-Anglo communities” taken over by the
United States.