Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

The expulsion of all Indians by 1830 from
the new State of Missouri was represented
in this illustration from Ballou’s Pictorial
newspaper of Boston on July 28, 1855.
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
to St. Louis. In 1807, Clark and Lewis’s
brother became partners with Manual Lisa,
Pierre Chouteau, Sr., and other investors, in
the new “St. Louis Missouri Fur Company.”
Governor Lewis procured a $7,000 federal
grant to fund one upriver trapping
expedition, and that conflict of interest in
using his public office to enhance the private
profits of friends would ultimately doom
the Osages.
Even though Osage furs were still
lucrative, deerskins could not compete with
beaver pelts in profitability. As both explorers
and administrators, Lewis and Clark made
the Osages expendable, because their
territory—“immense tracts of fine Country”
that were “much more fertile” than Virginia—
now had greater value than their trade.
The Osages were victims of their own
success in making French St. Louis a
profitable town that proved so appealing
to land-hungry Anglo-Americans. The
native allies of Laclede and Chouteau
generously shared their precious wisdom of
the West with President Jefferson’s fellow
Virginians, who used that knowledge to
undermine Osage hegemony and to diminish
their legacy.
Jefferson was determined to make the
United States the supreme power beyond
the Mississippi, but he could not risk
an immediate confrontation with the
H I S T O R I C S T . L O U I S
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