AUGUSTE PIERRE CHOUTEAU
Rene Auguste Chouteau (born September 7, 1749 in New Orleans; died February 24,
1829 in St. Louis) was a trader with Indians and an influential figure in early
St. Louis.
According to his grave marker in Bellefontaine and Calvary cemeteries, he is the
"Founder of St. Louis."
Chouteau established his fortune primarily through business dealings with Native
Americans -- particularly the Osage Nation.
While there is little question that Chouteau was an extremely influential
businessman who shaped St. Louis and Midwest, there is considerable question
about his early childhood and claims to founding St. Louis.
According to the story that is repeated in most histories of St. Louis, he was
born in New Orleans to Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau and René Auguste
Chouteau, Sr. According to the legend, the elder Chouteau abandoned Marie and
returned to Paris in the 1750s. Marie in turn took up with Pierre Laclede who
fathered more children with her including most notably Jean Pierre Chouteau.
In 1763 Laclede was the junior partner to Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent in the
Maxent, Laclede and Company contract for an exclusive license to trade with the
Native Americans on the west side of the Mississippi River. According to the
widely repeated story, Chouteau as a 13-year-old boy accompanied Laclede up the
Mississippi in November, dropping off his supplies at Fort de Chartres 45 miles
south of modern St. Louis before traveling on up to review possible building
sites for a trading post on a bluff overlooking the river.
According to the legend, in February or March 1764, Chouteau led a group of
settlers to St. Louis to begin building the trading post and community that
would become the city while Laclede remained at Fort de Chartres preparing to
bring his goods from the Fort. St. Louis immediately became a boom town for
French settlers on the east side of the river all the way to the Appalachian
Mountains after George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 declaring the
land was the Indian Reserve (1763) and that all settlers had to leave or get a
British permission to stay. The French settlers were not at the time that France
had secretly given St. Louis and the west side of the Mississippi to Spain in
the Treaty of Fontainebleau that was announced in late 1764.
Chouteau acted as "secretary" to Laclede and then took over the Laclede business
after Laclede's death in 1778.
Spain dissolved all the fur trading licenses when it finally took control of
Louisiana in 1769 and the partnership between Laclede and Maxent was dissolved
with Laclede buying Maxent out for St. Louis operations. During the next period
according to Spanish records Laclede was to be better known his agricultural
products (growing wheat and hemp) than for his now weakened fur trading business.
The first official mention in Spanish records of Auguste Chouteau in St. Louis
was in 1775 when Auguste received an official license to trade with the Osage.
Upon the death of Laclede, Auguste's brother Pierre was named executor of
Laclede's estate and gave to Maxent to repay debts.
Auguste in turn bought much of the property from Maxent.
Auguste purchased Laclède's gristmill (the only one in the region), a dam, lake
(known thereafter as Chouteau's Pond), and over eight hundred arpents of land
for two thousand livres.
In December 1780 following the Battle of St. Louis (the only battle west of the
Mississippi in the Revolutionary War), Chouteau was named a lieutenant in the
local militia and was charged with replacing the British had given the Native
Americans with gifts from the Spanish.
After St. Louis and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory changed hands
in 1803 from Spain to France to the United States, Chouteau continued his power.
Lewis and Clark reported meeting the Chouteaus and stayed for a time with Pierre.
In 1815 he was among the commissioners who as a result of the Treaty of Ghent
that ended the War of 1812 who were required to make formal peace treaties with
Native Americans. Officially the Treaties of Portage des Sioux were supposed to
assure the tribes that nothing had changed in their status from before the war.
However the commissioners were to slip in language "affirming" an 1808 Treaty of
St. Louis negotiated by his brother Pierre in which the Sac and Fox gave up a
swath of land stretching from the mouth of the Gasconade River in Missouri
through Illinois and Wisconsin including part of today's Chicago.
In 1787, he claimed eight slaves. Chouteau was a proponent of continuing the
region's slavery policies. In 1804 he and other wealthy St. Louisans petitioned
that the old French and Spanish slave codes be reinstituted. Congress responded
by implementing Virginia's relatively stringent slave code in the territory. Due
to the Missouri Compromise (and the lobbying of slavery supporters like Chouteau
and Thomas Hart Benton), Missouri entered the Union as a slave state in 1821.
Chouteau became leader of what in Missouri was called "the St. Louis Junto" of a
Franco-American elite. He was the political patron of Senator Thomas Hart Benton,
who built his early career championing the legal interests--especially land
claims--of well-to-do conservative French St. Louisans. In those roles Chouteau
opposed Missouri statehood, preferring continued military administration on the
old Spanish and territorial models, and he resisted incorporation of St. Louis
as a city and investing in civic improvements. His testimony in the 1820s land
claims dispute was part of opposition to setting aside town commons land for
support of public schools.
After the Civil War his story became important to St. Louis boosters. After the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, it linked St. Louis business history with
a romantic history of western exploration, and gave the city's upper classes a
myth with which to identify and promote major initiatives such as a 1914 charter
reform, when it was staged in a Pageant and Masque held in Forest Park to
promote civic unity. The story of Laclede and Chouteau supplied a major sequence
to one of the earliest cinematic depictions of an American city's history, "The
Spirit of St. Louis," filmed to promote a large bond issue election in 1923.
The legend has been challenged even by Chouteau descendants who have expressed
concern over besmirching the reputation of Marie.
Records at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans indicate that all the Chouteau
children were baptized there and indicated the elder Chouteau was the father.
Further records indicate that Laclede did not leave his inheritance to the
Chouteaus while the elder Chouteau did.
The legend says that Laclede and Marie had a common law marriage and that
Laclede signed away part of his property to them to protect them and maintain
the appearance that Marie was in a proper civil law relationship with the elder
Chouteau.
However, one 1790s account, published in translation, by a French officer
serving the Spaniards, Nicolas de Finiels, notes no founding role for Chouteau
and even goes as far as to say there was already a hamlet at the site of St.
Louis in 1763-64. The tale of Chouteau's role in the founding of St. Louis does
not appear in the historical introduction of the first St. Louis city directory
in 1820, and his name was not mentioned at all at the first celebration of the
town's past in 1847. A New Orleans militia census conducted after Laclede had
departed New Orleans shows him still at home with his mother and brothers.
The earliest St. Louis historian, Wilson Primm, dismissed the story. Auguste's
role in the founding is based on his own testimony in a land dispute in the 1820s,
and on an unsigned manuscript "Journal" attributed to him announced found by his
sole surviving son, Gabriel, in 1857.
The case for Chouteau's founding is largely based on a journal which his
youngest son Gabriel Chouteau discovered in 1857 -- 28 years after Chouteau's
death. According to Gabriel, Chouteau kept a Journal for 20 years during the
founding period. The journal was lost in a fire and Chouteau then rewrote a new
document.
The rewritten document, which was first given to the St. Louis Mercantile
Library Association but is now in possession of the University of Missouri-St.
Louis is widely quoted as legitimate. One of the most quoted passages deals with
the founding of St. Louis in which it is implied that it took nearly a month to
travel 45 miles from Fort des Chartes to St. Louis. Historians have said that
this must be an error and often say St. Louis was founded on Valentine's Day
rather than March 14 as stated in the journal.
Navigation being open in the early part of February, he fitted out a boat, in
which he put thirty men--nearly all mechanics--and he gave the charge of it to
Chouteau, and said to him: "You will proceed and land at the place where we
marked the trees; you will commence to have the place cleared, and build a large
shed to contain the provisions and the tools, and some small cabins, to lodge
the men. I give you two men on whom you can depend, who will aid you very much;
and I will rejoin you before long." I arrived at the place designated on the 14th
of March, and, on the morning of the next day, I put the men to work. They
commenced the shed, which was built in a short time, and the little cabins for
the men were built in the vicinity. In the early part of April, Laclede arrived
among us. He occupied himself with his settlement, fixed the place where he
wished to build his house, laid a plan of the village which we wished to found,
(and he named it Saint Louis, in honor of Louis XV, whose subject he expected to
remain, for a long time--he never imagined he was a subject of the King of Spain;)
and ordered me to follow the plan exactly, because he could not remain any
longer with us. He was obliged to proceed to Fort de Chartres, to remove the
goods that he had in the fort, before the arrival of the English, who were
expected every day to take possession of it. I followed, to the best of my
ability, his plan, and used the utmost diligence to accelerate the building of
the house.
Laclede died while returning up the Mississippi River and his body was buried
near the Arkansas River (his grave is not known now) and officially had no
children. Pierre Chouteau was named executor of his estate.
Marie Chouteau died in 1814 and was reportedly buried in Downtown St. Louis.
However when the Chouteau family remains (including Auguste) were moved from the
downtown cemetery to the Bellefontaine Cemetery her body could not be found. The
claim of "Founder of St. Louis" was added to Auguste's grave following the move.
Rene Auguste Chouteau (born September 7, 1749 in New Orleans; died February 24,
1829 in St. Louis) was a trader with Indians and an influential figure in early
St. Louis.
According to his grave marker in Bellefontaine and Calvary cemeteries, he is the
"Founder of St. Louis."
Chouteau established his fortune primarily through business dealings with Native
Americans -- particularly the Osage Nation.
While there is little question that Chouteau was an extremely influential
businessman who shaped St. Louis and Midwest, there is considerable question
about his early childhood and claims to founding St. Louis.
According to the story that is repeated in most histories of St. Louis, he was
born in New Orleans to Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau and René Auguste
Chouteau, Sr. According to the legend, the elder Chouteau abandoned Marie and
returned to Paris in the 1750s. Marie in turn took up with Pierre Laclede who
fathered more children with her including most notably Jean Pierre Chouteau.
In 1763 Laclede was the junior partner to Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent in the
Maxent, Laclede and Company contract for an exclusive license to trade with the
Native Americans on the west side of the Mississippi River. According to the
widely repeated story, Chouteau as a 13-year-old boy accompanied Laclede up the
Mississippi in November, dropping off his supplies at Fort de Chartres 45 miles
south of modern St. Louis before traveling on up to review possible building
sites for a trading post on a bluff overlooking the river.
According to the legend, in February or March 1764, Chouteau led a group of
settlers to St. Louis to begin building the trading post and community that
would become the city while Laclede remained at Fort de Chartres preparing to
bring his goods from the Fort. St. Louis immediately became a boom town for
French settlers on the east side of the river all the way to the Appalachian
Mountains after George III issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 declaring the
land was the Indian Reserve (1763) and that all settlers had to leave or get a
British permission to stay. The French settlers were not at the time that France
had secretly given St. Louis and the west side of the Mississippi to Spain in
the Treaty of Fontainebleau that was announced in late 1764.
Chouteau acted as "secretary" to Laclede and then took over the Laclede business
after Laclede's death in 1778.
Spain dissolved all the fur trading licenses when it finally took control of
Louisiana in 1769 and the partnership between Laclede and Maxent was dissolved
with Laclede buying Maxent out for St. Louis operations. During the next period
according to Spanish records Laclede was to be better known his agricultural
products (growing wheat and hemp) than for his now weakened fur trading business.
The first official mention in Spanish records of Auguste Chouteau in St. Louis
was in 1775 when Auguste received an official license to trade with the Osage.
Upon the death of Laclede, Auguste's brother Pierre was named executor of
Laclede's estate and gave to Maxent to repay debts.
Auguste in turn bought much of the property from Maxent.
Auguste purchased Laclède's gristmill (the only one in the region), a dam, lake
(known thereafter as Chouteau's Pond), and over eight hundred arpents of land
for two thousand livres.
In December 1780 following the Battle of St. Louis (the only battle west of the
Mississippi in the Revolutionary War), Chouteau was named a lieutenant in the
local militia and was charged with replacing the British had given the Native
Americans with gifts from the Spanish.
After St. Louis and the rest of the Louisiana Purchase territory changed hands
in 1803 from Spain to France to the United States, Chouteau continued his power.
Lewis and Clark reported meeting the Chouteaus and stayed for a time with Pierre.
In 1815 he was among the commissioners who as a result of the Treaty of Ghent
that ended the War of 1812 who were required to make formal peace treaties with
Native Americans. Officially the Treaties of Portage des Sioux were supposed to
assure the tribes that nothing had changed in their status from before the war.
However the commissioners were to slip in language "affirming" an 1808 Treaty of
St. Louis negotiated by his brother Pierre in which the Sac and Fox gave up a
swath of land stretching from the mouth of the Gasconade River in Missouri
through Illinois and Wisconsin including part of today's Chicago.
In 1787, he claimed eight slaves. Chouteau was a proponent of continuing the
region's slavery policies. In 1804 he and other wealthy St. Louisans petitioned
that the old French and Spanish slave codes be reinstituted. Congress responded
by implementing Virginia's relatively stringent slave code in the territory. Due
to the Missouri Compromise (and the lobbying of slavery supporters like Chouteau
and Thomas Hart Benton), Missouri entered the Union as a slave state in 1821.
Chouteau became leader of what in Missouri was called "the St. Louis Junto" of a
Franco-American elite. He was the political patron of Senator Thomas Hart Benton,
who built his early career championing the legal interests--especially land
claims--of well-to-do conservative French St. Louisans. In those roles Chouteau
opposed Missouri statehood, preferring continued military administration on the
old Spanish and territorial models, and he resisted incorporation of St. Louis
as a city and investing in civic improvements. His testimony in the 1820s land
claims dispute was part of opposition to setting aside town commons land for
support of public schools.
After the Civil War his story became important to St. Louis boosters. After the
Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, it linked St. Louis business history with
a romantic history of western exploration, and gave the city's upper classes a
myth with which to identify and promote major initiatives such as a 1914 charter
reform, when it was staged in a Pageant and Masque held in Forest Park to
promote civic unity. The story of Laclede and Chouteau supplied a major sequence
to one of the earliest cinematic depictions of an American city's history, "The
Spirit of St. Louis," filmed to promote a large bond issue election in 1923.
The legend has been challenged even by Chouteau descendants who have expressed
concern over besmirching the reputation of Marie.
Records at the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans indicate that all the Chouteau
children were baptized there and indicated the elder Chouteau was the father.
Further records indicate that Laclede did not leave his inheritance to the
Chouteaus while the elder Chouteau did.
The legend says that Laclede and Marie had a common law marriage and that
Laclede signed away part of his property to them to protect them and maintain
the appearance that Marie was in a proper civil law relationship with the elder
Chouteau.
However, one 1790s account, published in translation, by a French officer
serving the Spaniards, Nicolas de Finiels, notes no founding role for Chouteau
and even goes as far as to say there was already a hamlet at the site of St.
Louis in 1763-64. The tale of Chouteau's role in the founding of St. Louis does
not appear in the historical introduction of the first St. Louis city directory
in 1820, and his name was not mentioned at all at the first celebration of the
town's past in 1847. A New Orleans militia census conducted after Laclede had
departed New Orleans shows him still at home with his mother and brothers.
The earliest St. Louis historian, Wilson Primm, dismissed the story. Auguste's
role in the founding is based on his own testimony in a land dispute in the 1820s,
and on an unsigned manuscript "Journal" attributed to him announced found by his
sole surviving son, Gabriel, in 1857.
The case for Chouteau's founding is largely based on a journal which his
youngest son Gabriel Chouteau discovered in 1857 -- 28 years after Chouteau's
death. According to Gabriel, Chouteau kept a Journal for 20 years during the
founding period. The journal was lost in a fire and Chouteau then rewrote a new
document.
The rewritten document, which was first given to the St. Louis Mercantile
Library Association but is now in possession of the University of Missouri-St.
Louis is widely quoted as legitimate. One of the most quoted passages deals with
the founding of St. Louis in which it is implied that it took nearly a month to
travel 45 miles from Fort des Chartes to St. Louis. Historians have said that
this must be an error and often say St. Louis was founded on Valentine's Day
rather than March 14 as stated in the journal.
Navigation being open in the early part of February, he fitted out a boat, in
which he put thirty men--nearly all mechanics--and he gave the charge of it to
Chouteau, and said to him: "You will proceed and land at the place where we
marked the trees; you will commence to have the place cleared, and build a large
shed to contain the provisions and the tools, and some small cabins, to lodge
the men. I give you two men on whom you can depend, who will aid you very much;
and I will rejoin you before long." I arrived at the place designated on the 14th
of March, and, on the morning of the next day, I put the men to work. They
commenced the shed, which was built in a short time, and the little cabins for
the men were built in the vicinity. In the early part of April, Laclede arrived
among us. He occupied himself with his settlement, fixed the place where he
wished to build his house, laid a plan of the village which we wished to found,
(and he named it Saint Louis, in honor of Louis XV, whose subject he expected to
remain, for a long time--he never imagined he was a subject of the King of Spain;)
and ordered me to follow the plan exactly, because he could not remain any
longer with us. He was obliged to proceed to Fort de Chartres, to remove the
goods that he had in the fort, before the arrival of the English, who were
expected every day to take possession of it. I followed, to the best of my
ability, his plan, and used the utmost diligence to accelerate the building of
the house.
Laclede died while returning up the Mississippi River and his body was buried
near the Arkansas River (his grave is not known now) and officially had no
children. Pierre Chouteau was named executor of his estate.
Marie Chouteau died in 1814 and was reportedly buried in Downtown St. Louis.
However when the Chouteau family remains (including Auguste) were moved from the
downtown cemetery to the Bellefontaine Cemetery her body could not be found. The
claim of "Founder of St. Louis" was added to Auguste's grave following the move.