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Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier

Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier
By Shirley Christian

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Shortly after Meriweather Lewis reached St. Louis in 1803 to plan for his voyage to the Pacific with William Clark, he prepared his first packet of flora and fauna from west of the Mississippi and dispatched it to President Jefferson. The cuttings, which were later planted in Philadelphia and Virginia, were supplied by Lewis's new French friend, Pierre Chouteau, who took them from a tree growing in the garden of his mansion.

One of the best-known families in French America, the Chouteaus had guarded the gates to the West for generations and had built fortunes from fur trading, land speculation, finance, and railroads, and by supplying anything needed to survive in the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Patrician in their origins, they nevertheless won the respect and allegiance of dozens of Indian tribes. From their St. Louis base, the Chouteaus conquered the more-than-two-thousand-mile length of the Missouri River, put down the first European roots at the future site of Kansas City and in present-day Oklahoma, and left their names and imprints on lands stretching to the Canadian border.

Before Lewis and Clark: The French Dynasty that Ruled America's Frontier is the extraordinary story of a wealthy, powerful, charming, and manipulative family, who dominated business and politics in the Louisiana Purchase territory before the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, and for decades afterward.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #1614651 in Books
  • Published on: 2004-04-01
  • Original language: English
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 528 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Before the United States' westward expansion, French settlers dominated a wide swath of territory west of the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis and beyond. Pulitzer-winning journalist Christian (Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family) chronicles several generations of one of the major French families occupying this frontier territory in her fast-paced historical portrait. Born into a wealthy family, young Auguste and Pierre Chouteau moved to the town that soon became St. Louis in 1763. Their father, Pierre, one of the town's founders, came to the region from New Orleans as an explorer, but soon prospered as a fur trader. He established a very good relationship with the Osages and other Indian tribes, and he taught his sons to respect them. Auguste and the younger Pierre moved easily among the tribes to trade and sell, feeling as much at home in Indian huts as in their mansions on the Mississippi. They hosted parties for visiting American dignitaries, including Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose journeys reaped enormous benefits from their association with the Chouteaus. As Christian points out, the Chouteaus were instrumental in paving a smooth path in the relations between Indians and American settlers. But, as Christian observes, the settlers paid little attention to the cultivation of relationships with the Native Americans and thus encountered more resistance than the Chouteaus ever did. Christian's lively portrait of the Chouteaus opens a window on a little-known portion of early American history. Map.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
If not for evocative histories such as Christian's, America's French heritage might molder only in vestigial place-names and ruins. St. Louis and its environs have their share, and Christian brings alive the fur trade that created them. French-Indian trade, she emphasizes, predated the founding of the city in 1764 by Pierre Laclede, but his conduct of the business generated records that, in Christian's hands, palpably project a feeling for the perils and potential riches of frontier life. This quality, in addition to the emphasis on Laclede and his Chouteau sons and grandsons' vast trading network, endows her history with more than local attraction, for it captures the uniquely amicable relationships between whites and Indians. Without idealizing the Chouteaus' affairs on their journeys into the lands of the Osage, Kansa, and other tribes, Christian underscores their peacefulness. Some arriving Americans, including Lewis and Clark, took advantage of the Chouteaus' diplomatic value, which threads through Christian's narrative to her conclusion with fur trapping's decline. A fascinating history bound to enrapture Old West readers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Shirley Christian is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Miami Herald and the Associated Press. She is the author of Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family and lives in Overland Park in Kansas.