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The standard story of St. Louis's founding tells of fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau hacking a city out of wilderness. St. Louis Rising overturns such gauzy myths with the contrarian thesis that French government officials and institutions shaped and structured early city society. Of the former, none did more than Louis St. Ange de Bellerive. His commitment to the Bourbon monarchy and to civil tranquility made him the prime mover as St. Louis emerged during the tumult following the French and Indian War. Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the complexities of politics, Indian affairs, slavery, and material culture that defined the city's founding period. Their alternative version of the oft-told tale uncovers the imperial realities--as personified by St. Ange--that truly governed in the Illinois Country of the time, and provide a trove of new information on everything from the fur trade to the arrival of the British and Spanish after the Seven Years' War.

In 1790, Pierre-Charles de Lassus de Luzières gathered his wife and children and fled Revolutionary France. His trek to America was prompted by his \"purchase\" of two thousand acres situated on the bank of the Ohio River from the Scioto Land Company—the institution that infamously swindled French buyers and sold them worthless titles to property. When de Luzières arrived and realized he had been defrauded, he chose, in a momentous decision, not to return home to France. Instead, he committed to a life in North America and began planning a move to the Mississippi River valley. De Luzières dreamed of creating a vast commercial empire that would stretch across the frontier, extending the entire length of the Ohio River and also down the Mississippi from Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans. Though his grandiose goal was never realized, de Luzières energetically pursued other important initiatives. He founded the city of New Bourbon in what is now Missouri and recruited American settlers to move westward across the Mississippi River. The highlight of his career was being appointed Spanish commandant of the New Bourbon District, and his 1797 census of that community is an invaluable historical document. De Luzières was a significant political player during the final years of the Spanish regime in Louisiana, but likely his greatest contributions to American history are his extensive commentaries on the Mississippi frontier at the close of the colonial era. A French Aristocrat in the American West: The Shattered Dreams of De Lassus de Luzières is both a narrative of this remarkable man's life and a compilation of his extensive writings. In Part I of the book, author Carl Ekberg offers a thorough account of de Luzières, from his life in Pre-Revolutionary France to his death in 1806 in his house in New Bourbon. Part II is a compilation, in translation, of de Luzières's most compelling correspondence. Until now very little of his writing has been published, despite the fact that his letters constitute one of the largest bodies of writing ever produced by a French émigré in North America. Though de Luzières's presence in early American history has been largely overlooked by scholars, the work left behind by this unlikely frontiersman merits closer inspection. A French Aristocrat in the American West brings the words and deeds of this fascinating man to the public for the first time.

“His­tory as They Lived It deserves to be placed within the rich context of Illinois Country historiography going back more than a century. . . . It brings together the fully ripened thoughts of a mature scholar at the very moment that students of the Illinois Country need such a book.”—from the foreword by Carl J. Ekberg Settled in 1722, Prairie du Rocher was at the geographic center of a French colony in the Mississippi Valley, which also included other villages in what is now Illinois and Missouri: Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Fort de Chartres, St. Philippe, Ste. Genevieve, and St. Louis.  Located in an alluvial valley near towering limestone bluffs, which inspired the village’s name—French for “prairie of the rock”— Prairie du Rocher is the only one of the seven French colonial villages that still exists today as a small compact community. The village of Prairie du Rocher endured governance by France, Great Britain, Virginia, and the Illinois territory before Illinois became a state in 1818. Despite these changes, the villagers persisted in maintaining the community and its values. Margaret Kimball Brown looks at one of the oldest towns in the region through the lenses of history and anthropology, utilizing extensive research in archives and public records to give historians, anthropologists, and general readers a lively depiction of this small community and its people.

European colonization of America is now in very bad odor—bad White guys subjugating Native Americans and importing Africans to do their hard work. [...]he arrived at Quebec in September 1678 armed with a patent from French minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert “authorizing” (no thought of consultation with Native Americans, of course) La Salle to explore deep into North America, build forts where he deemed necessary, and trade in bison skins. [...]the Center for French Colonial Studies has done an admirable job publishing this book, producing a highly readable, user-friendly text.

Hiram Martin Chittenden’s classic study,The American Fur Trade of the Far West, was the first serious, modern study of the subject, and the author portrayed Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau as the founders of the St. Louis fur trade. Chittenden was a personal friend of Pierre-Sylvestre Chouteau (grandson of Jean-Pierre, Auguste’s half brother) and relied heavily on Chouteau manuscripts as sources for his work.¹ Chittenden’s original portrait has been altered remarkably little over the past one hundred years, merely painted in brighter colors. The early St. Louis fur trade is generally portrayed as having been dominated by Laclède, and

Étienne-François, comte de Stainville and duc de Choiseul, was Louis XV’s chief minister during the 1760s. It was Choiseul who persuaded the French king to convey Louisiana to Spain in the secret Treaty of Fontainebleau (November 3, 1762) and he who negotiated the Treaty of Paris (February 10, 1763) that forfeited all French possessions east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain. The territorial cessions to Great Britain were a consequence of French losses on the battlefield, while the cession of Louisiana was rooted in Choiseul’s lack of interest in, and knowledge of, the trans-Mississippian West. In Paul W. Mapp’s