Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

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

The collapse of the French empire in North America, ordained by the peace treaties of Fontainebleau (1762) and Paris (1763), ironically led to the development of what was the most thoroughly French community in the Mississippi River valley—early St. Louis. The village was a remnant of that collapsed empire, a veritable distillation of the French colonial civilization that had developed in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Between its first settlement and the arrival of a Spanish lieutenant governor in May 1770, no community in Louisiana was so convincingly French as St. Louis, not excepting New Orleans.

The French adventure, or misadventure, in the immense colony named Louisiana began with the explorations of Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet in 1673 and did not end until Louis St. Ange de Bellerive relinquished his command to Spanish authorities at St. Louis in 1770.¹ St. Louis was the last of a series of French colonial communities to coalesce in the Illinois Country. Marquette and Jolliet commenced recorded European exploration of the region in 1673, when they descended the Mississippi as far as the mouth of the Arkansas River. And, a decade later, Robert Cavelier de La Salle led an expedition

\"Standing Up For Indians\" analyzes the rich data in three hundred records of Indian baptisms in the early St. Louis Old Cathedral registers. Many of these records were heretofore unexplored and omitted from indexes. Through an analysis of three groups of baptisms—métis, slave, and unmarked records—this thesis proves that the Indian presence in early St. Louis has been underreported in official documents and neglected by historians. In particular, the baptism records prove that the 1769 declaration outlawing the enslavement of Indians in the Louisiana territory did not mean that the practice of Indian slavery ceased. Information from the records shows that the personal, complex, and diverse relationships between Indians and French Creoles helped define a culturally hybrid society. Status and patriarchy, two important principles of the French Catholic culture and the fur trade, were complicated by these sometimes unconventional relationships. The Catholic Church, however, provided a constant and consistent means by which new relationships were solidified. The appendices include previously unpublished extracts from the baptism registers.