René Auguste Chouteau

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René Auguste Chouteau (born September 7, 1749 in New Orleans, Louisiana; died February 24, 1829 in St. Louis, Missouri) 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. He was also to act as an Indian Agent and negotiated the Treaties of Portage des Sioux in 1815 that cleared the Sac tribe and Fox tribe title to what would become Chicago, Illinois.

1 Founder of St. Louis claim
2 Trade withe Osage
3 Power in the United States
4 Legacy
5 Challenges to the Legend
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Founder of St. Louis claim

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 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 (1762) 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.

[edit] Trade withe Osage

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.^[1]

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 Saint Louis (the only battle west of the Mississippi in the American 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.

[edit] Power in the United States

After the St. Louis and 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 much of what is today 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.

[edit] Legacy

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 St. Louis's 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.

[edit] Challenges to the Legend

The legend has been challenged even by Chouteau descendants who have expressed concern over besmirching the reputation of Marie.

[edit] Official records

Records at the St. Louis Cathedral, 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.^[2]

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 ^[3] 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.

[edit] Chouteau's "Journal"

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, who 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.^[4]

[edit] The Missing Bodies

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.^[5]. The claim of "Founder of St. Louis" was added to Auguste's grave following the move.