Marie-Therese Bourgeois Chouteau

Marie-Therese Bourgeois Chouteau (January 14, 1733 – August 14, 1814) is the matriarch of the Chouteau fur trading family which established communities throughout the Midwest.

She was born in New Orleans to a French father (Nicolas Bourgeois) and Spanish mother (Marie Joseph Tarare).^[1]

When she was 15 an arranged marriage was made to tavern keeper and baker René Auguste Chouteau, Sr. on September 20, 1748.

According to commonly accepted histories, René deserted her after she gave birth to René Auguste Chouteau in 1749.

She began a relationship with Pierre Laclède around 1755 and was to bear four children with him including Jean Pierre Chouteau in 1758.

After Laclede (along with his stepson Auguste Junior) established St. Louis, Missouri in 1764, he is said to have built her a house in 1767. The same year the elder René Chouteau demanded that authorities return her to New Orleans. In 1774 Louisiana Governor Luis de Unzaga ordered her to return. However she did not and the order was ignored until the elder Chouteau died in 1776. .^[1]

Laclède died in 1778. Upon the death of Madame Chouteau in 1814, she set her Indian slave free. She was buried on the grounds of the Basilica of St. Louis, King of France (which is now on the grounds of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. However when bodies were dug up in 1849 to move them to Calvary Cemetery and Bellefontaine Cemetery during a cholera epidemic, her body could not be found.

Challenges to the legend

Virtually all contemporary histories of St. Louis attribute a founding role to her including The First Chouteaus: RIVER BARONS OF EARLY ST. LOUIS by William E Foley and C David Rice ISBN 0-252-06897-1 and Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier by Shirley Christian ISBN 0-374-52958-2.

However there have been challenges to the story including challenges by her descendents.

Part of the challenge were considered efforts to show that she did not have a relationship outside of marriage. Other challenges were based on formal 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 Laclède did not leave his inheritance to the Chouteaus while the elder Chouteau did.^[2]

The legend says that Laclède and Marie had a common law marriage and that Laclède 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 even before the founding of St. Louis. 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.

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