Patricia Cleary. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

Few non-specialists know that St. Louis, Missouri, was a French-speaking town for four decades before Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began their famous expedition up the nearby Missouri River in 1803. Nor are many aware of the small battle that took place at St. Louis in 1780 during the American Revolution. Patricia Cleary set out to write the history of St. Louis in the four decades of its colonial period, in part because she had been taught so little about the city's early history while growing up there. St. Louis was founded in 1764 on the west bank of the Mississippi River, a little below its junction with the Missouri. The founder was a young Frenchman named Pierre Laclède, who had recently immigrated to New Orleans. In the financial aspects of this endeavor, he was the junior partner of a better established New Orleans merchant named Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent. Both hoped to grow rich by trading for furs with assorted Native peoples. Most of the earlier French settlements in the area were on the east bank, that is, in what is today Illinois. France ceded its holdings east of Mississippi to England at the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, so the French there knew they would soon be ruled by Protestants. Thus, French-speaking farmers and fur traders, born in France, Canada, and the Illinois Country, crossed the river. But it was unknown in the region until late in 1764 that two years earlier France had ceded all its land west of the river to Spain. Although Spanish troops did not arrive until 1767 and effective Spanish civil administration was not established until 1770, St. Louis was a culturally and linguistically French town ruled by Spanish administrators for most of its colonial period. Lewis needed an interpreter when he visited in 1803, and as late as the 1840s, the ability to write a business letter in French was useful to a St. Louis merchant.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Battle · Colonialism · Economic history · Ethnology · Fur trade · Genealogy · Geography · Human settlement · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies