AUGUSTE PIERRE CHOUTEAU Biography - Bussiness people and enterpreneurs

 
 

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AUGUSTE PIERRE CHOUTEAU

Rene Auguste Chouteau (born September 7, 1749 in New Orleans; died February 24,           
1829 in St. Louis) 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.                                               
                                                                                           
                                                                                           
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 Jean 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 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.         
                                                                                           
                                                                                           
                                                                                           
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.             
                                                                                           
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 St. Louis (the only battle west of the           
Mississippi in the 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.                                                     
                                                                                           
After St. Louis and the 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 part of today's 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.                                                                 
                                                                                           
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 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.               
                                                                                           
The legend has been challenged even by Chouteau descendants who have expressed             
concern over besmirching the reputation of Marie.                                         
                                                                                           
Records at the St. Louis Cathedral in 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.                                                   
                                                                                           
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 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.                                                     
                                                                                           
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, whose 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.                                                                                 
                                                                                           
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. The           
claim of "Founder of St. Louis" was added to Auguste's grave following the move.