Historical March 1985 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Pierre Laclede left New Orleans with his six year monopoly about August 10, 1763.
This permit to trade with the Indians near the mouth of the Missouri River for six years had been granted with exclusive privileges to Gilbert Antoine Maxent, a major New Orleans merchant. Maxent had then taken on two partners, Jean Francois Le Dee and Pierre de Laclede.
The latter agreed to lead the party which would, in fact, start and manage the trading post itself. Just before he left that August, Laclede learned that France had lost the Seven Years War, known in America as the French and Indian War.
The Treaty of Paris which ended the war ceded all of France’s New World lands to England. Just the year before France had given Louisiana to Spain.
The end result of all this was that the settlements east of the Mississippi and west of the Appalachians were now British although they were virtually all inhabitated by Frenchmen. Laclede knew this was an opportunity to establish not only a trading post but also a haven to which the Anglophobe French could go to escape British hegethony.
The trading party led by Laclede reached Ste. Genevieve on November 3, 1763.
There were no storage facilities large enough to winter all his supplies, so much had to be kept at Fort de Chartres across the river in Illinois country.
In December, Laclede with a limited crew including the thirteen-year-old Auguste Chouteau set out to find the site for their trading post.
The place had to have three qualities: it had to be as close to the mouth of the Missouri River as possible; it had to be west of the Mississippi to be outside the expanding British sphere of influence; and it had to be high enough to be above flood.
He found a thirty-foot limestone bluff about ten miles south of the Missouri and north and across the river from the French settlement of Cahokia.
A creek entering the river just south of the main part of the bluff afforded a break in the stone which sloped to river level about a mile north of the creek mouth.
We still call that creek Mill Creek after the mill Chouteau built on it to form the pond named after him.
The Mill Creek Water Treatment Station on the riverfront just south of the Poplar Street Bridge marks the location of the mouth of the creek.
After Laclede had marked some of the trees, he and his crew headed back to winter quarters at Ste. Genevieve and Fort de Chartres. Early in 1764, probably during the January thaw, Laclede began to make the rounds of the French settlements east of the river. Chouteau and the rest of the trading party left Ste. Genevieve and arrived at the bluff late in the day on February 14, 1764.
They began to build the trading post and their cabins on February 15, the day generally given as the founding day of St. Louis. Laclede arrived at the site in April, inspected the work, and named it for Louis IX, the patron of the then King Louis XV; He then returned to Fort de Chartres to bring up the supplies in storage.
Many of the French from Cahokia moved to the new trading post and accepted land from Laclede.
Because of his booster activities, many moved to St. Louis from various villages east of the river.
It was October 1765, when Louis St. Ange de Bellerive left Fort de Chartres after transfering Illinois country to the British.
He moved to St. Louis and brought quite an entourage of soldiers, artisans, traders, and villagers.
The French military remained in charge until 1770 when the Spanish finally got around to accepting the land ceded to them by France in 1762 to prevent the English from having it all.
By that time the population of St. Louis was about 500.
Unlike nearly every other post Or village in the Mississippi Valley, St. Louis began and grew as a mercantile center.
The early settlers never really grew accustomed to agricultural or agrarian activities.
The emphasis was always on exploitation and extraction rather than bucolic seasonal growth processes.
In many ways this is the reason much of history of the town romanticizes the fur trade and mining rather than farming. That tradition began almost immediately when the trading post was founded.
By the time Laclede died on his way back to St. Louis from New Orleans at the mouth of the Arkansas River in 1778 at the age of 48, the trading post was the premier village on the Upper Mississippi.
In the fourteen years since its beginning, it had acquired all the acquisitive merchants east of the river and the respect of the British and the Indians west of the river.
It was not an agricultural outpost but rather an active center of exploitation of the riches of the frontiers of North America.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, March 1985.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1985_03.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
