Historical October 1989 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
The first Papin came to Montreal in 1653.
The fur trade had long been the point of French imperial economic policy.
The Iroquois nation had been among the first to feel the brunt of the force of greed among French fur traders.
When Champlain sided with the Huron nation, the most efficient fur trappers among the Indians of the eastern Great Lakes, the Iroquois were the enemy of the Huron.
The British soon found it convenient to supply the Iroquois with weapons against the Huron and their French overseers. Montreal was the fur capital of the French empire based on the skin of the beaver in North America.
When the first Papin came to Montreal (Mount Royal), the Mississippi and Missouri were on the edge of a growing imperial economy.
One hundred years later the British were defeating the French. Joseph Marie Papin (1741-1811) was the only surviving child of Joseph Alexandre Papin and Marguerite Pepin dit LaForce.
His mother died when he was still a child.
His father took him to France and placed him at the Jesuit College of La Prytanes near Anjou.
The younger Papin came back to Canada for a short time after the French and Indian War (1756-1763).
He moved on to St. Louis preferring not to live under British rule. Joseph Papin entered the fur trade when he came to St. Louis in the early 1770s.
He courted and married Marie Louise Chouteau (1762-1817), the second daughter of Madame Chouteau and Pierre Laclede, on January 19,1779.
They had thirteen children, all of whom occupied important places in the early history of St. Louis. Joseph Papin received a Spanish land grant of some 3300 arpents in 1796.
He moved his family to that land that same year.
He obviously did not like the fur business and apparently was pleased to let his sons take up the profession without him.
The Papin tract of 3300 arpents included almost all of what is now Forest Park and extended north to what was later called Olive Street Road—now Delmar.
The Road to Olive Street extended from the Bonhomme land to Olive Street east of Kingshighway.
An arpent was about 1.3 acres; the 3300 arpents represented, then, some 4300 acres or nearly seven square miles.
In later years this land was divided among descendants of Joseph Papin, including the Kingsburys. Virtually the entire Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood was included among the lands granted to Joseph M. Papin in 1796. Three Papin sons are listed in the 1821 City Directory of St. Louis: Joseph, Vilray, and LaForce. Joseph (1780-1850) was a grocer and his business establishment was at the corner of what is now Memorial Drive and Locust Street. Sylvestre Vilray Papin (1794-1828) was a blacksmith in 1821 whose shop was probably on the location of the family home.
He may have lived in the house at the time at 34 North Main above “A” (Chestnut) Street.
He became known for his real-estate activities after the death of his parents, and it was most probably his determination which saw to the division of the Papin Tract after 1817. Alexander LaForce Papin (1782-1849) was very active in the fur trade and was perhaps one of the first of the Chouteau family to work for John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company. Well respected among the Indians along the Missouri between the Kansas River and Council Bluffs, he was one of the best Indian traders on the payroll of Astor.
He stayed with the Upper Missouri Outfit when Pierre Chouteau, Jr., and Bernard Pratte, Jr., his cousins, bought it from Astor in 1834, changing the name to Pratte, Chouteau and Company.
He married Julie Brazeau and lived at 90 North Main (First) Street just above Locust Street. Both he and his wife died of cholera when the pandemic spread into the Mississippi Valley in 1849. Of the other children in the fur trade, two deserve particular mention. Pierre Millicour Papin (1793-1849) was a very trusted factor for Pratte, Chouteau and Company.
For years he was in charge of the trading house in Osage Indian country near Papinsville in Bates County, Missouri.
The Indians had great respect for him, and he helped establish the Jesuits in the area who saw to the health of the Indian community after he died.
As was true of virtually the entire Chouteau family, he had a great deal of respect for the native culture and did his best to keep it from being exploited anymore than it already had been. Pierre Didier Papin (1798-1853) was the most frontier active of the Papin family in the fur trade.
From his youth he was part of the American Fur company out of St. Louis.
He was on the steamboat “Yellow Stone” in 1832 when it made its first successful voyage from St. Louis to Fort Union at the mouth of the Yellowstone River.
On that cruise also was his fatherin-law, Pascal Cerre. P.D. Papin was in charge of Fort Laramie for several years after it came into the American Fur Company orbit.
He is mentioned by numerous early western travel writers, including Francis Parkman.
He died at Scott’s Bluff on the Platte River about 80 miles below Fort Laramie.
The Papin Tract takes the Skinker-DeBaliviere neighborhood back to the earliest French history of the St. Louis area.
Since this is the 225th anniversary year of the founding of St. Louis by Pierre Laclede from New Orleans, it is only appropriate that attention is turned to the roots of European beginnings along the Mississippi at St. Louis.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, October 1989.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Archival transcription note: Land areas, arpent conversion, genealogical dates and interpretations of Indigenous/French relations are the historical columnist’s printed claims; not newly independently verified.
Original source: SD_Times1989_10.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
