Historical March 1990 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
William C. Carr was one of the most important legal minds in St. Louis early in the nineteenth century. Originally from Albemarle County, Virginia (just like Meriwether Lewis), Carr came to St. Louis on March 31,1804. Just three weeks earlier, on March 9-10, 1804, Captain Amos Stoddard had completed the Louisiana Purchase with the transfer of Upper Louisiana from Spain to France and then to the United States. Carried out on the Place de Publique where the Gateway Arch now stands, that transfer doubled the size of the fledgling United States.
A couple months later, May 14, 1804, the Lewis and Clark Expedition departed for its 28 month trip of discovery into the new frontier after spending the winter of 1803-4 putting supplies together from St. Louis merchants.
In short, William C. Carr came to St. Louis at a most exciting time—from our viewpoint.
He apparently found St. Louis less than thrilling. Within one month he had decided Ste. Genevieve would be the seat of power and had moved there.
He married Miss Anna Maria Elliott, daughter of Dr. Aaron Elliott of Ste. Genevieve soon thereafter. it took him a full year to realize that St. Louis was really in the better location and would soon outstrip the much older and more exposed to flood community of Ste. Genevieve.
He moved back to St. Louis at the same time that the Louisiana Purchase Land Commission was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson. Only when St. Louis became the legal center of the land questions left from French and Spanish grants did the decision emerge that it would also be the economic and political center of the West. Carr’s indecision reflects nearly 100 years of attempts to locate a power center for the opening of the West.
The history of the fur trade reveals part of this problem, and it was this earlier history which influenced Carr and other Yankees moving into the new frontier along the Mississippi’s west bank.
The very year that St. Louis was founded, 1764, saw the closing of what was thought by many in the French economic and military circles to be the answer to English expansion across the Mississippi. Over twenty years earlier, on December 18, 1743, plans were drawn for Fort de Cavagnial—on the Missouri River about two miles above what is now Fort Leavenworth.
This fort was to be the major western arm of the French fur trading efforts in the West, which efforts were coordinated at Fort de Chartres and Ste. Genevieve.
On April 25,1746, at the court of Louis XV in Paris, Jean Frederick Phelipeaux, comte de Maurepas and minister of colonies, personally ordered the completion of Fort de Cavagnial and the appointment of military and commercial leadership. Fort Cavagnial was to be the center of French efforts to stem the English fur traders, the Northwest and Hudson Bay Companies, coming from the north over the historic voyageur routes originally blazed from Montreal in the seventeenth century.
The hopes for Fort Cavagnial were dependent upon French financial fortunes in Europe.
The British were doing their level best to thwart the French, and the result was the Seven Years War in Europe, called the French and Indian War in North America.
With so many military and financial resources going to active war in other locations, Fort Cavagnial was never able to mature to the expectations of the French imperialists.
By 1763, it was all but abandoned.
In that year, Pierre Laclede received his monopoly to trade with the Osage Indians on the Missouri River, and this was the final undercutting of potential revenue in that direction. Fort Orleans, at the mouth of the Osage River, was likewise falling into disrepair.
All French interests fell back to the Mississippi line at Fort de Chartres and Ste. Genevieve.
As St. Louis was beginning, the French forces on the Missouri River were withdrawing to the east.
By 1770, when the Spanish took over the French imperial posts west of the Mississippi, including St. Louis, it was clear the British had carried the day in the opening fur hunting areas of the American West. Attempts to stem the British were carried on by Jacques Glamorgan, Manuel Lisa, and Pierre Menard. Only when the Americans came in full force after the Louisiana Purchase were the British really challenged.
It was this sense that all the fur trade posts were fighting a loosing battle which William C. Carr shared.
He saw St. Louis as just another one of those fur trader forts which would eventually succumb and not amount to anything. What changed that was the appointment of a land commission to be housed at St. Louis along with the movement of the governorship of the Louisiana Territory from Vincennes to St. Louis. William Henry Harrison was replaced by General Wilkinson, and the latter was stationed at St. Louis. Immediately the locus of power and influence moved upriver from Ste. Genevieve. William Carr moved again also, eventually building the first brick building built solely as a house in St. Louis at the corner of Spruce and First Streets in 1815.
When his first wife died in 1826, Carr married Dorcas Bent in 1829, daughter of Silas Bent, Sr., then clerk of the court. Silas Bent was the father of Charles and William Bent, the partners of Cyran St. Vrain, and the builders of Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas River along the Santa Fe Trail. Thus William Carr married into one of the most active families in the westward expansion of the United States.
Not only was he shrewd enough to follow the legal center of the frontier movement; he was also wise enough to choose his family connections and stay in the middle of the westward movement.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, March 1990.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1990_03.pdf, printed page(s) 6; PDF page(s) 6.
