Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the complexities of politics, Indian affairs, slavery, and material culture that defined the city's founding period. Their alternative version of the oft-told tale uncovers the imperial realities--as personified by St. Ange--that truly governed in the Illinois Country of the time, and provide a trove of new information on everything from the fur trade to the arrival of the British and Spanish after the Seven Years' War.
Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the complexities of politics, Indian affairs, slavery, and material culture that defined the city's founding period. Their alternative version of the oft-told tale uncovers the imperial realities--as personified by St. Ange--that truly governed in the Illinois Country of the time, and provide a trove of new information on everything from the fur trade to the arrival of the British and Spanish after the Seven Years' War.
St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive
344
St. Louis Rising: The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive
344eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Drawing on new source materials, the authors delve into the complexities of politics, Indian affairs, slavery, and material culture that defined the city's founding period. Their alternative version of the oft-told tale uncovers the imperial realities--as personified by St. Ange--that truly governed in the Illinois Country of the time, and provide a trove of new information on everything from the fur trade to the arrival of the British and Spanish after the Seven Years' War.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252096938 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 03/30/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 11 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
St. Louis Rising
The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive
By Carl J. Ekberg, Sharon K. Person
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09693-8
CHAPTER 1
Fort d'Orléans and the Grotton–St. Ange Family
The Padoucas spread a bison robe on the ground and placed M. de Bourgmont on it with his son, M. de St. Ange, and M. La Renaudière. Fifteen men then bore them to the dwelling of the head chief. —Philippe de La renaudière, 1724
Louis St. Ange de Bellerive first came to prominence under the sponsorship of his father, Robert Grotton–St. Ange, a humbly born and illiterate Frenchman. This book asserts that the Grotton–St. Ange family was the most important political and military family in Upper Louisiana for the half century between 1720 and 1770. Although never before made, this assertion is not controversial because not enough has been written about this family to provoke debate; confusion rather than controversy tends to characterize the history of the Grotton–St. Anges in the Illinois Country. Robert Grotton (his spelling, but also given as Groton or Groston) was born ca. 1665 in eastern France, in the picturesque town of Châtillon-sur-Seine in the Côte d'Or region of northern Burgundy. Robert's father, Jean Grotton, was a master baker, although Robert, who persistently aspired to higher status, identified his father as "captain of the hunt for the royal waters and forests." This was a fabricated title that had a vaguely aristocratic ring to it, conveying a sense of a rural aristocracy inhabiting a noble French landscape of woods and rivers. Robert immigrated to Canada at an early age, likely as a teenager, and quickly took up the military life as a way to advance himself and make his way in the New World. By 1686 he had attained the rank of sergeant and acquired the nickname St. Ange, meaning that he was called Robert Grotton dit St. Ange. This was slowly transmogrified into de St. Ange, putting a distinctly aristocratic spin on it that had no basis in his bloodlines.
Robert married Marguerite-Louise Crevier, widow of Laurent Beaudet in 1688, and the couple settled down at La Prairie, near Montreal. Although they experienced five barren years (1688–93), they finally produced eight children in less than ten years of childbearing. The formidable fertility of French Canadians, which produced more children than the harsh conditions and tenuous agriculture of the St. Lawrence Valley could sustain, was a major engine behind Canadian emigration to the Mississippi Valley. Marguerite died in 1707, leaving Robert with a house full of children to feed and raise, which he seems to have done in an entirely responsible fashion. The selfless shouldering of responsibility was a hallmark of the Grotton–St. Ange family, and this characteristic would ultimately have major consequences for the frontier community of St. Louis.
After a decade of life as a widower tending to his children, Robert Grotton took a second wife, Élisabeth Chorel, the sixteenth of eighteen children produced by François Chorel and his wife, Marie-Anne Aubuchon, over a thirty-year period. Robert and Élisabeth married in March 1718, Élisabeth bringing into the marriage a "natural child," Jeanne, born only six months earlier, in September 1717. Robert Grotton was a man with a highly developed sense of rectitude and honor, but taking for a wife a woman with Élisabeth's past (checkered by our standards but not necessarily by theirs) presented no obstacle to the marriage. If Élisabeth had made mistakes, Grotton knew human nature well enough not to dwell on them. Robert and Élisabeth were devoted to one another; she stuck by her man, and he by his woman, in settings and situations quite unimaginable to us.
By the time that Robert and Élisabeth signed their marriage contract (a prenup in modern American parlance) in March 1718 in the Montreal parish of Ville Marie, Robert's name had evolved from Grotton dit St. Ange to Grotton de St. Ange (see illustration). Despite this aristocratic affectation, however, Robert was still, after some thirty years in service, frozen in rank as sergeant in the French marines. Promotion to commissioned officer status was difficult in Canada for a man who had no certifiable noble lineage. This may well have been the reason that Robert chose to head West, where the Pays d'en Haut provided a more fluid social structure that would give him opportunities for advancement not available in the St. Lawrence Valley. Grotton chose wisely, as he most always did.
In the spring of 1721, we find Robert Grotton at Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, which flows into Lake Michigan from the southeast. This small French fort cum trading post was located where Niles, Michigan, now stands, and during the past quarter century historians and archaeologists have explored the site in remarkable detail. On April 17, 1721, the stalwart Élisabeth Chorel Grotton, who had accompanied her husband westward through Canadian waterways, bore a son at Fort St. Joseph. The Grotton son was baptized François-Marie in honor of Élisabeth's father, François Chorel dit St. Romain, and Louis Grotton (Bellerive) stood as godfather. But François-Marie did not survive the rigors of infancy in the wild place where he was born, and his baptismal record is the sole surviving document pertaining to his short life. Grotton St. Ange met Pierre-François Xavier de Charlevoix, the Jesuit father and famous epistolary, at St. Joseph. Charlevoix arrived there in August 1721 and remarked that "there is a commandant and a small garrison. The commandant's house, which is a very small affair, is called the fort because it is surrounded with a shoddy palisade." No commissioned officers were posted at St. Joseph at the time, and it seems likely that St. Ange, as a senior sergeant, was in fact the commandant mentioned by Charlevoix and that the "fort" was the structure in which Élisabeth bore her son in April 1721.
Charlevoix, a metropolitan Frenchman, regarded Canadians as a distinct species of human being, not quite French and not quite Indian. He posed the rhetorical question whether they had the mental capacity to engage in serious intellectual activities and was perhaps a bit taken aback by Grotton's gruff speech and illiteracy. Nevertheless, Canadians, even transplanted ones like Grotton, had certain virtues, of which Charlevoix had urgent need on his travels through the treacherous western waterways. He allowed that "their agility and dexterity are unequalled; the most skillful Indians do not handle their canoes better in the most dangerous rapids, and are not better marksmen." 10 In his travels on western waterways, Charlevoix required Canadian guides, and Grotton St. Ange evidently joined the Jesuit's entourage at Fort St. Joseph. Charlevoix wrote from Kaskaskia in October 1721 that he was accompanied by a well-armed and well-commanded escort, of which St. Ange was the commander.
When St. Ange, his wife, and children left Fort St. Joseph and headed south via the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers to Kaskaskia, they had effected the transition from Upper Canada (le Pays d'en Haut) to Upper Louisiana (le Pays des Illinois). Robert and two of his sons (Pierre and Louis) would rise to positions of prominence there, and both Robert and his (second) wife, Élisabeth Chorel, would die and be buried there. That a man could manage successfully to accomplish this transition at what was for that time advanced middle age (probably fifty-five years) tells us that in the person of Robert Grotton de St. Ange, we are dealing with a man of remarkable vigor and determination.
* * *
Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet were the first explorers to be captivated by the drama and mystery of the Missouri River. Passing the river's mouth in June 1673, Marquette remarked that "sailing quietly in clear and calm Water, we heard the noise of a rapid, into which we were about to run. I have seen nothing more dreadful. An accumulation of large and entire trees, branches, and floating islands, was issuing from The mouth of The river pekistanouï [Missouri], with such impetuosity that we could not without great danger risk passing through it. So great was the agitation that the water was very muddy, and could not become clear." A decade later, Robert Cavelier de La Salle passed the mouth of the Missouri on his way to the Gulf of Mexico, and a member of his party commented that "we camped ... close to a river that flows into the Mississippi and that makes it very turbulent and muddy. This river is called the Missouri and it flows out of the northwest. According to the Indians the valley is well populated, and the Panis live on this river a long way from its mouth." The Panis (Pawnees) were already of special interest because they so often were caught up in the Indian slave trade. Today, on satellite maps, the image of the Missouri as it flows into the Mississippi is much the same as seventeenth-century Frenchmen described it, the Mississippi running clear and the Missouri impenetrable with suspended sediments.
Étienne Veniard de Bourgmont (he signed this way, although the name sometimes appears as Bourgmond or Bourgmon) first ascended the Missouri River valley in 1714, the first known white man to do so. The presence of his outsize personality constituted something approaching an invasion of the valley. Bourgmont was one of the more flamboyant and fantastical characters to appear in colonial French North America, a region that was richly endowed with such larger than life individuals. Bourgmont was born in Normandy in 1679 and immigrated to Canada when he was about twenty years of age. All of the usual clichés—or perhaps truisms—that are generally applied to coureurs de bois apply to Bourgmont: adventuresome, restless, fearless, indefatigable, dissolute, but with Bourgmont there was also high intelligence and noble ambition. For four years, 1714–18, he lived in the Missouri River valley and drafted two lengthy reports that are replete with amateurish but valuable geographic and ethnographic information. He became an intimate of the Missouri Indians, resided for extended periods in one of their villages on the Missouri River, and fathered a son by a Missouri woman.
By 1720 Bourgmont was back in France, which was then ruled by the regent, Philippe duc d'Orléans, on behalf of the minor king Louis XV. At the time, greater Louisiana was controlled by the Indies Company, with which Bourgmont contracted to return to the Missouri River valley as leader of a major expedition. Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville was governor of Louisiana, and he explained that Bourgmont had "a commission as commandant and was under orders from His Highness the Regent to establish an outpost with the Missouris in order to reconcile, if possible, the Padouca [Plains Apache] tribe,16 allies of the Spaniards in New Mexico, with the Missouris," and therefore with the French. This geopolitical issue had taken on increasing urgency as a consequence of the 1720 Villasur expedition into what is now Nebraska. Although Pawnees and Otos (perhaps aided by French traders) destroyed most of Villasur's command, this expedition reminded French officials of the frightening reach of Spanish ambitions on the western plains. The vertiginous scope of Bourgmont's western ambitions as outlined in this letter is breathtaking. It possesses all the grandiosity of many of the regent's initiatives, which included John Law's risky financial schemes. Bourgmont's expedition was destined to be Bourbon France's most ambitious attempt to stake out a permanent position in the remote trans-Mississippian West, out as far as the ninety-fifth meridian.
On February 1, 1723, Governor Bienville explained that Bourgmont was about to leave New Orleans with "a company of infantry, rations, munitions and merchandise to endeavor to fulfill his mission," Bienville's choice of words revealing that he was not terribly sanguine about the mission's chance of success. Bourgmont's convoy apparently arrived at Fort de Chartres in July, when Bourgmont's name appeared in a minor commercial transaction. During his sojourn at the fort, Bourgmont strategized with the commandant, Pierre Dugué de Boisbriant, and discussed the impending western expedition. It was at that point that the trajectory of Bourgmont's life intersected that of Robert St. Ange's. Perhaps Boisbriant encouraged Bourgmont to add St. Ange to his entourage, but, in any case, St. Ange's association with Bourgmont during the following two years was fraught with significance for the history of the Illinois Country. Bourgmont proceeded on up the Mississippi from Fort de Chartres to Cahokia, where he recruited Jean-Paul Mercier for the Missouri campaign. Mercier was a priest from the Seminary of Foreign Missions in Quebec, and he was head of the growing mission establishment at Cahokia. Bourgmont's determination to recruit Mercier, as well as Mercier's willingness to join the expedition, demonstrate that the proposed fort in the Missouri River valley was intended to be a substantive undertaking, the creation of a potentially permanent outpost that required a resident priest. Mercier remarked, without elaborating, that Bourgmont had "done so much for us that we could not refuse his request to have one of us [missionaries] ascend the Missouri with him and his garrison."
Bourgmont spent roughly two months (July and August) in the Illinois Country before heading for the Missouri River valley. His overweening confidence that he could master that feral environment and engineer a lasting and ecumenical peace between Bourbon France and various Indian tribes bordered on the pathological. A band of Missouri Indians descended the rivers to meet with Bourgmont at Fort de Chartres, clearly revealing the affection with which the Missouris held the Frenchman. Something (perhaps a latitudinarian Roman Catholicism) in Bourgmont's upbringing in an ancient provincial family at Cerisy Belle-Etoile in central Normandy had endowed him with astonishing cross-cultural skills. The Missouris presented Bourgmont with a female Indian slave as a welcoming gift, and a question arose as to whether she might be a Padouca (Plains Apache). In keeping with the French intention of establishing a lasting peace with the Padoucas, Illinois commandant Boisbriant had expressly prohibited trading in slaves from that tribe. Bourgmont explained that the confusion of mutually unintelligible languages made it impossible to determine from which tribe she had come, but, knowing that the Missouris were not at war with the Padoucas at that time (summer 1723), he assumed that she was not a Padouca. In any case, Bourgmont decided to wash his hands of the matter. He bartered away the slave to local habitants (apparently at Chartres) in return for salt and flour that he needed for his impending expedition up the Missouri.
French officials were in earnest about abolishing trade in Padouca slaves, and in 1724 Bourgmont went to some pains to return captured Padoucas to their tribe. But over the long term, Boisbriant's prohibition on trading in Padouca slaves was not effectively enforced. More than a decade later, Governor-General Charles de la Boische de Beauharnois of Canada informed Pierre Diron d'Artaguiette, who would later succeed Robert St. Ange as commandant at Fort de Chartres, that if warfare between Padoucas and Panis resulted in producing Indian slaves for sale, it was permissible for Frenchmen to acquire them so long as the French had had nothing to do with instigating the warfare that produced the slaves. Beauharnois's casuistic approach to the issue was not in keeping with the original intentions of Boisbriant and Bourgmont, who had wanted to eliminate Padouca slaves from the French market in order to maintain a durable western peace with the Padouca tribe. In the event, Padouca slaves continued to be present in Illinois Country villages, including St. Louis, throughout the colonial era.
Bourgmont's western expedition included Frenchmen, Canadians, Louisianaborn Creoles (very few) from the Mississippi Valley, officers, soldiers, and engagés. The widely disparate backgrounds and social statuses of the men made Bourgmont's command a veritable nightmare. Two young gentlemen lieutenants, Jean Pradel de La Masse and Seimar de Belisle, caused Bourgmont endless grief as they bristled at having to take orders from one they deemed their social inferior. Three bateaux and an unknown number of pirogues constituted Bourgmont's convoy, which reached the principal Missouri Indian village on November 9, 1723. Lewis and Clark required only a month to get from their encampment at Wood River to the site on the Missouri River where James Mackay's map placed the remains of Bourgmont's fort. Clark was interested enough and knowledgeable enough to search for the site: "Mr. Mackey has Laid down the rems. [remains] of an old fort in this Prarie, which I cannot find." But the Americans, with their main vessel under sail, moved up the lower Missouri more swiftly than Bourgmont, whose expedition likely required two months to arrive at the site selected for the fort.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from St. Louis Rising by Carl J. Ekberg, Sharon K. Person. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.