Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier

By Shirley Christian

Book Overview

Shortly after Meriweather Lewis reached St. Louis in 1803 to plan for his voyage to the Pacific with William Clark, he prepared his first packet of flora and fauna from west of the Mississippi and dispatched it to President Jefferson. The cuttings, which were later planted in Philadelphia and Virginia, were supplied by Lewis's new French friend, Pierre Chouteau, who took them from a tree growing in the garden of his mansion. One of the best-known families in French America, the Chouteaus had guarded the gates to the West for generations and had built fortunes from fur trading, land speculation, finance, and railroads, and by supplying anything needed to survive in the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Patrician in their origins, they nevertheless won the respect and allegiance of dozens of Indian tribes. From their St. Louis base, the Chouteaus conquered the more-than-two-thousand-mile length of the Missouri River, put down the first European roots at the future site of Kansas City and in present-day Oklahoma, and left their names and imprints on lands stretching to the Canadian border. Before Lewis and Clark: The French Dynasty that Ruled America's Frontier is the extraordinary story of a wealthy, powerful, charming, and manipulative family, who dominated business and politics in the Louisiana Purchase territory before the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, and for decades afterward.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374110050
• ISBN13: 9780374110055
• Release Date: April 2004
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent source for historians and genealogists.

For those who study history with the genealogist's eye, this is an invaluable work. The charts, other families mentioned, detailed records that others find tedious, and fur trade information make it indispensable. If you just want a school kid's glossed-over history with anglo overtones, skip this one. This is the real story of who opened trade to the west.

Fur Trade Family Connections Classic

For anyone interested in the early history of the American West this book is an invaluable resource. The Chouteaus and other families in St Louis continuously intermarried and did business with each other. This book supplies what has been lacking in the literature of the fur trade, a solid and careful recounting of the story of their lives and business dealings, backed up with page by page notes, citing sources completely...

Exceptionally well done

Shirley Christian's work on the legacy of the Chouteau family should be considered the definitive on this subject area. After reading numerous books on the fur trade, it was enlightening and a treat to learn so much of the importance of this intriguing ancestry. From the days of establishing St. Louis in 1764 by Pierre Laclede Liguest (Chouteau) and his fourteen year old son Auguste Chouteau, up to circa 1850's, Christian...

well researched and interesting, though of limited scope

OK-I'm going on the wild assumption that you're checking out this book because of your interest in Lewis and Clark. Be warned, the subject matter in Christian's book is somewhat tangentially related, although you will be given little entertaining factoids such as that one of the scientific specimens sent back to Jefferson from St Louis at the start of the Expedition was a large hairball from the stomach of a buffalo.I live...