| Known as the
Gateway City and named in honor of King Louis IX
of France, St. Louis was first established as a
fur trading post by Pierre Laclède who was a
prominent member of the New Orleans mercantile
business. He was also partner in the fur
trading company Maxent, Laclède & Company
who had been given the exclusive rights to the
Indian trade in the Missouri River Valley in
about 1762 or 1763. Laclède, along with his young
assistant Auguste Chouteau (son of Marie T.
Bourgeois and René Chouteau), led a party up the
Mississippi River in search of a place to
establish a fur trading post. They located
a site eighteen miles south of the Mississippi
and Missouri confluence, marked their spot and
Laclède sent Auguste back to the location to
begin building the trading village. When Laclède
returned to the small village, he brought with
him Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau and her
three other children besides Auguste - son Jean
Pierre and daughters Pelagie and Marie Louise
Chouteau.
Records indicate
that Marie’s husband René had abandoned her
and their son Auguste in New Orleans and had
returned to France in July of 1767. A baker and
inn-keeper ten years her senior, their marriage
had been an arranged one and some speculated that
René had been cruel to her and that she had
found the company of Pierre Laclède engaging.
Though the two were never married, they lived
together in St. Louis with Marie’s children,
the latter four including Victorie who was born
in March 1764, are accepted as being the children
of Pierre’s since René Chouteau did not
return from France until 1774.
When René
Chouteau returned to New Orleans, he found the
whereabouts of his wife Marie and set about to
bring her back to New Orleans, but died three
years later on the 21st of April 1776 with her
never having left St. Louis or Pierre. - Although
it was well-known that Marie and Pierre lived in
the same house, she remained a respected resident
of the community and was held in good esteem,
some defending her reputation and stating her
relationship with Pierre was platonic
one. After her husband's death, she
did not marry Pierre, and was always referred to
as "Veuve" or Widow Chouteau.
Pierre Laclède's
death followed not long after on the 27th of May
in 1778. Most of his assets and holdings
reverted to his partner Antoine Maxent, but ten
years earlier Laclède had deeded Marie a newly
built limestone home and had specified that upon
her death, the house and common fields were to be
given to her children. - When Maxent offered
Pierre's land for sale which was adjacent to her
own and included a house, orchard, barn, and
slave cabins, she readily purchased it and seems
to have had a good income from it as she was
never dependent upon her children in her later
years. She died on August 14th in 1814, and
left the land and property to her children as
Laclède had instructed her to do and gave
freedom to Therese who was her Indian slave woman
who had managed her daily affairs.
At the time of
Marie’s death, there were other prominent
men in St. Louis including Edward Hempstead, who
was the law partner of Thomas Hart Benton, as
well as the Virginia Clarks and their
connections. One of these was Meriwether
Lewis who had served in the army and had become
the private secretary to President Thomas
Jefferson and was appointed by him in 1803 to
lead an expedition of the newly acquired
Louisiana purchase. Lewis had chosen as his joint
commander, William Clark, and together in May of
1804 led an expedition from St. Louis heading
north along the Missouri River across the Rockies
until they reached the Pacific in November of
1805.
When they returned
from their expedition to St. Louis on the
afternoon of September 23rd of 1806, Lewis and
Clark were invited by, and accepted the
invitation of Pierre Chouteau the fur trader, and
Auguste Chouteau to dine with them. While
in St. Louis, Lewis and Clark also sunned and
stored their animal skins at Pierre
Chouteaus’s warehouse.
In 1807 President
Thomas Jefferson named Meriwether Lewis as the
Governor of the Louisiana Territory, and William
Clark as the Brigadier General of the Territorial
Militia. He also named Clark as the
Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and thus he
soon met with the Osage Indians and a band of
Sioux to hear their complaints. Clark then hired
local traders as sub-agents and attempted to keep
peace between the Indians and the settlers.
After only a few months in St. Louis, Clark
returned to Virginia where he married Julia
Hancock whom he had been courting prior to the
expedition. He was still living in Virginia
in 1808 when Meriwether Lewis returned to St.
Louis to take up his quarters as Governor.
At the time of
their return to St. Louis, the town was bustling
with political crosscurrents. The French, who
were well established in the area, were
squabbling with the newcomers over land titles
and mining claims, and hunters and squatters were
paying little regard to the Indian Treaty and
were moving onto their lands.
Most of the
traders opposed the federal regulation placed on
trade with the Indians, but Lewis felt it was
essential in maintaining peace with the Indians
and settlers. These views made many enemies
of him and his troubles were further compounded
by a land deal in which there was a
dispute. Deciding to go to Washington D.C.
and personally straighten it out, he headed east
but died tragically and mysteriously on the night
of October 10th 1809 at Grinder’s Stand on
the Natchez Trace in Tennessee.
The same year
Meriwether Lewis died, William Clark became a
partner in the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company
which had been founded by Manuel Lisa.
Other partners at this time included Pierre
Chouteau Sr., Auguste Chouteau, Jr. and Sylvestre
Labbadie among others. However, the death of
Manuel Lisa and the competition from John Jacob
Astor’s fur company was eventually the
demise of this company which went bankrupt and
dissolved in 1812 by which time Joshua Pilcher
had also joined the company.
In the following
year Clark was commissioned governor of the
Missouri Territory by President James Madison and
during this time, continued to keep peace among
the Indians. He also took initiatives that made
him unpopular with St. Louisans who felt he was
limiting their economic future while enabling the
few old, wealthy trading families.
Clark was then
named Superintendent of Indian Affairs in 1821 by
President James Monroe (a position Joshua Pilcher
would also fill) and was made Surveyor General of
Illinois. For the remainder of Clark’s life,
he remained sympathetic to the Indians, and
feeling they had been broken and subdued, asked
the federal government to provide them with their
own domain, to educate, and give them annual
payments so that they might become productive
American agriculturists.
Clark died at the
home of his son Meriwether Lewis Clark, on
September 1st 1838, preceded by three of his
eight children and by his first wife Julia who
died in 1820 after a two-year illness. As his
hearse carried him to his place of rest at the
family plot on the farm of John O'Fallon, there
followed a large crowd to mourn him. Some
of these included his Masonic brothers who helped
him found the St. Louis lodge, and members of the
Christ Episcopal Church which he had helped to
organize in 1819.
By 1820 and into
the 1830’s, the city of St. Louis became a
thriving market place of trade. Steamboats, which
dominated its riverways, came to its wharves to
discharge their cargo while the smaller boats
which were able to navigate the shallow reaches
of the upper rivers, came downstream to transport
their loads of grain and lumber, fur, and salt
pork. And when travelers began rushing to
California in 1849, St. Louis was a major trading
center. In the years following, it became a
leading manufacturer of paint, stoves, nails,
ironware and heavy steamboat machinery on account
of its close proximity to the lead and iron ore
mines in Illinois.
Despite the War of
Rebellion, the city of St. Louis nearly doubled
in size during the 1860’s. Among those
newcomers were Thomas Anderson Moore who came in
1860 with his mother Rebecca (Cook) and brother
Joseph Moore. His bride-to-be, Clarissa
Pilcher, came from Illinois with her widowed
mother Louisa (Ballard) and family sometime after
the death of her father Ezekiel in 1858 and
before 1860 when she was enumerated in the
federal census with her family.
The relationships
of the Moore and Pilcher’s to the early
settlers of St. Louis clearly goes back to
Clarissa's Virginian roots. She is a
descendant of Captain Christopher Clark and also
of Mourning Lewis. The fur trader and
Indian Agent, Joshua Pilcher, was her grand
uncle, and in 1915 at the time of her husband
Thomas A. Moore's death, there was in his
possession a diary belonging to Augustin
Kennerly.
Augustin was the
son of James Kennerly and had been a sub-agent
for the Senecas in 1832 when William Clark was
Superintendent of Indian Affairs at St.
Louis. He was buried at Jefferson Barracks,
and somehow, unbeknown to anyone, his journal
which he kept while a sub-agent came into the
possession of Clarissa Pilcher-Moore's husband
Thomas. Upon the death of Thomas Moore, the
journal was donated to the Missouri Historical
Society by his daughter, Mabel (Mrs. S.E. Jones),
and it was ironically studied by John Francis
McDermott (1902-1981), a St. Louis historian and
descendant of Pierre Chouteau and Silvestre
Labbadie - undoubtedly leading a trail right back
to the Virginia ancestors who came to St. Louis
and associated themselves with the Pilchers.
Most of Thomas and
Clarissa's descendants have all but left the
grand city of St. Louis. Like their
ancestors before them they have moved farther
west, but have brought with them the history of
their ancestors who played an important role in
opening up the very lands they have now settled
west of the wide Missouri - and farther still
from the Culpeper farm in Virginia.
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