French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor (review)

Reviewed by: French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy ed. by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor Eric Sandweiss French St. Louis: Landscape, Contexts, and Legacy Edited by Jay Gitlin, Robert Michael Morrissey, and Peter J. Kastor (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 336. Illustrations, genealogies, maps, graphs, index. Clothbound $65.00; paperbound $35.00; e-book $35.00.) French St. Louis's editors have set out to rescue that city's early years from what they rightly call the "tired narrative frameworks, parochialisms, and origin myths" that long dominated its historiography (p. 2). Building upon papers presented at their 2019 commemoration of the 250th anniversary of St. Louis's founding, editors Gitlin, Morrissey, and Kastor complement their own earlier work on the colonial city—a community strategically sited at the corner of French, Spanish, British, and American empires—with that of nine other historians. Taken together, the contributors' research mines deep veins of cultural, environmental, and political evidence that have underlain early St. Louis history's hagiographic surface, awaiting discovery. Following ingenuously in the wake of an elderly Auguste Chouteau's 1825 testimony before the land commission that sought to establish title to the town's increasingly valuable lots, historians long accepted a simple civic foundation story that privileged the claim of Chouteau's common-law father (the New Orleans-based merchant Pierre Laclede), mother (Marie Therese Chouteau), and growing family to the city's power and wealth. As a boy, Chouteau had witnessed the village's founding; as a young man he inherited Laclede's fur-trading business; by the time of his testimony he was the town's wealthiest and most prominent resident—and the one with the most at stake in telling its story. Chouteau's version becomes, in this volume, just one piece of a bigger and more complicated tale—one whose protagonists include not only aristocratic French families but roughedged opportunists, hard-pressed government officials, shrewd women, and—especially—Native Americans (the Osage in particular) who brought their own designs and their own energy to the strategic settlement. Gitlin and his co-editors lay out pieces of that tale in four parts, which historically minded readers will likely find useful in direct relation to the order in which they appear. Section one, "Fashioning a Colonial Place: St. Louis between Empire and Frontier," fills in some of the complex relationships that Gitlin and others have begun to sketch over the last generation: of a settlement (St. Louis) in a region (the Illinois Country), sitting inside a territory (Louisiana), within an empire (first French, then Spanish). Those polycentric relationships, not surprisingly, developed into what Morrissey calls "a mutual order that was idiosyncratic and distinctive": neither the roughhewn wilderness of Turnerian legend, nor the well-oiled imperial machine that officials in Quebec or New [End Page 74] Orleans strived to maintain (p. 22). Robert Englebert points to the agency of French-Creole women, particularly the family of Marie-Catherine Giard, in defining this unique order; J. Frederick Fausz to the creativity of Osage traders; Patricia Cleary to the use among both Euro- and Native Americans of clothing and fashion as a medium of cultural exchange. A second section, "St. Louis and New Orleans: A Regional Perspective," offers Lawrence N. Powell and Andrew N. Wegmann a chance to model contrasting approaches to the study of St. Louis's relationship with its downstream cousin. In Powell's telling—and echoing the work of urban historians from Richard Wade to Timothy Mahoney—the cities' relationship is one of contrasting economies supported by differently organized hinterlands. Powell finds in this connection to distinct rural landscapes an answer to the question of why "St. Louis industrialized and New Orleans never did" (p. 131). Wegmann instead looks to the extensive networks of a single woman—the Creole woman of color Pelagie Rutgers—to explain how shifting and flexible racial categories joined the families—and cultures—of the Louisiana Territory's two urban poles. Section Three, "Visualizing Place: New Sources and Resources for Telling the Story of St. Louis," joins a pair of essays useful in themselves, but with little in common besides their relationship to the section's noncommittal...

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