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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
colorful tale of generations of a family leading the opening of the American West, April 9, 2008
This review is from: The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade (Hardcover)
A movie of the life of the Chouteaus would have to be one of those generational epics running as a week-long series on channels such as HBO. "This family [featured] energetic, adventurous men destined to play significant roles in the advance of the United States and Euro-American civilization westward from the Mississippi River." The Chouteau men were active mostly before the Louisiana Purchase. By their explorations and commercial ventures in large parts of the area of the Purchase and contacts with Native Americans, they eased the growth of the United States beyond the Mississippi River. Some of the Chouteau men were prototypes of the mountain men who became legendary in American lore; though the Chouteau men were usually more entrepreneurial (rather than individualistic) in their activities and aims. One of them spent time in a Spanish jail in the Southwest for misunderstandings with Spanish authorities about his presence in Spanish territory. And rather than trapping themselves and selling or trading the seasonal catch, most of the Chouteau men worked to create business networks of Native American tribes, European and American buyers, and varied commercial interests such as transportation and banking. In general, the Chouteau men also recognized the desirability and in some ways necessity of relations with governmental authorities. The first of the Chouteau men were actually children of a man who has come to be known historically as Leclede and a Marie Therese, the wife of Rene Auguste Chouteau, who after some time in New Orleans returned to France abandoning her. The children were given the Chouteau name because the mother had to keep this name since the parents' Catholicism forbid them from divorcing. It was Laclede who set the pattern for the following two generations of the Chouteau men who had such an influence on opening the West for Euro-American settlement and development. In sympathy with French claims to upper parts of the Mississippi at the time of the French and Indian War, Laclede "committed himself to the proposition of constructing and operating one of the first franchised trading operations in the barely explored wilderness of the Mississippi Valley." In 1763 with his teenaged son Auguste a member of his crew, Laclede set out by keelboat up the Mississippi from New Orleans. During this trading venture, in the Spring 1764, Laclede named a site where cabins for shelter and sheds for storage of furs had been built Saint Louis in honor of the French king. This was the origin of the city of Saint Louis which at first an outpost, later became a key crossroad in trade between the western lands and the eastern towns and cities. Before long, Laclede's wife moved from New Orleans to Saint Louis with their children. One of these was named Pierre Chouteau. Auguste and Pierre Chouteau and their male children carried on the tradition begun by their father Laclede. Pierre's eight sons especially had an incomparable role as sources of information about the areas and in advancing trade and other commercial interests as a prelude to settlement as they pursued their varied interests. Hoig--professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma--follows the adventures and accomplishments of the Chouteaus through developments relating to the Louisiana Purchase up to the Civil War. There are many legendary explorers and pioneers in the story of the United States' westward expansion. But the Chouteau's are unique in that they were generations of one family whose combined efforts largely in pursuit of business opportunities and becoming wealthy are beyond compare.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thorough and readable, if slightly juiceless, June 2, 2009
This review is from: The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade (Hardcover)
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States was a comparative infant of a country. Well established along the Atlantic coast, with adventurers and the settlers who invariably followed them just barely beginning to cross the Appalachians. There was nothing but three thousand miles of wilderness, about which practically nothing was known, when the largest portion of it was purchased from France. But by then the a teenaged Auguste Chouteau and his stepfather Pierre Laclede had already spent many years in the fur trade, venturing in clumsy keelboats, up the river from their original home in New Orleans to establish a trading post and engage in commerce with the various Indian tribes along the Missouri River valley and daringly with those to the west of the Mississippi, that great water highway. In 1764, Laclede had selected a place for his trading post, near the mouth of the Missouri river, on the west bank of the Mississippi - St. Louis. His base of operations would become the keystone of the western fur trade. Auguste Chouteau, his younger brother Pierre and three generations of their descendants would be intimately involved in trade, exploration and development of the West, as merchants and as agents to various tribes. They would be friends with everyone - explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, with Thomas Jefferson and William Henry Harrison, with the Sioux and Osage Indians, with the displaced Creeks and Cherokees, Sam Houston and Washington Irving, just to name a few. This account is a thorough and readable, if slightly juiceless of a family whose various frontier exploits and adventures would make a fantastically eventful novel, not to mention fairly complicated marital histories. One might wish that the writer had more of a novelists touch in bringing the various Chouteaus more vividly to life, but as this seems to be the only one of two recent books dealing with such a quietly important family, enthusiasts for the history of the pre-Civil War west must take what they can get.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing names-and-dates history, November 4, 2011
This review is from: The Chouteaus: First Family of the Fur Trade (Hardcover)
For a century beginning around 1765, four generations of the Chouteau family were important in the North American fur trade, and also in the exploration of the continent, the founding of cities and towns, the development of the economy and relations with the native Americans. This book recites the facts of their story in dry prose. The stories themselves are filled with passion, daring and adventure, but none of the characters comes alive. The liveliest passages are quotations from contemporaneous sources. If a book like this is to have much value, it must be accurate. Unfortunately it is quite sloppy. On page 4, Pierre de Laclede leaves New Orleans in August 1763 with his stepson, "fifteen-year-old Auguste Chouteau". In December of that year on page 5, he takes aside "fourteen-year-old Auguste." On page 6 the party returns to Fort de Chartres in December 1763. When the ice breaks two paragraphs later in February 1764, we are told the party again returns to Fort de Chartres to wait for the ice to break. This sort of inconsistency occurs throughout the book. It's usually easy enough to figure out what the author means, and in other cases the details don't matter much. But it's irritating and suggests the author didn't read his own book. I also didn't like the illustrations. The book could certainly use some clear maps for modern readers unfamiliar with the political boundaries and Indian tribe areas of influence of the period. It would also be useful to see illustrations of boats, houses, traveling equipment, clothing and other details. Instead the book uses mainly illustrations created much later by people who never saw the places or events described. An 1870 woodcut from Harper's Magazine of the first buildings in St. Louis a century earlier looks sort of like a period illustration, but is unlikely to be reliable. There are a dozen major Chouteau family members, as well as at least another dozen minor ones, many with similar or identical names. The author does give us a list in an appendix, but it would be much more helpful to see it drawn as a tree and ordered either chronologically or alphabetically. A timeline showing non-Chouteau characters and major events would also have made it much easier to keep track of the multi-threaded story that jumps around in time and place. My final complaint is ideological. Historian Daniel Usner ( Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783) has complained about "the geographical trivialization of the Gulf South in colonial American historiography." In shorter words, he added, "Its people have been largely ignored or casually dismissed as mere bit-players in the drama of American development--colorful no doubt, but peripheral and unimportant. Before falling under the sovereignty of the United States, lands along the Mississippi River appear to be an amorphous area sojourned by French woodsmen and Indian warriors while waiting to be occupied by Anglo-American settlers and their African-American slaves." This is the region that gave us the distinctively American musical forms--jazz and blues--the distinctively American cuisine--Creole--the distinctively American game--poker--as well as futures markets. It was the gateway to exploring the continent. Yet high school American history students can name dozens of Colonial and Federal people of note from Massachusetts and Virginia, but perhaps only Jean Lafitte and Mike Fink from the Gulf South--both colorful but unimportant and for that matter born in France and Pennsylvania respectively. This book should have joined the small but growing movement to correct this imbalance. Instead it adds to it. Spanish and French officials, and Native Americans, are treated distantly as unpredictable actors without motivation. Attention and understanding is reserved for Anglo-American political and military figures. A lot more of the book is about Washington than New Orleans or any western city other than St. Louis. In several places the book refers to Americans versus French or Spanish people, at times after 1803 when all were United States citizens by virtue of the Louisiana Purchase. This may have reflected attitudes of the times, but from today we can say that they were all Americans, all contributors to the modern country.
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