The most salient feature of Patricia Cleary’s honestly magisterial and compendious The World, the Flesh, and the Devil is the wholesale ambiguity of life in colonial Upper Louisiana. This appears first in the sense of territorial administration and secondly in colonial government’s attempts to rule directly and in accordance with principles of devoutness and propriety.
Where, for Gitlin, Morrissey, and Castor the colonial landscape is defined by the “Creole Corridor” of the Mississippi River valley, Cleary’s territorial understanding is far more geopolitical, with the river itself conceptualized as a bright line, difficult to traverse both North-South and East-West, and often the only definable feature of not just the Louisiana Territory but all parts west of the American eastern seaboard at all. When Cleary tells us “the interior of the continent was a scene of military maneuvers and challenges”, she is not just referring to Washington’s entry into the Illinois Territory in 1754, but highlighting that the defining feature of the area, at least to European eyes, was not just commerce, as Gitlin et al. would have us believe, but the establishment (or failed establishment) of military presence by a revolving door of colonial empires who endeavored to establish and maintain control of a great, and densely populated, continental region with a few dozen men posted at some marginal fortresses (Fort Chartres for the French, Fort San Carlos El Principe for the Spanish). I find this to be a vastly more helpful frame, one which seems to hew closely to the view actually taken by colonial administrators like Commandant St. Ange and Governor Leyba. A constant question of colonial oversight was maximizing control with a minimum of resources, and this renders the attitudes taken towards indigenous nations in a much more comprehensive light. The desire to seek a (chauvinist) peace with these nations, who outnumbered the Europeans to a bewildering degree, becomes an existential imperative for Cleary, and in her account it makes sense why Chief Pontiac’s Seven Years’ War (or the French and Indian War) was poised to upend British presence in the Americas for a time.
The ambiguity deepens when one turns to the actual shape of that colonial administration. When Laclede founds St. Louis in early April 1764, in the name of France and named for both the French king (Louis XV) and his patron saint (Louis IX), the territory west of the Mississippi (which Laclede has a now-defunct sole contract for Missouri River trade rights) is actually no longer French, having been ceded to Spain via the secret Treaty of Fontainebleu in 1762. Laclede was utterly unaware of this; he knew that France’s loss to Britain a year prior in the Seven Years’ War had seen the Illinois Territory east of the river fall into British hands, along with Canada, and in fact hoped St. Louis would receive French refugees from the British crown (it did – an observer noted that St. Louis was originally peopled by the dissolution of Fort Chartres and St. Philippe). The French and British colonial governors were extremely charitable to each other, St. Ange going so far as to directly intervene to save the lives of multiple British officials menaced by Native violence and threats. The Spanish remained absent from their new holdings for three and a half years before finally sending Governor Don Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Guiral, and even then Spanish presence was minimal, to say the least – he arrived in New Orleans with only 90 men (20 of which quickly deserted), chose to reside not in the capital but in the town of La Belize 100 miles north, signed a term-free joint administration deal with the French governor Captain Aubry, and did not even require the changing of the flags; the Spanish banner flew only at La Belize and nowhere else. The Spanish colonial government in the form of Lieutenant-Governor Pedro Piernas only arrives in St. Louis in 1768, and even he does not take over St. Louis, but rents from Laclede use of his storehouse.
A final note: the fundamental impotence of Spanish control in the Louisiana often mixed with rather hilarious attempts at patriarchal rule. The title of the book comes from Governor Fernando de Leyba’s letter to Bernardo de Galvez about the inhabitants of St. Louis, describing the trinitine temptations they regularly succumb to, and which are his responsibility to disabuse of. The world here means “commerce”, and here Leyba joins a tradition dating to St. Louis’ founding. As has been often noted, St. Louis’ nickname in the colonial era was Pain Court, meaning “short of bread”. This was an attack on St. Louisians’ perceived lazyness, but also their desire to hunt and pursue speculative activity in the fur trade instead of agriculture, resulting in a rather sizeable requirement for imported flour. For the Spanish Catholics, the mammon of the world was sadly pulling residents away from the more authentic and socially useful practice of farming, especially that of the fertile lands of the Valley.
The flesh refers to a penchant for alcohol and other bodily sins, which the Spanish especially punished with great relish; Cleary notes that there was a total ban on brandy, the Lieutenant-Governor regularly intervened in domestic disputes in the town, doling out banishments for offenses such as slander. Leyba et al. also prohibited Native slavery (even though labor demand was always high, given most European and creole men preferred to run off to trade furs and hunt) and punished severely. A later Governor, Cruzat, became enraged upon discovering a horse racing ring.
The devil simply communicates the Spanish Catholics’ dismay with the rather more secular French inhabitants of the region. For many years, and though Laclede platted the Rue de l'Eglise as one of the first three street in the village upon its founding, St. Louis lacked a church and even clergy, a fact that was intolerable to the incoming Spanish.
Overall, Cleary’s book rather exceptionally and exhaustively chronicles colonial St. Louis. It represents a significantly improved account over Gitlin et al.’s which is hamstrung by his own boosterish affinity with the Francophone Midwest, as evidenced by his association with the Les Amis group. Cleary’s portrait is both more vivid and does not turn away from the all-important Spanish tenure in the region, which has been even more buried than the French. Finally, she offers an excellent account of Laclede’s life in particular, following him out of the Pyranees to the New World, especially laboriously detailing the surveying of the site of St. Louis’ founding ("Ten miles south of the rivers' confluence and sixty miles north of Fort Chartres") and the work of clearing he set for Auguste Chouteau there, taken from the latter’s “Narrative on the Settlement of St. Louis” journals. Finally, here the native population of the Midwest appear not as woodsmen or dependents but as fierce and independent nations who are forced by circumstance into dealing with European powers, and significantly and sophisticatedly weigh in on political maneuverings. Whereas in other tellings the natives may appear as rogue traders or marauding threats, Cleary stresses that Laclede appeared initially “in a region fully inhabited by indigenous peoples, primarily the Missouri, Osage, and Kansas on the western side of the river and the Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Cahokia, and Peoria on the eastern side...and the immediate vicinity of St. Louis was the ancient home of the Mississippian Indians”. Further, a connection is made: the colonies were so profitable not just for the primitive accumulation possible in, for example, in “a source of commodities” and the continental interior being “a wild place of unfathomable natural abundance”, but also, absolutely crucially, because the native nations themselves represented a readymade market for consumption. The native nations had great and multifarious utility for a European looking to get rich, and quickly.