Gitlin, Morrissey, & Castor's French St. Louis
Gitlin, in particular, seems to be the foremost historian working on the American West and particularly what he calls the “Creole Corridor”, which is a sociocultural region and economic watershed roughly corresponding to the “lower” Mississippi River with New Orleans as its southern terminus and St. Louis as the northern, but also bringing in smaller (and now-disappeared) communities such as Ste. Genevieve, MO, Kaskaskia, and the greater pays des Illinois territory – “St. Louis was not founded with a knowledge of future industrial greatness. It was, however, founded on the edge of a colonial empire, at the crossroads of Indigenous communities, and in a well-developed, century-old colonial world: the Illinois Country”.
The essays that make up this volume largely plumb for evidence of the vanished French occupation of the Midwest, and strangely take pains to establish a collaborative detente between the French and native American populations which Morrissey goes so far as to denote as an “empire by collaboration”, in which the “heaven is high and the emperor is far away”-type colonial administration emanating from Paris left the French colonial occupiers forced to get along with the Illinois (the “Iroquois of the West”), the Osage, Missouri, and “other Siouan speakers in the plains”. A sample:
“In the 1730s, the French fought an initially unwanted war against the Fox Indians, largely because the Illinois Indians insisted on it. The provincial government in Illinois looked the other way when French colonists violated the strict requirements of the Coutume de Paris [the cadastral ledger] on matters of land tenure and inheritance. The Louisiana government allowed the colonists in Illinois to conduct slavery along idiosyncratic lines, sometimes in violation of the Code Noir…The frontier conditions of the colony meant that everybody—colonists, officials, Indians, even slaves—had power, and nobody could dominate”.
I find this rather hard to swallow. Even considering the somewhat lawless character of the Plains at that time, this softening of colonial relations seems rather to ignore the fact that the demographic differences between colonists and native Americans, or colonists and slaves, are not fictions of the census taker; they are clear and distinct relationships of power and social cohesion that do not disappear in the darkness of a “collaborative” gloss.
Far more interesting are accounts like Fausz’s, which focus on early colonial St. Louis as the commercial and mercantile inheritor of the military legacy of occupation abandoned when King Louis XV withdrew from Fort des Chartres following the Seven Years’ War. Yet even here, Fausz seems interested mostly in engaging in a sort of quietism with respect to the occupying French. His account of the Osage, in particular, labeling them the “Masters of the Hunting Country”, vital for their ability to produce “bucks”, the soft, brain-tanned deer chamois so prized in Paris, is used to establish St. Louis as a mercantile powerhouse nevertheless empowered solely by its fur trade, going so far as to approvingly cite an unnamed Parisian who called the Osage the “true bankers of the region”, where there was no king but commerce. Again, this seems to be strangely misleading, and the exegetic account of the differences between the collaborative nature of French colonization vs. the violent outbursts of a Virginian or Kaintuck event that held in Anglo-American settler colonialism. Reading this, you would almost be inclined to believe the authors buy the hype: that the French empire of the Creole Corridor was truly a “civilizing” one!
Where this book does shine is in establishing that French Louisiana truly was an empire, thereby breaking with the common view, even in academic histories, that St. Louis was an isolated frontier outpost. Over and against the quotidian cosmogenesis of Laclede’s Landing, Powell’s essay “You Are Who You Trade With” especially, borrowing heavily from the comparative work of Timothy R. Mahoney. Powell points out that St. Louis is not founded by an intrepid explorer, but by French capital by way of New Orleans, with the specific intent to capture the upriver trade market in a literal example of vertical integration. He also further stresses the manufacturing base of St. Louis allowed it to explode as the senescence of New Orleans, with its fortunes tied to the overtly violent but economically stagnant cotton industry of the slave south. In particular, Mahoney is used to point out that the preponderance of small satellite towns around St. Louis established a network of trading partners and speculative tributaries who combined to drive two cycles of land rush in 1816-19 and 1835-37 which overall contributed to regional fortunes that all converged on St. Louis as an industrial powerhouse along lines of development originally set down by French traders and speculators. Powell quotes an economic observer in 1854:
“There are few branches of industry, few kinds of manufacturing, but what are now being carried forward successfully in St. Louis.” He counted twenty flour mills, a large number of lumber and planning mills, twenty- five foundries, a bevy of engines and boiler manufacturers, numerous machine shops. There were stovecasting shops, plus an extensive locomotive building works, railroad car works, saddle and harness works, rope works and bagging factories, never mind “large quantities of furniture”—a consumer durable particularly sensitive to the density of market demand. There were shops that turned out “tin and sheet iron ware, carriages and wagons, and agricultural implements, heretofore imported.” Inexplicably overlooked was St. Louis’s five-hundred-man tobacco factory, one of the nation’s largest.”
Lawrence, in a later essay, directly links this regional explosion to the last French governor of the territory, Pierre-Clément de Laussat, who drove the regionalization of the Corridor in his final months, bequeathing the hungry American empire a readymade economic engine.
The last few essays slide into maudlin whining about the disappearance of French St. Louis—did you know Union Station was inspired by the Carcassonne? City Hall by the Hotel de Ville? About the SLLIS Midwestern French immersion school? St. Louis Accueil, Centre Francophone, Les Amis? Does it matter?
With respect to Primm’s Lion of the Valley, we may say Gitlin et al. have done exceptional work highlighting the French commercial influence and existence of the late Empire as opposed to Primm’s rather doctrinaire focus on Laclede and co. as mythic figures in the wilderness. The pre-American territories are illuminated as a living, syncretic civilization here, though the native American presence prior to the French is of course, still elided. However, the force of French St. Louis upends Primm’s account, which by relation seems even more focused on the Anglo settler and American St. Louis than it did before. As critics have noted, Primm is blinkered by his strict focus on the city as it is defined by strict municipal limits; what French St. Louis does is firmly and finally puts the lie to such a position.