René Auguste Chouteau (photo courtesy of the Missouri History Museum)
The city of St. Louis was born out of absurdity. It was founded, the story goes, by a teenager. It was founded almost exclusively for the trade of little furs cut from the backs of beavers. It was founded in the name of the French king on ground secretly owned by the Spanish king.
But the founder of St. Louis was far from absurd. Born on September 7, 1749, René Auguste Chouteau remains a fascinating, complex character who forged the beginnings of a mighty city out of the wilderness. Chouteau’s first name, René, got lost somewhere along the way—perhaps because it reminded him of his father, who was estranged from his mother, Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau. So estranged that she began a common-law marriage with Pierre Laclède Liguest, a fellow Frenchman living in New Orleans. Divorce was impossible back then, and living on the edge of civilization required marital improvisation—much to the later consternation of their descendant Dr. Alexander DeMenil. His 1921 letter to the Globe-Democrat, later turned into a booklet titled Madame Chouteau Vindicated, was a hilariously argued attempt to hide what by then seemed a scandal.
When Laclède and his adopted son Auguste Chouteau founded St. Louis in 1764, they named the new fur trading post after St. Louis, the patron saint of the current king of the time, Louis XV. But Louis XV had been squandering French power in the years before the men set foot on the bluffs above the Mississippi. Facing defeat in the Seven Years’ War, he’d secretly given away the western half of the Lousiana Territory to his fellow Bourbon family member, King Charles III, making St. Louis Spanish territory when the city was founded. Taken back by Napoleon Bonaparte from a weak and vacillating Charles IV, the First Consul of France in turn sold Louisana to the United States.
Through all of this, Chouteau and his half-brother Jean-Pierre quickly built a huge fur trading empire while deftly engaging in what we now call multi-culturalism. First, they forged close ties with the Osage Nation, which controlled much of the territory beyond the safe confines of the Mississippi River valley. Later, when the Spanish finally arrived, it was the Chouteaus’ turn to learn to live under foreign rule. Chouteau business dealings would stretch as far as the Great Plains, and the family name shows up in local place names hundreds of miles away from St. Louis.
Madame Chouteau(photo courtesy of the Missouri History Museum)
In a remarkable life that stretched from January 14, 1733 to August 14, 1814, Madame Chouteau watched her family’s influence expand. Born a French subject, she’d become a Spanish subject, briefly enjoyed French citizenship, and died an American. She’d taken the arduous journey north from New Orleans to the fledgling city her son and lover had founded, and she’d blithely ignored an attempt by her deadbeat husband to force her return to New Orleans. She was buried on the grounds of the Old Cathedral.
The Chouteaus took advantage of the strong ties they continued to nurture with New Orleans and the Osage. But America and its newly arrived businessmen from the East had new ideas on how to run the vast new territories of the West. One can imagine the sadness the francophones felt as St. Louis’s streets were changed from their eloquent, melodic French names to the decidedly unevocative numbers and tree names that persist today. The Osage soon found themselves expelled from their ancestral homes, and a German-American, John Jacob Astor, arrived to challenge the Chouteau’s stranglehold on the fur trade. Astor came from the east, and not from New Orleans, the Chouteau’s ancestral home and still an important trade partner. Determinedly gracious, the Chouteaus did business with his American Fur Company. There must have been a bit of tension beneath the surface of those dealings, but they kept the French sense of lightness, charm, and resilience in play.
Adapting to the changing times and the arrival of the railroad, the Chouteaus enthusiastically promoted St. Louis as a rail center. Henry, Auguste’s son, joined an ensemble of eminent St. Louisans on a ride across the newly completed Pacific Railroad bridge over the Gasconade River. Tragically, the trestle collapsed, killing Henry and dozens more. St. Louis’ hopes of arriving first in the Pacific died that day, and a decade later, when the Mississippi River closed to commercial traffic during the Civil War, the city’s hope of beating the young upstart to the north, Chicago, came to an end.
The Chouteau legacy continues to pervade modern St. Louis, if more subtly. Streets such Cerre and Gratiot, now sad little lanes deep downtown, allude to previous Chouteau wives and business associates. The grand Chouteau mansion, demolished as the city grew, possibly survives in small part in the Ionic columns of the front porch of the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion in Benton Park.
The Chouteaus exist in much the same manner: in families scattered around the region; in little bits and pieces of an earlier time; in legend and memory.
A Chouteau Today
Evan Murphy is a ninth-generation descendent of Auguste Chouteau. He went to DeSmet High School, and he’s now an attorney at Wells Fargo Advisors. He lives in Kirkwood with his family. And he grew up hearing the history of his family name, especially from his grandmother, seventh-generation Jeanne (pronounce it softly; French names were preferred en famille). She grew up in the exclusive Vandeventer Place, then moved to a mansion on Lindell just north of Forest Park.
Tradition remains important to the Chouteaus, but not suffocatingly so. While most are still baptized and married in the Old Cathedral, as they have been since the beginning of St. Louis, Murphy was married in the Shrine of St. Joseph, just north of downtown.
When it came time for the reception, though, bride and groom headed to the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion, once owned by another branch of the Chouteau family. Its current board president is Ted Atwood, another Chouteau descendant.
Asked what a young Chouteau does when it comes time for a career, Murphy laughs. “Fend for yourself!” Working for the “family business” is no longer an option. Asked what trait defines the Chouteaus, Murphy says hospitality—and a welcoming disposition. Most of us are a bit shy at a social gathering where we know few people, but the Chouteaus respond with open arms and friendship. Whether making friends with the Osage or the German-American beer family, the Griesediecks(with whom they still maintain a close relationship), the family has always been ready to adapt to new situations. They survived the arrival of the Spanish, the Americans, and the multinational corporations. During high school, Murphy says, his family home was known as a refuge for friends having trouble with their own parents. At his grandmother Jeanne’s funeral, people with grateful memories of the family’s hospitality crowded into the New Cathedral.
So what does a Chouteau think the city his family founded should do to improve its current lot? Murphy’s amazed that even though St. Louis is right in the middle of the country, this critical advantage doesn’t come up more often in the greater civic discussion about improving the local economy. And while he greatly appreciates the reinstallation of signs downtown commemorating his ancestor Auguste’s original French street names, he emphatically believes that living in the past, focusing too much on St. Louis’ 20th-century losses in prestige, is a detriment to our future. “You have to progress,” he says, “or you start to die.”
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