From Publishers Weekly
Before the United States' westward expansion, French settlers dominated a wide swath of territory west of the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis and beyond. Pulitzer-winning journalist Christian (Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family) chronicles several generations of one of the major French families occupying this frontier territory in her fast-paced historical portrait. Born into a wealthy family, young Auguste and Pierre Chouteau moved to the town that soon became St. Louis in 1763. Their father, Pierre, one of the town's founders, came to the region from New Orleans as an explorer, but soon prospered as a fur trader. He established a very good relationship with the Osages and other Indian tribes, and he taught his sons to respect them. Auguste and the younger Pierre moved easily among the tribes to trade and sell, feeling as much at home in Indian huts as in their mansions on the Mississippi. They hosted parties for visiting American dignitaries, including Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose journeys reaped enormous benefits from their association with the Chouteaus. As Christian points out, the Chouteaus were instrumental in paving a smooth path in the relations between Indians and American settlers. But, as Christian observes, the settlers paid little attention to the cultivation of relationships with the Native Americans and thus encountered more resistance than the Chouteaus ever did. Christian's lively portrait of the Chouteaus opens a window on a little-known portion of early American history. Map. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
You could just about fill up a bookshelf with recent volumes devoted to Lewis and Clark and their storied expedition. My guess is that the topic's appeal has something to do with the reassuring spectacle of whites and Indians cooperating in an outsized adventure -- the fleeting glimpse of racial harmony that underlies the tale. At any rate, the success of these books seems to be helping other early explorers of the American West to emerge from obscurity. So it is with the subjects of Shirley Christian's Before Lewis and Clark: the Chouteaus, a French-American family whose fur-trading ventures made them the men to see when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were planning and prepping.The clan's sire wasn't a Chouteau at all but a man named Pierre Laclède de Liguest. As a second son in his native France, Laclède had felt boxed in. In 1755, at age 26, he emigrated to New Orleans, where he took up with a young mother who was estranged from her husband, a man named Chouteau. The "newlyweds" had four children of their own, all of whom they passed off as additional Chouteaus. Society looked the other way because Laclède was rapidly becoming a man of influence: With a partner, he obtained a license to trade with all Indians living west of the Mississippi River. Eight years after his arrival in the New World, Laclède chose an advantageous site, on the western bank of the Mississippi just south of its confluence with the Missouri, for the future city of St. Louis.Trading with Indians meant handing over supplies -- everything from blankets and guns to fake medals -- in return for pelts. Christian sets the stage for the launching of the family enterprise: "Well before Laclède set up business in St. Louis, Louis XIV had made the wide-brimmed beaver hat the fashion rage among European men by perching it atop his chestnut curls and parading around in high heels. But John Jacob Astor, who was to amass from the fur trade America's first multimillion-dollar fortune, was still in diapers in the German village of his birth. The fur trade was then dominated from Canada, where most of the twelve thousand whites were in the fur trade in some form by the end of the seventeenth century. In the Mississippi and Missouri basins, the business had been very modest, operated by individuals with little capital. Laclède brought a determination to change that, to build a large, well-organized business, and to impose his leadership."Through several changes of rule -- from Spain to France and finally to the United States -- the family manifested a remarkable talent for getting along with Indians, especially the otherwise testy Osages. The Chouteaus' secret was simple but almost revolutionary: They treated Indians not as wayward children but as fully adult humans, with needs and desires and feelings. Time and again, the Chouteaus interceded with government officials to get better deals for Indians, not so much for love of them or their way of life (although Chouteau males often took common-law Indian wives and had children by them, while in residence at trading posts) as to keep the pelts moving. The Chouteaus added a lucrative southern front to the fur industry, moonlighted as Indian agents, invested in land and did well without becoming filthy rich. They also had a good time. To the consternation of visiting Protestants from the East, the Chouteaus and other French Creole St. Louisans "enjoyed billiards, cards, horse races, and, most of all, dancing to the music of fiddlers."Fur trading was hazardous, and Christian's accounts of various mishaps suffered by Chouteau principals and agents underline the risks involved. In 1829 a keelboat carrying pelts back from a rendezvous with the Kansa and Shawnee Indians ran into strong winds and was swept into a boulder. The boat sank, three hands were drowned, and the pelts lay underwater in the boat's hold. As a third-generation Chouteau looked on, a slave named Joseph Lulu went down "no less than 375 times" to retrieve the precious cargo. Two years later, the Chouteaus' steamboat Yellow Stone encountered low water while heading up the Missouri and got stuck for almost two weeks. Everyone on board had to be kept fed while other, smaller boats came to the rescue. That same summer, another Chouteau vessel, this one a barge, capsized en route to St. Louis, ruining a large haul of furs and deerskins.Lewis and Clark weren't the only newcomers to Indian territory to benefit from Chouteau expertise. At various times, artists George Catlin and Karl Bodmer hitched rides on Chouteau boats; their voyages yielded invaluable records, in brush strokes and in words, of what Christian calls "the time just before the region erupted into open conflict between whites and Indians." Before the fur trade declined in the late 1840s, the Chouteaus had a hand in founding not only St. Louis but also Kansas City, Mo., and the town that became the capital of South Dakota, named after Pierre Chouteau Jr., the trader who located a post there. Without the Chouteaus' common sense and knack for maintaining cordial relations with Indians, the opening of the American West would have been uglier and crueler than it was -- as Christian points out, you only have to look at what happened once the U.S. Army took over to appreciate the family's tolerance and flexibility.As a native St. Louisan whose family (on my mother's side) once had business dealings with the Chouteaus, I read this book with keen interest. Those without such ties should be advised: Although Shirley Christian has done her homework and told her story thoroughly, perhaps even definitively, narration is not her forte. Some of this material begs for pulse-quickening treatment and a dose of what reviewers used to call "epic sweep," but unfortunately she rarely delivers either.I can't resist ending with the Osages. After being talked out of most of their once vast holdings, they ended up with what Christian calls "one and a half million beautifully rolling acres, a green and treed land," in Oklahoma. It also turned out to be a land of plenty when oil was discovered there. The Osages' royalties "hit a peak of $13,000 a person in 1925," Christian writes, "and Rolls-Royces purred along the streets of Pawhuska." As she notes, the Chouteaus would likely have been pleased. Reviewed by Dennis DrabelleCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.


From Booklist
If not for evocative histories such as Christian's, America's French heritage might molder only in vestigial place-names and ruins. St. Louis and its environs have their share, and Christian brings alive the fur trade that created them. French-Indian trade, she emphasizes, predated the founding of the city in 1764 by Pierre Laclede, but his conduct of the business generated records that, in Christian's hands, palpably project a feeling for the perils and potential riches of frontier life. This quality, in addition to the emphasis on Laclede and his Chouteau sons and grandsons' vast trading network, endows her history with more than local attraction, for it captures the uniquely amicable relationships between whites and Indians. Without idealizing the Chouteaus' affairs on their journeys into the lands of the Osage, Kansa, and other tribes, Christian underscores their peacefulness. Some arriving Americans, including Lewis and Clark, took advantage of the Chouteaus' diplomatic value, which threads through Christian's narrative to her conclusion with fur trapping's decline. A fascinating history bound to enrapture Old West readers. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Library Journal
"Well-written and profusely researched."


L.A. Times
"Christian works hard to understand the Chouteaus on their terms…[he] ably details the persistence of the Chouteaus."


Book Description
Shortly after Meriweather Lewis reached St. Louis in 1803 to plan for his voyage to the Pacific with William Clark, he prepared his first packet of flora and fauna from west of the Mississippi and dispatched it to President Jefferson. The cuttings, which were later planted in Philadelphia and Virginia, were supplied by Lewis's new French friend, Pierre Chouteau, who took them from a tree growing in the garden of his mansion.

One of the best-known families in French America, the Chouteaus had guarded the gates to the West for generations and had built fortunes from fur trading, land speculation, finance, and railroads, and by supplying anything needed to survive in the region between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains. Patrician in their origins, they nevertheless won the respect and allegiance of dozens of Indian tribes. From their St. Louis base, the Chouteaus conquered the more-than-two-thousand-mile length of the Missouri River, put down the first European roots at the future site of Kansas City and in present-day Oklahoma, and left their names and imprints on lands stretching to the Canadian border.

Before Lewis and Clark: The French Dynasty that Ruled America's Frontier is the extraordinary story of a wealthy, powerful, charming, and manipulative family, who dominated business and politics in the Louisiana Purchase territory before the famous Lewis and Clark expedition, and for decades afterward.



About the Author
Shirley Christian is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Miami Herald and the Associated Press. She is the author of Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family and lives in Overland Park in Kansas.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The year was 1804. In the little French Creole village of St. Louis on the Mississippi River, where the brothers Auguste Pierre and Pierre (Cadet) Chouteau were the leading figures, there was great uncertainty about the future. Nevertheless, the Chouteaus and all of St. Louis welcomed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as the two men prepared for their spring voyage up the Missouri River to explore the new lands and search for a route to the Pacific Ocean." Before Lewis and Clark is the saga of the Chouteaus, the dynasty that guarded the gates to the West for three generations. From St. Louis, founded by the family four decades before the arrival of Lewis and Clark, the Chouteaus built fortunes as land speculators, financiers, Indian agents, and, above all, fur traders. The Chouteaus conquered the more-than-two-thousand-mile length of the Missouri River, put down the first European roots at the future site of Kansas City and in present-day Oklahoma, and left their names and imprints on lands stretching to the Canadian border.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Before the United States' westward expansion, French settlers dominated a wide swath of territory west of the Mississippi from New Orleans to St. Louis and beyond. Pulitzer-winning journalist Christian (Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family) chronicles several generations of one of the major French families occupying this frontier territory in her fast-paced historical portrait. Born into a wealthy family, young Auguste and Pierre Chouteau moved to the town that soon became St. Louis in 1763. Their father, Pierre, one of the town's founders, came to the region from New Orleans as an explorer, but soon prospered as a fur trader. He established a very good relationship with the Osages and other Indian tribes, and he taught his sons to respect them. Auguste and the younger Pierre moved easily among the tribes to trade and sell, feeling as much at home in Indian huts as in their mansions on the Mississippi. They hosted parties for visiting American dignitaries, including Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, whose journeys reaped enormous benefits from their association with the Chouteaus. As Christian points out, the Chouteaus were instrumental in paving a smooth path in the relations between Indians and American settlers. But, as Christian observes, the settlers paid little attention to the cultivation of relationships with the Native Americans and thus encountered more resistance than the Chouteaus ever did. Christian's lively portrait of the Chouteaus opens a window on a little-known portion of early American history. Map. (Apr.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

With May 14, 2004, marking the 200th anniversary of the start of Lewis and Clark's journey of discovery, the publication of this book is well timed. However, the word "before" in the title is misleading; it actually denotes that the Chouteau family was by 1804 well established in St. Louis after the city's founding by family patriarch Pierre Lacl de in 1763. Through telling the story of Laclede and the following two generations of his family, Christian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has created an insightful history of the maturing American frontier during the first half of the 19th century. The Chouteaus were leaders in running the fur trade, mediating between whites and Indians, and in opening the Louisiana territory to settlement. Christian does not romanticize the family, pointing out that they were sharp in business, owned slaves, and helped to displace the Indians. She richly describes both the fur trade and the gradual destruction of the native tribes. The book's two maps are inadequate given the text's wide-ranging geographical content, but Christian's well-written and profusely researched book is an essential purchase for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/03.]-Lawrence R. Maxted, Gannon Univ., Erie, PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews