Overview

"The animal wealth of the western wilderness"" provided by talented ""savages"" encouraged French-Americans from Illinois, Canada and Louisiana to found a cosmopolitan center of international commerce that was a model of multicultural harmony. Historian J. Frederick Fausz offers a fresh interpretation of Saint Louis from 1764 to 1804, explaining how Pierre Lacl de, the early Chouteaus, Saint Ange de Bellerive and the Osage Indians established a ""gateway"" to an enlightened, alternative frontier of peace and prosperity before Lewis and Clark were even born. Historians, genealogists and general readers will appreciate the well-researched perspectives in this engaging story about a novel French West long ignored in American History."""

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9781609490164

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Combining vivid storytelling with meticulous research, Fausz helps readers see St. Louis in an entirely new way, as a multicultural city. He brings to life its fascinating French, Osage Indian, and other peoples, as well as its natural and urban landscape and the central importance of international commerce. In doing so, he shows us a future that could have been, a frontier based on economically fruitful cooperation rather than violence and expulsion. <b>--Kathleen DuVal, author of <i>The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent</b></i> Correcting numerous errors that have burrowed into the historical record, Founding St. Louis digs deep to offer the most impressive history yet written of the city's French founders, of the old world they came from and the new one they created. An absolutely essential book for historians of St. Louis, of colonial Louisiana, of the Early Atlantic World, and of American history. <b>--Stephen Aron, author of <i>American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State</b></i> The details will fascinate, and every reader will learn something new, even those well-versed in the city's history. The story of the founding of St. Louis now has the solid foundation it has deserved. <b>--Jay Gitlin, author of <i>The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion</b></i>

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Fred Fausz is a history professor and former dean of the Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, specializing in the ethnohistory of Indian-European relations in colonial America. He received an AB degree in European history from Thomas More College in his native Kentucky; earned his PhD in early American history from the College of William and Mary, with Phi Beta Kappa honors; and was a fellow of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library, Chicago. Three of his many publications have won best of the year? awards from historical societies in Missouri, Virginia and Maryland, and in May 2007, Time magazine cited his research on early Jamestown. Committed to sharing historical knowledge with the general public, he was a consultant on Kevin Costner's eight-hour Indian documentary, 500 Nations, and has exhibited his extensive collection of fur trade artifacts in major museums and at other sites in seven midwestern states. In 2006, he was the lead organizer and program chair for the Ninth North American Fur Trade Conference in St. Louis and received the 2007 Missouri Governor's Award in the Humanities for Enhancing Community Heritage.

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