Overview

Born into slavery in St. Louis in 1806, Jeffrey Deroine (de-rō-NAY) worked and lived in the heart of a rapidly changing nation. Forced to work in the fur trade on the Missouri River, he experienced Missouri's rapid transformation from territory to statehood. As a trader, he helped his hometown grow from a small trading center into a large river town. Later, he participated in the founding of the frontier city of St. Joseph, Missouri. Though scraps of his life are still present in the historical record, specifics have proven elusive. Still, it is important to tell Deroine's life story, as it gives us a look both into the life of an enslaved man and the struggles of a free person of color in pre-Civil War Missouri. His life spanned a critical point in the history of the state, and he seems to have spent most of it at the very heart of the action. Though not well known, the story of Jeffrey Deroine is significant because it illustrates the nuanced intersectionality of lives on the American frontier. Deroine was a man of both French and African descent who lived much of his life among Indigenous people. Born into slavery, he became a free person of color who was a businessman, owned property, and enslaved others. His life defied expectations and stereotypes, and a consideration of it allows us to better understand the history of Missouri and the West.

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9780826223494

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Reviews

“Greg Olson illuminates the entangled histories of bondage, commerce, and empire in the American West in this beautifully written and thoroughly researched biography of trader and interpreter Jeffrey Deroine. His synthesis of fragmentary evidence from this one man’s life represents some of the best that microhistorical analysis has to offer.”—Kristen Epps, Kansas State University, author of Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras

Author Information

Greg Olson served as the Curator of Exhibits and Special Projects at the Missouri State Archives from 2000–2018 and is the author of six books, including, The Ioway in Missouri; Voodoo Priests, Noble Savages, and Ozark Gypsies: The Life of Folklorist Mary Alicia Owen; and Indigenous Missourians: Ancient Societies to the Present.

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