Regis Loisel (1773?–1804)

Regis (Registre) Loisel was born near Montreal, Canada, in about 1773, and at an early age he entered the fur trade. He worked on the Des Moines River, perhaps for the Canadian-based merchant Andrew Todd, whose interest stretched from Michilimackinac south and westward into Spanish territory. Loisel first appeared in St. Louis in 1793 at about the time a large shipment of Todd’s merchandise was confiscated as smuggled contraband by Spanish authorities there.

Todd supplied several St. Louis traders, among them Jacques Clamorgan. As director of the Missouri Company, Clamorgan acquired a controlling interest and the company’s monopoly on the Missouri River fur trade. Through Clamorgan’s influence, the Spanish government in 1795 granted Todd a monopoly on the Indian trade north of the river. To legitimate their clandestine alliance and facilitate their various projects, the two tapped young Loisel in 1796 and organized the firm of Clamorgan, Loisel, and Company. Using Loisel as his agent, Todd bought heavily into the Missouri Company. The partners had nearly achieved their trading empire when Todd’s sudden death during the New Orleans yellow fever epidemic of 1796 shattered the project. Both the Missouri Company and Clamorgan, Loisel, and Company were heavily in debt to Todd. In the years of litigation that followed, Todd’s heirs destroyed both companies and nearly bankrupted Clamorgan in their efforts to recover the debt.

Clamorgan and Loisel continued cooperating informally to control the Missouri River trade. When Clamorgan secured the government monopoly on trade with the Otos, Omaha, and Poncas, Loisel asked for the trade with the river tribes above Clamorgan’s grant. The intricate and shifting business alliances of St. Louis required wide connections, however. In May 1800, Loisel married Helene Chauvin, daughter of Jacques Chauvin, one of the lesser St. Louis traders who had repeatedly joined his peers in attempts to break Clamorgan and the Missouri Company.

Soon after the wedding, Loisel returned upriver to explore the potential of his grant. He traveled far into present-day South Dakota and may have begun construction of a trading post on Cedar Island, about thirty-five miles downriver from the modern city of Pierre. Business prospects in the neighborhood were poor: the Teton Sioux favored the Montreal-based Northwest Company and strongly opposed the St. Louis traders’ efforts to contact tribes farther upriver, a connection that would supply their enemies and cut their profits as middlemen in a lucrative river trade.

To strengthen his position, Loisel entered a two-­year partnership in July 1801 with Hugh Heney, a Canadian of old Northwest Company connections, now working for Clamorgan and Auguste Chouteau. While Clamorgan and Loisel cooperated in protecting the Oto-Ponca-Omaha trade from interlopers, Clamorgan acquired an interest in the new Loisel-Heney partnership, and Chouteau outfitted the partners for another trading venture on the upper Missouri.

In 1802 they ascended the river, and Loisel completed his trading post, Fort aux Cedres, on Cedar Island. Again, however, trade was frustrated by the Sioux blockade and serious competition from the Northwest Company. The trader returned to St. Louis early in 1803 and so impressed Charles de Hault Delassus, the lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana, that Delassus commissioned Loisel to undertake a formal investigation of conditions on the upper Missouri for the Spanish government. Loisel again ascended the river, stationing one trading party above his fort at the mouth of the Cheyenne River and another below among the Arikara while he spent the winter of 1803–1804 at his fort. Old problems plagued him: the Sioux demanded extravagant presents and refused to allow his men to visit other tribes or to resupply the party upriver. Loisel’s protests and alarm at British incursions may have been sincere, but Heney openly returned to his old associates in the Northwest Company.

His venture failing, Loisel returned to St. Louis in May 1804. On the way downriver he encountered the Lewis and Clark expedition and shared information, advice, and maps with the officers. In his formal report, Loisel warned of British and American designs on the upper Missouri and Spanish possessions to the south. He asked for a commission as Indian agent to the upper Missouri tribes. Spanish officials in St. Louis and New Orleans strongly approved both the report and the request, but before they could act Loisel fell seriously ill. He died in New Orleans in October 1804.

Loisel was among the first to challenge the Sioux blockade on the river trade. His Fort aux Cedres was probably the earliest establishment on the upper river. Clamorgan hoped to continue the project and tried unsuccessfully to claim the fort after Loisel’s death. The fort was soon abandoned, however, and burned, probably in early 1810. In St. Louis, Loisel left a wife, two daughters, and a son. Both girls married into the Papin family, St. Louis traders related to the Chouteaus. The son, Regis Jr., was said to be the first St. Louis native ordained to the priesthood.

This article was first published in Lawrence O. Christensen, William E. Foley, Gary R. Kremer, and Kenneth H. Winn, eds., Dictionary of Missouri Biography (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), and appears here by permission of the author and original publisher.