Pierre-Charles Delassus de Luzières (1739–1806)

Pierre-Charles Delassus de Luzières played an important role in the history of Upper Louisiana during the decade preceding the Louisiana Purchase. He was born in Bouchain in the province of Flanders on March 9, 1739. His father, Charles-Philippe de Hault Delassus, was mayor of Bouchain, as well as a councillor to Louis XVI; his mother was Anne­Marguerite d’Arlot.

Pierre-Charles followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a councillor to Louis XVI, and with the coming of the French Revolution he, not surprisingly, cast his lot with the king. In 1790 he fled Revolutionary France for North America. Passing through Philadelphia, he settled briefly in Pittsburgh. Luzières’s entourage in America included his wife, Domitilde-­Josephe Dumont, whom he had married on May 13, 1765; three of their five children, Charles-Auguste (b. 1767), Jeanne-Felicite-Odile (b. 1773), and Philippe­-François-Camille (b. 1778); and Jeanne-Felicite’s husband, Pierre-Augustin Derbigny, who later served briefly as governor of the state of Louisiana.

Traveling via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, Luzières first visited Ste. Genevieve in Spanish Upper Louisiana in 1792. He reconnoitered the region, probably staying with François Vallé II, and in the spring of 1793 descended the Mississippi to New Orleans to lay out his grandiose plans to the governor-general of Louisiana, Francisco Luis Hector de Carondelet. Luzières proposed to found a new community in Upper Louisiana adjacent to Ste. Genevieve and to name it New Bourbon in honor of the Bourbon king of France, Louis XVI, who had recently been guillotined in Paris. Governor Carondelet approved of the plan, and by the summer of 1793 Luzières was back in Upper Louisiana designing his settlement, arranging to have his house built high on the hills above the floodplain of the Mississippi, and waiting for his family to arrive from the East.

Despite bouts of malarial fever in the autumn of 1793, Luzières’s hopes for success in the New World started to materialize. His family arrived safely in Spanish Illinois, his large vertical-log house was soon completed, and the settlement of New Bourbon began to take shape. In 1797, Governor Carondelet appointed Luzières commandant of the newly created New Bourbon District of Upper Louisiana, and his first major task was to conduct a comprehensive census of the district. The document he created constitutes the single most important source on the settlement at New Bourbon, whose 270 people included whites and both free and enslaved Blacks. A majority of the thirty-eight heads of household enumerated on the census were Creoles from the Illinois Country, but New Bourbon also had a significant number of American families (such as those of John Dodge and his brother Israel Dodge) who had migrated to Spanish Illinois from the east side of the Mississippi.

To the New Bourbon census of 1797 Luzières included a lengthy appendix titled “Observations on the Character, Qualities, and Occupations of the Inhabitants of the New Bourbon District.” This document, together with his extended correspondence with Governor Carondelet, reveals that the politically conservative French aristocrat had remarkably progressive ideas about improving the economy and modernizing the society of the New Bourbon District. He planned to exploit the natural resources of the area more efficiently, build levees to control the Mississippi River, and introduce a medical doctor and a trained midwife.

Luzières’s plans met with sporadic success for a few years, and his son Charles de Hault Delassus rose in the Spanish colonial bureaucracy, serving as commandant at New Madrid from 1796 to 1799 and then as lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana from 1799 to 1804. However, the alien environment, the river-valley fevers, his wife’s profound unhappiness, and mounting debts gradually ground down Luzières’s body and spirits. His letters to Carondelet became a jeremiad of grievances. With the Louisiana Purchase, Luzières became an American citizen, which did not please him, and in his last years he presented a pathetic figure who found some solace in wine and whiskey. Luzières’s wife died in July 1806, and he died in December. Both were buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery in Ste. Genevieve, but their insubstantial gravestones have long since disappeared and the whereabouts of their graves are unknown. The Missouri frontier did not treat these gentle folks gently. Within fifty years the entire community of New Bourbon, overlooking the river bottomlands of le Grand Champ at Ste. Genevieve, had disappeared.