François Saucier (1740–1821)

Known as “the pioneer of St. Charles,” François Saucier was born in 1740 in the Illinois Country near Fort de Chartres, the third of three sons to Jean Baptiste and Adelaide Lepage Saucier. Jean Baptiste also used the name François and became renowned during his military career as the civil engineer who designed the second Fort de Chartres. The younger François Saucier also served in the military in the late eighteenth century, under both French and Spanish authority. He commanded Fort Massac at the time of its surrender to the English in 1765 following the Seven Years’ War. Saucier then moved to St. Charles, on the western side of the Mississippi, and married Angelique Roy dit Lapensee by 1787.

In 1799 Zenon Trudeau, lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana, asked Saucier to found a military post and settlement on the Mississippi River approximately fourteen miles northeast of St. Louis on a narrow neck of land defined by the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. Officials considered the location, called Portage des Sioux, to be a weak spot in the defense of Spanish Territory in Upper Louisiana. It had earned its name after a band of Sioux had trekked across the point and attacked a group of Missouria. The Sioux caught the Missouria by surprise because they had cut across this small peninsula at a point above their encampment, rather than traveling along the slower and more defensible water route, as expected. After hearing of plans to build a US post on the eastern side of the Mississippi at Paysa, near the present site of Alton, Illinois, Spanish authorities feared that Americans would follow the Sioux example and ambush their hold on the area. Trudeau wanted Saucier to stem the American settlement by acting first. A fort in this location would help control trade on the Missouri River and provide a buffer against invaders.

Saucier accepted the commission and established a small village at Portage des Sioux in the St. Charles district of Upper Louisiana. He encouraged many ethnic French settlers in the Illinois Country to relocate on the western side of the Mississippi. He served as captain of the local militia and commandant of the community until 1804, when the Louisiana Territory became part of the United States.

Although political control had changed hands, Saucier continued to serve in prominent civil positions at Portage des Sioux through most of his life. In 1805 he became the presiding justice of the Court of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions for the St. Charles District. The United States built a new fort there during the War of 1812, noted as the site of peace negotiations conducted between federal representatives and Native Americans following the war. Portage des Sioux remained the most important settlement in the district well into the nineteenth century, with Saucier as one of its leading citizens.

Trudeau had initially promised Saucier an annual salary of one hundred pesos for his services as commandant at Portage des Sioux. His successor, Charles de Hault Delassus, compensated Saucier with eighty-eight hundred arpents of land on La Saline Ensanglantee (Bloody Saline River) west of St. Louis. Unfortunately, the salary was never paid, and the area’s first board of land commissioners refused all but one thousand arpents to Saucier. He later sought recourse from the US government for the lack of compensation for his services.

Saucier served as a delegate to a convention in St. Louis that protested American land policies, taxation, military service without compensation, the movement of Native Americans into the territory, and the attachment of the Louisiana District to the territory of Indiana. The convention produced a document attesting to these grievances, which Saucier signed on September 29, 1804.

Saucier lived in Portage des Sioux the remaining years of his life, in poverty for many of them. He again petitioned the government for relief in 1817, claiming only the one-thousand-arpent concession granted in 1799 and a small plot of the common field. The remaining balance of the original land grant was finally paid to his heirs on November 1, 1833. François Saucier died on August 6, 1821, at the age of eighty-one, leaving twenty-two children and his second wife, Françoise Nicolle Les Bois.

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.