A seventeenth-century engraving of Paris’s Hôpital Général de la Salpêtrière, where Marie-Claire Catoire spent her childhood as an orphan. [Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection (CCBY 4.0)]

Marie-Claire Catoire Billeron’s name first appears in North America on the…

The Louis Bolduc House in Ste. Genevieve. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Missouri Postcard Collection, P0032]

Louis Bolduc was born near Quebec City in the village of St. Joachim around 1739 (his…

Bollinger’s Mill. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. [Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-highsm-65211]

A group of German-Swiss immigrants landed in Philadelphia in 1710 and settled in southeast…

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Although Alexander Buckner served in Missouri’s 1820 Constitutional Convention, the state…

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Henri Peyroux de Ia Coudrenière was born in France around 1743, the son of Marguerite-…

A detail from Thomas Hutchins’s 1778 map of the Illinois Country showing Ste. Genevieve, Kaskaskia, and Fort de Chartres. [Courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Image 5045002]

During the first half of the eighteenth century, marriages between Native Americans and…

Charles de Hault Delassus. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N36696]

Following the Louisiana Purchase, Charles de Hault Delassus, Upper Louisiana’s last Spanish…

1. This watercolor portrait of Henry Dodge was painted by George Catlin during the Dodge-Leavenworth Expedition of 1834. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, 1962-192-0001]

Henry Dodge served his nation in a long and prosperous life on the nineteenth-century…

This 1778 map of the Illinois Country by Thomas Hutchins depicts the region as it appeared during Israel Dodge’s lifetime. [Courtesy of the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, Image 5045002]

Israel Dodge exemplified the adventurous spirit of a young, expanding United States at the…

John Wesley Emerson, circa 1880. Photograph by John A. Scholten. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, P0233-2542]

John Emerson, a lawyer in Ironton, Missouri, became a small-town Victorian gentleman who…