Note of Jacques Clamorgan agreeing to pay skins worth $153 to Pierre Chouteau on July 19, 1807. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Clamorgan Family Papers, A0288-00017]

Jacques Phillippe Clamorgan arrived on the Missouri frontier in the early 1780s and spent the rest of his…

Franscisco Cruzat served two terms as lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana in New Spain. [Alcée Fortier, A History of Louisiana, 1904]

Francisco Cruzat, the only Spanish lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana to occupy that…

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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 lieutenant…

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 turn of the…

A detail from the Finiels map of the Mississippi River showing the area around St. Louis. The original is in the Archives de la Marine, Chateau, Vincennes, France. [Courtesy of Carl J. Ekberg]

Nicolas de Finiels, an expatriate French engineer who served the Spanish monarchy during…

This depiction of colonial Ste. Genevieve by artist Oscar Berninghaus is among the murals in the Missouri State Capitol. [State Historical Society of Missouri, color transparency in Ralph Walker Photographs Collection, P0108-017298-1]

The French Revolution induced many royalists to emigrate to the Louisiana Territory in the late eighteenth…