Charles Gratiot. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Photographs and Prints Collection, N12406]

At the time of the Louisiana Purchase, Charles Gratiot’s outspoken support for the incoming…

Plan of Hardeman’s Garden, also called Fruitage Farm, with labyrinth. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Glen O. Hardeman Collection, C3655]

John Hardeman, best remembered for the botanical showplace he created on the banks of the…

Francis White Cloud. Portrait by George Catlin, circa 1844–1845. [Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art]

The Ioways did not live in what is now Missouri for much of the historical era.…

An artist’s depiction of Fort San Carlos. Constructed under orders from Fernando de Leyba, it played a crucial role in stopping the British attack on St. Louis in 1780. [Walter B. Stevens, ed., History of St. Louis the Fourth City, 1764–1909, vol. 1 (1909)]

Controversy swirled around Upper Louisiana’s third lieutenant governor in life and in death…

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Regis (Registre) Loisel was born near Montreal, Canada, in about 1773, and at an early age…

A late nineteenth-century illustration of French missionaries traveling by canoe with Native Americans. [Harper’s Monthly, April 1892]

Pierre Gabriel Marest, a Jesuit priest in the Illinois Country, was among a group of French…

Mo-Hon-Go (Sacred Sun), an Osage woman, and her child. [State Historical Society of Missouri, Image Collection, 021180]

The most powerful tribal group in the early history of Missouri was referred to as the Wah-…

Manuel Pérez. [Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, Objects Collection, X04268]

Manuel Pérez, Spanish lieutenant governor in St. Louis from 1787 to 1792, was born in…

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Pedro Joseph Piernas, the first Spanish lieutenant governor in St. Louis, occupied that…

This eighteenth-century map shows the mouth of the River Des Peres (unnamed, below St. Louis) and the Kaskaskia village to the south on the opposite side of the Mississippi, where the River Des Peres mission resettled after abandoning the site in what is now south St. Louis. [Frederick Charles Hicks, ed., A Topographical Description of Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and North Carolina, 1778]

More than half a century before the founding of St. Louis, French priests established a…