American Confluence: The Missouri Frontier from Borderland to Border State

2. Traditions

During the 1740s, land grants enticed habitants to cross the Mississippi and, around 1750, to establish the village of Ste. Genevieve. Initially, this crossing made no difference. Life in and around the new village resembled the older towns on the other side of the Mississippi. On both sides of the Mississippi, French villagers drew on and departed from colonial histories. In their system of local governance, their elimination of feudal lords, and their broad and relatively equitable distribution of landholdings, Ste. Genevieve and sister communities in the mideighteenth century looked more like mid-seventeenth-century New England than like older parts of New France. The prevalence of slavery in the Illinois Country and the imbalanced demography of Ste. Genevieve, however, were more reminiscent of another English colonial region: the Chesapeake. More like the Chesapeake than New England, Illinois settlements also directed much of their agricultural production to distant markets. A different set of commercial considerations inspired the founding of a second settlement on the west bank of the Mississippi . This was St. Louis, which was established in 1764 near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. In contrast with Ste. Genevieve, the founders of St. Louis reverted to the 2.  Traditions AMERICAN CONFLUENCE  40 former French emphasis on trade between cultures rather than export of agriculture. Even as French traders from New Orleans laid out St. Louis, imperial shifts altered its situation and remapped the confluence region. Defeated in its war against Great Britain, France ceded St. Louis, Ste. Genevieve, and all its claims west of the Mississippi to Spain. Canada, the Great Lakes, and all lands on the east side of the confluence region became British territory. With the stroke of very distant pens, New France disappeared from North America and the Mississippi turned into a border between Map 3. French Settlements in the Confluence Region, c. 1750s.  41 Traditions Spanish and British colonial possessions. Thereafter, the peoples of the confluence region had to adjust to life in a divided and contested borderland. More surprising were the adjustments made by Spanish and British authorities. Partially abandoning prior colonial habits, the new players learned that, in dealing with Indians and colonists in the confluence region, it made sense to follow what had become the traditions of the French. The Customs of Ste. Genevieve In histories of the state of Missouri, the establishment and initial development of the village of Ste. Genevieve has merited much attention and generated some controversy. The attention owes to Ste. Genevieve’s place as the first enduring European settlement in what would one day become the state of Missouri. The controversy traces to the date of its origins, with some histories giving 1735 as the year of Ste. Genevieve’s founding, and others delaying it until the 1740s or even as late as 1751. That uncertainty reflects the insignificance of the event at the time, for in the beginning the customs of Ste. Genevieve mirrored those of existing villages in the Illinois Country.1 Only in retrospect did the settling of Ste. Genevieve take on much significance; the establishment of the village garnered little notice—so little, in fact, that none of its pioneer inhabitants documented the day they crossed the Mississippi to erect a new town or work in adjacent fields. True, many of these first settlers were illiterate, but then even if they could write, they had little reason to mark the occasion. At the time of Ste Genevieve’s founding, neither habitants nor French officials viewed the Mississippi River as a border. Traversing the Mississippi —to trade with Indians, to gather salt, to mine lead—was not unusual. In fact, in an era of poor roads and rickety wagons, it was far easier to cross the river than to transport goods overland between villages on the eastern side of the Mississippi. That the French initially colonized the east bank owed primarily to topographical, not political, considerations. On the east side of the river, an alluvial plain, stretching back as much as three miles from the Mississippi, provided invitingly fertile, if flood- AMERICAN CONFLUENCE  42 prone, fields for farmers. By contrast, much of the opposite bank contained little bottomland, and the higher ground near the river was not only less fertile but also less easily broken by the primitive plows used by French farmers. A small stretch of bottomland did exist on...