Recent reads

Before Lewis and Clark : the story of the Chouteaus, the French dynasty that ruled America's frontier, by Shirley Christian. I can't claim that I read all of this book in detail. I skimmed through some of the later chapters, due to lack of reading time. My interestin the book was prompted by the fact that I recognized the names associated with the Chouteau-Laclede-Labadie group of families because a number of towns and counties in Missouri and Oklahoma are named after them.

In addition to the history of the Chouteau family and its influence over fur trading, Indian relations, and the early economic and political development of St. Louis, the book discusses the Osage Indians, their primary Indian trading partners, at some length. Although the US Army's later conflicts with the Sioux and Cheyenne got more press, it's clear that the Osages were a power to be reckoned with in their day. Early travellers reported that few men of the tribe were less than six feet tall, with heads shaved and blazoned scarlet except for a "mohawk"-style scalplock. They had access to the tough wood of the "beau des arces" (present-day "Bodarc") tree to make superior bows, and they took full advantage of their strategic location near the trading posts at St. Louis and along the Missouri river to obtain weapons and tools that other tribes did not have.

Unfortunately, the US politicians and political appointees who show up late in the game, after the Louisiana Purchase, are about as grasping and shortsighted as their present-day counterparts. Both the Chouteaus and the Osages were gradually pushed out of the key positions they had held. (Christian mentions briefly, in an afterword, the riches that came to the surviving Osages much later in the twentieth century, when their desolate reservation in Oklahoma turned out, to everyone's surprise, to have major oil reserves.)