Many people were delighted to learn about the tiny ‘almost forgotten’ Missouri River settlement called La Charrette…Where the West actually began. Books were sold, contacts established, while fifty or so authors shared experiences. While there I visited with those stopping by my popular display as the La Charrette banner fluttered in the background.

Met Patrica Adkins-Rochette, author of Bourland in North Texas and Indian Territory. She has done a magnificant compiling this historical documentary of two volumes. See her web page at www.BourlandCivilWar.com for details or e-mail Pattie at prochette@Juno.com 

“The missing link in the history of the American frontier”

The missing link in the history of the American frontier

Denton, TX (March 27, 2006)—The works of a Missouri-born author and retired professor will be featured in three local events from April 22-26, 2006. His book, La Charrette: A History of The Village Gateway to the American Frontier, is central to two ongoing national bicentennial celebrations, that of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike’s. Never before has the history of multi-cultural La Charrette Village, America’s first westernmost village of the Louisiana Purchase, been revealed. “Both expeditions departed from La Charrette in 1804 and 1806, respectively,” said the author, Dr. Lowell M. Schake. “This September 20, Lewis and Clark re-enactors will return to the location where the village once stood to again ‘Shout for Joy’!”

The Denton Public Library will host a reception and book signing for the Port Aransas, TX author on Sunday, April 23 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., at the Emily Fowler Library at 502 Oakland. Schake explained, “that only seven families lived at La Charrette Village, yet they represented a virtual ‘Who’s Who’ of the American West with unique ties to Texas. Lewis and Clark wanted to train there, but the French denied them entry into the territory.”

As the last-known settlement west of the Missouri River, La Charrette played a pivotal role for travelers on their way to exploring the American frontier. It was there that they stopped to rest, to conduct their business, or to get maps and advice for their journey.

Schake’s book is also important to the study of diversity. As a settlement of French and German settlers, Black slaves and American Indians, La Charrette was an early experiment in multiculturalism. The rich multicultural history of this small Missouri town had languished in obscurity until this book was published. La Charrette offers a compelling look at the daily lives of frontier settlers—their hardships and their triumphs.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For futher information contact:
Name, phone number
e-mail

The missing link in the history of the American frontier

Denton, TX (March 27, 2006)—The works of a Missouri-born author and retired professor will be featured in three local events from April 22-26, 2006. His book, La Charrette: A History of The Village Gateway to the American Frontier, is central to two ongoing national bicentennial celebrations, that of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike’s. Never before has the history of multi-cultural La Charrette Village, America’s first westernmost village of the Louisiana Purchase, been revealed. “Both expeditions departed from La Charrette in 1804 and 1806, respectively,” said the author, Dr. Lowell M. Schake. “This September 20, Lewis and Clark re-enactors will return to the location where the village once stood to again ‘Shout for Joy’!”

This missing link in American history will be among the 100 or books featured at The North Texas Book Festival on Saturday, April 22 at The Denton Civic Center, 321 East McKinney Street at Bell Avenue from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

The Denton Public Library will host a reception and book signing for the Port Aransas, TX author on Sunday, April 23 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., at the Emily Fowler Library at 502 Oakland. Schake explained, “that only seven families lived at La Charrette Village, yet they represented a virtual ‘Who’s Who’ of the American West with unique ties to Texas. Lewis and Clark wanted to train there, but the French denied them entry into the territory.”

On April 24, 25 and 26, Schake has volunteered to tell Denton ISD 4th and 5th graders about life at this multi-lingual Missouri River village where the Native American-French families lived with nine orphan children. “There was no school, church or store, just a rugged fur trading outpost with a river landing” is how Schake described the lost village of his birth where his maternal grandparents once lived in the same cabin as Daniel Boone did years before.

As the last-known settlement west of the Missouri River, La Charrette played a pivotal role for travelers on their way to exploring the American frontier. It was there that they stopped to rest, to conduct their business, or to get maps and advice for their journey.

Schake’s book is also important to the study of diversity. As a settlement of French and German settlers, Black slaves and American Indians, La Charrette was an early experiment in multiculturalism. The rich multicultural history of this small Missouri town had languished in obscurity until this book was published. La Charrette offers a compelling look at the daily lives of frontier settlers—their hardships and their triumphs.

DENTON RECORD-CHRONICLE

Local News
DENTON, RC.COM
07:11 AM CDT on Thursday, April 13, 2006
 
Reception, book signing scheduled at library
The Denton Public Library will host a reception and book signing for author Dr. Lowell M. Schake from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Sunday, April 23, at the Emily Fowler Central Library at 502 Oakland St.
His current book is La Char­rette: A History of The Village Gateway to the American Fron­tier, concerning the history of multicultural La Charrette Vill­age, America’s first westernmost village of the Louisiana Purchase.
For more information, call 940-349-8712.

April 11, 2006

Missing Link in History Featured

Denton, TX – The works of a Missouri-born author and retired professor will be featured in a local event on April 23, 2006. His book, La Charrette: A History of The Village Gateway to the American Frontier, is central to two ongoing national bicentennial celebrations, that of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike’s. Never before has the history of multi-cultural La Charrette Village, America’s first westernmost village of the Louisiana Purchase, been revealed. “Both expeditions departed from La Charrette in 1804 and 1806, respectively,” said the author, Dr. Lowell M. Schake. “This September 20, Lewis and Clark re-enactors will return to the location where the village once stood to again ‘Shout for Joy’!”

The Denton Public Library will host a reception and book signing for the Port Aransas, TX author on Sunday, April 23 from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., at the Emily Fowler Library at 502 Oakland. Schake explained, “that only seven families lived at La Charrette Village, yet they represented a virtual ‘Who’s Who’ of the American West with unique ties to Texas. Lewis and Clark wanted to train there, but the French denied them entry into the territory.”

As the last-known settlement west of the Missouri River, La Charrette played a pivotal role for travelers on their way to exploring the American frontier. It was there that they stopped to rest, to conduct their business, or to get maps and advice for their journey.

Schake’s book is also important to the study of diversity. As a settlement of French and German settlers, Black slaves and American Indians, La Charrette was an early experiment in multiculturalism. The rich multicultural history of this small Missouri town had languished in obscurity until this book was published. La Charrette offers a compelling look at the daily lives of frontier settlers—their hardships and their triumphs. For more information, contact the Emily Fowler Library at 940-349-8712.

This was my first post-retirement project lasting from 1995-1999. My interest in La Charrette Village intensified after learning that all of my ancestors disembarked at old La Charrette Landing on the Missouri River upon arriving from Germany. Notice that La Charette carries only one ‘r’ in this spelling, one of the many alternate ways it appears in older documents. It was not until a year or so into village research that I became fully aware that my families had actually owned many of old La Charrette Village farms.

This story of our Schake family from Humfeld, Lippe (Germany) of the Teutoburger Forest with related history and Ethnohistories is lovingly dedicated to the first Schake mother of America. Wilhelmine Friederike Kuhfuss Schake came to the SCHAKES OF LA CHARETTE farms in Charette Township, Warren County, Missouri with her farmer and blacksmith husband Kurt in 1855. To this day we do not know when she died or where she is buried. Little apparently was recorded on her behalf. We have every reason to believe she was a loving wife, mother and grandmother.

This family history is typical of the German experience in Missouri’s German Belt. It is presented in four parts;

Part One - Auswandering (Wandering-out or away from home)

Part Two - Genealogies

Part Three - Schake Pictorial History

Part Four - Oral History

To learn more about this electronic book, click on ‘here’.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For further information please contact:
Sarah Wischhof, (402) 323-7800 x. 279
sarah.wischhof@iuniverse.com

Tenth Annual Whooping Cranes Celebration Features New Speakers

Port Aransas, Tex. (February 15, 2006)—The Tenth Annual Celebration of Whooping Cranes and Other Birds is certain to be more spectacular this year than ever before in the presence of a record number of Whoopers appearing at nearby Aransas National Wildlife Refuge. The event will also feature birding tours by both land and sea, the International Crane Children’s Art Exhibit, a Nature-Theme Trade Show and lectures by birding experts.

(more…)

This is the subject of my current writing project…due to appear by about 2008

Lawrence Harvey Walkinshaw (1904-1993) and the Michigan Audubon Society were separated by only two-days in age when he published its 75-year history1. Born in rural Pennfield Township, Calhoun County, Michigan, Larry’s birding interests emerged early in life. By age 12, ten of his one-room schoolmates joined his new Junior Audubon Society but he continued Christmas Bird Counts alone until 1929. “No one else liked birds the way I did” was his admission2. He first attended local Olivet College but earned the D.D.S. degree from the University of Michigan, with honors, at age 25. By then he had published 13 articles and established notable contacts with Michigan Audubon Society leaders. Soon Josseyln Van Tyne, the University of Michigan’s Curator of Birds, would become his mentor directing his interest toward cranes and Kirtland’s Warblers. Once Van Tyne wrote3 “I am very much pleased with the way you are progressing in ornithology. You may be sure that I would not have bothered to annotate your manuscripts so extensively if I did not think you are ’going places’…” Larry’s 80-years of ‘amateur’ birding concluded with 350 other publications including The Sandhill Cranes (1949), Cranes of the World (1973) and Kirtland’s Warbler: The Natural History of an Endangered Species (1983).

(more…)

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

La Charrette, the Missing Link in Frontier American History featured… Where the west ‘really’ began
The works of a Missouri born author and retired professor will be featured in three local events from April 22-26, 2006. His La Charrette: A History of The Village Gateway to the American Frontier Visited by Lewis and Clark * Zebulon Pike * Daniel Boone is central to two ongoing national bicentennial celebrations…that of Lewis and Clark and Zebulon Pike’s. Never before has the history of multi-cultural La Charrette Village, America’s first westernmost village of the Louisiana Purchase, been revealed. “Both expeditions departed from La Charrette in 1804 and 1806, respectively” according to the author, Dr. Lowell M. Schake. “This September 20, Lewis and Clark re-enactors will return to the location where the village once stood to again ‘Shout for Joy’!”

“La Charrette” transports the reader back in time to the village’s unique place in America’s history and the fascinating lives, including both the hardships and the adventures, of its people.

Visitors to this sleepy little Missouri River village include Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery during their epic journey of 1804 and triumphant return in 1806.  Zebulon Pike visited La Charrette before exploring and opening the trade route over the famous Santa Fe Trail.  Other historical figures such as trapper Jim Bridger, Major Stephen Long, and the Duke of Wurttemberg visited La Charrette.

The heart and soul of La Charrette belonged to its citizens and neighbors including the one and only Daniel Boone, his son-in-law Flanders Callaway, “Mountain Man” John Colter and Charles “Indian” Phillips.  As a fourth great grandson of John Colter, I enjoyed reading about his home on Little Boef Creek.  There he lived with his wife Sarah, his children Hiram and Evelina, and neighbors John Sullens and Charles Phillips.  Of particular interest to the reader concerns Nathan Boone’s last tribute to John Colter.

The author, himself a native of Charrette Creek, insightfully describes the interdependency between the Native Americans, French Canadians, African Americans, American trappers, and later the German populations of La Charrette as a “continuing process of cultural assimilation.”  Lowell Schake skillfully ties together the microcosm of the village to the national events shaping history such as the Louisiana Purchase, War of 1812, and the Trail of Tears.

This book is highly recommended not only as a result of the impeccable research by the author, but also his talent for “bringing to life in print” the village of La Charrette.

Timothy Forrest Coulter
St. Wendel, Indiana

“Boone descendants will be happy to see this new and original book pertaining to a part of Daniel Boone’s life, and the lives of his family members, that has not been written about before…. If you are interested in learning more about the earliest life of those who moved to and settled Missouri when it was still the edge of the American frontier, you will enjoy this book.”—Margy Miles, Boone family descendant

Reviewer: Clive G. Siegle, Southern Methodist University
Executive Director, Zebulon Pike Bicentennial Commission

For several decades that straddled the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the small Missouri River settlement of La Charrette served as the virtual gateway for the westering impulses of Euro-Americans on the frontiers of Louisiana. The village proper never probably amounted to more than around seven permanent residences, with a smattering of outlying farms nearby. But during its brief existence as the westernmost European settlement on a river whose course led nearly two thousand miles into the heart of the northern Great Plains, it played host to an astonishing assortment of frontiersmen and settlers whose exploits largely defined the era of exploration and Indian trading ventures in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, despite its unique niche in frontier history, La Charrette remained at best a paragraph or footnote in most histories of the era until the publication of Lowell Schake’s book, La Charrette: A History of the Village Gateway to the American Frontier. In this endeavor, Schake has done an admirable job of teasing a coherent and compelling portrait of a significant but largely neglected community from an uneven and complex multi-cultural trove of sources.

Poised as it was on the western edge of Euro-American settlement, La Charrette saw a constant parade of cultures and conditions walk, ride, and float past its eclectic assemblage of ramshackle bousillage dwellings. Although the village always retained an element of French flavor throughout its brief lifespan, its crossroads location assured that besides having a core of original French settlers, villagers and nearby neighbors also included the legendary Daniel and Nathan Boone, mountain man John Colter and his Lewis and Clark comrade Robert Frazer, and such frontier characters as “Indian” Phillips. One of the book’s strong suites is Schake’s effective employment of genealogy and primary legal documents to reconstruct the lives if these early settlers. This is particularly important for the French settlers, whose everyday lives have often been lost or overshadowed by the historical focus on downriver towns like St. Louis, or the romance of the fur trade. When Lewis and Clark passed through in 1804, they noted that the village consisted of but seven households. The author has skillfully identified and documented all seven, giving the reader a glimpse into the little-known lives of each of those families who largely came to define the community.

The book also does a fine job of fitting Charrette and its environs into a greater regional context by not only touring the immediate “suburbs,” but linking the greater village and its gateway metaphor to the larger pageant of the West on the cusp of the nineteenth century, whether as a port of call for Lewis and Clark or Zebulon Pike, or as the base for the fur trading adventures of its own sons like the Cardinal family, or Jean-Baptiste Luzon.

The footnoting in this work is at times a bit spare, and in a few places they rely a bit too heavily on secondary sources—although these are, in general, usually authoritative in their field. To better showcase its scholarship, this book would have benefited from a formal, detailed bibliography, rather the convention of relying on the reader to fish one out of the endnotes. Often this is the result of a regrettable cost-cutting trend in scholarly publishing these days, and whether or not that is the case here, the book deserves better. The reader soon realizes from the text, for example, that the author has done extensive primary documentary research in both microfilm and hard-copy media, but the resources have not been compiled in a comprehensive bibliographic form that would enhance its academic value as a scholarly resource. The book also lacks an index—not surprising, since this sort of enhancement goes hand-in-hand with a formal bibliography. While these may mean little to the avocational historical reader, this book is the product of much too serious a research effort to lack these enhancements.

For both the scholar and the avocational historian, La Charrette adds much-needed pages to the history of the westering experience and the Missouri River. Incredibly, La Charrette’s eventful few decades of existence on the Missouri ended so mysteriously that its demise can only be conjectured to have been due, not surprisingly, to a catastrophic flood. Today, not a trace remains.

Except, that is, in Schake’s book. He deftly and convincingly snatches back from the gloom of obscurity and the watery depths of the Missouri a relict landscape that lives again, where the great and the not-so-great strive in the tribulations and triumphs of this unassuming gateway to the West.

“Every square inch of earth has its own history. In this meticulously researched and compiled study, a small Creole village gets its due. La Charrette, one of the earliest settlements on the Missouri River flourished for 30 years in the late 1790s and early 1800s and then disappeared. Using this obscure village as his focal point, Schake covers a wide swath of classic American history—the Louisiana Purchase, Daniel Boone, the fur trade, black and Native-American slavery, the War of 1812, the Trail of Tears and the daily life of the Osage tribe—as it related to the daily life of small town settlers. He includes countless arcane yet fascinating little facts: The origin of the word “Missouri” may be smoky water. Male Osage warriors who showed cowardice in battle were forced to dress as, and live among, the squaws. One of the prime objectives of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to establish friendly relations among the Indians. A local Indian, tried for the murder of his wife, was acquitted on the argument that the prevailing citizenry were, by law, non-native aliens, and therefore he could not be expected to obey their laws. Observed with an acute eye for detail, life in a small river town in the early 1800s was just as complex and rapidly changing as our own confused era. A delicately crafted, absorbing account of an American past seldom encountered in conventional histories.”

– Kirkus Discoveries

Editor Leo E. Oliva of the Santa Fe Trail Quarterly, Volume 17:4, August 2003, concluded, “This is an important book and recommended.”

“[T]his is intriguing material … well organized … in an easy-to absorb presentation” was offered by Writers Club Press editors, April 12, 2003

“As Schake notes in this highly informative and entertaining book on La Charrette, the history of North America is that of various peoples—Asian, African, and European—coming together in many different settings, none of which are any more or less valuable than the others” was F. Todd Smith’s assessment of La Charrette’s unique diversities. Dr. Smith, associate professor of history, University of North Texas, Denton, specializes in the American frontier borderlands and Native Americans.

Another Smith and professor of history, this one named Stephen E. at Southwest Missouri State University, has his review posted HERE. (Scroll over the first dozen or so reviews to get to La Charrette.)

“If you have ancestors who moved to and settled in Missouri when it was still on the edge of the American frontier, you will be interested in … La Charrette.… I think you will find it an interesting historical and genealogical source,” states Martha Jones, PhD, in her “Relatively Speaking” genealogy column of September 7, 2003, Victoria Advocate, Victoria, Texas.

“Charrette Village is put in its universal, national and territorial place. For the strong interest now in the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this book should be useful matter” said Ralph Gregory, president, Franklin County Historical Society, in a 2003 Washington Missourian article.

Stephen E. Smith Manager, Missouri Southern News Bureau, Missouri Southern State University-Joplin, published his review at MyMissourian. He concluded, “If you are a history buff—or even if you’re not— La Charrette: Village Gateway to the American West will make a valuable edition to your personal library.”

History Professor Walter Kamphoefner Director of graduate studies at Texas A&M University said, “One might question whether a village of seven houses rates a book, but to do so would be to underestimate both Lowell Schake and La Charrette. This was not just any village … Schake has done a remarkable job of digging into French, Spanish, and territorial records to reconstruct the multiracial, multilingual, and multiethnic society of his hometown, the intriguing frontier village of La Charrette.” Kamphoefner is a native of nearby New Melle, St. Charles County, Missouri.

Timothy Forrest Coulter of St. Wendel, Indiana, a direct descendant of America’s first “Mountain Man” of La Charrette—John Colter of Lewis and Clark fame—wrote, “La Charrette transports the reader back in time to the village’s unique place in America’s history and the fascinating lives, including both the hardships and the adventures, of its people.… The heart and soul of La Charrette belonged to its citizens and neighbors including the one and only Daniel Boone, his son-in-law Flanders Callaway, “Mountain Man” John Colter, and Charles “Indian” Phillips. As a fourth-great-grandson of John Colter, I enjoyed reading about his home on Little Boef Creek. There, he lived with his wife Sarah, his children Hiram and Evelina, and his neighbors John Sullens and Charles Phillips.… Lowell Schake skillfully ties together the microcosm of the village to the national events shaping history such as the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the Trail of Tears.… This book is highly recommended not only because of the author’s impeccable research, but also because of his talent for bringing to life in print the village of La Charrette.