Presently, I am about mid-way through Nathaniel Philbrick’s phenomenal Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, 2006, ISBN0-670-03760-5 published by the Penguin Group, New York, where another story of an early North American village unfolds as never before told.

I am struck by two parallels between Philbrick’s new disclosures about the Pilgrims and their Native American neighbors and the citizens of La Charrette. In both instances Native Americans were confronted with both acceptance followed by exclusion from society. Even though these village histories were seperated by two centuries in time, their extended histories followed similiar paths. Eventually, it was the exclusion of Native Americans at Plymouth that set into motion their being pushed ever westward for successive centuries.

La Charrette Village citizens became home to those like Charles “Indian” Phillips as a displaced Shawnee, and many, many others coming from the east, a process initiated at Plymouth following King Philip’s War. If only the Pilgrims had been inclusive enough to do what the French Canadians did at La Charrette… American history, the plight of Native Americans, and the lives of ALL Americans might have been forever the benefactor. The process of intermarriage was so abundant at La Charrette that the two cultures co-existed on the very edge of the American frontier in apparent harmony. 

It is difficult to over emhasize how Civil Rights and Political Correctness might have differed from the present if more inclusiveness was contained in the hearts of those arriving on the Mayflower. They came to practice religious freedom but could not accepted that others might wish the same opportunity. For them to marry a heathen was unthinkable.

I suggest you read both the Mayflower and La Charrette to appreciate the extensive, perhaps profound, impact of these rambles.

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La Charrette provides a first-ever historical look at America’s westernmost frontier settlement, which, over a mere thirty-year existence, managed to leave behind a rich, vibrant legacy that is firmly rooted in local, state, and national history.

Located sixty miles beyond St. Louis on the banks of the Missouri River, La Charrette Village began as an eighteenth-century French fur-trading outpost. The citizens of La Charrette—one of America’s earliest melting-pot communities of Native Americans; African descendants; and French, Spanish, and German immigrants—played a vital role in shaping the American West. Its people were the first to be granted Indian trade rights and to map the Santa Fe Trail, and La Charrette was the last outpost of civilization along the monumental trek toward westward expansion.

A virtual Who’s Who of the American frontier, La Charrette documents the life and times of the families who lived in this influential riverbank village. It also chronicles many legendary heroes who passed through, including Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, Captain Pike, ‘Indian’ Phillips, John Colter, Flanders Callaway, Syndic Chartran, and others who helped to shape history and forever change the face of our nation.