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.
