Reviewed Work: The First Chouteaus: River Barons of Early St. Louis. By WILLIAM E. FOLEY and C. DAVID RICE. (Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Abstract
In 184 7, at a ceremony commemorating the founding of St. Louis, eighty-eight-year-old Pierre Chouteau spoke nostalgically of the simplicity and honesty of the creole society of St. Louis's early years, his thoughts carrying him back to "the frontier dawn ofhis pilgrimage, when the first Chouteaus were truly the barons of the river" (p. 204). So concludes William Foley and David Rice's valuable biography of Auguste and Pierre Chouteau. In their study of these complex, long-lived, and remarkable men, whose influence spanned over sixty years in Missouri history, Foley and Rice make a long overdue contribution to the history of the political and economic development of the Mississippi Valley.
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