Background
Auguste Pierre Chouteau was born on May 09, 1786 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. He was the son of Jean Pierre and Pelagie (Kiersereau) Chouteau.
Auguste Pierre Chouteau was born on May 09, 1786 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. He was the son of Jean Pierre and Pelagie (Kiersereau) Chouteau.
Auguste entered West Point Academy on July 17, 1804, and graduated June 20, 1806, as an ensign in the 2nd Infantry.
Chouteau served for a short time as aide to General James Wilkinson on the southwestern frontier, but resigned from the army January 13, 1807. In the same year, at the head of a trading party, he accompanied the military expedition led by Ensign Nathaniel Pryor in the first attempt to restore the Mandan chief, Big White (Shehaka), to his people, and for his gallantry in the disastrous battle with the Arikaras, September 9, was commended by General Clark in a report to the secretary of war. He was one of the ten partners of the Saint Louis Missouri Fur Company and accompanied the expedition of 1809 to the mouth of Knife River, returning to St. Louis the following May.
In the War of 1812 he served as a captain of the territorial militia, and though on March 1, 1813, he took his seat as judge of the court of common pleas, he appears not to have retained the place, hut to have continued in the military service till the peace. In 1815, with Jules de Mun, he conducted a trading and trapping expedition to the upper Arkansas, meeting with great success until the spring of 1817, when the party was captured by Spanish soldiers and taken to Santa Fé. The two leaders were put in chains and imprisoned for forty-eight days, and their property, valued at $30, 000, was confiscated. After his release and return he traded for a time with the Osages in western Missouri and middle Kansas.
In 1823 he bought the trading house of Brand & Barbour, on the Verdigris, near its junction with the Arkansas, and in this region he spent the greater part of his remaining days. It was the country of the Arkansas Osages, whom his father had colonized there more than twenty years before—a country soon to be shared by them with the Creeks, the Choctaws, and the Cherokees. The Dwight Mission, on the Grand, had been established in 1820, and a military post, Fort Gibson, was built in 1824. To this region, thronging with savages often at war, came Indian agents, soldiers, missionaries, traders, and land speculators; and it remained for many years the theatre of the most stirring and colorful drama to be found anywhere on the old frontier. Not the least of its notables was Sam Houston, who from 1829 to 1832 lived with the Cherokees and became an intimate friend of Chouteau’s.
On the Grand, near the present Salina, Chouteau built a two-story log palace, and here, in the midst of his Indian family and attended by retainers and slaves, he lived the life of a frontier baron, the arbiter of numberless disputes and the dispenser of a lavish hospitality. From St. Louis, where he happened to be in September 1832, he led the party of Commissioner Ellsworth, General Clark, Washington Irving, Count de Pourtales, and Charles Latrobe on their long ride over the prairies to his home, and often he was the host of other travelers, eager for a view of the West in its most picturesque setting.
In 1835 he built, on the abandoned site of Camp Holmes (near the present Purcell), another trading post, which he put in the charge of an agent. Two years later, appointed by the secretary of war to negotiate treaties among the warring Indians, he visited this post, where he remained for the winter and the following spring. By common consent Chouteau was a colonel, and in distinction from his uncle, “Colonel Auguste, ” during the latter’s lifetime, he was known as “Colonel A. P. ” He died in the vicinity of Fort Gibson and was buried at the fort with military honors.
Chouteau was married at St. Louis in church on August 13, 1814 to his cousin Sophie Labbadie, who with one son and five daughters survived him. He also had an Indian wife, Rosalie, born an Osage but naturalized a Cherokee, by whom he had several children, and he also had children by three other Indian women.
