Pierre Laclède was born in the village of Bedous, in the lower Pyrenees, France. His surname was Liguest--the form Laclede Liguest appearing in all legal documents bearing his signature--but he chose to be known as Laclede. He is said to have been of good family and to have been trained for commercial pursuits.
Laclede arrived in New Orleans in 1755, and after a time became a member of the trading firm of Maxent, Laclede & Company. In 1762 Maxent, Laclede & Company obtained an eight years' monopoly of the trade with "the savages of the Missouri, " and in August of the following year Laclede with his family started north, arriving at Fort de Chartres, on the Illinois side of the river, exactly three months later. The transfer of the territory east of the Mississippi to the British determined him to establish his trading post on the western side.
In February 1764, he put his young stepson in command of a party of thirty men and sent them across the river to a location he had already selected, with instructions to plat the ground and erect a storehouse and cabins. In April he followed and named his village St. Louis, in honor of Louis IX.
Until the installation of civil government, more than eighteen months later, he was the sole ruler of the community. He was, however, a benevolent dictator, who dispensed justice with an even hand and distributed the land fairly, keeping little for himself. His village grew, and though his monopoly was revoked, his trade expanded. His commercial methods, however, proved faulty, and he accumulated a mass of worthless paper which left him heavily in debt to his firm.
In the fall of 1776 he left for New Orleans, where he spent nearly two years in the effort to straighten out his tangled finances. On his homeward voyage, when near the mouth of the Arkansas river, he died. The place of his burial was marked, but efforts made some time afterward to discover it were unsuccessful.
Laclede was the founder of a great family which does not bear his name and of a great city which for many years suffered his memory to be wholly eclipsed. Historical research has restored him to his place. He appears as a man of vision, who saw in his little village St. Louis a future metropolis; a man of initiative, energy, and daring, just in his dealings, and, though a trader, less devoted to his own interests than to those of his community. The St. Louis downtown riverfront area is named Laclede's Landing in his honor. Laclede is also recognized with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
In 1857 Laclede formed a union, unsanctioned by church or state but approved by society, with Marie-Therese Bourgeois Chouteau, a highly respected woman who had left her husband, taking her infant son, (Rene) Auguste Chouteau, with her. By Laclede she had a son, (Jean) Pierre Chouteau, and three daughters, all of whom, in observance of French law, bore the surname of the undivorced husband.
