When I think about the best cultural indicators of any frontier city, my mind goes immediately to the work of John Francis McDermott, an interdisciplinary scholar of the history of the book before such terms were coined. In a scholarly career stretching from the 1930s to the 1980s, McDermott investigated the cultural and intellectual history of his beloved St. Louis. From his very first book, Private Libraries in Creole St. Louis, McDermott tracked the distribution of books and their appearance in early communities of the Midwest in a way destined to debunk long-held notions of what the frontier meant to people of the past and the present, and how a frontier city served as connection point between the presumed wilderness and the very centers of erudite culture.1
McDermott was a painstaking sleuth, constantly rediscovering lost manuscripts from early territorial governors, documents of explorers, and records of merchants. His bibliographical dedication to the work of John James Audubon, Washington Irving, Seth Eastman, and George Caleb Bingham often left his findings on St. Louis founders Pierre Laclede and Auguste Chouteau for other scholars to explicate. But McDermott remained cognizant of the special place of such bibliographical studies in St. Louis, seeking to reconstruct the local libraries and learn how the frontier manifested itself in such a mixed-up culture stew as was present in a frontier city.2 Time after time, McDermott returned to the theme of private libraries in frontier St. Louis, cataloging the books owned by early American St. Louisans such as William Clark, Jedediah Smith, John Mullanphy, Frederick Bates, and W. Price Hunt, and seeing such books as implicitly civilizing determinants of frontier participants.3
To this day the grand Turnerian thesis of culture moving inexorably from east to west in an unbroken continuity still infects much thinking subliminally among current writers and popular history, and ignores the multicultural timelines in the history of the European colonies of North America, if not the world over. Yet McDermott’s research presaged the insights on frontier cities we have found here. He proved conclusively that St. Louis was never backward or isolated. We might further suggest that frontier cities did not develop either culturally or socially according to central-place theory. The inhabitants of such western places did not stand idly by waiting for a critical mass of easterners to arrive in order to establish cultural institutions; rather, they gathered ideas, collected books and maps, and kept in touch with correspondents from a variety of places and people in the East, in Canada, in Europe, and in Indian country.
His methodology remains a good one. In order to compare Montreal in the last days of the seventeenth century to, say, Boston in the same period, McDermott would have started to dig in probate records and archives to prove that there were as many as ten books in the French settlements of the St. Lawrence Valley for every one tome belonging to the few Puritan divines in frontier Boston in the early 1670s.4
Some twenty-five years ago, at the annual meeting of the Bibliographical Society of America, I was asked by a colleague from the Library of Congress, knowing of my connection with an early St. Louis library, just what some of the major bibliographical studies might be on our city. I instantly remarked that one of the best still was John Francis McDermott’s Private Libraries in Creole St. Louis, even then long out of print. Perhaps it was the exotic title with the word Creole in the title—a term with a long history of shifting and often contested meanings—or the delight at the prospect that the bibliography of an entire city might perhaps be based on cookbooks of spicy recipes of one type or another, but regardless, my friend started laughing uncontrollably as he walked away, shaking his head at such a strange bibliographical concept.
Yet, like the concept of frontier cities themselves, those who can get beyond their initial surprise can learn a tremendous amount from early libraries and bibliographic projects like McDermott’s. We can see the tastes, culture, and aspirations of early cities in Europe and North America refracted in McDermott’s work, his scouring of St. Louis’s early probate records, circuit court records, surviving letters, contemporary travel and biographical sketches, and early newspaper reviews and notices in order to bring life back into the documents of those who came here from Spain, France, and the United States and who strode across the eighteenth century and early nineteenth with such importance and style.
And yet such methods and such records in comprehensive depth still remain virtually an untapped resource in studying the comparative bibliographies of various early regions in colonial North America, either affiliated with New England, New France and Louisiana, or New Spain and Mexico.
McDermott fretted over the paradox of early travelers—especially those from the young United States, before the Louisiana Purchase—who commented on St. Louis’s isolation, as if on “the confines of the Wilderness.”5 Given St. Louis’s position from its very beginnings as a commercial center and an administrative capital, such a view was always mistaken; the city’s relatively small size obscured its importance as a center for far-flung commercial transactions across two thirds of a continent. Yet early nineteenth-century American writers such as Timothy Flint, Edmund Flagg, and especially Washington Irving promulgated the idea of St. Louis’s backwoods isolation. Those wishing to promote the supposed “civilizing” effect of Anglo-American political and cultural institutions in the so-called old French country of the Mississippi River valley ignored the existing cultural refinements of French colonial cities like St. Louis and New Orleans as they remade them on their own terms.
The key to understanding the paradox of these early French outposts, and all frontier cities, is the nature of their residents—world citizens by any meaningful measure. When Pierre Laclede from Béarn by way of New Orleans, Charles Gratiot from Lausanne by way of London and Montréal, Jean Pierre Cabanné, Jacques de St. Vrain, Dr. Antoine Saugrain, and Louis Cortambert from all corners of the French-speaking world came to St. Louis, they brought a constant influx of new ideas. Visiting travelers, whether critical or not in their later reflections, also demonstrated St. Louis’s cosmopolitan, unconfined nature, simply by their increasing numbers and the books they eventually produced. Basil Hall, André Michaux, Georges-Henri-Victor Collot, and François Marie Perrin du Lac all commented on St. Louis as a commercial center, and all such centers tended to create global attitudes through trade—a signature sign of frontier cities, with connections just as evident in New Orleans, Montreal, New York, Boston, and Detroit. These writers visited cities whose residents knew and read their works. The evidence remains in the early editions of their books preserved in St. Louis collections, evidence that their ideas were considered and embraced.6
McDermott, in examining the probate records of St. Louis between 1764 and 1800, considered book ownership as an indicator of how an eighteenth-century French frontier city eschewed isolation and decline. Of approximately six hundred white citizens in St. Louis in this period, almost seventy heads of households owned nearly three thousand books, exclusive of duplicates, collectively.7 As Helmut Lehmann-Haupt long ago concluded, non-Anglophone colonial libraries were often private, family repositories, imported from European booksellers, and French St. Louis certainly bears this out, with huge numbers of books possessed outside of any public or quasi-public or subscription library until the 1820s. This remains hard to imagine for bibliographers who have focused on studies of the book in this period along the Atlantic seaboard.
In eighteenth-century St. Louis, there were virtually no institutions of public education and no public libraries, yet thousands of books were owned across virtually all settled families. Such private libraries included titles of scientific as well as literary holdings and historical and religious volumes. The founding family, that of Pierre Laclede and his Chouteau descendants, obviously possessed pronounced interests in trade and commerce, politics, and property. Auguste Chouteau himself, the patriarch and friend to so many subsequent leaders of the frontier capital, was a great freethinker—a quarter of his books were on the Index. From Ovid to Ariosto, from Defoe to Fielding, from Descartes to Diderot, the citizens of the early, tiny outpost of St. Louis were well read and informed, ready to create a city which left its mark on the world stage.
Remarkably, many of these books were passed down and survive, regionally, in private hands and in public research collections to this day. The early St. Louis merchant families who founded the city were avid readers of a wide array of classics; sets of Voltaire from the very age of the philosophes with local ownership marks are represented in local libraries. Often the property lists of books of the founding citizens of this city ran into hundreds of titles. Such Old World–style collections were formed and kept within one’s study, one’s own library, rather than communally held in public institutions, as was more common in Anglophone communities.8
A brief glance at some of McDermott’s bibliographic discoveries reveals both the breadth of reading matter circulating in early St. Louis and the literary self-consciousness these first inhabitants possessed as urban pioneers. The earliest private library of record in eighteenth-century St. Louis was formed by a Laurent Trudeau. At his death in 1774, his books were not itemized, but in the same year Louis St. Ange de Bellerive’s estate listed the French military code and Charlevoix’s history of the Spanish colonies, appropriate books for the commandant of the area’s Fort Chartres in the French Illinois country.9
Pierre Laclede’s library perfectly reflected this well-educated businessman—commerce, finance, taxation, marine law, history, military affairs, travels, and literature spread across an astonishing three hundred titles in 1778, including some of the first sets of the classics west of the Mississippi, as well as John Locke, Bacon, Rousseau, and Descartes.10
At the time of his death, the merchant Silvestre Labbadie in 1794 was one of the wealthiest men in St. Louis. In his library was one of Jefferson’s favorite books in the French edition, and thus crucial subsequently to Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery: Jonathan Carver’s Travels in the Interior of North America.11
Cleric Pierre Didier, a Benedictine monk forced to flee revolutionary Paris, died in St. Louis in 1799. He and merchant Gabriel Cerré, who died in 1802, left behind the largest libraries up to their time in St. Louis. In these hoards, books on philosophy and religion vied with Cervantes, Cook’s Voyages, and numerous other historical and political titles.
Antoine Saugrain, descended from booksellers and publishers in Paris, became the surgeon of the military hospital at St. Louis. His library remained in his descendants’ hands well into the twentieth century and was quite extensive, reflecting an interest in medicine, chemistry, and botany, to be sure, but also history, politics, and physics.12
The Chouteau family provided the best glimpse of book ownership in early St. Louis. Auguste Chouteau left perhaps the largest of the early French libraries in St. Louis, and his is reflective of his extensive knowledge of world affairs and the growing presence in his city (a city which he, as the story goes, helped create at the young age of fourteen) of American influence at the time of his death in 1829.13 His own important manuscript book on the founding of St. Louis has been preserved in the Mercantile Library since his son, Gabriel, presented it in 1857.14 Some of the most important works on New France existed on Chouteau’s shelves: Lafitau’s seminal treatise on the Iroquois; La Hontan’s Travels; Hennepin, and scores of early works on North America, fortified with modern law, science, and the classics. It is clearly evident that the long historical rendition or prelude to Chouteau’s Narrative was based in part on extensive reading of grand historical texts present in the Chouteau library. Chouteau, in collecting histories of Europe and North American exploration and settlement, created a material and literary context into which he might place himself and his city, both worthy of belonging to a broader master narrative of urbanity and progress.
Thus, from its beginnings St. Louis had citizens with the means and the inclination to read and collect books for their, or their family’s, private use. However public libraries in any sense of the modern meaning were not established until the early nineteenth century in the bustling frontier city.
As the town grew larger, the need was finally felt for the creation of such a public library. By 1808, with the Americans firmly in control administratively after the Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis was one of the first printing centers west of the Mississippi, along with New Orleans and a few other places. Local newspapers such as the bilingual Missouri Gazette,15 pamphlets, books of civil ordinances and other laws, even early creative literary efforts, were being produced here, not exclusively imported. Textbooks were needed for schools, and as the strategic importance of St. Louis was rediscovered in the nineteenth century, there was a need for some form of preservation and free access to this information. The first locally printed play, poem, arithmetic, primer, city directory, and history were produced at the beginning of the 1820s. How nice to have been a buyer at St. Louis’s first bookseller, the Essex Book Shop!16
The private French libraries gave way to the early American subscription libraries across the entire Illinois country of the French settlers. Individuals would become library patrons and members for a fee; proprietary shares would be sold for the purpose of acquiring a collection of useful books for general consumption. This is the heritage maintained by the members of today’s St. Louis Mercantile Library. The first attempt at creating this sort of public collection from donations from the earlier private collections came and went in 1811. Other abortive efforts occurred in 1818 with the creation of such institutions as a “Reading Room and Punch House,” and the St. Louis Debating Society’s St. Louis Library Company.17
But St. Louis received its first lasting public library in 1824, when the Mayor and several other citizens founded the St. Louis Library Association. This institution, the first large collection of public books for the citizens of St. Louis, was in existence until 1839, when it finally closed its doors, transferring its valuable collections of books on all subjects to the library of the St. Louis Lyceum.18
The bibliographical importance of the Lyceum experiment to St. Louis was enormous, even if it was, again, not a sustainable model. In the span of a generation it passed a portion of the collection of the earliest library company, that of the St. Louis Library Association, along with its own extensive book collection, its archives, catalog, and business records, and that of smaller literary societies and donations to it from the earliest families, in 1851, to the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association, which had the backing and management of the thriving merchant community and dedicated philanthropists wishing to preserve their cultural legacy in such a public institution. This is also an intriguing cultural circumstance. The Mercantile Library, traditionally dating its founding to 1846, is one of the oldest libraries anywhere in the trans-Mississippi, but few writers except McDermott have realized the unbroken heritage of St. Louis’s public libraries, through specific mergers, dating from 1824. Given that heritage, the Mercantile could have claimed that earlier date of founding, making frontier St. Louis’s first library one of the oldest in continuing existence, virtually as old as such institutions as the Boston Athenaeum and those libraries of Providence, Cincinnati, and New York.19
Michael Winship has found that, in the early 1850s, books published in New York were routinely accessioned by the St. Louis Mercantile Library Association within weeks of their publication.20 Already a transportation center by then, St. Louis’s distribution networks could get books deep into the rural reaches of its economic or trading territories within the period of an additional few days. By examining library records in St. Louis and comparing dates to original newspaper notices and later references such as the Bibliography of American Literature, it can be shown that the Mercantile Library in St. Louis often acquired books published in Boston, New York, or Philadelphia—Emerson, Thoreau, Lowell, Parkman, Stowe, Whittier, Whitman, Melville, immediately on publication, in some cases the very same day that the Harvard College Library accessioned these books.21 Such data radically changes our notion of intellectual frontiers in this era.
The continued vitality of the St. Louis Mercantile Library as a bridge to earlier cultural days along the frontier, side-by-side with more contemporary book centers, has ensured that a significant number of the earliest books read by the first citizens of St. Louis have survived in the original editions. In 1851, the Mercantile Library bought approximately two-thousand of the non-duplicated titles from the St. Louis Lyceum for roughly fifty cents per volume (or a bit over one thousand dollars). The records created when these books were accessioned provide a glimpse of not only the earliest private libraries of St. Louis but also a composite of all the early St. Louis public book collections that had survived.
The Mercantile has preserved the earliest library catalogs, circulation records, and membership rolls of its predecessors, the Lyceum and the old Library Association. Numerous eighteenth-century French works in history, the classics, fiction, science, travel, and biography exist side-by-side in the catalog with their English counterparts, testifying to a moment when two separate frontier literary stories were linked within one library collection,22 and through that, representing the mind or composite intellect of a frontier city.
Many of the books that were bought by the Mercantile Library itself (especially worn books or much early fiction) were not added to the permanent collection. But over eleven hundred titles, with accession numbers between #8000 and #9100, were included from those years. Of that span, 153 books (or 15 percent) were published in the eighteenth century in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Philadelphia, or Boston and are present. Many of these have ownership marks of some of the earliest French citizens, as noted above, demonstrating how books circulated across all boundaries as St. Louis grew from a village to a metropolis.23
Eighteenth-century books are fascinating barometers for the North American frontier city. These books were international best sellers in their day. Just as the first merchants of St. Louis were connected economically to other urban centers in both North America and Europe, so were they connected through their books to a broader world of literary production, scientific thinking, and map making. The very presence of such books in early libraries disproves notions that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century frontier cities were confined, isolated, or restrained, thus confirming the implications of McDermott’s bibliographical studies.
Charles Peterson reversed the measure in Colonial St. Louis: Building a Creole Capital by tracing the depth and variety of historical sources about St. Louis surviving worldwide.24 This was, in short, a two-way street. Others in very distant places were also thinking about St. Louis, and this frontier place was inscribed in maps and documents being produced in Spain, in France, and elsewhere. The immediacy of this shared print culture seems to prove that frontier cities such as St. Louis did not simply attain “culture” as they matured, increased in size, or became part of a regional economy; rather, as McDermott meant to suggest with his provocative and startling title, this frontier place—from its very inception—had access to the latest thoughts of Rousseau and Voltaire. St. Louis was an urban place in Indian country. That was no contradiction. It was never a wilderness.
These books are still being rediscovered, and with them their very special associations. Only recently a two-centuries-old root cellar was excavated by amazed archaeologists in the old French town of Florissant, in northern St. Louis County. I was asked to take a look at the cache of books that was found in a long-forgotten foundation, open to the elements but preserved by loving hands in this region when the city was young.
I have reflected on the existence of early libraries and the evolution of a specific early library, the Mercantile, which through books in “frontier” days created a memory, a version of one city’s past. There were simultaneous developments and thus interesting sidebars for researchers to investigate in this field of cultural history. Rather than following a geographical progression from east to west, early libraries and their sources of supply arose simultaneously. The Vincennes Library Company in Indiana (1806); the Albion, Illinois, Public Library (1818); John Mason Peck’s books in southern Illinois, a legendary collection of the 1820s; the Edwardsville Public Library of 1819, of which the catalog survives and many of the first books are now preserved at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville; early books sold by Joseph Philipson in 1807 in St. Louis; the Kaskaskia library of Father Gibault (1790); private libraries from Ste. Genevieve before 1810; Bartholomew Tardiveau’s extensive collection of books in New Madrid before 1801; the first presses in early Kentucky, and Joseph Charless’s printing of books and newspapers in St. Louis after 1807—the details may overwhelm, but all together, the evidence of these early libraries which seemingly arose overnight in Missouri and Illinois demand renewed research if we wish to gain a full picture of frontier cities, and intellectual underpinnings of the life in all the cultures of early America.25
Taking McDermott’s work one step further, we might pay more attention to the circulation of books and letters in these French-speaking frontier cities, questioning how distribution worked in languages other than English. We might also probe the divide between private and public in the cultural realm. Such inquiries might provide another opportunity for decentering our traditional national narratives. And we should remember that the inhabitants of a frontier city such as St. Louis also produced letters, maps, and various kinds of texts that were shaped not only by what they read, but also by what they experienced in cross-cultural encounters with the native peoples of the area. Historians need to read these texts as the products of multiple epistemologies.
Founders of St. Louis and the developers of the trans-Mississippi West more generally found inspiration and knowledge in books; their eyes pored avidly over the lines of text with curiosity, interest, and ambition, when the volumes and the city and region were both quite young. Many of these books remain to us today—a decidedly strong and rewarding link to the lost world of these frontier cities.