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Francois Valle and His World - Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark (Paperback)
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Francois Valle and His World - Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark (Paperback)
Series: Missouri Biography Series
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Winner of the Kemper & Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana
History for excellence in historical scholarship for the year 2002,
awarded by The Historic New Orleans Collection, The Louisiana
Historical Association. In Francois Valle and His World, Carl
Ekberg provides a fascinating biography of Francois Valle
(1716-1783), placing him within the context of his place and time.
Valle, who was born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper
Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer
sometime during the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead
mining, and the Indian trade, he ultimately became the wealthiest
and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, although he never
learned to read or write. Ekberg focuses on Upper Louisiana in
colonial times, long before Lewis and Clark arrived in the
Mississippi River valley and before American sovereignty had
reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi. He vividly captures
the ambience of life in the eighteenth-century frontier
agricultural society that Valle inhabited, shedding new light on
the French and Spanish colonial regimes in Louisiana and on the
Mississippi River frontier before the Americans arrived. Based
entirely on primary source documents-wills and testaments, parish
registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and Spanish
administrative correspondence-found in archives ranging from St.
Louis and Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans and Seville, Francois Valle
and His World traces not only the life of Francois Valle and the
lives of his immediate family members, but also the lives of his
slaves. In doing so, it provides a portrait of Missouri's very
first black families, something that has never before been
attempted. Ekberg also analyzes how the illiterate Valle became the
richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the
sociopolitical hierarchy to become an important servant of the
Spanish monarchy. Francois Valle and His World provides a useful
corrective to the fallacious notion that Missouri's history began
with the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the turn of the nineteenth
century. Anyone with an interest in colonial history or the history
of the Mississippi River valley will find this book of great value.
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