Francois Vallé and His World: Upper Louisiana before Lewis and Clark (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 François Vallé and His World, Carl Ekberg provides a captivating biography of François Vallé (1716–1783), placing him within the context of his place and time. Vallé, who was once born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer sometime right through the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead mining, and the Indian trade, he in the end became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, despite the fact that he never learned to read or write.
 
Ekberg makes a speciality of 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 Vallé 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, François Vallé and His World traces not only the life of François Vallé and the lives of his immediate members of the family, 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 Vallé became the richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the sociopolitical hierarchy to change into a very powerful servant of the Spanish monarchy.
 
François Vallé and His World provides a useful corrective to the flawed 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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