René Auguste Chouteau (born September 7, 1749 in New Orleans, Louisiana; died February 24, 1829 in St. Louis, Missouri) was a trader with Indians and an influential figure in early St. Louis originally from New Orleans. He is traditionally celebrated as co-founder of St. Louis with his "step-father" Pierre Laclède. Along with his mother, Marie Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau (Madame Chouteau) and his half-brother Jean-Pierre, he established the powerful Chouteau family westward along the Missouri River.

Auguste's father, René Auguste Chouteau (père), abandoned the family in 1753 or 1754, and returned to France. Pierre Laclède took up with Madame Chouteau in 1755, and unofficially adopted Auguste, eventually making him his secretary.

According to tradition, Laclède brought Chouteau with him on an expedition up the Mississippi River in 1763 to find a place to contruct a fur-trading post near the confluence with the Missouri River, a project authorized as part of the Indian policy of a transitional French administration awaiting the arrival of authorities from Spain, which had been granted Louisiana by the French at the end of the Seven Years' War. Chouteau at age 13 or 14 then oversaw construction of the new town in 1764.

However, one 1790s account, published in translation, by a French officer serving the Spaniards, Nicolas de Finiels, notes no founding role for Chouteau and claims there was already a hamlet at the site of St. Louis in 1763-64. The tale of Chouteau's role in the founding of St. Louis does not appear in the historical introduction of the first St. Louis city directory in 1820, and his name was not mentioned at all at the first celebration of the town's past in 1847. A New Orleans militia census conducted after Laclede had departed New Orleans (Archivo General Des Indies, Audiencia De Santo Domingo, Legajo 2515, published in translation in 1972) shows him still at home with his mother and brothers. The earliest St. Louis historian, Wilson Primm, dismissed the story. Auguste's role in the founding is based on his own testimony in a land dispute in the 1820s, and on an unsigned manuscript "Journal" attributed to him announced found by his sole surviving son, Gabriel, in 1857.

Auguste Chouteau was still a prominent and powerful merchant, land speculator, and politician in the new city. His fortune was built on close connections with Spanish military officials, and on his control of trade with the Osage Indians. This pattern of relationships continued after the Louisiana Purchase (which concluded a brief return to French formal control, 1801-1803) and transfer of the west bank of the Mississippi to American military territorial administration.

Chouteau became leader of what in Missouri was called "the St. Louis Junto" of a Franco-American elite. He was the political patron of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who built his early career championing the legal interests--especially land claims--of well-to-do conservative French St. Louisans. In those roles Chouteau opposed Missouri statehood, preferring continued military administration on the old Spanish and territorial models, and he resisted incorporation of St. Louis as a city and investing in civic improvements. His testimony in the 1820s land claims dispute was part of opposition to setting aside town commons land for support of public schools.

Nevertheless, especially after the Civil War his story became important to St. Louis boosters. After the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, it linked St. Louis business history with a romantic history of western exploration, and gave the city's upper classes a myth with which to identify and promote major initiatives such as a 1914 charter reform, when it was staged in a Pageant and Masque held in St. Louis's Forest Park to promote civic unity. The story of Laclede and Chouteau supplied a major sequence to one of the earliest cinematic depictions of an American city's history, "The Spirit of St. Louis," filmed to promote a large bond issue election in 1923.

External links

• Historian Jay Gitlin's "Constructing the House of Chouteau: Saint Louis"

History of Missouri | St. Louisans