| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 36.3 | The History Cooperative

*Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty that Ruled America's Frontier.* By Shirley Christian. (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004. 509 pp. Illustrations, map, notes, index. $27.00.)
One family above all others is key to the fur trade of the Far West: the Chouteaus of St. Louis. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Shirley Christian adds to the canon of Chouteau studies a highly readable and well written discussion of the evolution of the four generations of French aristocrats who established this dynasty.	1
With a slightly misleading main title (that might have been forsaken in favor of the subtitle), the book's contribution is its in-depth, genealogical focus on individual Chouteaus and the author's understanding of the marriage system that interlinked French families of influence throughout Louisiana. Beginning with René Augustin Chouteau (1723–1776) and Pierre Laclède Liguest (1729–1778), Christian correctly identifies Marie Thérèse Bourgeois, "Madame Chouteau" (1733–1814), as the key to understanding the dynasty's origins and the family's ascension in social and economic life. Astutely, Christian emphasizes the role that matriarchy played in creating an otherwise male-dominated world not unlike the patriarchies of pre-Revolutionary France.	. . .

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