The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (The Lamar Series in Western History) Review

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The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (The Lamar Series in Western History) Review
Jay Gitlin's book, Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion, is excellent. This is from a lay-historian whose interest in French colonial history is primarily in the Lower Mississippi Valley. While familiar with 18th century Pennsylvania, Louisiana, and Texas Indian traders, I had not gotten around to studying the French traders in Upper Louisiana. Therefore, the book was a perfect introduction to the fur traders, primarily of St. Louis, who traded to the west of the Mississippi in the late 1800s into the 19th century. But more than just an introduction, it was an interesting study of the rise socially, politically, and economically of a group of rough, smart and capable French frontiersmen who became educated and sophisticated merchants and business leaders and still kept their French character. It is a clear overview of events and important players of that area in that time.
That said, although I thoroughly enjoyed the chapters on the Chouteaus and related trader bourgeois merchants, my favorite chapter was "La Confederation Perdue." This chapter is a very good overview of 19th century Francophone merchants of Louisiana, especially New Orleans, before, during and after the Civil War. It is so clearly the reality of what happened to the non-planter French creoles, black and white, as the war changed everything.
In Bourgeois Frontier, Gitlin pours out facts, well-documented in footnotes, and clearly presented. My only complaint is that at 190 pages (plus 78 pages of excellent footnotes and bibliography, and index), it is too short.
The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (The Lamar Series in Western History) OverviewHistories tend to emphasize conquest by Anglo-Americans as the driving force behind the development of the American West. In this fresh interpretation, Jay Gitlin argues that the activities of the French are crucial to understanding the phenomenon of westward expansion.
The Seven Years War brought an end to the French colonial enterprise in North America, but the French in towns such as New Orleans, St. Louis, and Detroit survived the transition to American rule. French traders from Mid-America such as the Chouteaus and Robidouxs of St. Louis then became agents of change in the West, perfecting a strategy of "middle grounding" by pursuing alliances within Indian and Mexican communities in advance of American settlement and re-investing fur trade profits in land, town sites, banks, and transportation. The Bourgeois Frontier provides the missing French connection between the urban Midwest and western expansion. (20091201)

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