Pierre Laclède (1729–1778)

Frenchman Pierre Laclède, credited with co-founding the city of St. Louis, Missouri, died aboard his trading boat on the Mississippi River and was buried on the river’s west bank, near what would later become the Arkansas town of Napoleon (Desha County). His grave was very likely swept away by river floods, but the place where he was buried still exists and contains other graves, making this one of the state’s oldest non–Native American cemeteries.

Laclède (who sometimes added Liguest to his name for legal reasons) was born in the French Pyrenees on November 22, 1729, and emigrated to New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1755, where he established himself as a merchant and then as a fur trader. In 1763, another New Orleans merchant, one with an exclusive right to buy furs from Native tribes along the Missouri and parts of the Mississippi rivers, sponsored Laclède so that he could establish a trading post farther north. Laclède, accompanied by a crew and his common-law wife Marie Therese Chouteau’s fourteen-year-old son, Auguste Chouteau, traveled up the Mississippi River. After spending some time at Fort de Chartres, in Illinois, the men moved on to the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, ultimately establishing a post eighteen miles from the confluence in 1764.

Laclède and Chouteau named the settlement St. Louis, which quickly grew into a thriving city. Initially, Laclède had a monopoly on buying furs from the Osage, but by 1778 he was in debt, dispirited, and ill. Hoping to recoup his fortune, Laclède went to New Orleans to buy merchandise to sell in St. Louis. While traveling back up the Mississippi River, he died somewhere near the mouth of the Arkansas River, a day or two before May 27, 1778. He was forty-eight.

At this time, Arkansas Post was located seven miles up the Arkansas River, under the command of Captain Balthazar de Villiers, who also acted as the Post’s coroner. He recorded that, on May 27, 1778, he traveled downstream to view Laclède’s body, pronouncing that “death had occurred naturally.” (Laclède’s death was recorded in St. Louis on June 20, which later came to be seen as his death date.)

The burial took place on a bench of land at the juncture of the two rivers, according to St. Louis historian Wilson Primm, who knew Jean Pierre Chouteau, one of Laclède’s children with Marie Therese Chouteau. Laclède’s boatmen built his coffin using wood from the boat’s rowing benches and then buried the body at the forested site. This was likely already an established graveyard, because the Arkansas River’s confluence with the Mississippi had long been a transfer point for goods and passengers. Nineteen years later, these same boatmen showed the burial location to Jean Pierre Chouteau.

John F. Darby, another early St. Louis historian, also claimed to have visited this graveyard and wrote that Laclède’s grave was not identifiable, as it had no tombstone or rocks to mark it. According to Darby, writing in 1872, “the spot where Pierre Liguest Laclède was buried is…just above the town of Napoleon—in a deep, heavy grove of timber, in a light sandy soil, and on that account the place became a famous grave-yard for the last sixty or seventy years, particularly when the cholera and yellow fever raged, and there might be, perhaps, from ten to fifteen dead bodies to bury from a single steamboat.”

Napoleon was a rough river town established in the 1820s or 1830s, by which time steamboat travel had become common. Ultimately this sandy graveyard would hold the bodies of steamboat passengers, residents of Napoleon, and the boatmen who died at its U.S. Marine Hospital, in use from 1855 until the building collapsed into the river in early 1868. Darby stated that the graveyard contained several thousand bodies.

The Arkansas and Mississippi rivers experienced several massive floods; during the Civil War, the Mississippi’s course was deliberately altered, to Napoleon’s detriment. A flood in 1874 caused the remaining residents to require rescue, although it was the flood of 1882 that washed away all traces of the town, and also washed out coffins that were later found far downstream. At least a portion of this graveyard survived, now stranded on an island due to the changing course of the Arkansas River.

One year after Laclède’s death, in 1779, the Post moved back to its earlier Écores Rouges location. The site is now known as Arkansas National Post Memorial, part of the United States National Park Service.

For additional information:
“Arkansas Post. ‘A Question of History’—Laclede’s Death.” Arkansas Gazette, April 17, 1872, 1 [signed W.C. Stout].

“Early Times in Arkansas.” Arkansas Gazette, April 14, 1872, p. 2.

Ekberg, Carl J., and Sharon K. Person. St. Louis Rising; The French Regime of Louis St. Ange de Bellerive. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015, pp. 4, 58–63, 107–108, 225.

“A Question of History.” Arkansas Gazette, April 7, 1872, p. 2 [signed James H. Lucas].

Report of the Celebration of the Anniversary of the Founding of St. Louis, on the Fifteenth Day of February, A.D. 1847. Online at https://archive.org/details/reportofcelebrat00sain/page/n3/mode/2up?q=laclede (accessed November 10, 2024).

Abby Burnett
Kingston, Arkansas