Marie Therese Bourgeois Chouteau
(Madame Chouteau)

Besides having a strong capitalistic streak, Pierre Laclede had another reason for setting out into the wilderness and establishing a fur trading post in 1764. His very personal reason involved the woman who soon came up the river to join him. Her name was Marie Therese Chouteau, forever known to St. Louisans as Madame Chouteau.

She was born in New Orleans on January 14, 1733 and later became the matriarch of St. Louis. Her father, Nicholas Bourgeois, was French, her mother, Marie Joseph Tarare, was Spanish. Her father died when she was a young girl, and she lived with her mother and stepfather until she was 15 years old, when a marriage was arranged to a tavern keeper and baker named Rene Auguste Chouteau, on September 20, 1748. Marie Chouteau's new husband battered her, then after a time ran off to France and deserted her, leaving her to shift for herself and her infant son.

Pierre Laclede stepped into the picture about 1755, and began caring for her son Auguste and raising him as his own. In addition, Madame Chouteau went on to have four children after the departure of her husband for France. Since she knew her husband might return to New Orleans at any time to reclaim her, she traveled up the river to St. Louis in 1764 be with Laclede, the father of her children. Laclede built the fine stone house on Block 33 for her in 1767. That same year René Chouteau reappeared in New Orleans, and demanded that the authorities return his wife to him. This was no idle request, for both church and civil law made Madame Chouteau her husband's property, and the government was officially bound to find and return her. The mails were slow and government officials were understanding for several years. However, in 1774 Madame Chouteau was officially ordered by Governor Unzaga to return to her husband. Even upon receiving the official orders from New Orleans, Lt. Gov. Pedro Piernas in St. Louis was reluctant to force the issue with the town's most important and powerful family. Two more years went by, and Madame Chouteau's drunken husband died in an apoplectic fit in New Orleans before she was forced to return to him.

Madame Chouteau was a powerful presence in early St. Louis. After the death of Pierre Laclede in 1778, she was involved in business ventures and real estate. No one, not even her powerful sons Auguste and Pierre, could tell her what to do, and she dominated the social and cultural life of St. Louis. She lived out her days in St. Louis, dying on August 14, 1814, and leaving a small fortune of some $2,000. She set her faithful Indian slave Therese free with gifts of money, a cow and calf, and flour. She was buried in the village churchyard (see Block 59). Although her grave was marked with an iron cross, it had disappeared by 1835, and her body was not relocated and moved with the rest of the Chouteau family remains to Calvary Cemetery in north St. Louis in the 1850s.