From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

From French Community to Missouri Town: Ste. Genevieve in the Nineteenth Century. By Bonnie Stepenoff. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 232. Preface, acknowledgments, illustrations, bibliography, index. $29.95.) Ste. Genevieve, a small Missouri town on the bank of the Mississippi River, is of permanent interest to American and Arkansas historians. It was founded around 1750, but a great flood forced it to move to its current location in 1785, where it has been a permanent fixture under French, Spanish, and then American governments. As an old town, it was an actor in and a witness to events during those decades of change, a fact that makes its history inherently important. At the same time, it was itself changing, adapting to meet the new regimes with their new rules and new opportunities. How its citizens, old and new, got along, what they decided to bring with them from their various traditions, and what institutions and customs they invented to create a new future together are topics that can shed light on the larger processes of social change in the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Such dynamic processes can and should be studied close to the centers of power, such as St. Louis. They may look a bit different in the smaller towns, though, because of the smaller number of players and the personal nature of the negotiations. Ste. Genevieve is that kind of historical locus. For historians of Arkansas, it offers an important case study of the Americanization process also experienced at Arkansas Post and smaller French and Spanish settlements. Its story has been studied by many scholars, particularly for the French and Spanish periods preceding the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Less attention has been paid to Ste. Genevieve's American nineteenth century, and the lacuna has helped create the questionable assumption that Americanization came fairly routinely with the change of flags and governmental officials. This volume is an attempt to help fill that lacuna with details of life in American "Ste. Gen," as it came to be called. Bonnie Stepenoff is a history professor at Southeast Missouri State University in nearby Cape Girardeau. For eight summers (1997-2004), she took her students to Ste. Gen for a historic preservation field school sponsored by her university and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. They toured, heard lectures, participated in archaeological excavation, and did research in cemeteries and public records. In the process, they generated a significant amount of data. The archaeological material has been published in the 1999 volume of Ohio Valley Archaeology. This volume presumably contains most of the remaining information and insights. Given the kind of research done by classes, this book could have been expected to be filled with biographical information from local records, and that is the case. It thus serves as a local history, but it is local history done in a famous and much-studied town, so it is written in the shadow of a larger corpus rather than designed to stand alone. That awareness is shown in frequent references to earlier studies, particularly those by Carl J. Ekberg and Walter A. Schroeder. It also is revealed in an unfortunate omission-although there are a few good historical photographs, there are no maps. It seems the reader is expected to have read the earlier histories and have their maps at hand. Orthography is a problem throughout the book. Proper spelling is not just a stylistic issue in a study of the development of a multilingual town. Those who have worked with documents of old Louisiana know the frustration of identifying people from year to year: Francois becomes Francisco becomes Francis becomes Frank. In this book, he becomes "Francois." The author explains that she has attempted to establish consistency by choosing one spelling for each name, "the most common or the one that appears in the most rehable sources" (p. …