Opening the Ozarks: a historical geography of Missouri's Ste. Genevieve District, 1760-1830

Abstract

Opening the Ozarks: A Historical Geography of Missouri 's Ste. Genevieve District, 1760-1830. By Walter A. Schroeder. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Pp. xxi, 551. Foreword by Terry Jordan, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, tables, conclusion, appendices, bibliography, index. $49.95.) Opening the Ozarks gets my vote for the book with which to celebrate the Purchase. It has two major characteristics that should endear it to people who live in the Purchase area: it has nothing to do with Lewis and Clark, and it has everything to do with the real historical problems of transferring the land from its colonial owners to the United States. As the subtitle makes clear, Opening the Ozarks is not history book, although historical data perfuse the text and the extensive footnotes. It is historical geography, the master work of long-time geography professor at the University of Missouri, recently retired. Schroeder inscribes his purpose forthrightly: his book is a search for order in the settlement of the Ste. Genevieve District, portion of the eastern Ozarks of Missouri. The processes of invading new lands, acquiring and occupying property, and creating landscapes of communities in all their comprehensiveness and complexities must have purpose and order behind them . . . . It is my mission to explain how purposeful order came (p. xvii). Why should students of Arkansas history be concerned about the Ste. Genevieve District? Arkansas, after all, has the venerable Arkansas Post to ponder as key to the French and Spanish colonial periods, and the studies of Morris Arnold have made the Post's history readily available. Arkansas Post, however, had little to do with the decisions about how was organized and settled. Those decisions were made by the Spanish and American governments in St. Louis, and the focus was on the area where most of the Upper Louisiana population lived in the decades before and after the Purchase. That area was the west bank of the Mississippi, where French Illinois had spanned the river to form new towns-Ste. Genevieve (ca. 1750), St. Louis (1764), New Bourbon, New Madrid-and where the Spanish government had welcomed American settlers-Cape Girardeau, Potosi, and others. The Ste. Genevieve District contained all of these citizens, and it thus became the major focus for determining the patterns of transition of the Purchase to the United States. As Terry Jordan points out in his foreword to the volume, the Ste. …