The Forgotten French of the Midwest

 The time is 1823. The place is Fort Wayne. Indiana has been a state for seven years. The dismayed writer is William H. Keating, who has just arrived from the east:

Not being previously aware of the diversity in the character of the inhabitants, the sudden change from an American to a French population, has a surprising, and to say the last, an unpleasant effect; for the first twenty-four hours, the traveller fancies himself in a real Babel. . . . The business of a town of this kind differs so materially from that carried on in our cities, that it is almost impossible to fancy ourselves still within the same territorial limits.

This quote leads off Yale historian Jay Gitlin's book The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders and American Expansion. Whether he liked it or not, Keating knew what we have systematically forgotten.

Not only was French spoken frequently "in an enormous region stretching from Detroit to St. Louis to New Orleans," as Gitlin explains, the story of this Francophone Midwest "has never found a place in American history textbooks for three related reasons: the dramatis personae have never been correctly identified; the geographical setting of the story lies upon a north-south axis and therefore lies counter to the traditional east-west presentation of U.S. history; and the story has been dismissed as being irrelevant to the general themes of American history." {2}

Gitlin is out to fix this. His story centers on the powerful and prosperous Chouteau family (sometimes called a dynasty) of St. Louis and westward, who do not fit the cheerful-lazy-voyageur stereotype propagated by early US historians. These French came from many places, not just Canada; they were cosmopolitan; and they were deeply involved in commerce and trade. This was an urban frontier before it was a farmers' frontier. From the start it was "urban, cosmopolitan, connected, and diverse." {188} Gitlin concludes that the French have remained invisible, not because they were uninvolved in nation-building, but "in part because their story demands that we accept a frontier past that transcends our old dichotomies of heroes and villains, settlers and Indians." {190}

This book will change your idea of the Midwest, and its smooth readable style will leave you wanting more.

H-Net also has an interesting review of a related book, Claiborne A. Skinner's The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes.



Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders & American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).

Claiborne A. Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).


Harold Henderson, "The Forgotten French of the Midwest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

History books of potential interest to genealogists

Three books that looked promising to me, out of the huddled masses reviewed in The American Historical Review 117, no. 2 (April 2012): 533, 543, 525

An Illinois woman's struggle in the 1860s and later to give allegedly insane people the right to a jury trial before being immured in an asylum:
Linda V. Carlisle, Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010).

How non-snooty restaurants rose along with the middle class:
Andrew P. Haley, Turning the Tables: Restaurants and the Rise of the American Middle Class, 1880-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

A family story about crossing racial boundaries in St. Louis and New Orleans (although without as much historical context as one reviewer wanted):
Julie Winch, The Clamorgans: One Family's History of Race in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011).


Harold Henderson, “History books of potential interest to genealogists” Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 3 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post.]

Genealogy Bank comes through

I've been pretty hard on GenealogyBank in the past, so it's only fair to make note that today, when I needed information on an obscure hurricane on an island south of Cuba almost a century ago, the New York Times archive failed me, but GB came through with a topical article from New Orleans, background information from Cleveland, and an informative well-cited nugget from the American State Papers. It's not even 11 am and it's already a good day for genealogy!

In this case the technical feature I appreciated most was the ability to search by location, using only keywords, since the particular name was irrelevant at this stage. This ability gives the database microhistorical as well as purely genealogical value (at least as I use those words).

How did you find THAT?

The Midwest turns up where you least expect it, like smack in the middle of the article, "Identifying Benjamin W. Cohen of New York and New Orleans," by Teri D. Tillman, CG, in the current National Genealogical Society Quarterly (member$hip required, earlier blogged here).This article is a wonderful genealogical tour de force. Her key piece of evidence that New York City doctor Benjamin W. Cohen and New Orleans dentist B. W. Cohen were the same person comes from -- a 10 Feb 1842 letter now in the archives of the University of Notre Dame! (page 252)

I love unconventional sources as much as the next guy, but what's the story behind the story? How did the author ever get the idea that it might be worth trolling the archives of a Midwestern Catholic university for information on a Jewish dentist in Louisiana?