History of our Meramec River

[Gavin]

And he was a Jesuit....Converted many to Christ at gun point no doubt. 

 

[Mitch f]

58 minutes ago, Gavin said:

And he was a Jesuit....Converted many to Christ at gun point no doubt. 

 

You sure hate Jesus, huh?

[Al Agnew]

Actually, Gravier almost certainly wasn't the first Frenchman to "discover" the Meramec (the Indians would have laughed at the word "discover" here).  Marquette and Joliet certainly saw the mouth of the river when they took their voyage of exploration down the Mississippi from the Illinois River to the Gulf of Mexico.  They would have passed the mouth of the Meramec in June of 1673.  With a little imagination you can picture them paddling a short distance up the river, but it isn't in their records.   I wrote a chapter on the history of the Meramec Basin in my book, and it was fun doing the research of what happened back in those days.  Following is an excerpt from the book, picking up right after Marquette and Joliet:

 

The next official expedition down the Mississippi was in 1682.  Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was an adventurer and would-be businessman who had heard the Spanish had neglected to build forts to defend the lower Misssissippi and was sure the possession of the great river was key to control of the New World.  Receiving a grant of permission from the King of France to explore the river and set up forts along it, he set out from the Illinois River in early 1682, and on April 9, 1682, reached the mouth of the Mississippi, where he erected a column with the name of the king and the date, and claimed possession of "this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, people, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams and rivers, within the extent of said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio...as also along the (Mississippi), and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the Sioux...as far as its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, and also the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from the natives of these countries that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the river..."  Thus, the Meramec and all the tributaries of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers were claimed by France.

 

In December of that year, La Salle helped set up the first fort defending the Mississippi Valley at Starved Rock on the Illinois River, and soon French-Canadians were regularly traveling down the Mississippi and presumably up the Meramec in search of furs, minerals, and souls to be saved.  Though they found a country rich in natural beauty, with park-like forests and abundant wildlife, they had little interest in settling this land; they were there for adventure and fortune.  It was the mineral lead that brought the first real settlers of European descent to the Meramec Basin.

 

Father Jaques Gravier led an expedition in 1697-1698 which found deposits of lead in at least two places within the Basin.  One was at a location called Silver Hollow, near present day Sullivan.  The other was discussed in his report in October, 1700, where he talked of the presence of rich lead ore "12 or 13 leagues" from the mouth of the "River Miaramigoua".  At that time, Big River was often called the Little Meramec (or Miaramigoua), and he probably meant that distance up Big River, which would have been somewhere near where lead deposits would later be exploited. 

 

That same year, De La Motte Cadillac, a frontier entrepreneur, visited the lead deposits reported by Gravier and petitioned the French king for the lead concession for Louisiana Territory.  Knowing that the king and his immediate supporter, Scots banker John Law, were not interested in lead, De La Motte "salted" his request by misrepresenting silver ore from Mexico as coming from Missouri.  Law, who had installed himself as director-general of the Bank of France, was fooled by the ruse, and formed an investment company called the Company of the West, obtaining a grant for exclusive commerce and mining privileges for 25 years.  He started a massive promotional campaign based upon the story of rich silver mines, and did a "land office business" selling shares in the company to thousands of wealthy and not so wealthy investors.  Unfortunately, when the silver failed to materialize, the company bank that was using the investors’ money accumulated about $200 million in worthless bank notes and collapsed, ruining the investors in what became known as the “Mississippi Bubble”.

However, while it lasted the company was influential in developing mines in Missouri.  Philippe Francois Renault, director of the company’s mines, left France in 1719 with 200 miners, tools, and supplies, and purchased 500 slaves in Santo Domingo and arranged for 25 additional slaves to be sent to the mines each year.  They were almost certainly the first slaves ever imported to Missouri.

Renault arrived at Fort Chartres, across the Mississippi in Illinois, in April 1720, setting up a headquarters from which to explore eastern Missouri for potential mineral resources.  It’s generally believed that he found lead along the Meramec, Big River, and the Mineral Fork, and at a small stream he called Fourche a Renault, he found a vein of lead two feet thick on the surface.  Fourche a Renault still bears that name and is one of the two creeks that merge to form Mineral Fork, west of present day Potosi. 

Actually, there is some question as to whether the present-day Fourche a Renault was really the stream where he found the lead.  What is known is that he received a grant in 1723 for one and one half leagues along the “Petit Merrimac” (Big River) and extending up the first tributary (Mineral Fork) for six leagues, a total of 9 square leagues.  A league was approximately 3-4 miles, so six leagues would have been at least 18 miles up the Mineral Fork, which is 17 miles long from the mouth to where the stream splits into Fourche a Renault and Mine a Breton creeks.  A few miles to the northeast was a place called Old Mines, because mines had previously been opened there by Sieur de Renaudiere in a brief search for silver.  There the miners had built crude cabins along Old Mines Creek, calling the place “Cabannage de Renaudiere”, and in 1723 Renault built a brick furnace there.  Were Renault’s mines there instead of Fourche a Renault?   His own miners apparently used the old cabins, living there much of each year, one might presume that they wouldn’t commute several miles to work the mines.  Some of the descendants of those early miners still reside in the Old Mines area today, and only a few decades ago, it was still common for members of the old families to speak a “Missouri French” dialect as much as English.  They maintained a French culture well into the 1900s.

Wherever the actual mines were, they were worked into the 1730s, and reopened in 1743.  Renault’s land grants were in dispute for nearly 100 years, and the failure of the Company of the West left him in deep financial trouble, still owing for some of the slaves and lacking credit.  But he continued to attempt to profit from the mines.  He lived in a stone house near Fort Chartres until 1744, when he gave up his holdings to the crown, sold his slaves, and moved back to France.

 

Note that my research showed some things a bit differently from this original post.  Many sources say that Miaramigoua meant "Little Meramec", and Big River was often called that.  Record keeping and accounts of journeys wasn't all that common back in those days.