DISCOVERING THE VALLEY OF THE FLOWERS

The 850,000 square mile reach of land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains (known during the 1700s as the Louisiana Territory) was occupied for many centuries before the arrival of white American colonists and Europeans by tribes of Native Americans. Evidence of fire pits and artifacts in Missouri's Florissant Valley area date back to the late Archaic Period, the late Hopewell Period, the late Woodland Period and early Mississippian cultures, so identified by archaeologists, and reaching back in time as far as 4,000 B.C. White settlers of the region encountered Kickapoo, Sac, Fox, Tuscarawa, and Winnebago tribes.

The first white men of record to pass through the Florissant Valley (current Florissant and Hazelwood, MO) area were the French explorers Pere Marquette and Louis Joliet who, in 1673, traversed the length of the Mississippi in canoes and discovered the mouth of the Missouri River.

In 1682, the entire trans-Mississippi wilderness was claimed by Sieur de LaSalle in the name of his sovereign, Louis of France, and was known as Louisiana. France retained possession of the region for 81 years, but, aside from establishing a series of forts facing the British colonies of the American East Coast, concentrated efforts at colonization only in the Mississippi delta region.
In 1763, France ceded the Louisiana Territory to Spain during negotiations that followed the French and Indian War. It was not until 1786 that the Spanish established the first civil government in the Florissant Valley region known as Upper Louisiana.

In 1764, Pierre Laclede, Auguste Chouteau and other French trappers came up the Mississippi from New Orleans to establish a fur trading post that they named St. Louis. The post grew to be a town that early on became the commercial and cultural center of Upper Louisiana. Growth of population was accelerated when the Spanish Colonial government encouraged settlement by offering generous grants of land, free of charge, to those who would migrate to the area and establish roots. French families from Canada and New Orleans, and American families willing to become Spanish subjects, thus were enticed to the new, raw land.

In 1800, Spain was induced by Napoleon to retrocede the Louisiana Territory to France. The United States became apprehensive that the port city of New Orleans might be closed to American commercial interests. Envoys were duly dispatched to Paris to negotiate the purchase of New Orleans and its port, but accepted instead Napoleons offer to sell the entire territory for $15 million. The U.S. took formal possession of New Orleans in 1803 and the upper region, centered on St. Louis, in 1804.
The nation then wrote its signature all the way across the Louisiana Territory by sending an expedition under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on a two year journey up the Missouri River to its headwaters, across the Continental Divide, and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. The expedition began its journey at the mouth of the Wood River, just up river from Hazelwood, MO.

By 1809, in addition to St. Louis, the official territorial newspaper mentioned towns called Herculaneum, St. Ferdinand, St. Charles, St. Genevieve, New Madrid, and Cape Girardeau.
The Florissant Valley in its early years was shared by French and Spanish early settlers and the American newcomers from Virginia, Kentucky, and the deep south. The Musick wagon train in 1797 marked the beginning of the American era in the Hazelwood area settlements. The Spanish would depart in 1802, leaving but scant traces of their occupation. The French would remain, leaving family names that are still known in the area, such as Aubuchon, St. Cin, Teson, Beaugenot, Desloge, Riverie, Dunegant, Papin, Girard, and Moreau. The American pioneer families are similarly remembered in the Florissant Valley and Hazelwood areas. Musick, Stuart, Ellish, Utz, Mullanphy, Brown, Graham, Cross, and Caldwell are a few names that settlements in the Florissant Valley have enshrined as Founding Fathers of the region.