Fort d'Orléans and the Grotton–St. Ange Family

The Padoucas spread a bison robe on the ground and placed M. de Bourgmont on it with his son, M. de St. Ange, and M. La Renaudière. Fifteen men then bore them to the dwelling of the head chief. —Philippe de La renaudière, 1724

Louis St. Ange de Bellerive first came to prominence under the sponsorship of his father, Robert Grotton–St. Ange, a humbly born and illiterate Frenchman. This book asserts that the Grotton–St. Ange family was the most important political and military family in Upper Louisiana for the half century between 1720 and 1770. Although never before made, this assertion is not controversial because not enough has been written about this family to provoke debate; confusion rather than controversy tends to characterize the history of the Grotton–St. Anges in the Illinois Country. Robert Grotton (his spelling, but also given as Groton or Groston) was born ca. 1665 in eastern France, in the picturesque town of Châtillon-sur-Seine in the Côte d'Or region of northern Burgundy. Robert's father, Jean Grotton, was a master baker, although Robert, who persistently aspired to higher status, identified his father as "captain of the hunt for the royal waters and forests." This was a fabricated title that had a vaguely aristocratic ring to it, conveying a sense of a rural aristocracy inhabiting a noble French landscape of woods and rivers. Robert immigrated to Canada at an early age, likely as a teenager, and quickly took up the military life as a way to advance himself and make his way in the New World. By 1686 he had attained the rank of sergeant and acquired the nickname St. Ange, meaning that he was called Robert Grotton dit St. Ange. This was slowly transmogrified into de St. Ange, putting a distinctly aristocratic spin on it that had no basis in his bloodlines.

Robert married Marguerite-Louise Crevier, widow of Laurent Beaudet in 1688, and the couple settled down at La Prairie, near Montreal. Although they experienced five barren years (1688–93), they finally produced eight children in less than ten years of childbearing. The formidable fertility of French Canadians, which produced more children than the harsh conditions and tenuous agriculture of the St. Lawrence Valley could sustain, was a major engine behind Canadian emigration to the Mississippi Valley. Marguerite died in 1707, leaving Robert with a house full of children to feed and raise, which he seems to have done in an entirely responsible fashion. The selfless shouldering of responsibility was a hallmark of the Grotton–St. Ange family, and this characteristic would ultimately have major consequences for the frontier community of St. Louis.

After a decade of life as a widower tending to his children, Robert Grotton took a second wife, Élisabeth Chorel, the sixteenth of eighteen children produced by François Chorel and his wife, Marie-Anne Aubuchon, over a thirty-year period. Robert and Élisabeth married in March 1718, Élisabeth bringing into the marriage a "natural child," Jeanne, born only six months earlier, in September 1717. Robert Grotton was a man with a highly developed sense of rectitude and honor, but taking for a wife a woman with Élisabeth's past (checkered by our standards but not necessarily by theirs) presented no obstacle to the marriage. If Élisabeth had made mistakes, Grotton knew human nature well enough not to dwell on them. Robert and Élisabeth were devoted to one another; she stuck by her man, and he by his woman, in settings and situations quite unimaginable to us.

By the time that Robert and Élisabeth signed their marriage contract (a prenup in modern American parlance) in March 1718 in the Montreal parish of Ville Marie, Robert's name had evolved from Grotton dit St. Ange to Grotton de St. Ange (see illustration). Despite this aristocratic affectation, however, Robert was still, after some thirty years in service, frozen in rank as sergeant in the French marines. Promotion to commissioned officer status was difficult in Canada for a man who had no certifiable noble lineage. This may well have been the reason that Robert chose to head West, where the Pays d'en Haut provided a more fluid social structure that would give him opportunities for advancement not available in the St. Lawrence Valley. Grotton chose wisely, as he most always did.

In the spring of 1721, we find Robert Grotton at Fort St. Joseph on the St. Joseph River, which flows into Lake Michigan from the southeast. This small French fort cum trading post was located where Niles, Michigan, now stands, and during the past quarter century historians and archaeologists have explored the site in remarkable detail. On April 17, 1721, the stalwart Élisabeth Chorel Grotton, who had accompanied her husband westward through Canadian waterways, bore a son at Fort St. Joseph. The Grotton son was baptized François-Marie in honor of Élisabeth's father, François Chorel dit St. Romain, and Louis Grotton (Bellerive) stood as godfather. But François-Marie did not survive the rigors of infancy in the wild place where he was born, and his baptismal record is the sole surviving document pertaining to his short life. Grotton St. Ange met Pierre-François Xavier de Charlevoix, the Jesuit father and famous epistolary, at St. Joseph. Charlevoix arrived there in August 1721 and remarked that "there is a commandant and a small garrison. The commandant's house, which is a very small affair, is called the fort because it is surrounded with a shoddy palisade." No commissioned officers were posted at St. Joseph at the time, and it seems likely that St. Ange, as a senior sergeant, was in fact the commandant mentioned by Charlevoix and that the "fort" was the structure in which Élisabeth bore her son in April 1721.

Charlevoix, a metropolitan Frenchman, regarded Canadians as a distinct species of human being, not quite French and not quite Indian. He posed the rhetorical question whether they had the mental capacity to engage in serious intellectual activities and was perhaps a bit taken aback by Grotton's gruff speech and illiteracy. Nevertheless, Canadians, even transplanted ones like Grotton, had certain virtues, of...