Bérénice Chouteau, Mother of Kansas City, Part 2

Date Published: Nov 3

Bérénice Chouteau lived until 1888.
Widowed at only 36 years old (François died of a heart ailment in 1838, when he was just 41), she chose not to live in St Louis (or Kaskaskia) with her family or with François’s, but instead she remained in the rapidly changing settlement that would become Kansas City.

Bérénice Chouteau, A Pioneer Woman on the Missouri Frontier

In over 60 years of life at the confluence of the Kaw and Missouri rivers, she survived floods, cholera and small pox outbreaks, and eventually the death of all but one of her children. (Frédéric lived only three years longer than his mother, dying a very wealthy man and leaving some twelve or fourteen children!)
Bérénice traveled to and from Saint Louis first on keelboats and pirogues, then steamships, and finally trains.
After their first trip on a steamboat, François wrote “… our trip was one of the most pleasant that I have ever made.”

A Pillar of Compassion and Community

Throughout it all Bérénice mothered the community around her: she sewed shrouds for the victims of cholera (reportedly some out of her own wedding dress); she took in and cared for a number of métis children (the children of of native american women and their trapper husbands) as well as the granddaughter of the Kansas chief White Plume, and she was the godmother for many other chidren, including Elizabeth Boone, the granddaughter of Daniel Morgan Boone (son of the famous Daniel Boone).
Finally, she put up some of her own money to build the first church at Chouteau’s Landing -- for the same Father Roux whose sermons against dancing and merrymaking she would object to not much later!

Bérénice Chouteau, The Grande Dame of Early Kansas City

After yet another flood in 1844, and faced with the decline in the fur trading business, the majority of the French-speaking community of Kansas City moved elsewhere. Bérénice remained, however. She became the grande dame of Kansas City, riding in a glossy carriage drawn by two perfectly matched grey horses, and living initially in a large white two-story home that she had built near the intersection of today’s First and Grand Streets, where, as John McCoy put it, “hospitality was dealt with a lavish hand. Inherent French politeness and wealth characterized the entertainment.” Not long before the Civil War Bérénice sold the Chouteau farmlands to the Belgian, Joseph Guinotte – a story to be told in a later episode!
Indeed there is more to Bérénice’s story as well, along with that of the many other women who turned Chouteau’s Landing into a flourishing Francophone community during the first half of the Nineteenth Century.
You can hear some of their stories at the talk Prof Krause gave at the at the KC Central Library, sponsored by the Alliance Française de Kansas City, the KC Atheneum and the KC Public Library.

Main References:

• Dorothy Brandt Marra, Cher Oncle, Cher Papa : the Letters of Francois and Berenice Chouteau, trans. by Marie-Laure Dionne Pal ; ed. by David Boutros (Kansas City, MO : Western Historical Manuscript Collecton-Kansas City, 2001)
• Shirley Christian, Before Lewis and Clark : the story of the Chouteaus, the French dynasty that ruled America's frontier, (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).