Marie-Thérèse Bourgeois Chouteau

Born in New Orleans on January 13, 1733, she had a French father (Nicolas Bourgeois) and Spanish mother (Marie Joseph Tarare).

At the age of 15, on September 20, 1748, Marie-Therèse married René Auguste Chouteau, Sr., an older tavern keeper and baker.

Afterward, Marie-Therèse Chouteau referred to herself as a widow, as it gave her more legal and social rights.

A French merchant and official in New Orleans sponsored an expedition north on the Mississippi River to seek additional places for a trading post.

He hired Laclède (who also took Auguste Chouteau, Junior, his stepson and Marie-Therese's legal son with Rene) to find a good site for another settlement.

[citation needed] A few years later, the elder René Chouteau returned to New Orleans and demanded that authorities make her join him.

During the cholera epidemic of 1849, bodies were dug up from this area to reinter them at Calvary and Bellefontaine cemeteries.

[citation needed] Contemporary 21st-century histories of St. Louis attribute a founding role in the city to Auguste Chouteau , including The First Chouteaus: RIVER BARONS OF EARLY ST. LOUIS (2000) by William E Foley and C David Rice ISBN 0-252-06897-1 and Before Lewis and Clark: The Story of the Chouteaus, the French Dynasty That Ruled America's Frontier (2004) by Shirley Christian ISBN 0-374-52958-2.

This was to enable her to maintain the appearance that she was in a proper civil law relationship with the elder Rene Chouteau.

But the elder Rene Chouteau did leave an estate to his widow and children with his surname.

[3] Nicolas de Finiels, a French officer serving the Spaniards, notes no founding role for Auguste Chouteau in his 1790s account of the settlement.

Its historical introduction made no mention of Auguste Chouteau's having had a role in founding the settlement.

[citation needed] The earliest St. Louis historian, Wilson Primm, dismissed the story of Auguste Chouteau.