This week we commemorate the death of Moses Austin, who succumbed on June 10, 1821 at the home of his daughter, Emily Bryan, in Ste. Genevieve. Austin was
One of the main reasons for an explosion of settlement in Missouri prior to statehood was available land. However, obtaining title was complicated. First,
Welcome to the Missouri Bicentennial Minute from the State Historical Society of Missouri.
Deposits of lead and other minerals were a primary stimulus for settlement in early Missouri. The French discovered lead in the St. Francis Mountains around 1700, and Sieur Renault opened several mines, including Mine la Motte, in the 1720s. These were surface mines, and large diggings began and deforestation provided wood for smelting ore. Individuals and small groups also dug in locations likely to provide ore.
Moses Austin introduced bedrock mining near Mine a Breton, renamed Potosi, and also built the first reverberatory furnace for efficient smelting. A successful ironwork began in 1815, giving rise to a future booming industry.
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Missouri’s bumpy road to statehood continued early in 1821 with the approval by Congress of the First Missouri Constitution. The territory presented the Constitution to Congress in November 1820, setting off an immediate reaction by those opposing admitting Missouri as a slave state.
The grounds involved a clause requiring the General Assembly to enact a statute prohibiting free persons of color from moving into the state. Some states recognized the citizenship of freed slaves, and thus objected to enacting such a prohibition. Opponents claimed any such statue would violate the privileges and immunities clause of the U. S. Constitution in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 1. This clause prevents states from treating citizens of other states in a discriminatory manner.
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The first Europeans to settle Upper Louisiana saw river bottoms with a diverse mix of flood-tolerant trees and lowland prairies. In the Bootheel, prairies on ancient sand deposits were sites of the earliest settlement.
Animals included bison, elk, and prairie chickens. These alternated with swamp forests of oaks, sweetgum, and cypress up to 1000 years old. The higher sites that native peoples had cultivated had grown up to dense giant cane. Forested river hills along the Mississippi gave way to open oak-hickory forests with grassy understory inland.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft described these uplands in 1818, “barrens and prairies, with occasional forest of oak, the soil poor, and covered with grass, with very little underbrush.” Elk, deer, black bear, and turkey were abundant. Open shortleaf pine forests covered south and west-facing slopes, with prairie grass between. Farther west, trees gave way to prairies covered by perennial grasses, which covered roughly half the state.