MANUEL LISA: A Scoundrel Among Scoundrels

"Damn Manuel and triply damn Mr. B," Manuel Lisa's partner Francois Benoit, wrote Meriwether Lewis to William Clark after the Spaniard had fouled up the supplies Lewis and Clark had purchased from Lisa for their venture west. Another of Lisa's enemies, which included nearly everyone he knew, left a negative description when he wrote, "Rascality set on every feature of his dark-complexioned Mexican face."

Lisa came to Saint Louis from New Orleans in 1798. Then Saint Louis and the Missouri River Valley were under Spanish rule and Lisa was Spanish, unlike Saint Louis' founding family, the Chouteaus, who were French. Having no qualms about exploiting this advantage, Lisa obtained the rights to trade with the Osage Tribe, a trade privilege the Chouteaus had held for nearly a decade. In Lisa's petition for this privilege he proposed to make a $1,000 gift to the royal Spanish treasury. But the Chouteaus did not let Lisa steal this lucrative and monopolized business they'd held while exploiting the Osage by selling them whiskey to secure better trading deals.

Lisa's official agreement gave him the sole right to deal with the Osages of the Missouri. He may not have considered that, at the time, the Osage dwelt only in the Missouri Valley. But the Chouteaus considered it and, somehow, convinced half of the Osage to relocate to the valley of the Arkansas River. There, the Chouteaus legally continued their trade with them.

But Lisa accumulated wealth by dealing in real estate and buying and selling slaves. He also thought it would be profitable to open trade between Saint Louis and Santa Fe, some 900 miles distant. When he presented this idea to James Wilkinson, the new governor of Louisiana Territory, the man vetoed it, saying "no good can be derived to the United States from such a project." Wilkinson's felt, so he said, that success of the scheme would "depend entirely upon the Spaniards," of which Lisa was one, and that the Spaniards would not permit such an intrusion, unless to serve their political and personal interest. He was right, as Lieutenant Zebulon Pike discovered when he landed in a Spanish jail. After Wilkinson turned down Lisa's proposal he sent Pike on just such a journey. Lisa retaliated by detaining the expedition when he had Pike's interpreter arrested for debt.

Until now the fur industry had operated by trading merchandise to the Indians for pelts but Lisa changed much of this. After purchasing two keelboats and hiring fifty men, he started up the river. He planned to use white men to trap the beaver, thus omitting a considerable portion of the cost of the Indian trade. Whether it was because he was not liked or his fellow merchants thought his scheme foolhardy, no one would help back this venture. But that didn't stop Lisa. He was up the Missouri River, right in the wake of John Jacob Astor's fur brigade that was heading west, some nineteen days ahead of Lisa. The Spaniard planned to use Astor's group as protection from the Sioux and other menacing native tribes.

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