Francois Vall and His World

Winner of the Kemper & Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History for excellence in historical scholarship for the year 2002, awarded by The Historic New Orleans Collection, The Louisiana Historical Association. In Franois Vall and His World, Carl Ekberg provides a fascinating biography of Franois Vall (17161783), placing him within the context of his place and time. Vall, who was born in Beauport, Canada, immigrated to Upper Louisiana (the Illinois Country) as a penniless common laborer sometime during the early 1740s. Engaged in agriculture, lead mining, and the Indian trade, he ultimately became the wealthiest and most powerful individual in Upper Louisiana, although he never learned to read or write. Ekberg focuses on Upper Louisiana in colonial times, long before Lewis and Clark arrived in the Mississippi River valley and before American sovereignty had reached the eastern bank of the Mississippi. He vividly captures the ambience of life in the eighteenth-century frontier agricultural society that Vall inhabited, shedding new light on the French and Spanish colonial regimes in Louisiana and on the Mississippi River frontier before the Americans arrived. Based entirely on primary source documentswills and testaments, parish registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and Spanish administrative correspondencefound in archives ranging from St. Louis and Ste. Genevieve to New Orleans and Seville, Franois Vall and His World traces not only the life of Franois Vall and the lives of his immediate family members, but also the lives of his slaves. In doing so, it provides a portrait of Missouris very first black families, something that has never before been attempted. Ekberg also analyzes how the illiterate Vall became the richest person in all of Upper Louisiana, and how he rose in the sociopolitical hierarchy to become an important servant of the Spanish monarchy. Franois Vall and His World provides a useful corrective to the fallacious notion that Missouris history began with the arrival of Lewis and Clark at the turn of the nineteenth century. Anyone with an interest in colonial history or the history of the Mississippi River valley will find this book of great value.