Oklahoma Will Honor First White Settlers.
Citizens of Salina, Okla., are making an effort to raise funds with which to erect a monument in Salina marking the site of the first white settlement in what is now Oklahoma.
An organization known as the Choteau Monument Association has been formed in Salina, and its object is to assemble funds or to coöperate with others in raising funds with which to erect the monument.
The Daughters of the American Revolution and the Oklahoma Historical Association may be appealed to for financial aid, and the suggestion has been made that St. Louis, Mo., where the Choteau family has lived since the founding of that city, be asked to aid in marking the spot.
Professor Joseph B. Thoburn, of the University of Oklahoma, State ethnologist, gives the following account of the establishment of the trading post at Salina:
"It is not generally known in Oklahoma that Salina is the site of the first white settlement in Oklahoma—at least of the first of which anything is known. It was nearly one hundred and twenty years ago, or, to be exact, in 1796, that a trading post was established here by the Choteaus of St. Louis. The Choteau brothers were mere lads when they were brought to St. Louis at the time of the first settlement in 1764. They had grown up in the Indian trade, and for many years they had a practical monopoly of that of the Osage tribe, the members of which were several times as numerous as they are now.
"In 1795 Manuel Lisa, a creole Spaniard, secured from the Spanish governor general of the province of Louisiana, at New Orleans, an exclusive concession or monopoly of trading with the Indians of the valley of the Missouri and those of all of its tributaries.
"As the Osage Indians spent most of their time in the valley of the Osage River, and as the Osage never was a tributary of the Missouri, it followed that the Choteaus would lose the lucrative business which they had built up among the Osages. Moreover, there was nothing to prevent the Choteaus from trading with the Osages at any place outside of the watershed of the Missouri.
"Accordingly, the members of the enterprising firm busied themselves in inducing a large number of Osages to move over and settle in the valleys of the Neosho—or Grand—and Verdigris Rivers, in southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma. The establishment of the trading post in the valley of the Grand River, in Mayes County, on the present site of the town of Salina, followed shortly afterward."[Pg 68][Pg 67]
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