Early settlers in the old lead belt that became Washington and adjacent counties were French until the late 1790s. However, once the Spanish authorities allowed Americans to immigrate to Upper Louisiana, a new settlement developed that was, in the words of historical geographer Walter Schroeder, “an exclusive American community.” The Bellevue Valley of southern Washington and northern Iron counties is a scenic, triangular lowland of 30 square miles, 300 feet lower than Ozark ridges on two sides and the igneous Buford Mountain on the east. The valley is a graben, a subsided block of rock within the St. Francis Mountains. Early settlers thought lead might be in the valley as in nearby areas. This local geology precluded the occurrence of lead deposits, however.
William Reed arrived first, in 1798, receiving permission to settle from De Luziere, commandant of New Bourbon. His nephew Joseph Reed arrived shortly thereafter. Solomon George and Benjamin Crow also arrived in 1798. Elisha Baker moved from Bois Brule Bottom after the 1798 harvest, and his son Elijah settled four miles from his father on Clear Water Creek. Settlers continued to trickle in. Residents needed a mill to grind grain crops, and Benjamin Strother, already settled on Saline Creek in Ste. Genevieve District, received a grant on Cedar Creek to build a mill.
Settlement in the Bellevue Valley became a flood in 1802-1804. Settlers arriving in the mid-1802 to March 1804 heard of the Louisiana Purchase by the end of June 1803. The formal handover was December 20, 1803, which became the cutoff date for carrying land ownership in Louisiana from pre-American jurisdictions to U. S. possession. To beat this deadline, as documented by later testimony, settlers selected their land parcels and stood on them, so Elisha Baker and Benjamin Crow observed them. Baker and Crow swore later those newcomers from the U. S. had “settlement rights” because they were “on the land” and “occupying it” by the cutoff date. Most of these settlers were of Scots Irish descent, including Tennessee and North Carolina Methodists, and upper Catawba Valley North Carolinians.
Two factors limited wholesale settlement initially. The Osage continued small raids in the valley until 1808, when the Treaty of Fort Osage ended the raids and moved the tribe further west. Second, the 50-mile distance from the Mississippi restricted easy trade of surplus crops and import of the few necessities the settlers needed. Settlers after the treaty were largely North Carolina Presbyterians.
The Bellevue was indeed an exclusively American settlement. One anecdote emphasizes that. A wealthy Frenchman, Pascal Detchmendy, a planter who fled Saint Dominque in 1796, had a floating claim of 6000 arpens that he attempted to locate in Bellevue in January 1804. He proposed to place it in a location that overlapped several existing claims. When he arrived with Irish immigrant Thomas Maddin, deputy surveyor for the district, 10 armed Americans greeted him, led by William Reed. The Americans said they would not allow a “refugee” nor an “unprincipled Irishman” to settle. They further declared they would submit only to the authority of the United States, even though the area was still French territory. Detchmendy soon sold his claim to an American, Joshua Morrison.
The population of Bellevue Valley grew from around 230 at the Louisiana Purchase, to 700 in 1814. Other than a couple of small attempts to smelt iron ore, the residents were small-scale farmers. Thus, the settlement pattern was families on farms averaging a half mile apart. The valley became the breadbasket for mining communities in surrounding areas.
