Lewis and Clark were not the first explorers to go up the Missouri River. On their way upstream, they met a party led by Regis Loisel. He had taken with him a middle-aged man as secretary. This man’s account of life along the Missouri River is one of the finest we have available. Pierre Antoine Tabeau traced his ancestry back to one of the early families of Ste.Genevieve . His mother was the great-granddaughter of Jean Valle, whose brother, Louis-Charles, was a direct ancestor of the Valle family of Missouri’s first permanent settlement.
