TIDYING UP CAPE GIRARDEAU'S HISTORIC STORIES

Last Christmas, Jim Bequette gave some visiting relatives "the historic tour" of Cape Girardeau. They started at Cape Rock. At the conclusion two hours later, someone suggested he share his knowledge with a wider audience.

The result is "Historic Founding of Cape Girardeau Missouri," a self-published booklet that seeks to demythologize some of the stories about the city's origins while providing a chronology that begins "as the Ice Age neared its end."

Bequette is a native of Bonne Terre, a history buff who first moved to Cape Girardeau in the early 1970s.

"I got to know a lot of people who seemed to know a lot about Cape Girardeau," he said. But he still had questions.

Why is Cape Girardeau not the county seat? Who was Don Louis Lorimier and where did he come from? And why did he come here?

Bequette, a former Methodist minister who now works at Nowell's Camera Shop, came by much of his knowledge about Cape Girardeau by way of research for a manuscript about the years before the Louisiana Purchase.

One story Bequette has heard often has Ensign Jean Baptiste Girardot, stationed at Fort de Chartres near Prairie Du Rocher in Illinois in 1733, jumping out of his pirogue in the Mississippi and swimming ashore to set up a trading post at Cape Rock. The rock then extended 50 or 60 feet into the Mississippi, setting up a natural harbor for boats.

That scenario is not likely, says Bequette. Records show that Girardot and his family remained at the fort or nearby Kaskaskia. Bequette surmises that Girardot came to Cape Rock perhaps only two or three times per year to trade with the Indians.

Don Louis Lorimier is the more imposing figure in Cape Girardeau, though Bequette says the city's founder may not have measured 5 feet tall. He also was known for his facility with languages, including Indian dialects. But Bequette notes, as Louis Houck previously did in his histories, that the founder of Cape Girardeau could neither read nor write. He could, however, sign his name beautifully.

But Lorimier's warm personality and his tendency to ally himself with the underdog stood him well in the 18th century, says Bequette, who describes Lorimier as "an entrepreneur who drifted with the wind.

"He was just trying to make a living."

Lorimier was one of four white men who were present when the Shawnee captured Daniel Boone in Kentucky and afterward took him to British headquarters in Detroit. For this, Gen. George Rogers Clark and a band of Kentucky militiamen attempted to kill Lorimier at his station in Ohio.

He escaped and made his way west, opening a joint trading company in Ste. Genevieve before eventually following the river south. Once here, the Frenchman who'd once been a Tory and was always surrounded by loyal Shawnee Indians petitioned Spain for trading rights.

Bequette doubts Lorimier's Red House was located at the site where a plaque proclaims it was -- near Old St. Vincent's Church at the corner of William and Spanish streets. That terrain would have flooded too easily, he writes, and the house was described as occupying a gentle slope above the Shawnee encampment. The more likely site for Lorimier's House is a few blocks west, above Indian Park, Bequette writes.

Bequette ties the New Madrid Earthquake in 1811-12 and Lorimier's death in 1812 to the removal of the seat of justice from Cape Girardeau to Jackson. One person who came through after the first quake hit in December 1811 said the area was "nearly depopulated."

Then Lorimier died in June. "With Lorimier gone, most hopes for any community at all got dampened," Bequette writes.

Government leaders in St. Louis moved the seat of justice to Jackson in 1814, though Cape Girardeau would make a comeback.

Another bit of common knowledge Bequette challenges is the belief that few people in the Cape Girardeau area owned slaves. In 1820, Cape Girardeau County had the state's third-highest population of slaves, he states.

Copies of the booklet have been donated to Riverside Regional Library in Jackson and the Cape Girardeau Municipal Library. It also is available at Nowell's and at the Annie Laurie Antique Mall.

The American Queen is selling the booklet on a trial basis. It may then be offered aboard the Delta Queen and Mississippi Queen.

In his postscript, Bequette urges the community to support restoration of its historic downtown. "I travel William Street from Spanish to Frederick trying to envision hundreds of Shawnees encamped there when it served as their permanent home site," he writes. "Unfortunately, the only remaining human-made structure from bygone Lorimier days is Lorimier Cemetery. ..."