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Smithsonian:
Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings

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  Virginia Historical Society
  
  

Missouri History Museum

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Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings
Stirring the Melting Pot

St. Louis: Cultural Crossroads

Unlike in Jamestown, Québec, and Santa Fe, where a single culture dominated each colonial settlement, the three European cultures—Spanish, French, and English—flourished in St. Louis. The Missouri Historical Society presents a companion section to the national exhibition, focusing on the local intersection of cultural influences in St. Louis's early history. This portion of the exhibition will be on display only in St. Louis and was developed from the Missouri Historical Society Collections.

October 27 through March 23, 2008

One of the things we remember from history classes is that Jamestown, founded in 1607, was the first permanent English colony in America.  From this beginning, American history seemed to unfold.  The exhibition, Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings, opening at the Missouri History Museum on October 28, 2007, complicates and enriches this grade school view through an examination of three centers of European influence that interacted in various ways with Native American cultures to create a multi-national legacy.

The seeds of this complex history were planted by 1610 since the settlement of Jamestown was followed in 1608 with the establishment of Québec by the French and, in 1609, with the arrival of the Spanish who pushed north from Mexico to found Santa Fe.  In the new world, these three great European empires found a new arena to act out old conflicts, with the Native people and later the enslaved Africans caught in the middle.   

Visitors to the exhibition will see 140 artifacts and 60 graphics including rare surviving Native and European artifacts.  Maps, documents, farming implements, clothing, weaponry, and ceremonial objects collected from both sides of the Atlantic tell the story of cultural encounter.  For example, Captain John Smith’s 1612 map of Virginia is one of the few early maps to credit information received from Native people by marking it with a Maltese cross.  Artifacts show how the French in icy Québec adopted Native people’s technologies for transportation, developing their own canoes, snowshoes, and toboggans.  An Italian-made breastplate, worn by the Spanish, is engraved with the Virgin and Child reflecting the ideas of conversion that drove the Spanish conquests.

To emphasize the web of cultural influences that constitutes American history, exhibition text is presented in three languages—English, French, and Spanish.   

Jamestown, Québec, and Santa Fe has been jointly organized by the Virginia Historical Society and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History, with support from Robins Foundation, Land America, Jamestown 2007, and Virginia Department of Natural Resources. 
 

From the Missouri Historical Society Collections.