The Amazing Life of Jeffrey Deroine
Enslaved Trader, Prairie Diplomat, and Missouri Settler
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of Missouri Press
Publishing:27th May '26
£24.00
This title is due to be published on 27th May, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Born into slavery in St. Louis in 1806, Jeffrey Deroine (de-rō-NAY) worked and lived in the heart of a rapidly changing nation. Forced to work in the fur trade on the Missouri River, he experienced Missouri’s rapid transformation from territory to statehood. As a trader, he helped his hometown grow from a small trading center into a large river town. Later, he participated in the founding of the frontier city of St. Joseph, Missouri.
Though scraps of his life are still present in the historical record, specifics have proven elusive. Still, it is important to tell Deroine’s life story, as it gives us a look both into the life of an enslaved man and the struggles of a free person of color in pre-Civil War Missouri. His life spanned a critical point in the history of the state, and he seems to have spent most of it at the very heart of the action.
Though not well known, the story of Jeffrey Deroine is significant because it illustrates the nuanced intersectionality of lives on the American frontier. Deroine was a man of both French and African descent who lived much of his life among Indigenous people. Born into slavery, he became a free person of color who was a businessman, owned property, and enslaved others. His life defied expectations and stereotypes, and a consideration of it allows us to better understand the history of Missouri and the West.
“Greg Olson skillfully documents the multifarious activities and unique experiences of Jeffrey Deroine, an enslaved man, free person of color, multi-lingual interpreter, world traveler, frontier trader, businessman, and property owner. His unheralded and little-known story is particularly telling at a time when efforts to minimize the contributions of marginalized people are the order of the day. With this well-researched and engaging book Olson adds yet again to America’s all-encompassing history.” —William Foley, Professor Emeritus of History, University of Central Missouri, author of The Genesis of Missouri: From Wilderness Outpost to Statehood
“In his latest work, Greg Olson constructs the life story of a fascinating man and family whose lives unfold at the intersection of three groups residing on the margins of the standard history of North America: Indigenous peoples; French North Americans; and Enslaved and Free People of Color. Skillfully bridging traditional Western History and the New Western History, Olson manages to emphasize adventures and memorable characters as well as inclusion, cultural interactions, and the agency and perspective of marginalized peoples. This book—the story of what truly was an ‘amazing life’—will delight readers and challenge their preconceptions.”—Jay Gitlin, Yale University, author of The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion
“Greg Olson illuminates the entangled histories of bondage, commerce, and empire in the American West in this beautifully written and thoroughly researched biography of trader and interpreter Jeffrey Deroine. His synthesis of fragmentary evidence from this one man’s life represents some of the best that microhistorical analysis has to offer.”—Kristen Epps, Kansas State University, author of Slavery on the Periphery: The Kansas-Missouri Border in the Antebellum and Civil War Eras
ISBN: 9780826223494
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm
Weight: 399g
180 pages