The Amazing Life of Jeffrey Deroine: Enslaved Trader, Prairie Diplomat, and Missouri Settler

Greg Olson is coming to the Central Library on Sunday, October 25, to talk about his new biography of Jeffrey Deroine. The talk is part of the Missouri Valley Sundays series, and it runs from 2 to 3 PM in the Helzberg Auditorium.

If you've never heard the name, Deroine is exactly the kind of figure who makes Missouri history so strange. He was of French and African descent, born into slavery in St. Louis in 1806, and spent his life moving through worlds that rarely overlapped. He started out in the fur trade along the Missouri River, eventually bought his own freedom, and then worked as an interpreter for the Ioway nation. From there, he became a businessman and property owner, and helped found the frontier city of St. Joseph.

But that's not the whole story. Deroine also enslaved other people himself, and later stood as the plaintiff in a freedom suit against Joseph Robidoux IV, the man who founded St. Joseph. It's a life that doesn't fit into a neat box, and that's what Olson is digging into: the contradictions of a man who lived through the pre-Civil War era and navigated its shifting lines of power and status.

Olson knows his way around this territory. He served as Curator of Exhibits and Special Projects at the Missouri State Archives from 2000 to 2018 and has spent more than three decades working with Indigenous tribes to document Native presence across Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. His 2023 book, Indigenous Missourians, took home both the Missouri Conference on History Book Award and the State Historical Society's Missouri Book Award. He's spent years in the archives and in the field, and this new biography is the latest result. The talk is Sunday, October 25, from 2 to 3 PM at the Central Library's Helzberg Auditorium.