Hunting and furs were already important in the Osage way of life, and Europeans capitalized on this by trading manufactured goods such as kettles, axes, hoes, knives, and other durable items for furs that Europeans could sell. On July 6, 1763, the French governor granted an eight-year trade monopoly to Maxent, Laclede and Company, and later that year Pierre Laclede left New Orleans for Spanish Illinois with Auguste Chouteau, his family, and their workmen, operating out of Fort de Chartes in present-day Illinois. On February 15, 1764, Laclede sent 15-year-old Chouteau to begin work on the town he called St. Louis, which quickly became the center of trade for tribes of the upper Louisiana Territory and the place where tribes received annual gifts so Europeans could control them; in 1768, Laclede's monopoly ended and licenses were issued yearly. In the fall of 1793, Auguste Chouteau began a plan to control the Osage by building a fort near the Big Osage village, and in April 1794 he and four Big Osage and two Little Osage chiefs went to New Orleans to explain the plan to Governor Baron de Carondolet. In return for building a fort among the Osage at his own expense, Chouteau received a six-year monopoly on trade with them, a trade that then represented more than half of the entire fur trade out of St. Louis. The fort, built in 1795 and named Carondolet, at first helped bring peace between the Osage and the Pawnee and Kansa tribes and opened negotiations with the Commanches, but the peace did not last and the Osage soon were again in conflict with other tribes and settlers. Manuel Lisa, a St. Louis merchant, sought free trade with the Indians and, after failing to break the monopolies, petitioned the new governor for Chouteau's monopoly, promising to relieve the government of the annual militia payment and to build a flour mill. On June 12, 1802, the governor canceled Chouteau's monopoly and gave it to Lisa, but Chouteau fought back in court and eventually persuaded many Osage to move to Three Forks of the Arkansas near present-day Claremore, Okla., where he remained outside Lisa's monopoly and continued trading with them. After Chouteau abandoned Fort Carondolet in 1802, it was ransacked, and when Zebulon Pike traveled up the Osage River in 1806 he found that almost nothing remained. As the Osage became more dependent on European goods, they had to spend more time obtaining furs, and historians estimate that each year they sold as much as 9,000 pounds of fur from bear, beaver, deer, and other animals. As more animals were killed, local animal populations declined; in 1806 Pike found large game difficult to locate near Osage villages and reported trouble finding food for more than four days traveling toward the villages and for three days traveling away from them. In 1820, George Sibley wrote that game was clearly diminishing in the country inhabited by these tribes, though it had not yet become scarce, and that its gradual decline had chiefly made the Indians more expert and industrious hunters.