Looking for American History

 

“… not all of colonial America was English.”

Matt Yglesias has recently taken to publishing excerpts from Alan Taylor’s American Colonies:  The Settling of North America.  I don’t know if he is currently reading it for the first time or he simply found his old edition on a bookshelf and decided to use excerpts in his blog.  If you haven’t read it, and you are interested in American history, you should pick up a copy. It is well worth your time.

Alan Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1996 book William Cooper’s Town:  Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. I’ve never had the opportunity to read that history of the father of James Fennimore Cooper and I did not notice when it won the Pulitzer Prize. Alan Taylor was not on my radar the day I was wandering through the history section of Barnes and Noble, looking for a history of North America that wasn’t exclusively an English history.

For reasons too complicated to explain, back around 2003 I found myself needing to learn more about the history of the British West Indies, the German migration to Pennsylvania in the early 1700’s and the colonization of Canada by the French.  I wasn’t sure exactly how much I needed to know and, while  I was prepared to start checking books out of the library, I wasn’t sure where to start.  What I needed was the view from 20,000 feet, a general history of North America that covered all of these geographic areas.  Then I could decide exactly where I would zoom in on. 

My local library branch didn’t have one on its shelves that fit my needs.  The available books were almost completely centered on the 13 colonies, throwing in mentions of Spanish conquistadors and Marquette/Joliet’s exploration of the Mississippi.  There was almost nothing about the West Indies. 

Of course I had access to the entire library system through the card catalog.  But perusing a card catalog is just not the same as paging through actual books to see if they meet your needs.  So I headed to Barnes and Noble sure that it was a waste of time but fully intending to console myself by buying a new novel while I was there.

I wandered through the history section and finally picked up a paperback copy of Alan Taylor’s 2001 book, American Colonies.  I skimmed the introduction:

By long convention, “American history” began in the east in the English colonies and spread slowly westward, reaching only the Appalachian Mountains by the end of the colonial period. According to this view, the “seeds” of the United States first appeared with the English colonists in 1607 in Jamestown in Virginia, followed in 1620 by “the Pilgrims” at Plymouth in New England.  Earlier Spanish and contemporary French settlements were fundamentally irrelevant except as enemies, as “foreign” challenges that brought out the best in the English as they made themselves into Americans. What we now call “the West” did not become part of American history until the United States invaded it during the early nineteenth century.  Alaska and Hawaii made no appearance in national history until the end of that century.

I thought that pretty much summed up history as I had learned it.  But, said Taylor, “the traditional story of American uplift excludes too many people.” 

As I thumbed through the book I realized that it was exactly what I needed.  He said:

Striking a balance between the emerging power of British America and the enduring diversity of the colonial peoples requires bending (but not breaking) the geographic boundaries suggested by the United States today.  Hispanic Mexico, the British West Indies, and French Canada receive more detailed coverage than is customary in a “colonial American history” (which has meant the history of the proto-United States). All three were powerful nodes of colonization that affected the colonists and Indians living between the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes.  The internal cultures, societies, and economies of the Spanish, French, and Dutch colonies also warrant attention lest they again appear only in wars, reduced to bellicose foils to British protagonists.  Such internal description also affords the comparative perspective needed to see the distinctive nature of British colonial society that made a colonial revolution for independence and republicanism possible first on the Atlantic seaboard.

I bought it on the spot. I read it.  And I regularly go back to it when I need an overview of a certain geographic location at a certain time.  I have blogged about how Winnie the Pooh is a “book of my life” because it affected what I expected from a well written story.  American Colonies is a “book of my life” because it changed how I looked at the history of this country.

The book is divided into three parts.  Part I, “Encounters”, gives a general overview of the pre-European continent and discusses New Spain, the Spanish Frontier and Canada/Iroquoia.  It takes us up to the mid 1650’s.  It is not until Part II, “Colonies”, that we truly meet the British, beginning with the colonization of Virginia and continuing through the colonization of the Chesapeake Colonies, New England, Carolina and the Middle Colonies.  There is a chapter about Puritans and Indians and a whole chapter about the West Indies.   Part III is called “Empires” and it takes us from about 1650 all the way to the Pacific colonization in 1820. It includes good descriptions of French America  and has a nice section on the German migration to Pennsylvania. 

If you want a broad perspective on colonial North America, this is the book for you. For instance, often the importance of the West Indies in colonial life is overlooked other than noting that it was part of the “triangle trade” in slaves.  Taylor spends time on their importance in the British economy.  Thus we understand why, when negotiating the peace treaty after the Seven Years War, the British, who had conquered Canada and the French West Indies, considered “keeping most of the French West Indies and returning Canada.”

Although much smaller, the sugar islands were far more lucrative.  But the influential British West Indian lobby did not want to weaken its advantageous position within the empire by accepting new competition from the more productive plantations on Guadeloupe and Martinique.  The British West Indians lobbied to keep Canada instead. … By taking vast new territories in the Treaty of Paris, the British broke with a previous imperial policy that had sought to maximize maritime commerce while minimizing continental entanglements.  Somehow they would have to raise the money to administer and garrison their expensive new domains in Canada, the Great Lakes, the Ohio Valley, and Florida.

My copy is well used at this point.  And over the years, as  I’ve sought out books about specific peoples, places and periods,  I’ve never had reason to think that Taylor got anything wrong in his overview. 

Taylor has a new book out, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies.  It is on my to-be-read list, but first I must finish his 2007 book  The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution.  It has been sitting on my shelf for a few years but I finally picked it up this month and am engrossed in it.

But for all around usefulness, and sheer readability, American Colonies can’t be beat and I recommend it.

New Netherland

They say that the victors always write the history. Over the years of reading French North American colonial history I’ve come more and more to appreciate that fact. When I recently read Fur, Fortune and Empire I mentioned that I enjoyed reading about the Dutch colonization of what is now New York. I knew that the Dutch had a successful fur trade and I knew that many Dutch stayed on after England took over New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. I knew that they helped shaped New York and yet, since they were the losers, their history is not in the forefront of people’s minds. So I was pleased to pick up The Colony of New Netherland: A Dutch Settlement in Seventeenth-Century America by Jaap Jacobs. I thought that understanding the Dutch in New Netherland would help me better understand the French in New France.

Before I talk about it, I want to talk a bit about my view of the Dutch from reading French colonial history. My favorite narrative histories of New France were written by W.J. Eccles and his The Canadian Frontier: 1534-1760 is very informative.

When the French and the Dutch began to settle North America they came during a time when the Iroquois Confederation, a great military power, were engaged in a war with the Huron/Algonquian for control over the St. Lawrence River Valley. Eccles writes about the 1609 clash between the Huron and the Iroquois where the Huron/Algonquian are aided for the first time by the French and their modern weaponry.

It is sometimes asserted that Champlain’s role in this brief clash was the direct cause of the ensuing long struggle between the French and the Iroquois. Although his role on this occasion did nothing to endear him to the Iroquois, too much must not be made of it. The French had established themselves in the St. Lawrence Valley and were allied commercially with the northern tribes, enemies of the Iroquois. Within a few years the Dutch established themselves on the Hudson River and provided the Iroquois with European weapons. Once this occurred the lines were irrevocably drawn, the ancient war between the Algonkin and Iroquois now became a war between two European powers and two economic regions for dominance in North America.

A few pages later, he writes:

The Iroquois, provided with weapons by the recently established Dutch at Fort Orange where Albany stands today, and paid high prices in trade goods for furs, were becoming increasingly bold, ambushing the northern tribes en route to trade at Quebec and pillaging them of their furs or goods.

The Huron/Algonquian knew the French wanted to be trading partners and the price of that partnership was assistance against the Iroquois. This seemed to shift the balance of power at first, when the Iroquois thought the French with their weaponry were invincible. But soon the French proved all too human and that gave the Iroquois new resolve.

If the Iroquois were to obtain supplies of firearms, they could retaliate, perhaps regain the lands they had lost. With the Dutch on the Hudson River willing to give almost anything to trade for furs, arms could be had. After 1615 the Iroquois took the offensive. To the end of the century, the French found themselves engaged in a desperate struggle to defend their fur trade empire against the assaults of the Iroquois, who were seeking to divert the trade from Montreal to Albany, ultimately from Paris to London, thereby making themselves the dominant power in the region.

Eccles goes into more detail later when he explains why, starting about 1625, the stakes began to be higher for the Iroquois:

The Dutch were now well established on the Hudson River. At Fort Orange the Iroquois could obtain European goods, including firearms. In 1626 they had traded over 8,000 beaver and other furs; it is estimated that by 1633 they were bringing nearly 30,000 pelts a year to the Dutch. This exhausted the supply of fur in Iroquois territory. The attempts of the Iroquois to obtain furs through trade with the Huron and Algonkin tribes came to naught. There was, then, no alternative now that they were dependent on European manufactured goods to maintain their recently improved standard of living, but to wage war to divert the flow of north-western furs from the French at Quebec to the Dutch on the Hudson, with themselves reaping the middleman’s profit.

The thing I’ve always liked about Eccles’ narratives is how he explains the motivations of all the parties. It was a complex situation. The French were greatly outnumbered by the Indians along the St. Lawrence. The Dutch were greatly outnumbered by the Iroquois. The Huron, Algonquin and Iroquois were at war before the French and Dutch intervened. The French and the Dutch felt compelled to assist their trading partners. But the mere presence of the French and the Dutch and their supply of European goods, especially weapons, changed the nature of the war. Eccles shows over the course of a couple of books how this adversely affected the French. So I was very interested in hearing about how the Dutch saw things and how they were affected.

Jaap Jacobs’ emphasis is not on the fur trade but on New Netherland as a colony. It is a valid point of view to take but since the entire raison d’etre of the colony was the fur trade I assumed it would be necessary for him to discuss it.

At an early stage, probably within a couple of years after the Mohawk-Mahican War ended in 1628, the area around Fort Orange became the center of the Fur Trade. Little is known about how trade was conducted there in the 1630’s and 1640’s.

Hmmm. Well that wasn’t encouraging. I suppose that means that he believes nothing was known about how the trade was conducted prior to the 1630’s? I found that hard to believe. But I don’t read Dutch so I could be wrong.

I looked in vain for any mention of the conflict between the Huron/Algonquian and the Iroquois in the early years. Finally, Jacobs points out that in 1634 the Dutch tried to discover why the fur trade had recently turned bad. Ah, I thought. It’s because the Iroquois had hunted out their territory and the Huron wouldn’t trade with them because they were mortal enemies. Right? Nope. “The cause turned out to be the competition from the French in Canada, who offered better rates.”

Ok. Maybe. But what about the war with the Huron? What about all the arms that the Dutch traded (and had been trading for 25 years) that were being used by the Iroquois in furtherance of their military and economic goals?

Even more unforgivable in the eyes of the authorities than providing the Indians with alcohol was to supply them with weapons and ammunition. Van den Bogaert reported that he and his companions were repeatedly asked to fire their guns [at their 1634 meeting with the Mohawk], which suggests that the Mohawks were not much acquainted with firearms at the time and did not yet possess them. This started probably to change around 1640, although it is possible that the Algonquian groups acquired firearms earlier. A 1639 ordinance required the death penalty for the sale of weapons and gunpowder and lead to Indians, an indication of how serious the trade in weapons was considered to be.

Wait. Was he trying to tell me that the Dutch never traded arms? I was beginning to lose faith in Jacobs. But then, a paragraph later, he wrote:

But once the Indians had discovered the advantages of firearms it was impossible to stop the trade. To keep the situation under control, the arms trade in New Netherland was the monopoly of the government. The directors in patria ordered director general and council not to risk war with the Indians by bluntly refusing to sell them arms and ammunition and ensuring that such trade took place as little as possible. But if the Mohawks would acquire their gunpowder and lead from the English, the beaver trade might be diverted. The authorities had to walk a fine line.

Right. There we go. They traded arms because their Indian fur trading partners demanded it. And they darn well knew that it was drawing them into a war with the French and their allies, right? Well, no. The above was pretty much all Jacobs says.

The French are almost never mentioned in this book. The Iroquois/Huron wars in which the Iroquois would eventually decimate the Huron are no more than a mention. There is no mention of the effect of the war on the French. But most importantly, there is no mention of the affect of the war on the Dutch. And, maybe, there lies the key. As far as Jacobs is concerned, there was no war with the French. And the Huron/Algonquian were certainly not at war with the Dutch. Why does he seem to conclude this? Because no real mention of it shows up in the Dutch records?

Maybe the French made the whole thing up. Or, maybe the Dutch didn’t write about it because they weren’t directly affected by the wars. They traded arms to the Iroquois and the Iroquois in turn traded them furs. It all worked out, no need to ask why the Iroquois tribes wanted the guns and ammunition. The fact that the Iroquois were arming themselves to make war on the Huron/Algonquians and French in pursuit of the fur trade was just not something the Dutch worried about. They themselves weren’t attacked so it didn’t affect them. Why should they think about it?

So, from their point of view if there was a war it was an “Indian” war. From the French point of view (and the point of view of the many French colonists who were being attacked by the Iroquois for being allies of the Huron/Algonquian) it was a real war, they new darn well that the arms were coming from the Dutch and that those arms were killing them.

Of course this is one man’s take on the Dutch colony. He makes the point that most of the leading Dutch citizens stayed on after the English took over and helped shaped the attitude of the commercial center that would become New York. And I have to say that once I got over my initial surprise at the lack of mention of the war, I thought this seems fairly typical of the American mindset about selling arms.

[Update: In the course of discussion in the comments I realized that there is one brief paragraph in which he dismisses the theory of overhunting and the tribal wars as the cause of the shortage of beaver. This conclusion is based on the 1997 work of Jose Antonio Brandao and reference to Brandao's work was relegated to a footnote in the book I read. It was given a paragraph in the earlier version of the book. Of course now I want to read Brandao. But whether the cause of the wars is disputed or not, it doesn't change the fact that from his point of view they didn't seem to directly affect the Dutch colonists. "

Ouaouaboukoue or Ouaouagoukoue? Whatever.

In reviewing some of my family history information recently in connection with my LeBeau family research, a question was raised regarding the grandparents of Marie Louise Jourdain, the wife of Jean Baptiste/Jacques LeBeau.  My dad and I list her maternal grandparents as Jean Baptiste Reaume and Symphorose Ouaouagoukoue.  Or sometimes it is spelled Ouaouaboukoue. And sometimes, believe it or not, it is spelled 8a8ab8k8e.

I think it is pronounced something like  wah-wah-goo-kway.   Anyone who has ever traveled through Wisconsin will see many places containing a syllable sounding like “wah”.   Wausau. Waukesha.  Milwaukee.  Waushara.  Kewaunee. Once you start seeing it, you see it everywhere.  And you realize it must mean something in one of the Indian languages.  Of course, when I ask non-Indian Wisconsinites they just shrug and say they don’t know.  But someday I’ll find out.  

Anyway, as I’ve said before, Symphorose Ouaouagoukoue is something of a mystery and I wish I knew more about her. 

I know a lot about her husband.  Jean Baptiste Reaume was born September 24, 1675 in Petite Riviere St. Charles, just outside Quebec. He was the son of Rene Reaume and Marie Chevreau, both of whom immigrated to New France separately. They married in 1665 and had quite an extensive family – thirteen children, out of which eleven were boys. 

Jean Baptiste was only one of the many Reaume brothers to leave Quebec and head west.  References to his brothers, Robert, Pierre, Charles and Simon, show up in multiple French records of the time as voyageurs.  Robert Reaume was, in fact, hired to escort Madame Cadillac, the wife of the founder of Detroit, to join her husband at that new post.  Simon Reaume was a very well known fur trader, perhaps the most successful of the brothers, and at one point the temporary commander of the French post at Ouiatenon.

Jean Baptiste joined (or succeeded) Pierre Reaume in the La Baye (Green Bay WI) area as a scout and interpreter and trader.  There is some confusion over whether Pierre Reaume was the son of Rene Reaume, and a brother to Jean Baptiste, or was a son of Robert Reaume and a nephew to Jean Baptiste.  Also, some historians believe that some references to “Reaume” the interpreter in the La Baye area that have been identified as Pierre Reaume should really be Jean Baptiste Reaume.   In any event, according to a voyageur contract transcribed by Peter Scanlan in his excellent resource Prairie du Chien: French, British, American,  by 1718 the 42 year old Jean Baptiste Reaume was officially in La Baye having been licensed to take a canoe there for the well known Montreal merchant Pierre de Lestage. 

By at least 1725 he was an interpreter at the post and was trading for himself (and possibly Pierre).  That year Robert Reaume, “representing Jean Baptiste Reaume, voyageur and interpreter”, bought merchandise valued at 4821 livres  on credit from the Montreal merchant Charles Nolan Lamarque.  We are all indebted to whoever took the time to list many of Jean Baptiste Reaume’s  (and other voyageur’s) contracts on a very useful website.  I encourage anyone interested to click through and read them (warning: they are in French).

In 1725, a daughter of Jean Baptiste Reaume was baptized at Michillimackinac.  Her name was Marie-Judith but the name of her mother is not disclosed.  I can find no mention of Marie-Judith ever again.  I do not know if she was legitimate or illegitimate.

By 1728 the French decided to abandon the military post at La Baye due to fighting with the Fox Indians.  Reaume moved down to the post at the River St. Joseph (present day Niles Michigan) to serve as interpreter to the post commander there.  He continued to trade there as can be seen from his contracts.

More importantly for us, it is only when Jean Baptiste Reaume transfers to the post at the River St. Joseph that we discover he has a wife and that she is an Indian.  And we discover that they have have at least one child, named Marie.  We discover this because Marie Reaume acts as godmother at a baptism and the names of her parents are listed in the entry in the church register: 

In the year 1729 the 7th of March I J. Bap. Chardon priest and missionary of the society of Jesus at the river St. Joseph baptized Joseph son of Jean Baptiste Baron voyageur from the parish of Boucherville at present settled in this post and of Marie Catherine 8ekioukoue married in the eye of the church, baptized the 8th of March the day following his birth. The godfather was Mr. Louis-Coulon de Villiers junior and the Godmother Marie Rheaume daughter of Sieur Jean Baptiste Rheaume interpreter and of Simphorose ouaouagoukoue married in the eyes of the church.

J. B. Chardon M. of the soc. of Jesus

Louis de villier

marie reaume

It is unlikely that this “Marie Rheaume” was the four year old Marie Judith Reaume.  Most people assume that the Marie Reaume in this record is Marie Madeleine Reaume who, within 2 years, would be married to Augustin L’Archeveque, a prominent St. Joseph fur trader.  Madeleine was probably not very old when she married.  She might have been as young as 12, which would account for the guess of many that the Reaumes were married about 1720..  Madeleine spent most of the rest of her life in St. Joseph and was a leading citizen.  After L’Archeveque died she married another prominent trader named Louis Chevalier.  Marie Madeleine Reaume has been the subject of some interesting historical research into the role that women played in the French fur trade.  I recommend Susan Sleeper-Smith’s book, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounters in the Western Great Lakes.  Many of Madeleine’s descendents moved to Cahokia and St. Louis.  When Toussaint Jacques LeBeau married Marie Le Fernet in 1795, one of the witnesses to his marriage contract was “L. Chevalier, cousin” and this was probably one of the grandchildren of Madeleine Reaume.

As an interesting aside, the godfather in that baptism at St. Joseph was Louis Coulon de Villiers, the son of the military commander of Post St. Joseph.  Young Louis would grow up to enter the military like his father and, as his wikipedia entry notes, he is the “only military opponent to force George Washington to surrender”.   

But I digress.  In the late 1720's the war was between the French, their Indian allies and the Fox Indians.  While serving at St. Joseph, Jean Baptiste Reaume acted as an agent and spy for the post commander to try to learn what the Fox were planning.  He and his brother Simon played a large role in the defeat (and massacre) of a large party of Fox in 1730. 

By 1732 Jean Baptiste Reaume seems to have returned to La Baye with Commander de Villiers, who was ordered to re-open that post.  De Villiers was killed not long after that in an Indian battle and references to Reaume cease.  I’ve always wondered if he was at that battle.  He worked so closely with de Villiers that I feel he would have been there if he was not away at the time for some reason.  I’ve wondered if he was wounded, I’ve even sometimes wondered if he died.  But he was a well enough known figure at the time that I think his death would have been reported.  In the website that lists his contracts, the contracts cease for a long period and then begin again in the 1740s, but I think it is possible that by that time his son, the younger Jean Baptiste Reaume, was already acting as official interpreter at the post and those contracts could be his.  Or they could be our Jean Baptiste Reaume’s and there was a reason we do not know as to why there was such a long period between contracts.

We do know that in 1746 he is not listed as “deceased” at the marriage of his daughter, but he also was not listed as present at the wedding:  

1746, I received the mutual [marriage] consent of B. Jourdain, son of Guillaume [Jourdain and of] Angelique la Reine, and _______ Reaume, daughter of J.B. Reaume, residing at la Baye … P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the Society of Jesus. Louis Pascale Chevalier.

Although the name of the daughter is blank in the marriage record, we know that this is Josephe Reaume because she and JB Jourdain are listed as parents at the baptism of a daughter the following summer of 1747.  The summer of 1747 also saw the marriage of another daughter of JB Reaume and, again, he is not listed as deceased as the parents of the groom are: .

July 1, 1747, I received the mutual marriage consent of Charles Personne de la Fond, son of the late Nicolas Personne de la Fond and of the late Madeline la Suse, of the parish of Montreal; and of Susanne Reaume, daughter of Jean Baptiste Reaume and of Symphorose Ouaouaboukoue, residing at La Baye, after one publication of Bans instead of three, having granted dispensation from the other two publications.

P. du Jaunay, miss. of the society of Jesus

Amiot; Baptiste Le Beaux; Coulonge, witnesses

(Did you LeBeau fans notice who the witness was at that wedding?)  So, we have church records that confirm that both Josephe and Susanne are daughters of Jean Baptiste Reaume.  The church records also confirm that Susanne is the daughter of Symphorose Ouaouaboukoue.  Assuming that the older sister would marry first, that makes Susanne the younger sister.  Jean Baptiste Reaume and Symphorose Ouaouaboukoue were married in the eyes of the church according the the St. Joseph church record. And if the Jesuits said you were married, you were married.  So it seems unlikely that Josephe would have a different mother than her younger sister Susanne.   From this evidence most of us have decided it is more likely than not that the mother of Josephe was also Symphorose Ouaouaboukoue.  If we guess that both daughters were probably about 15 years old when they married, they would have been born in the early 1730’s, perhaps even after the Reaumes returned to La Baye.

When did Jean Baptiste Reaume die?  By September of 1747 his son Jean Baptiste Reaume is entering into a marriage contract with Felicite Chavillon and he is described as the son of the deceased Jean Baptiste Reaume, .  It does not appear that this marriage of the younger Reaume ever occurred though.  The younger Jean Baptiste Reaume married a woman of the Folle Avoine tribe a few years later at Michilimackinac.  He and his wife already had a child, who had been born “at the wintering grounds” and who was brought to Michillimackinac for baptism.  (I’ve seen some researchers who think it was the older Jean Baptiste Reaume who married the Folle Avoine woman, but I feel fairly certain it is the son since the older Jean Baptiste Reaume would have been about 80 at this time – plus that marriage contract says he was dead by the time of that marriage.).

But this marriage contract of the younger Jean Baptiste Reaume also causes confusion because it lists his mother as Marie-Anne Thomas.  Who is Marie-Anne Thomas?   I don’t believe there is a baptismal record for the younger Jean Baptiste Reaume so I suppose it is possible that he is younger than Suzanne and had a different mother.  Some family researchers seem to have assumed that Marie Anne Thomas was a dit name for Symphorose Ouaouagoukoue.  I wonder why?  Symphorose is an unusual name but it is the name of a Christian saint.  Why would she go by Marie Anne?  On the other hand why would her granddaughter Marie Josephe go by Marie Louise?  And why would Baptiste LeBeau go by Jacques LeBeau?  The French never seemed very attached to their given names.  Since the mother of the bride-to-be was also named Marie-Anne it is possible that the notary just messed up and entered Marie-Anne twice.   But what about the last name Thomas?  It is very confusing.

In any event, that’s all we know.  I’d love to know more about Symphorose Ouaouaboukoue, as would the many people who post messages on the various genealogy message boards.  But so far no one has come up with any definitive information.  I’ve seen people state that she “must” be from such and such tribe, but I’ve never seen documentation.  Personally, I’ve always suspected she was Pottawatomie.  But that’s just a hunch, not real information. There are many people who think she belonged to the Illinois.   Hopefully someday we’ll find out more about her.

As usual, if anyone has anything to add, make a comment or drop me an email.

More on Fur, Fortune and Empire

Just a couple more thoughts on Fur, Fortune and Empire.  After writing my previous post and before returning the book to my dad I decided to take a careful read of the footnotes.  I had skipped back to them while reading the book when something caught my attention but I wanted to give them a thorough read. 

Sometimes the footnotes can be more interesting than the actual book or, at least, can provide separate items of interest.  This was the case here. 

As I said before, the scope of this book was different than I expected.  I would have preferred to have read about the actual trading itself but this was really a history of Americans.  In the footnotes he points out the following, which I think is very true:

“One of the difficulties in writing about the American fur trade, especially during the colonial era, is that almost all the historical documents were written by the white people who interacted with the Indians rather than the Indians themselves.  Thus it is nearly impossible to say with certainty what the Indians thought about their participation in the trade, and how they perceived the people with whom they were trading.  Still some documents do exist, and historians have used them, and have also carefully analyzed the broader contemporary literature written by whites, to create portraits of the fur trade, and in particular Indian involvement, that are as accurate and balanced as possible.” (p. 328 fn. 18).

Unfortunately he doesn’t give any specific examples of those historians in that citation.  But I think he’s correct.  They say that history is written by the victors and that’s true. But it’s also true that history tends to be written by those who can write.  The oral tradition of the Indians doesn’t make their histories any less valid than the written histories of the whites with whom they traded but it does make them more difficult to access. 

One of the best quotes in Dolan’s footnotes, though, is from Professor Jennifer Brown, of the University of Winnepeg:  “European records made a big thing of how impressed the Indians were with their trade goods; Indian oral tradition tells the reverse – how impressed the Europeans were with the furs that the Indians didn’t value particularly highly.”  (p. 328 fn 20).

And this sounds true.  It especially sounds true when you know exactly what the colonial traders were trading for. Dolan had some very good sections about the anatomy of the beaver and how beaver skins are used in the making of hats.  The beaver has two types of fur – long coarse outer hairs covering the soft warm inner fur.  Plucking out the outer hairs was time consuming but necessary to get to the fur they wanted.   The most profitable furs were, therefore, furs for which this process had already taken place.  Indians tended to create robes with the fur on the inside and as they wore them the outer hairs would wear away leaving only the soft inner fur.  Fur traders valued these “worn” garments more highly than new unused furs.  I’ve always thought the Indians must have thought the Europeans were slightly crazy to want to buy what the Indians saw (quite rightly) as their smelly used clothes. 

In return for their old clothes and some animal skins, the Indians got mettle goods like kettles. In a later footnote, Dolan quotes historian Ian K. Steele:  “Historians have been irrationally embarrassed by Amerindian economic interests evident in the fur trade of the north and the deerskin trade of the south.  Earlier portrayals of naive Amerindian victims of underpriced furs and overpriced European goods have righty been superseded by more plausible accounts of discerning Amerindian customers able to demand exactly the kind of kettles, blankets, knives, or guns they wanted.” (p. 330 fn. 31).

All of this is to say that some of the things I may have complained about in my post yesterday as lacking were not lacking because Dolan was unaware of them.  Clearly he had his own viewpoint that he was trying to get across and these things were outside the scope of what he was trying to accomplish.  But the footnotes make it clear that he was well aware of these other issues. 

It also is a way of leading up to a quote that he gives in the footnotes from an interview/discussion between Richard White and William Cronan on why the Indians valued kettles:  “Indians wanted kettles partly because you can put them on a fire and boil water and they won’t break.  That’s nice.  But many of those kettles didn’t stay kettles for long.  They got cut up and turned into arrowheads that were then used in the hunt.  Or they got turned into high-status jewelry.  Indians valued kettles because they were such an extraordinarily flexible resource.” 

It’s a great quote but he also gave a a web address for the citation to the quote which took me to an interesting article:  http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1986/5/1986_5_18.shtml

This article is a discussion between Richard White and William Cronan that took place before White published his seminal work The Middle Ground.  In it they talk about the Indian’s use of animals and I was very much reminded of the discussion that took place when I read and blogged about Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.

R[ichard] W[hite]: What’s hardest for us to understand, I think, is the Indians’ different way of making sense of species and the natural world in general. I’m currently writing about the Indians of the Great Lakes region. Most of them thought of animals as a species of persons. Until you grasp that fact, you can’t really understand the way they treated animals. This is easy to romanticize—it’s easy to turn it into a “my brother the buffalo” sort of thing. But it wasn’t. The Indians killed animals. They often overhunted animals. But when they overhunted, they did so within the context of a moral universe that both they and the animals inhabited. They conceived of animals as having, not rights—that’s the wrong word—but powers. To kill an animal was to be involved in a social relationship with the animal. One thing that has impressed me about Indians I’ve known is their realization that this is a harsh planet, that they survive by the deaths of other creatures. There’s no attempt to gloss over that or romanticize it.

W[illiam C[ronan] There’s a kind of debt implied by killing animals.

RW Yes. You incur an obligation. And even more than the obligation is your sense that those animals have somehow surrendered themselves to you.

WC There’s a gift relationship implied …

RW … which is also a social relationship. This is where it becomes almost impossible to compare Indian environmentalism and modern white environmentalism. You cannot take an American forester or an American wildlife manager and expect him to think that he has a special social relationship with the species he’s working on.

WC Or that he owes the forest some kind of gift in return for the gift of wood he’s taking from it.

RW Exactly. And it seems to me hopeless to try to impose that attitude onto Western culture. We distort Indian reality when we say Indians were conservationists—that’s not what conservation means. We don’t give them full credit for their view, and so we falsify history.

It’s a very interesting interview all around and I encourage everyone to read it.  And as Richard White says: “We can’t copy Indian ways of understanding nature, we’re too different. But studying them throws our own assumptions into starker relief and suggests shortcomings in our relationships with nature that could cost us dearly in the long run.”

Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, by Eric Jay Dolin

The problem is, I interpreted the title wrong. I thought it was an epic history of the fur trade in America. Yes, I know it says that. But I thought it meant North America. Or at least that it meant the fur trade in parts of North America that later became the United States of America But it really was an epic history of the fur trade in the United States of America with occasional asides about the rest of the fur trade in North America, including parts that later became the United States of America. And, unfortunately, that means that the most fun part of the history of the fur trade in North America was off stage for most of this book.

I knew I was in trouble when it began with the Pilgrims. And while I understand that he was trying to show how the fur trade was an important part of the history of Plymouth Colony, the plain fact of the matter is that Plymouth Colony's fur trade failed fairly quickly (relatively speaking). In fact, most of this book is about the failed history of the American fur trade – at least until old John Jacob Astor decided to buy the entire trade and wipe out the animal population of the west. Which, if you think about it from an environmental perspective, is also a failure.

If you are looking for a thorough history of how the United States and its territorial expansion was affected by the fur trade this is a good place to start. If you are looking for a good history of the North American fur trade, reading this is like wanting to learn about Jazz and starting with a history of Jazz in France. Of necessity a little of the overall history has to be thrown in, but the picture is skewed.

And what is really odd is that the actual mechanics of the trade itself – with the Indians – seem glossed over. I was actually a bit excited that he spent some time talking about the evolution of New Amsterdam because I don’t know as much about New Amsterdam and the Albany trade as I’d like. But then I was disappointed that there wasn’t really much about actual Dutch people trading with actual Indians in it. Just a lot about Dutch people and English and Swedish people fighting over boundaries. The story of the Dutch as they actually traded and their relations with the Five Nations must have been more interesting than as portrayed in this book. Unlike the English in New England, the Dutch were relatively successful in their trade. But they failed as a colony. Reading this book reminded me that history is written by the victors.

And I know the French story was far more interesting than he portrayed it. And although the period I focus on is predominantly the 18th century and not the 19th century, I know that the story of the men involved in John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company was much more interesting than he made it. David Lavender’s biography of Ramsay Crooks, The Fist in the Wilderness, made them come alive for me. I highly recommend that book to anyone who really wants a picture of the trade in the 19th century to see if they are interested in learning more.

The truth is that he tried to put so much into this book that he ended up making it rather dry. The details seem accurate but it tends to plod along. And looking at the footnotes and the bibliography he seems to have relied quite a bit on secondary sources rather than primary sources, which is understandable given the breadth of the topic. But this lacks the spark that quotations from primary sources give.

On the other hand if you need a reference book on the fur trade that goes into a lot of really great detail about the animals being hunted, I think this is an excellent book.

Colonial Notaries

I’m reading a book about colonial Arkansas called, appropriately, Colonial Arkansas 1686-1804. It is by Morris S. Arnold.  If you click the link you will find out that Mr. Arnold is a federal judge in the 8th Circuit.  But the link won’t tell you about this book, just that he has a keen interest in history.  Someone should update the wikipedia entry to tell people about this book.

I’m really enjoying reading it, maybe because it is written by a lawyer.  He puts together a great narrative but always tells the reader what is fact and what is speculation.  And he has a good sense of humor.

It is filling in some gaps in my knowledge of colonial French history. It also has some useful information on French (and Spanish) legal process.  Last week when I was writing about finding Jacques/Jean Baptiste LeBeau I wrote about how my dad had found the marriage contract for his wife’s second marriage.  I said that St. Louis was a big enough town to have a real notary who kept these records. Now that I think about it some more, and look at some copies of marriage contracts, St. Louis didn’t always have a notary.  Often the post commander acted in lieu of the notary. But it did have a good record system so we can still look at all these contracts.

I didn’t describe the French notary process in that post, but Judge Arnold does it very well in this book and I thought I’d share it with my readers.

To an American common lawyer, the notary is not a member of the legal profession, not even a paralegal.  But in seventeenth and eighteenth century France he enjoyed a much more elevated status, as indeed he still does in that country.  Originally an official of the medieval European ecclesiastical courts, the notary developed into a full-blown, noncontentious secular legal professional in France. In England, partly because the canon and secular laws were not on speaking terms, “the notarial system never took deep root.” For one thing, an important aspect of the notary’s duties, his authority to authenticate documents, was of little use to the English.  The whole notion of a state-sanctioned authenticator of private acts was entirely foreign to English common law; whereas in France we see notaries making or passing contracts, the common law left that to the parties.  The state was very much in the background in England and was called upon only to enforce obligations that arose by force of nature.

… the eighteenth century French notary’s duties [included] the drafting of documents, conveyancing, and the giving of practical legal advice.

Judge Arnold later describes a typical marriage contract under French Law.  That made my pull out my marriagae contracts and look at them.  And as long as I have them out I thought I should share one with you, my readers.

I’m using, as an example, a contract for a second marriage.  This contract between Marguerite DesRosiers, the widow of Antoine Barada, and Joseph Sorins (sometimes spelled Saurins) was made in 1782 in St. Louis, Spanish “Illinois”.   The entire midwest was at one time called the Illinois country.  After it was partitioned, the portion in Spanish Louisiana was still called Illinois.

Keep in mind that although Marguerite DesRosiers without a doubt spoke French, and may have spoken very little Spanish, St. Louis and all of Louisiana was under Spanish rule at the time.  So all contracts have this odd blend of Spanish and French which, when translated into English, is apparent mostly in the names. The names are almost always mispelled and use the Spanish rendering.  Hence Marguerite becomes Margarita.

The contract begins by naming the parties.  Notice how the person with the most descriptive words is Francois Cruzat, the Lieutenant Governor.  Normally the contract would be made before a professional notary but often the commander of the post would be the notary if there wasn’t a “real” notary available.

In the town of St. Louis of Illinois, the thirteenth day of the month of April in the year one thousand, seven hundred eighty-two, before me, Don Francois Cruzat, Lieutenant Colonel of the Infantry, Captain of the Regiment stationed in Louisiana, commander in chief and Lieutenant Governor of the Western part of Illinois and the amended districts andin the presence of the attending witnesses, Antoine Cutian and Joseph Bernes, personally appeared Joseph Sorins, residing in the said town of St. Louis stipulating for himself and in his name party of the first part

And Margarita De Rosier, widow of Antoine Barada, deceased, stipulating for herself and in her name, party of the other part,

Then the contract goes on to name the people who are “standing up” with the bride and groom.

Which parties, with the advice and counsel of the relatives and friends here present and herein after named to wit:  On the part of Joseph Sorins, Joseph Marie and Renato Cruyan, residing in the aforesaid town,

And on the part of Margarita DesRosier, Baptiste Becquet and Gabriel Dodier, here present all relative and friends.

Marguerite DesRosiers and her deceased husband, Antoine Barada, had many children and one of them, Louis Barada, married Marie Becquet, the daughter of Baptiste Becquet. Gabriel Dodier was Baptiste Becquet’s brother-in-law, the uncle of Marie Becquet.   I don’t know who the men standing up for Joseph Sorins were.  But the whole point is that the two people are doing this as part of a community who have advised them on this matter.  

Once the parties and witnesses are named, the contractual provisions begin. 

Which parties and witnesses have made and agreed between themselves to the matrimonial convention as follows to wit:

As Judge Arnold writes:

The provisions typically found in marriage contracts executed in accordance with eighteenth-century Parisian notarial practice are well known.  The first and invariable undertaking by the future spouses was a promise to celebrate their marriage in church, and the parties would then choose the regime that would govern their property during the marriage.  Next would come a declaration that the ante-nuptual debts of the parties were to remain their separate obligations; this was foll0wed by a disclosure of the parties’ assets, a requirement of the validity of the provision regarding debts.  The dowry brought to the marriage by the wife was then recited; and delineating preciput, the right of the spouse to specific property in the event of a dissolution of the community, frequently followed. Finally came the donation clause, usually a reciprocal grant of all or part of the predeceasing spouse’s estate. 

This contract is, of course, under Spanish Law since Illinois in Louisiana was under Spanish Rule. So they reference the law of Castille and the “Recompilation of the Indies” which was a set of statutes that governed the American colonies.  Marguerite Barada had existing children and this contract references the terms of the contract she had with her first husband, Antoine Barada (which I don’t think we’ve ever found).  The blank is, I believe, in the original (although maybe it was just illegible, I don’t recall).  Under this contract, unlike Judge Arnold’s usual contracts, the debts of the spouses are not kept separate but are to be paid out of the community.  Perhaps because of this, there is no listing of the assets of the parties or of any dowry. 

First: The said Joseph Sorins and the said Margarita Desrosier, have promised and do promise to take each other with the counsel of their relatives and friends, in the name and according to the matrimonial laws and to have their marriage celebrated before our mother the Catholic and Apostolic and Roman Church as soon as possible or as soon as one of the parties shall require it of the other.

2nd: The future couple shall be one and in common as regards all the goods they actually possess, those they may acquire in future and the said future husband declares that if he should die first, all their goods shall belong to the future wife so that none of these nearest relatives can claim any thing nor establish any rights thereto. This donation thus made, provided there be no children born of the said marriage for if there be any the said community shall be regulated according to the law of Castille and the Recompilation of the Indies, and the goods which the said future wife brings into the community shall be divided in equal parts between the children born of her first marriage and those which may be born of this present marriage according to the terms of the contract executed between her and her first husband, deceased, on the second day of October in the year One thousand Seven Hundred and Fifty. 

3d.: The future couple wish that all the goods accruing to their community which they this day establish shall belong to the _____ if there be no children; and in case of children shall be divided according to the terms aforementioned.

4th: The said future couple have covenanted that all the debt contracted either by one or by the other party before the celebration of this present marriage shall be paid out of the goods of their actual community.

For thus has been covenanted and agreed between the parties, promising, accepting, and those who do not know how to write have made their customary marks before me and the aforesaid attending witnesses who have signed with me,  Lieutenant Governor, the same day, month and year as above written.

A copy of the contract was kept with the official records of St. Louis and this one can be found in the Colonial Book 3, item 188 #2063. According to Judge Arnold, if they had been living under French law the contract would have had to have been registered with the superior council in New Orleans to be valid.  I don’t know if it was necessary, under Spanish Law, to send a copy to the Cabildo in New Orleans.

Investigating Mr. LeBeau

I’ve learned a lot of things from working with my dad on our family genealogy. I’ve learned a lot about parts of American history that aren’t covered in American History classes, or are covered only perfunctorily. I’ve learned a lot of facts. But the most important thing I’ve learned is to approach the whole endeavor with an open mind. I’ve learned to ask myself if what I believe to be true really is true or whether it is something I simply assume to be true.

In the comments to my post about Jean Baptiste LeBeau I listed some of the sources I and my dad used to try to track him down. But I want to tell the story of how we discovered he existed at all. It is a story of mistaken assumptions. Finding the existence of Jean Baptiste LeBeau, voyageur, made me realize how important it is to regularly question my assumptions.

About ten years ago my dad got a call from a man on the west coast who thought we might be distantly related. The man’s family had originally come from St. Louis and the man had hired a professional genealogist in St. Louis do some research for him. The man had taken the ancestral names he was provided with and had done a little work to discover if any descendents might still be living in or around St. Louis. He discovered my uncle who put him in touch with my dad - “he’s the one you should talk to; he’s the one that knows the family histories.” The man and my dad figured out that, yes, they were probably related. The connection appeared to be the family of my great-great grandfather – a man named Charles Dumont. And the only thing my family had ever known about Charles Dumont’s heritage was that he was supposedly born in St. Charles, Missouri and his father had come from Canada.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER ONE: Neither my dad nor I had, at that time, bothered to research the Charles Dumont line because the word “Canada” stopped us. I think we assumed that it would be difficult to do any type of genealogical research on Canadians. Would it involve a trip to Canada? If so, we had no idea what part of Canada the father of Charles Dumont came from. I think we assumed that researching this branch would be harder than other branches and so we put it off for the future. We ended up being wrong about this. Researching your French Canadian ancestors turned out to be incredibly easy compared to researching other nationalities. There are compilations of records that give good starting places. And the French Canadians seemed to document everything with contracts and those contracts give you lots of clues in your research.

During the conversations between my dad and this distant relative, the man very generously offered to share with my dad the research that he had compiled with the help of the professional genealogist. He asked my dad to use the information freely but to share with him any additional information my dad came upon that would correct or complete the information on that branch of the family. My dad said he would be glad to look at it. I remember that he was excited to get it but didn’t seem too sure that he could add anything. At that time my dad was still a novice researcher. That was about to change.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER TWO: In looking at the research sent by our west coast distant relative, we saw that he had taken the family back pretty far through the female lines. We hadn’t thought about starting with the mother of Charles Dumont. We tended to assume that researching female lines is harder than researching male lines. This is a reasonable assumption. In order to research a female line you must know the wife’s maiden name. We had been spending time researching English, Irish and Scottish lines and under British law a woman pretty much lost her identity when she got married. My dad had gotten (and still is) pretty frustrated with the Irish branches of the family. Even if you can figure out that Mary Murphy the wife of John Murphy (and do you KNOW how many John and Mary Murphys there are?) was originally, say, “Mary Ryan ” – how on earth were you going to figure out her father or mother when there were also thousands of Mary Ryans in the world. It isn’t impossible, but it is hard.

So we, I think, assumed that if the Canadian father of Charles Dumont was going to be hard to find, his mother would be even harder to find. There may have been other assumptions in here too. Maybe we assumed that she came from Canada too. And maybe we assumed that tracing the father’s line would lead to more interesting stories because men had always led more adventurous lives and certainly it would have been the man who made the decision to make that long journey overland from Canada to St. Charles, Missouri. (And why St. Charles? That had always bothered me. If you were going to come all the way to St. Charles, why not come a few miles further to St. Louis? Maybe because they were farmers and there was better land up near St. Charles? But if they were farmers why would they have lived in town?)

So my dad started looking at what he had been sent. According to the professional genealogist, Charles Dumont’s father “a Canadian, brought his family to Missouri about 1835 and settled in St. Charles. His wife was, apparently, deceased, and, within a few years, he married Marie Louisa Lebeau” and they had one son, Charles. “Brought his family” sounded so American. The great American migration – in covered wagons of course. At least that’s what I assumed when I read that. Based on census data, the genealogist stated that Dumont had five children who had come to St. Charles with him, so Charles Dumont would have had five half-siblings. The genealogist even gave the names of two of them based on 1850 census data: Florence and Anuranth Dumont.

My dad went out to the St. Louis County Library and talked to the research librarians and learned a lot about researching your Canadian ancestors. As I said, it turned out to be a lot easier than we thought and we wondered why we hadn’t started sooner. It all was made easier by the fine resources here for researching the French who came to Missouri from Canada. There are lots of St. Louis records of those people. The most important thing my dad discovered was that French women don’t lose their maiden names when they marry, they are still referred to by their maiden names in official records and even though the United States had taken over French territory the French custom of listing the mother’s maiden name had stuck among the French settlers. So tracing the female line was not going to be any harder than tracing the male line.

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER THREE: It is easy to assume that the name that is recorded on any official record is the right spelling or even the right name. Don’t assume that! Record keepers are human. They make mistakes. They hear things wrong. They sometimes have bad handwriting. They make assumptions that turn out false. They spell things the way THEY usually spell them. One of the biggest issues in St. Louis genealogical research is that the French who came to St. Louis were living under a Spanish regime and then an American regime. The Spanish tended to spell things in the Spanish way. “Jean Baptiste” might be recorded as “Juan Bautista”. Americans were even worse when it came to French spellings. And the priest at St. Charles Borromeo church in St. Charles originally came from Belgium and spelled things his own way. So you MUST be flexible in your thinking and search under what would ordinarily be “wrong” spellings.

Since the mother of Charles Dumont was a local St. Charles woman my dad started by looking for information about her. He found some deeds that she and her husband executed that named her as “Luisa”. Sometimes she is referred to as “Mary Louise” or just “Mary” or just “Louise”. But he did find her marriage records and her baptismal records and her gravesite. Her real name was Marie Louise LeBeau.

Eventually we discovered that her marriage to Charles Dumont’s father was, in fact, a second marriage. She had been widowed in her 20’s with two children – Florence and Amaranthe. It appears that the census taker in 1850 assumed that all the children were Dumonts because the French speaking mother was named Dumont when, in fact, only Charles was the Dumont. In fact, we’ve never found any indication that Charles Dumont’s father brought any children with him. We’re not even sure it is a good assumption that he was previously married. Note that the census taker had spelled Amaranthe incorrectly. And the records for Marie Louise’s first marriage had transcribed her first name incorrectly as Larisse instead of Louise (handwritten records are hard to read). But once we put two and two together, it all became clear.

Oh, and our assumption about the overland route with the wagons? Turns out nobody travelled by wagons in those days if they could help it. The roads, if they existed at all, were terrible. They travelled by river. Why would we, living here in this city at the confluence of two great rivers, have forgotten about river travel? Because nobody travels by river anymore except people moving grain and coal. And our history lessons told us that people came through St. Louis to travel west in wagons. Yes, they did – at a later date. It is a lesson to not just assume you know how people moved around. Think about it. Research it.

And Charles Dumont’s father, Thomas Dumont? His marriage record lists his parents’ name and the place they were from in Canada (although the spelling is so mangled it is hard to interpret their French names), so, yes, family lore was right. He was Canadian. But the more we look into him the more we think he did not come to St. Louis directly from his original home in Canada. We think he may have headed first to the Saskatchewan region, working the fur trade for a while. Then we think he came down through the Dakotas to Missouri, on the Missouri River. He may have been doing work for the American Fur Company which was based here and that’s how he ended up here. But that’s still a working hypothesis since the records are few.

When my dad found Marie Louise LeBeau’s baptismal record he confirmed her correct name and that she was born June 13, 1811, baptized at St. Charles Borromeo Church in St. Charles on July 31, 1811. And the baptismal record listed not only the name of her father, Baptiste Lebeau, but also the maiden name of her mother, Marguerite Barada, who turned out to have an interesting family history which I won’t go into here. We ended up going all the way back to the early 1600s on her line.

But what about Marie Louise’s father? What about his family?

MISTAKEN ASSUMPTION NUMBER FOUR: We bought into the narrative created by the professional genealogist. We thought it was based on facts or if it was based on assumptions they were reasonable.

Never assume that a narrative is completely true. It is always dangerous to create a narrative based on only a few facts. If you create a narrative make sure your facts are correct and if you are making assumptions you should state them.

In the genealogical summary sent to my dad, it stated that Baptiste Lebeau was Jean Baptiste LeBeau, the son of Jacques LeBeau and Marie Louise Jourdain from the Diocese of Quebec, and he “was an infant in 1780 when his family moved from Canada to Spanish Upper Louisiana. He grew up in St. Louis and subsequently settled in St. Charles where he married.” Later the narrative states that Jean Baptiste Lebeau was born about 1779 and still “not baptized, he was a babe in arms of his pregnant mother in late spring or early summer of 1780 when the family arrived in St. Louis. After Madame LeBeau gave birth to a baby girl, Marguerite, on June 19, 1780, both the newborn infant and Jean Baptiste were baptized by Father Bernard de Limpach, a Capuchin Friar, who was a parish priest of St. Louis, King of France, Catholic Church.”

Again, my dad and I had only our school histories to guide us and we had visions of wagons heading southwest from Canada carrying the LeBeau family to their new life in St. Louis. Why? Well because that’s what people did in those days, wasn’t it? They went west, always west. And in wagons. We still hadn’t figured out the whole river thing. And we certainly hadn’t yet figured out that fur traders, sometimes with their families, moved over vast distances on those rivers as on a regular basis. Voyageurs didn’t travel to a new town to settle in it. They travelled to trade. And often they went back and forth to towns over the course of many years. But of course we hadn’t yet figured out that we had Voyageurs in our family. We just assumed that, like the Americans who came later, the French Canadians were moving west to settle the land. We assumed, in fact, that the genealogist was correct that the LeBeau family had “moved” to St. Louis.

The narrative also went back to Jean Baptiste’s parents, which was where we got stuck. The father, Jacques LeBeau, was named, but not his parents. But the summary said that the mother, Marie Louise Jourdain, was the daughter of Francois Jourdain and Celeste Roussel. The marriage took place sometime about 1769 in the Diocese of Quebec. It said that Jacques was “born about 1740” and married “about 1769”. And it said: “Because there is no record of LeBeau’s death or burial in St. Louis’s Catholic Church records (nor any civil or military record), it must be presumed that Jacques died in Canada or on the long journey south.” The baptismal date of Jean Baptiste LeBeau is only three weeks after a British led Indian attack on St. Louis and if they were here before that date Jacques LeBeau surely would have been pressed into duty and there were no records of that. So, according to the genealogists narrative, the widow LeBeau arrived in St. Louis with her children, settled down and then, in 1790, married again to Michael Quesnel. Her children then moved to St. Charles when it was founded.

All of that sounded so exciting, if somewhat vague. Picture it. The LeBeau family making their way with pregnant Marie Louise holding little Jean Baptiste in the wagon, making their way toward St. Louis. Jacques dying along the way (how sad! and maybe it was death by Indians!) and the widow finding her way into St. Louis only to find the town in turmoil after the Indian attack. How frightening it must have been for her! And then after long years of widowhood she marries again.

It was a good narrative. But this was where things got interesting for my dad and me. Up until now the actual factual data we were sent had been correct and confirmable in the public records. There was a baptismal record for Jean Baptiste LeBeau and it did state that his parents were Jacques Lebeau and Marie Louis Jourdain. And it was the right date. But neither he nor I could find anything at all about Jacques Lebeau except references that had to do with his children. And neither he nor I could find confirmation that Marie Louise Jourdain was the child of Francois Jourdain and Celeste Roussel. There were Jourdains in St. Louis at the time by that name and we eventually concluded that the genealogist must have concluded that it was a good assumption that Marie-Louise Jourdain was related to the other Jourdains in the St. Louis area. But he didn’t state it as an assumption, he stated it as a fact.

Turns out that although it fit a narrative, it was a bad assumption. And the truth turned out to be far more interesting. My dad found the marriage contract of Marie Louise Jourdain and her second husband Michael Quesnel. (St. Louis was a big enough town that it had a notary to make actual contracts. If you are doing research you have to love the French and their contracts.) This contract lists the names of the bride’s parents as Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume. So the facts we were given were wrong. And the new facts we discovered changed the entire narrative.

The new information sent my dad and me off on a search for the Jourdains. We discovered that Jean Baptiste Jourdain had been born in Montreal, the son of a stone mason, but had moved to the area now known as Green Bay Wisconsin, where he became a trader and married Marie Josephe Reaume. He never went back to Montreal and he is listed among the first families to settle Green Bay. His wife was born somewhere in the Lake Michigan area and was the daughter of Jean Baptiste Reaume, the official French interpreter (and trader) at the post of Green Bay, and Symphorose Ouaouagoukoue, a Native American woman, who were legally married in the eyes of the church.

Well, that was interesting! And it made me rethink the whole theory of Marie Louise cowering in fear of Indians.

But although Marie Louise’s marriage contract lists her parents (and we assume it is correct because… why would she lie?) there was no record that those two persons had a daughter named Marie Louise. That was a bit of a mystery.

We discovered that Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume did have two daughters who were (confusingly) both named Marie Josephe after their mother but were known as Josette and Lysette. There was another daughter Madeleine. And there were references to a younger daughter named Angelique (who showed up later in St. Louis with her husband Augustin Roc). And references to a son named Jean Baptiste. But there was no Marie Louise.

Interestingly, however, in 1764 both Josette and Lysette Jourdain were married at Michilimackinac. Josette married a voyageur named Francois LeBlanc and Lisette married a voyageur named … Jean Baptiste LeBeau.

Now what are the odds, we thought? What are the odds that Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume had a daughter Lysette who married Jean Baptiste LeBeau, a voyageur, and also a daughter Marie Louise who married a Jacques LeBeau? Probably not good but also not impossible. Could they be the same person? Or is it just that her baptismal record is missing?

We’ve never resolved the question of whether Marie Louise is Lysette but that isn’t a road block. We know that, whether they are the same person or not, she is the daughter of Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume. So, from a genealogical perspective we could continue researching back from there, and we did. My dad and I took her family back two or three more generations to the point where her ancestors immigrated to Canada in the 1600’s. Unfortunately we were not able to find anything at all about her Indian grandmother, not even what tribe she belonged to. She remains a mystery to be solved.

And that leaves us with Jacques/Jean Baptiste LeBeau. We have no narrative for him, but we are continuing to work off the theory that they are the same person. While it is important not to create a narrative out of false assumptions, it is also important to have a working theory that states your assumptions and then to try to prove your assumptions true or false.

How did we decide this was a viable theory? First, by looking at the genealogist’s assumptions about Jacques LeBeau to see if we could challenge them. We were told he was “born about 1740”. We have no idea where that assumption came from. It probably seemed a logical age. It would have made Jacques about 40 years old when his children were being baptized. But what if he wasn’t born then? Could he have been older? At first I didn’t consider that, but then one day I asked myself why not? Why couldn’t he have been significantly older than Lysette? Maybe my mistake was to consider Lysette, who was three quarters French and one quarter Indian, to be a typical Frenchwoman. Maybe she was more like the Indian women of her grandmother’s people than Frenchwomen. Voyageurs were known to take young wives from among the Indians. They formed a working partnerships with these women who could do the hard work of preparing the skins for transport. Lysette would have been brought up in the fur trade, her father was a trader, her grandmother was an Indian. The Indians in Green Bay were a part of everyday life. They outnumbered the French. The entire settlement was built around the fur trade. Lysette had the opportunity to learn all the traditional skills. She would have been a good wife to a voyageur, no matter his age. This idea came to me when I ran across a reference to Francois LeBlanc with his “Indian” wife and I thought “well, either he had another wife or that was Josette.” And it occurred to me that there was no reason it couldn’t have been Josette.

Second, the genealogist states that Jacques was married “about 1769”. This was probably based on the age of his known children. Again, once I challenged that date (which had no documentation behind it) I realized there was no reason he couldn’t have been married earlier. Maybe their earliest children didn’t survive. Maybe they were baptized elsewhere or were never baptized. Maybe they didn’t have any children for a few years. The only children listed for them are Toussaint Jacques LeBeau (who is listed as 21 years old in 1792), Jean Baptiste LeBeau and Marguerite LeBeau. The genealogist assumed that their oldest child would have been born immediately after their wedding and that Toussaint was the first child they had. There is no reason either of those assumptions have to be true.

Third, we knew through documentary evidence that Marie-Louise didn’t marry Michael Quesnel until 1790 and we also know that, at that point, she and Michael Quesnel already had children. This was something the genealogist didn’t mention but it is a pretty important fact, Maybe he thought it would be embarrassing to document illegitimate children? But they are right there in the baptismal records. It was a fact in those days that children were often born out of marriage. For one thing, there weren’t always priests around when you needed them. You had to go into a town to find a priest.

Marie-Louise and Michael Quesnel were married in 1790, the same year that three of their children were baptized. That leads us to believe that she left St. Louis sometime after the baptisms in 1780 and she would have, of course, taken her LeBeau children with her. So maybe the genealogist was wrong and Jacques Lebeau wasn’t dead when his children were baptized. Maybe they had lived out among the Indians prior to that. Then, perhaps the turmoil of all the Indians being on the move for the Indian attack on St. Louis caused them to come into St. Louis after the attack. Heck, maybe they were with the Indians who were moving down to attack. Maybe they were a part of the attack? And then they decided that as long as they were there they would stop in at the church and have their children baptized and then move on again. All great narratives with no documentary evidence. But in any event Jacques LeBeau could have died before Louise showed up in St. Louis or after Louise showed up in St. Louis for the baptisms. There is no proof either way. The mere fact that there isn’t a death record for Jacques Lebeau in St. Louis doesn’t mean he didn’t die after that date. Especially not if they left St. Louis again.

And here is where modern assumptions got in the way for the genealogist. If a family came to St. Louis in 1780 then they must have come to settle there. That’s what we think. The idea that they might just come for a while and leave seems foreign to us. It doesn’t fit the narrative we learned in school. But the fact is that they could have left and gone out among the Indians again. People did that in those days.

We can assume that Jacques was dead before 1790 when Marie-Louise remarried. And we can assume he died a few years before that, the three Quesnel children baptized in 1790 point to that fact. But should we assume that he was dead in 1780? I’d say no. It doesn’t make sense that Marie Louise would have stayed “single” for almost 10 years after Jacques died. Or even for five years. That’s a modern concept, not how life was in those days. Almost all women remarried fairly quickly in those days. The marriage registers provide proof of this. So if Marie Louise was acting as most women of that time and place acted, there shouldn’t have been too long between the death of Jacques LeBeau and the appearance of Michael Quesnel in her life.

So, if our narrative is true, the genealogist was wrong and they did not “move” to St. Louis and their son Jean Baptiste LeBeau did not “grow up” in St. Louis. He grew up wherever his parents were and then wherever his mother and step-father were. Where were they? We don’t know. And trust me we’ve looked. We’ve looked for Lebeaus and for Quesnels.

And where, oh where, were Marie Louise Jourdain and Jacques Lebeau in the years between their possible marriage at Michilimackinac in 1764 and 1780 when their children were baptized in St. Louis? Again, we’ve looked. We found her brother in law, Augustin Roc, in Peoria during that time (presumably his wife Angelique Jourdain was with him) and there is even a reference to a Jean Baptiste Jourdain in Peoria in the early 1780s. That could be her father or her brother. But there is no evidence of the Lebeaus in Peoria.

So our current working theory consists of the bare minimum of this: Jacques and Marie Louise are the same people as the Jean Baptiste and Lysette who were married in 1764. We have no idea where they went after their marriage, where they lived or where he died, but we know they made a stop in St. Louis in 1780 to have two children baptized. And then later she came back to St. Louis with Michael Quesnel to have their children baptized and to get married. And the Quesnels either settled here or used it as a base to come and go.

That’s the theory. If anyone can prove or disprove any part of it or fill in the gaping holes in it, or come up with a better theory, let me know.

[Update: My dad reminds me that the census taker in 1850 not only spelled Amaranthe's name wrong but got the gender wrong too. Also, today I ran across a reference to a smallpox epidemic that raged up the Missouri River in 1781-82. I wonder if that is what might have killed Jacques LeBeau. The timing might work out with the births of the Quesnel children. ]

Who Is Jean Baptiste LeBeau?

This will be of no interest to most of my readers, but what else is a personal blog for if not to throw out a question to the world and wait for the long tail to drag in an answer.

Who was Jean Baptiste LeBeau?

In 1764, at the Mission of St. Ignace at Michilimackinac (in present day Michigan ), there was a double wedding of two sisters:

July 24, 1764, I received the mutual marriage consent of jean Baptiste le Beau, voyageur; and marie joseph, called lysette jourdin, after the three publications of Bans.

On the same day I received the mutual marriage consent of francois le Blanc, voyageur; and of marie joseph, called josette jourdin after the three publications of bans. P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the society of Jesus. Francois le Blanc, + his mark; Baptiste Le Beau; Langlade; Laurent Ducharme; Cardin; Jean Baptiste Jourdain, + his mark, father of the brides.

Who was this Jean Baptiste Le Beau who married Lysette Jourdain in 1764? From the wedding register we know nothing about him except that he was a voyageur and he could sign his name (unlike the other groom and the father of the brides). He is a mystery that I would like to solve.

We know a fair amount about Lysette Jourdain although we don’t know her age because, confusingly, she and her sister were baptized with the same name. The first Marie Josephe Jourdain was born in 1747 the year after her parents were married at St. Ignace:

1746, I received the mutual [marriage] consent of B. Jourdain, son of guillaume [Jourdain and of] Angelique la Reine} and _______ Reaume, daughter of J.B. Reaume, residing at la Baye … P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the Society of Jesus. Louis Pascale Chevalier.

June 20, 1747, I solemnly baptized (S.C.) marie joseph, legitimate daughter of jean baptiste jourdain and of josephe Reaume, residing at La Baye, the child having been born at la baye in the month of April last. The godfather was Mr. de Noyel, the younger, commandant of this post; and the godmother Mlle Bourassa, wife of Mr Bourassa, the elder, who signed here with me. P. DU JAUNAY, miss. of the society of Jesus. Noyelle, fils; Marie La Plente Bourassa.

Residing at “La Baye” meant that they were living at the French settlement at what is now Green Bay Wisconsin. The second Marie Josephe Jourdain was baptised in 1756 along with a sister and two cousins:

July 19, 1756, I, the undersigned priest, missionary of the society of jesus, supplied the ceremonies and baptized conditionally, jean Simon personne, son of Charles personne and of Suzanne Reaume, his father and mother; and hubert personne, son of the same above mentioned; marie joseph, daughter of jean Baptiste jourdain and marie joseph Reaume, her father and mother, and Marie magdelaine, daughter of the same – the first boy, six years old, born on the fourteenth of April, 1750; the second born on the 1st of December, 1753; the first girl born on the tenth of October, 1751, the second on the 25th of january 1754. The godfather of the first boy was jean le febvre; and the godmother marie josette farley; the godfather of the second boy was Mr Couterot, Lieutenant of infantry; and the godmother Charlotte Bourassa; the godfather of the first girl was jean Baptiste le tellier; and the godmother Marie Anne Amiot; the gofather of the second girl was Antoine janis; and the godmother Marie Angelique Taro. M. L. LEFRANC, miss. of the society of Jesus. H. COUTEROT; BOURASSA LANGLADE; JEAN LE FAIBRE; JOSETTE FARLY; JEAN TELLIER; ANTOINE JANISE; MARI ANGELIQUE TARO

In between a brother, Jean Baptiste, born in November 1748, was baptized. Then in 1760 another sister, Angelique, born in February 1759, was baptized.

Which of the Marie Josephe Jourdains was Lysette and which was Josette? We’ll never know. But on their marriage day one was 17 years old and the other was only 12 1/2 years old. Three years later, on February 9, 1768, her sister Magdeleine, was contracted to marry Jean Saliot in Detroit. She was 14 years old. There is no existing record of when Angelique Jourdain married her husband, Augustin Roc.

But who is Jean Baptiste Le Beau? Where did he come from and where did he and Lysette go after they were married?

1764 was a year of transition for the French in the Wisconsin/Michigan area. France had lost the Seven Years War and had ceded all of its territory east of the Mississippi River to Britain. The British were beginning to move into the territory and the French traders were seeing their livelihood dry up. Earlier in the same month of Lysette’s marriage, a deposition was given by Garrit Roseboom, Tunis Fischer, Cummin Schields and Wm. Bruce, merchants from La Bay “before a Court of Enquiry at the Detroit the 4th day of July 1764”.

Garrit Roseboom declares that about the latter end of April, 1763, he was going from the Bay to the Soaks [Sac Indians] to look for his Partnr Abrah Lancing who had been up there [with the Sac], being told that he was killed, that on his way he met some Indains coming down with some Packs [of furs], which he knew to be his, and which they said he might have for paying the carriage; That both the French and Indians told him Mr. Lancing and his son were killed by two Frenchmen, Tibot [Thibaut] and Cardinal, both servts. of Mr. Lancing, who, they had been told, upon the above Murder made their escape to the Illinois [the country south of Prairie du Chien along the Mississippi River]; that on his return to the Bay he found Mr. Garrit and the Garrison there, and came with them to Michilimackinac, leaving his goods in possession of one Jordan, a Frenchman and an Inhabitant at the Bay; that when he returned from Michilimackinac with the Indians to La Bay, he found some of his goods taken away he thinks of his and Mr. Fischer’s to the value of 20 pounds, wh. he [Jourdain] said was stolen by the Indians, but Mr. Roseboom declares he saw his goods wore by Jordan’s Family afterwards.

That was almost certainly Lysette’s father who was accused of taking Mr. Roseboom’s goods. Of course in a “he said/he said” situation it’s hard to know what happened and it doesn’t appear that the testimony of Mr. Jourdain was sought. But stolen goods might have been the least of his problems. Mr. Roseboom continued his deposition:

That the Indians told him that the French at the Bay … had told them there was an open war between the English and French; That the French would send the Indians ammunition enough & if they went down amongst the English they [the English] would put poison in their [the Indians] Rum, which he [Roseboom] was sure prevented the Indians from coming down [to trade] much sooner, [Roseboom] declares from the treatment He and the rest of the English Traders received, and the lyes propogated by the French at LaBay, among the Indians … he thinks these Inhabitants [of La Baye] were Very bad subjects …

So the new British overlords were hearing from Mr. Jourdain’s new competitors that Mr. Jourdain was a Very Bad Subject. The remainder of the deposition continues with the things that the English Traders heard from the Indians which was all mostly wishful thinking on the part of the French and the Indians that the French govt. would return.

But the deposition of William Bruce also refers to a LeBeau who must be the same LeBeau who married Lysette Jourdain:

That about the latter end of Sept. a Chief of the [Saks Indians] had brought him up [a river] called the [Wisconsin] and at the Renards Castle [the encampment of the Fox Indians], an Indian told him that he was come from la Bay with a letter from Goalie, the Interpreter, to one Le Beaue [sic] telling him that there were officers from France who had come with a large Fleet commanded by the Dauphin, etc., and that the Governor of Quebec had offered these officers a Purse of Money for their News, that soon after the Fleet was seen, and that Quebec and Montreal would soon be taken, being no more than 500 men in Each, which news immediately spread among the Indians, who were there at the time in great numbers; that the Sauteurs, Ottawas, Renards and Puants gave a Good Deal of Credit to it … but that the [Saks] and the Folloeavoines could not believe it; that at the [Saks] Castle, the Indians told him, the Deponent, that the French there intended to kill him, on which they called a council and brought the French to it, and told them if they killed the Englishman every Frenchman should die with Him, this had been told to [the deponant] by the Indians to whom the French had discovered their intentions; the Names of the French on the above Voyage up to the Wisconsin were Martoc [Jean Baptiste Marcot?], Jordan & Labeau , Rivier, St. Pier, Mon. Fontasie, Havness, Lafortain, the three first discovering all the marks of bad subjects and disaffection to the English in their whole behaviour; That he hear’d St. Pier say that if he had wrote such a letter as the Interpreter wrote to Labeau, he wo’d expect to be hanged if ever he went among the English.

Tensions were high at this time because in the summer of 1763 the Indians around Michilimackinac attacked the English, sparing the French. Given the political situation, and given that Jourdain was being tagged as a “bad subject” who showed “disaffection to the English” in his behaviour, maybe he thought he ought to start getting his daughters married because he might not be getting much in the way of trade goods in the future.

But who was the man he chose to marry Lysette?

Although there were many LeBeaus in the Detroit region, there were not many references to LeBeau in the Wisconsin, Northern Michigan area. In 1736, among the boatmen contracted for that year were “Baptiste Lebeau, Antoine Giguaire, Louis Marcheteau to the Sioux”. That same year a new Company of the Sioux had been formed to trade with the Sioux (west of the Mississippi in present day Iowa and Minnesota) and some of the traders licensed through that company were members of the Giguere family. This leads me to believe that the boatman, Baptiste LeBeau, might be the son of the Jean Baptiste Lebeau who married Marguerite Giguere. Their son, Jean Baptiste LeBeau, was born in 1705 which would make him 31 years old in 1736.

But he may have been in the area earlier. In the early 1730’s there is a reference to a Lebeau in a report made to the Canadian government regarding the exploration of some copper mines in the Lake Superior area:

The said Corbin left Sault Ste. Marie … with two men named Vaudry and Le Beau who were going to meet the Sieur de la Ronde’s son. The latter was returning after spending the winter at Chagouamigon. He embarked with Them and they were followed by two others named feli and Gobin. They took on board a savage at the place called The cove (L’anse") near the point of Kienon, who asserted that he had thorough knowledge of the mines and of the Copper in the said River of Tonnagane. They travel led thither, and after entering the said River, which they ascended for a distance of about 8 leagues from the shore of lake Superior, they found a mine about 15 arpents in length ascending the river, 30 feet from the water’s edge and which may be at a height of 60 feet in the cliff.

There is no indication of the first name of this “Le Beau”.

Jean Baptiste LeBeau is never a godfather (or a father, for that matter) at any of the baptisms at St. Ignace, but he was a witness at the 1747 marriage of Lysette Jourdain’s aunt, Suzanne Reaume, to Charles Person de la Fond. This seems to indicate a lasting relationship with the Reaume/Jourdain family. The only other church record that lists a LeBeua is on July 23, 1786, there is a Bte. Labeau listed as a churchwarden of the church of Ste. Anne de Michilimackinac. This seems unlikely to be the same Jean Baptiste Lebeau since he never showed any interest in the church before this, although at this point if it is the same man he would have been 81 years old and maybe the church appealed to him. More likely it is not him.

Of course if Jean Baptiste LeBeau, voyageur, was born in 1705, he would have been close to 60 when he married Lysette. This isn’t outside the realm of possibility but it does give one pause. So maybe that isn’t who Jean Baptiste LeBeau is. Or maybe it is his son – perhaps through a relationship with a Native American woman and the son was never baptised at St. Ignace. Or maybe he is just someone else. But I’ve been through all the possible Jean Baptiste Lebeaus and can’t pin anyone else down unless their wives died early or they were also bigamists. (This would be a real possibility in later fur trade years but less so in the 1700s – and why risk getting married in the church if you were committing bigamy? The Jesuits were big blabbermouths and wrote a lot of letters.)

In the list of Licenses granted for Michilimackinac and places beyond in 1778, the trader “J.B. LeBeau” is licensed to take two (2) canoes to the “Illenois” with Fuzees, gunpowder, shot and ball. This is interesting to me because two years later, in the summer of 1780, there was an attack on the town of St. Louis which was located outside of British territory on the Spanish side of the Mississippi River. And immediately after the attack a woman named Marie Louise Jourdain showed up in St. Louis to have two children baptized. The first was her son, Jean Baptiste LeBeau, who must have been a few years old already, and the second was a daughter named Marguerite who was a newborn. The father is listed as “Jacques LeBeau”.

What is the connection you may ask? In 1790 Marie Louise Jourdain married for the second time to Michael Quesnel and her marriage contract lists her parents as Jean Baptiste Jourdain and Marie Josephe Reaume. In 1800 she died and her age is listed as “about” 50. So the immediate question is whether this was a Jourdain daughter who was never baptized and who happened to marry a man named Jacques LeBeau who may or may not have been related to the husband of her sister Lysette? Or is this really Lysette using the name Louise. I’ve found numerous examples of French men and women using names different than their baptismal names, so it seems a real possibility that this is Lysette and that Jacques Lebeau is really Jean Baptiste LeBeau.

In any event, whether she is or isn’t Lysette, she is the daughter of the Jourdains. There is no reason she would have lied in her marriage contract. And Augustin Roc, the husband of Angelique Jourdain, is a fixture in the lives of her children (witnessing weddings, attending burials, etc.).

But who is Jacques LeBeau? If the name Jean Baptiste LeBeau leads to few places in the Green Bay/Michilimackinac area, the name Jacques LeBeau leads nowhere. There are a couple of men named Jacques Lebeau in other places but the facts just don’t match up. (And to add confusion there is one reference to her husband being Francois LeBeau.)

The St. Louis LeBeaus had three living children (that we know of): Toussaint Jacques LeBeau (who was about 21 in 1790 and who married Marie LaFernai or LaFernay), Jean Baptiste LeBeau (who married Marguerite Barada), and Marguerite Lebeau (who married a man named Etienne Bernard but died in childbirth a year later). If Jacques is the Jean Baptiste LeBeau who was the son of Marguerite Giguere, he may have wanted his daughter named after his mother. It’s a thought.

The reason I’m interested is that I’m descended from Jean Baptiste LeBeau and Marguerite Barada. And my dad and I have been looking for Jacques/Jean Baptiste Lebeau for years.

By the way, the reason I don’t think that the LaBeau who was a churchwarden in Michilimackinac in 1786 is the LeBeau I’m looking for has nothing to do with the St. Louis connection. I am fairly sure that the LeBeau family showed up in St. Louis after the Indian attack, had the baptisms performed and then left again. Why? Bechttp://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=1974275832677042000&postID=1333076643983233155ause when Marie Louse Jourdain remarried in 1790 she also had three children baptized at the same time – Joseph, Susanne and Etienne, all the children of Michael Quesnel, her new husband. So they were clearly not in St. Louis during those years. And then their daughter Angelique was born a few months later, so the bride was pregnant. But if the LaBeau who was in Michilimackinac in 1786 was the husband of Lysette, and if Lysette really was Marie Louise – she was cheating on him.

Anybody who has any helpful information please leave a comment or feel free to email me.

[Update August 14, 2010: In response to comments I've been looking through some of my information and want to confirm exactly what I have on Jacques/Jean Baptiste LeBeau and realized that the baptism records make it even more likely Jacques/Jean Baptiste are the same but show how confused the naming is:

The index to the baptism at the Old Cathedral in St. Louis shows that on June 19, 1780 were baptised Jean Baptiste "LeVeau" and Margaret "LeVeau" children of Baptiste "LeVeau" and Marie Jourdain.

There is no death record for Lebeau.

The transcription of the marriage contract for the second marriage of "Marie Louise" Jourdain to Michel Quesnel in 1790, lists her as the widow of "Francois LeBeau" and the daughter of Jean Baptiste Jourdain, deceased, and Marie Joseph "Reamme" (Reaume). Present was her brother in law Augustine "Roe" (Roc or Roch or Roque- transcribers often get his name wrong and he couldn't sign his own name) and Etienne Bernard, her son-in-law.

In the baptismal records of the Old Cathedral of St. Louis are records of "Guinel" children of Michel "Guinel" and Marie Louise Jourdain all baptised on July 1, 1790: Joseph, Susanne and etienne. Then Angelique is baptised October 19, 1790 (Marie Louise was pregnant when she and Michel arrived back in St. Louis.) Later there is an August listed with the same parents but not baptised until May 3, 1837 - this is either an error (since the parents were long dead) or he had never been baptised as a child and was baptised as an adult. On January 27, 1796 their daughter Emilie was born and was not baptised until May 1, 1796 at St. Charles Borromeo (so they may have left between 1790 and 1796).

The transcribed copy of the marriage contract, in 1795, of Toussaint Jacques LeBeau and Marie LaFrenais doesn't list any parents for either of them but lists those present for the groom as: Augustin Roch, his uncle, Pierre Quesnel, L. Chevalier, cousin" (the Chevaliers are related to the Jourdains through the Reaume mothers).

O.W. Collet's index to St. Charles Marriage Register lists the marriage on February 4, 1800 of Jean Baptiste LeBeau, son of "Jacques" Lebeau and Louise Jourdain now wife of MIch. Quesnel, to Margt. Barada daughter of Louis Barada and Marie Becquet.

The records of St. Charles Borromeo Church show the baptism of Marguerite LeBeau, daughter of Jean Baptiste LeBeau and Marguerite Barada on December 18, 1800 with godparents Toussaint LeBeau "uncle of child" and Marie Bequet.

Marie Louise Jourdain, wife of Michel "Quenelle" died October 3, 1802 and was buried at St. Charles Borromeo Church "age about 50 years". Michel "Quenel" died January 1, 1816 "husband of the deceased Marie Louise Jourdain" and was buried in St. Charles Borromeo.