From Death Rapids to Saint Paul Mission: Hilaire Guilbault
From Death Rapids to Saint Paul Mission
Les Dalles des Morts
The Columbia River earned its reputation in pieces. Long before the 1838 disaster, the stretch of water north of present-day Revelstoke, British Columbia, had a name that required no translation: Les Dalles des Morts — the Rapids of the Dead. Seven men had died there in 1817, stranded after losing their canoes, starved on the riverbank. The name was already on the maps when the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Columbia Express set out in the autumn of 1838.
The brigade had a specific purpose on this particular crossing. Fathers Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers — the first Catholic missionaries to be sent to Oregon Country — were traveling with the party, beginning the westward journey that would bring the Catholic church to the Pacific Northwest. It was a significant moment in the history of the Columbia District, and the HBC was providing the transportation.
Among the men on that brigade was a young middleman from Verchères, Québec, named Hilaire Guilbault. He was twenty years old. He had been baptized in June of 1818 in the parish of St-François-Xavier, the fourth child of Joseph Guilbault, farmer, and Rosalie Lescault. He had left Verchères for HBC service that same year. This was, as far as the record shows, his first crossing of the mountains.
At Les Dalles des Morts, a bateau capsized.
The accounts vary in detail but agree on the essential facts. A passenger named Robert Wallace stood up in the boat in a panic and capsized it, spilling everyone into the freezing current. Wallace himself drowned, along with his wife Maria — the Métis daughter of Governor Sir George Simpson, married to Wallace only weeks before at Fort Edmonton. Three of Pierre Leblanc’s children went under. Two of the steersman André Chalifoux’s children were lost. In all, twelve people drowned. Of the approximately twenty-six aboard, fourteen survived.
One surviving daughter of Pierre Leblanc was found alive under the overturned hull, preserved by an air pocket formed by the luggage. The steersman Chalifoux — who lost two of his own children — held the craft together until the very end. A man identified as McGillivray swam to shore.
So did Hilaire Guilbault.
The Dalles des Morts had earned its name in 1817. The 1838 disaster deepened it. Hilaire Guilbault was twenty years old, and he swam to shore.
Fathers Blanchet and Demers were not on the capsized boat — they traveled in a separate vessel within the same brigade and witnessed the aftermath from a distance. They continued west, and in the years that followed they built the Catholic mission community that would record the rest of Hilaire Guilbault’s life.
He did not go home to Verchères. He was twenty years old, and the Columbia District was now his world.
Sworn Before James Douglas
By the summer of 1842, Hilaire Guilbault had been in the Columbia District for four years. He had a wife — Louise Walla Walla, whom he had married at Fort Vancouver in April 1842, three months earlier, at which same ceremony he formally adopted her four children as his own. He was stationed at the Cowlitz Farm, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s major agricultural operation on the River Cowlitz, working as a laborer alongside a community of French-Canadian, Métis, and Indigenous farm hands.
On a day in late July, he was in the woods near the farm with two fellow servants, splitting shingles. Their names were Narcisse Forcier and Narcisse Moussette.
Moussette began to talk about John McLoughlin Jr., who had been murdered in April at the Company’s Fort Stikine — killed by the servants under his command while in charge of the post. The story had shaken the Columbia District. Moussette raised it not as a warning but as a precedent. If his comrades would agree, he said, he would attempt to do the same thing here — to murder Charles Forrest, the clerk in charge of Cowlitz Farm, if the other servants would support him.
Hilaire Guilbault rejected the proposal. He reproved Moussette for it. And when the work day ended, he went directly to Mr. Forrest and told him everything.
Five days later — on July 30, 1842 — he gave a sworn deposition before James Douglas.
The document that survives in the Hudson’s Bay Company Archives — HBCA B.47/z/1, Cowlitz Farm Miscellaneous Items, 1842 — is a two-page sworn statement in a clear clerical hand, witnessed and signed by James Douglas himself. Its contents label, added by an archivist, reads simply: Deposition of Hilaire Gilbeault re intended murder of Charles Forrest.
HBCA B.47/z/1 · Cowlitz Farm · 30 July 1842 · Sworn before James Douglas
Hilaire Gilbeault, a servant in the employ of the Hudsons Bay Company, stationed at a Farm on the River Cowelitz, deposeth and sayeth, that one day, being at work splitting shingles in the woods near the Farm, in company with Narcisse Forcier and Narcisse Moussette two of his fellow-servants who were employed with him at the same job; he heard Narcisse Moussette speaking of the death of the late Mr John McLoughlin, who was murdered in April last, at the Hudsons Bay Company’s Establishment of Stikine, while in charge of that Post, by the Company’s servants attached to it; and that the said Narcisse Moussette went on further to say that if his comrades would agree, he would attempt to repeat the same act here, meaning thereby that he would assist in murdering Mr Forrest the Clerk in charge of the Farm, if the other servants would support him. The said deponent rejected the proposal with horror, and reproved the said Narcisse Moussette for his wicked designs and immediately on his return from work he called upon Mr Forrest, and told him every thing that Narcisse Moussette had said in his presence.
James Douglas was not a minor official. He was already the senior figure at Fort Vancouver and would go on to become the first Governor of British Columbia. He traveled to Cowlitz Farm personally to take these depositions. That he did so — and that he signed both statements himself — signals how seriously the Company treated the matter. The murder of McLoughlin Jr. at Fort Stikine had been a catastrophe for the HBC’s sense of internal order. The prospect of a similar act at Cowlitz Farm was not something Douglas would leave to subordinates.
Narcisse Forcier, the third man in the woods that day, gave a separate deposition. Douglas noted at the bottom of Hilaire’s document that Forcier’s account “states to the same effect.” Two men had heard the same proposal. Both refused it. Both reported it.
What happened to Narcisse Moussette after July 30, 1842 is not recorded in the French Prairie community. He does not appear in the Oregon settlement records that document Hilaire Guilbault, Narcisse Forcier, and the wider Cowlitz-to-French Prairie community. The deposition was the end of his presence in this story.
Source: Hudson’s Bay Company Archives, B.47/z/1, “Deposition of Hilaire Gilbeault re intended murder of Charles Forrest,” Cowlitz Farm, 30 July 1842. Sworn before James Douglas. Archives of Manitoba, Winnipeg. This is the only primary HBCA document identified to date that names Hilaire Guilbault as its principal subject.
Godfather at Saint Paul Mission
Six months after the deposition, Hilaire Guilbault was standing at a baptismal font at Saint Paul Mission in the Willamette Valley.
The child being baptized was François, the son of Paul Guilbeau and Catherine, Walla Walla by nation. Paul Guilbeau was Hilaire’s first cousin once removed — a French-Canadian boatman from L’Assomption, Québec, who had been in the Columbia District since 1831 and was by 1843 one of the most frequently appearing names in the Fort Vancouver mission registers: godfather at baptisms, witness at burials, embedded in the community across a decade of Catholic life on the Willamette.
The register entry for January 29, 1843 is brief and precise. Father J.B.Z. Bolduc officiated. The child’s parents were Paul and Catherine. The godfather was Hilaire Guilbeau. The godmother was Louise Walawala by nation — Hilaire’s own wife, married to him nine months earlier at Fort Vancouver, the same ceremony at which Hilaire had adopted her four children as his own.
B-876: the baptism of François Guilbeau, January 29, 1843. Godfather: Hilaire Guilbeau. Godmother: Louise Walawala. The register entry links the two Guilbault cousins through the Catholic bond of godparentage — Hilaire naming Paul’s son, Louise serving as godmother, nine months after her own marriage to Hilaire at Fort Vancouver. Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver Vol. I (Munnick & Warner, Binford & Mort, 1972).
These two men — Hilaire and Paul — were not simply neighbors at French Prairie who happened to share a surname. They descended from the same extended Guilbault family of the lower St. Lawrence valley, from the same network of Quebec parishes that had fed men into the fur trade for generations. Paul had come west in 1821; Hilaire in 1838. They had traveled different routes across different decades to arrive in the same community. At the baptism of François in January 1843, they made that kinship formal in the language their world understood best: Catholic godparentage, witnessed by a priest and entered into a register.
Both men would die in 1849. Both at Saint Paul, Marion County, Oregon. Both in the same community they had built from the ruins of the fur trade world.
A Stable This Winter
The years between the godfather record and Hilaire’s death are documented in scattered but telling fragments. He remained in HBC employ at Cowlitz Farm through at least 1848 — a laborer, and in the language of at least one contemporaneous source, a farmer. The Cowlitz Farm was a substantial operation: twenty-nine numbered fields totaling more than 1,800 acres under cultivation, growing wheat, clover, timothy, oats, turnips, and colseed along the banks of the Cowlitz River, with a barn, residential structures for the workers, and a permanent community of employees and their families.
On Monday, September 6, 1847, the farm manager William Roberts made a note in his journal. The day’s entry ran through the usual rhythms of a working farm — ploughing, well-digging, carting manure, sending men for supplies — and then recorded one specific task: “Carrier pulling down & carters removing Gilbeauts old house to below the hill where it is to be set up again to answer for a stable this winter.”
It is a small detail in a long day’s record. But it is Hilaire Guilbault’s house being moved, repurposed, made into a stable. He had lived at Cowlitz Farm long enough to have had a house there. Five years after the deposition, he was still in the community — still working, still present, his domestic life embedded in the farm’s physical landscape even as that landscape was being rearranged around him.
Roberts’s footnote in the published journal goes further. It identifies Hilaire as a “middleman and farmer, 1847–48, Cowlitz Farm employee list, H.B.C. Arch.” — confirming that an HBC administrative record documented his service in these years. It adds one more fact: “He was at the farm as early as 1842.” The deposition had already established this. Now an HBC employee list confirms it independently.
In March 1847, he had been granted a provisional land claim in Lewis County, Oregon — registered in the provisional government records as Vol. 4, Pg. 205. He was a settler, not merely a laborer. He had staked a claim to the ground.
He did not live to patent it.
Hilaire Guilbault died on June 26, 1849, at Saint Paul, Marion County, Oregon. He was thirty years old. He was buried at the Saint Paul Roman Catholic Mission Cemetery — the same community cemetery that would receive the bodies of the voyageurs and their families, the fur trade servants and their wives and children, who had come west through the same pipeline of brigades and country marriages and Catholic mission life that had brought Hilaire from the Dalles des Morts to French Prairie.
His son François — born to him and Louise Walla Walla in 1847, the year Roberts moved the house — died two years later, on November 8, 1851, aged three or four years old. He was buried at the same cemetery. The community plaque at the Old Saint Paul Roman Catholic Mission Cemetery records his name: Francois Gilbeau, 4 yr., Nov. 8.
André Chalifoux — the steersman who had held the capsized bateau together in 1838, who had lost two of his own children in the current that day — is also named on that plaque. He had come west, too. They all had.
The men who survived Death Rapids did not go home. They went to work. And the archive followed them there.
The Full Record Behind This Story
The case study and methodology pages document every primary source cited here — HBCA B.47/z/1, the Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, the Roberts Cowlitz Farm Journal, and the PRDH records that establish Hilaire’s Quebec origins and his relationship to Paul Guilbault “The Canadian.”
Case Study: The Survivor → Full Methodology → Paul Guilbault — The Canadian → From Oka to Oregon →Want to Know When New Stories Are Published?
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