The Mountain-Slasher
In September 1684, a young man from the coastal province of Saintonge stepped off a ship at Québec. He was roughly eighteen years old, the son of Jean Gourbeil and Marie Bernard from the parish of Saint-Porchaire in what is now the Charente-Maritime. His true family name — Gourbeil or Gourbillon — would eventually fade from the colonial record. What survived instead was the name his comrades gave him: Tranchemontagne.
The Mountain-Slasher.
It is a name that still appears on parish registers, notarial acts, and census records more than three centuries later. And like all the best dit names of New France, it tells us something about the man who carried it — and about the world that produced him.
What "Tranchemontagne" Actually Meant
To modern ears, the name sounds fierce. Tranche — to cut, to slice. Montagne — mountain. A man who could cleave mountains. But in seventeenth-century French culture, the word carried a different resonance. Le Robert defines tranchemontagne as "fanfaron qui se vante d'exploits fabuleux" — a braggart who boasts of fabulous exploits. It belongs to the same family as matamore, the boastful soldier of the commedia dell'arte, and fier-à-bras, the swashbuckler who talks bigger than he fights.
This does not mean André was ridiculous. Among French military units, noms de guerre — war names — served specific social functions. They distinguished soldiers with common surnames. They built esprit de corps. And they reflected how a man was perceived by the people who knew him best: his fellow soldiers. A name like Tranchemontagne could mark genuine daring, good-natured swagger, or the kind of bold personality that kept morale alive during long winter marches. Often it marked all three at once.
— Gérard Lebel, Our French-Canadian Ancestors, Vol. 19
André was not the only Tranchemontagne in the colony. The name circulated among French soldiers the way call signs circulate in modern military units — a shared vocabulary of personality types. Sansregret (No Regret), Brisefer (Iron-Breaker), Lafleur (The Flower), Sanschagrin (No Sorrow). Each name told you something immediately about the man standing in front of you. André's told you he was the kind of man who claimed he could handle anything — and probably said so loudly enough that everyone in the barracks heard him.
That several unrelated men carried the same dit name is worth holding onto, because it is a trap as well as a curiosity. A shared dit name is not evidence of a shared family. The Soulière dit Tranchemontagne line of L'Assomption, which appears elsewhere in this series, is a separate family: the name is the same, the blood is not — at least on the evidence so far.
A Marine, Not a Carignan
This distinction matters, and it is easy to get wrong. André Corbeil was baptized on 28 April 1666 — a year after the celebrated Carignan-Salières Regiment arrived in New France. He was an infant while that regiment was fighting the Mohawk campaigns and building the forts along the Richelieu River. By the time the Carignan-Salières was demobilized in 1668, André was two years old. He cannot have served in it, and any account that places him there has confused two military generations.
When he arrived at Québec on 24 September 1684, he came as a soldier in the Compagnies franches de la Marine — the professional colonial troops that replaced the Carignan as France's permanent military presence in Canada. His unit was the Crisafy Company, commanded by the brothers Antoine and Thomas de Crisafy, who had received their captains' commissions in France on 3 April 1684 and sailed with their companies that same year.
That company name deserves a word about where it comes from. Cyprien Tanguay, compiling his Dictionnaire généalogique in the 1880s, read a marriage act that named André a soldier of Monsieur de Crisafy. That act has not been found since; Gérard Lebel, working the same family a century later, called the detail priceless and no longer verifiable. The Crisafy attribution therefore rests on Tanguay's reading of a document we can no longer put our hands on. What sits on firmer ground is everything around it: the date André landed, the year the Crisafy brothers brought their companies over, and the plain fact that a soldier stepping ashore at Québec in September 1684 was stepping into the Marine and not into a regiment disbanded sixteen years earlier.
The Marine companies were a fundamentally different kind of force. Where the Carignan-Salières had been an expeditionary regiment sent from France for a specific campaign, the Marines were permanent: crown-paid colonial garrison troops under the naval ministry, stationed in Canada for the long term, expected to defend the colony, train militia, and eventually settle.
And the warfare they practiced bore little resemblance to European battlefield tactics. Marine soldiers in New France learned canoe travel, snowshoe marching, and the ambush-and-raid style of la petite guerre — small war. They adopted Indigenous tactics and equipment. They operated in small detachments across vast distances. A successful Marine soldier needed adaptability, physical endurance, and a personality comfortable with uncertainty. The shy and rigid did not thrive.
This was exactly the kind of environment where a name like Tranchemontagne was earned.
Nine Years a Soldier
André spent roughly nine years in military service, from his arrival in 1684 until he mustered out around 1693. Those nine years encompassed some of the most volatile events in the colony's history.
In 1687, Governor Denonville launched a major expedition against the Seneca — an operation that relied heavily on Marine soldiers and their Indigenous allies for wilderness travel and combat. In 1689, the Lachine attack devastated settlements near Montréal, sending the colony into emergency mobilization. If André was stationed in the Montréal region — and his later settlement at nearby Pointe-aux-Trembles and Rivière-des-Prairies strongly suggests he was — he almost certainly experienced the defensive patrols and refugee escorts that followed.
Then came King William's War. From 1689 to 1697, colonial warfare became nearly continuous: winter raids on snowshoes into English territory, surprise attacks on frontier settlements, long-distance expeditions to Hudson Bay and Newfoundland. Marine soldiers were the backbone of these campaigns. Whether or not André participated in any specific named engagement, the operational tempo of those years would have shaped him profoundly.
By the time he decided to leave military life, he was approximately twenty-seven years old and had spent his entire adult life as a frontier soldier. The boy from Saintonge had become something the province of his birth could never have produced: a Canadian.
The Settler's Life
On 4 January 1693, André Corbeil dit Tranchemontagne appeared before the priest at Pointe-aux-Trembles to marry Françoise Bizelon — a widow of about forty-two who had borne ten children to her second husband, seven of them still living, and who had an adult daughter besides from her first marriage. She was a woman of considerable experience: a Fille du Roi who had arrived in the colony in 1668, widowed once before she married Pierre Marsan dit Lapierre, and by 1693 twice over. André was twenty-six; he was her third husband. No marriage contract was drawn up — a sin of omission, the family historian noted, though perhaps understandable for a soldier with few possessions and a bride who already knew exactly what colonial marriage entailed.
The marriage lasted barely seventeen months. On 30 May 1694, Françoise died in childbirth. Their son François was baptized the same day she was buried at Saint-Enfant-Jésus — burial and baptism recorded on the same page, in the same hand. André was left alone with a newborn and five minor Marsan stepchildren in his care: Antoinette, Jeanne, François, Jean and Joseph.
Eight days later, on 7 June 1694, he stood before the royal notaries at Ville-Marie with the three families his wife had left behind, transacting to head off the lawsuits that three sets of half-siblings would otherwise generate. The infant François was named among the heirs, his share of three hundred livres payable in equal portions on New Year's Day of 1695, 1696 and 1697 — in coin, or in merchantable wheat, because André had no money.
Eight months later he found Charlotte Poudret, also recorded as Poutré — seventeen years old, the seventh child of another former soldier, André Poudret dit Lavigne of the Carignan Regiment, and Marie Jeanne Burel. They married on 14 February 1695 at Pointe-aux-Trembles. The marriage contract, drawn up two days earlier before notary Adhémar in Ville-Marie, was notably thorough: the dowry was set at 400 livres, the reciprocal préciput at 100 livres, and the document specified that little François Corbeil — alive, then, at nine months old — "will be raised and educated in the fear of God…until the age of eighteen."
He did not reach eighteen, or if he did, no record of it survives. February 1695 is the last time François Corbeil appears in the documents. There is no marriage for him, and no burial. He simply stops.
André and Charlotte would have eleven children between 1696 and 1718. In November 1698, struggling financially and still entangled with the Marsan heirs, André exchanged his Pointe-aux-Trembles properties for uncleared land at Rivière-des-Prairies on the north side of the island. The exchange with André Archambault required starting over entirely: Archambault agreed to help build him a cabin sixteen feet long and fourteen feet wide, sow two minots of wheat, and provide a shed. Of the three hundred and fifty livres Archambault owed, three hundred went straight to Pierre Marsan's children.
The family persevered. By the 1732 census, André owned a concession of forty arpents with a house, a barn, a stable, and thirty-eight arpents under cultivation. He was elected church warden in 1717. He signed a contract for a family pew in 1724. In 1730, at about sixty-four, he gathered his children and sons-in-law at the rectory to announce that his arms no longer had the strength to work the land, and he donated the farm to his unmarried son Charles — who in return would provide his parents with firewood, a cow, a garden, twelve hens, one rooster, and a dignified old age.
The Name That Remained
André Corbeil died in October 1740 and was buried on the 13th. The register gives his age as seventy-six; by his baptism of April 1666 he was seventy-four — the ordinary drift of a colonial burial entry, where ages were given from memory by whoever stood at the graveside. Charlotte survived him by fifteen years, dying at the home of their son Simon at Saint-Antoine-sur-Richelieu in 1755.
The family name went through the transformations typical of colonial record-keeping: Gourbil, Gourbeil, Corbeil, Corbeille, Goupil, and eventually into the variations Beel, Cobach, Core, Corbulle, and Gourbeille. But Tranchemontagne endured — carried forward not as a joke but as an identity, outliving the military culture that created it.
Whether André chose the name himself or received it from his comrades in the Crisafy Company, whether it marked genuine bravado or affectionate mockery, it became inseparable from the man. In a colony where identity was fluid, where a Saintongeais recruit named Gourbeil could become a Canadian settler named Corbeil, the dit name was often the truest name of all. It said not where you came from, but who you had become.
The Mountain-Slasher became a farmer, a father of eleven, a church warden, and a man who divided his land with care among his heirs. But the name — bold, theatrical, slightly larger than life — never let the colony forget the young soldier who had carried it.
André Corbeil dit Tranchemontagne was the third husband of Françoise Baiselat, a Fille du Roi and founding mother of the Souliere Line.
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