The Voyageur Years

The Challenge

Gabriel Guilbault père was born at L'Assomption in 1762. By October 1798, when his children received emergency baptisms at Saint-Paul-de-Joliette, his occupation was recorded as "voyageur et maintenant agriculteur" — voyageur, and now farmer. The voyageur years were behind him. Or so the priest assumed.

They were not. By 1816, Gabriel was back in the pays d'en haut — at fifty-four years of age. His wife Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe had died at Rigaud in June 1813. He remarried in February 1815. And then, at an age when most men of his era were aging into their final decade, Gabriel Guilbault returned to the North West Company.

Parish records label Gabriel as a voyageur across multiple decades, but they do not document where he worked. They record baptisms, marriages, and burials — not canoe routes, trade contracts, or account balances. The gap between Marie Josephte's death in June 1813 and any specific documented context spans more than seven years. During this time, he remarried, fathered children, and returned to the interior trade.

Finding Gabriel in the NWC account books required not one archive search but two independent platforms — and they did not return the same results. The HBCA Name Index, the searchable database at the Archives of Manitoba, identified Gabriel in three volumes under phonetic name variants. But two additional volumes documenting his 1821 dissolution payments — F.4/43 and F.4/45 — appeared only through Ancestry's separate indexing of the same collection, where his name was rendered as Guilbeau and, in one entry so phonetically degraded it defies surname searching, Gulbiau.

Neither platform alone gives a complete picture. A thorough search of this collection now requires both platforms and a willingness to search under first name alone across hundreds of results.

The NWC Name Index also identified a second man — Paul Guilbeau — working at the same posts in the same years. Establishing who Paul was, and distinguishing him from a second man also named Paul Guilbault in the same records, required tracing five volumes and the Quebec parish system. The resolution came from the NWC's own dissolution ledger, which placed the two Pauls eight entries apart on the same page — with different surname spellings and different wage figures — making the disambiguation visible to anyone who looked.

The 1821 merger restructured the entire interior fur trade. What happened to Gabriel after the merger? The 336-livre credit balance in his Athabasca account was his to claim. The dissolution payment records in F.4/43 and F.4/45 show 610 livres — the gross wage figure at the dissolution stage, before the Lachine deductions that produced the net 336. His final accounting is documented across three volumes at two accounting stages.

The Breakthrough

F.4/47 — North West Balances 1821 — places both men eight entries apart on the same dissolution page, under different surname spellings:

• Gibeau Paul: 500 wages / 617.14 balance — Paul père, Gabriel's brother. Matches his F.5.3 NWC contract (500 livres) and his F.4/37 settlement (617.14) exactly.
• Guilbeau Paul: 350 wages / 96 balance — Paul "The Canadian." Matches his F.4/32, p.396 account exactly.

The NWC's own dissolution ledger distinguished them with different surname spellings. The disambiguation that required five volumes to establish was built into the company's accounting all along. Paul Guilbault père's identity as Gabriel's brother is confirmed through seven Quebec parish documents. Paul "The Canadian" is Gauthier Entry #57 — HBC 1821–1840, linked to Hilaire Guilbault and the Oregon settlement.

The Result

Gabriel Guilbault was continuously employed by the North West Company from 1816 through the 1821 merger — five years documented across five HBCA volumes in two search platforms. His route: Lac La Pluie to Athabasca. Athabasca wages: 450 livres. Net balance after post deductions: 336 livres. Gross wage figure in the dissolution payment records: 610 livres. His account was formally settled — and he was back at Lachine by August 31, 1821, in the same dissolution payment list as the Indigenous voyageurs who had paddled with him.

He was fifty-four to fifty-nine years old during this service. His brother Paul, born 1761, was working alongside him. Together they appear in three of the same five volumes. The fur trade pattern of family-based recruitment, operating invisibly in the Quebec parish records, is directly visible in the NWC account books.

The methodological discovery is as significant as the archival one. The HBCA Name Index and Ancestry's indexing of the same collection are complementary, not equivalent. The HBCA index found Gabriel in three volumes. Ancestry found him in two additional dissolution volumes under spellings the Name Index does not surface. Three searches are now standard for any thorough HBCA research: the HBCA NWC Account Books Name Index; the HBCA Servants' Contracts Index; and Ancestry's HBC Corporate and Employment Records using first-name and surname variant searches.

In October 1798, a priest recorded "voyageur et maintenant agriculteur." By 1802, the Oka records called him maçon. From 1816 through 1821, five NWC volumes document him in the pays d'en haut. When Gabriel died at St-Benoît on 8 April 1833, the register recorded: maçon. The mason's trade, not the voyageur's paddle, was how the parish remembered him. His son Joseph Claude, born in the pays d'en haut to his Ojibwe wife, was buried five months earlier at Oka — recorded by that priest as what he had always been: Voyageur.

Gabriel's movements between the August 1821 dissolution payment and his 1827 Ottawa River land acquisition remain undocumented. The origins of Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe — "de la Nation Sauteuse sur le lac Supérieur" — remain the research frontier for the family's Ojibwe line. And whether José Gilbeau (A.32/30, fo.192, 1821, Fort Chipewyan, George Simpson) is Gabriel's son Joseph Claude — a promotion from devant to gouvernail at the merger — is an open hypothesis pending the 1819 original HBC contract.