The Survivor — How the Research Was Done

Establish Quebec Identity and Pedigree Through PRDH

The starting point was a systematic PRDH-IGD search for Hilaire Guilbault, son of Joseph Guilbault and Rosalie Lescault, born 1818. PRDH Individual #2462814 confirmed the baptism: June 23, 1818, Verchères (St-François-Xavier); father Joseph Guilbault, mother Rosalie Marie Lescault Lesot. The Verchères register image provides the original entry — the same entry that names Hilaire Lesot and Félicité Guinreau Labadie as sponsors, and Rambor père as priest.

PRDH Individual #611757 confirmed Joseph Guilbault: born December 15, 1786; baptized January 1, 1787, St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie; parents Paul Guilbault and Marie Geneviève Olivier Milot. Joseph’s marriage to Rosalie Marie Lescault Lesot on September 23, 1811 at Verchères is confirmed in PRDH Family #116841, which lists their children, including Hilaire (b. June 23, 1818).

PRDH Family #34045 (Gabriel Guilbault b. 1731 × Marie Charlotte Morin) confirmed the relationship to Paul Guilbault b. 1761 — listed as a child of this family alongside Gabriel père b. 1762, the researcher’s 4th-great-grandfather. This established that Hilaire’s grandfather Paul (b. 1761) and Gabriel père (b. 1762) were brothers, making Hilaire the researcher’s second cousin four times removed through the Gabriel père line. The same card names Gabriel’s own parents as Charles Guilbault and Marie Catherine Antoinette Deguise Flamand.

Locate Hilaire in the Gauthier Compiled Ancestry

Gauthier entry #56 (GUILBAULT, Hilaire; HBC 1838–1848; born June 23, 1818, Verchères; son of Joseph Guilbault, farmer, and Rosalie Lescault; linked to Paul Guilbault) was confirmed against PRDH Individual #2462814 on every verifiable field: birth date, parish, parents. The Gauthier document is a compiled secondary source, but its identification data for Hilaire is independently confirmable.

The Gauthier designation “HBC 1838–1848” provides the service period framework. The phrase “linked to Paul Guilbault” — which Gauthier applies to Paul as well — signals a community connection that the PRDH records now document as first cousin once removed. The relationship is not stated in the Gauthier entry; it must be established through the pedigree chain. Gauthier’s scope (“Ancestry of French Canadians to Oregon Prior to 1842”) explains why Hilaire is included: he belongs to the same westward migration community she was documenting.

No HBC servant contract has been located for Hilaire in the HBCA Name File. The Gauthier service dates cannot currently be confirmed against a primary HBCA source. This is documented as an open research question, not a gap that can be papered over.

Identify the Dalles des Morts Survival Through Secondary Sources

The Munnick annotation A-34 states that Hilaire was “one of those who saved himself in the bateau disaster at the Dalles des Morts with the brigade bringing Fathers Blanchet and Demers to the West in 1838.” This is a secondary source claim derived from Munnick’s research in mission and HBC records; it is not an original document. The claim is consistent with Gauthier’s HBC start date of 1838, with Hilaire’s presence in the Columbia District in subsequent Catholic register entries, and with the historical record of the 1838 Columbia Express disaster.

The Dalles des Morts disaster of October 22, 1838 is well-documented in HBC history and secondary literature. The brigade was transporting Fathers Norbert Blanchet and Modeste Demers — the first Catholic missionaries to Oregon Country — on the HBC Columbia Express. At Les Dalles des Morts, a bateau capsized. The fullest near-contemporary account is the steersman’s own, told to Paul Kane at the same rapids in October 1846 and printed in Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of North America (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans & Roberts, 1859), 332–335. The steersman, who is not named, describes two boats and a party of about forty; his boat carried twenty-two. The whirlpools were filling as he ran the rapids; the boat went more than a mile before Robert Wallace, holding his wife Maria, sprang for a ledge of rock and the boat filled and turned over. The steersman and another man rode the overturned hull down, his own daughter of about ten was found alive inside it among the luggage, and “M’Gillveray and four others saved themselves by swimming, the remaining fourteen were drowned.” Other accounts give twelve dead, among them Pierre Leblanc and two of his children and two sons of André Chalifoux.

Kane’s text is treated with care: the steersman spoke eight years after the event (he says “about four years ago”), and recent scholarship holds that Wanderings was largely written for Kane rather than by him (I.S. MacLaren, 1995). It is the account of one survivor at second hand, not a record of the brigade.

Two Company records fix the date and two of the dead. HBCA A.44/3, p. 35, kept at Hudson’s Bay House, London, records that administration of the effects of “Pierre Le Blanc late of Fort Vancouver Columbia River in North America, a Servant of the Hudsons Bay Company deceased” was granted on 19 December 1844 to his widow Nancy Le Blanc by the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, and gives his death as 22 October 1838 — the day of the wreck. The HBCA biographical sheet for André Chalifoux lists him as guide in 1838 (B.239/g/18), and quotes Munnick that two of his sons, “apparently Michel and Charles,” were drowned in the bateau wreck at the Dalles des Morts. Neither record names Hilaire; they establish the event he survived.

Sylvia Van Kirk’s biography of Leblanc’s wife, Nancy McKenzie (Matooskie), in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 8, fills in the family. Leblanc, who had been building Lower Fort Garry when they married at Red River in 1831, was posted to the Columbia in 1838; the family crossed with Blanchet and Demers, and Nancy appears as witness or godmother at many of the baptisms the priests performed on the way. Their eldest daughter died in September; on 22 October Leblanc and their two other children drowned at the Dalles. Nancy and her daughter Grace (by John George McTavish) were given a home at Fort Vancouver. Van Kirk cites the Munnick registers, HBCA records, and J.A. Stevenson, “Disaster in the Dalles,” The Beaver, outfit 273 (September 1942): 19–21 — the last not yet consulted here.

The A-34 annotation designates Hilaire as “a middleman” — a specific HBC workforce category, indicating a paddler in a brigade, senior to a simple engagé but below a guide or steersman. The identification is consistent with the HBC service period Gauthier establishes. The claim is treated as a secondary source requiring eventual primary verification in HBC brigade records; it has not yet been located in any contemporaneous HBC journal entry.

Locate and Transcribe HBCA B.47/z/1 — The Deposition

HBCA B.47/z/1 (Section B, Class 47, Sub-division z, Piece 1; Description: Cowlitz Farm Miscellaneous Items, 1842) was identified through the HBCA finding aids as the archive group for Cowlitz Farm miscellaneous documents. The contents label, in a cataloging hand, reads: “Deposition of Hilaire Gilbeault re intended murder of Charles Forrest.” This is the only HBCA record identified to date that names Hilaire in its own right as a primary subject.

The deposition runs across three pages on two leaves, numbered 1 and 2 at the upper right, in a clear clerical hand, headed “Deposition of Hilaire Gilbeault” and dated 1842 at the head of the first page. James Douglas signed twice on the final page — beneath Hilaire’s deposition, and beneath a note confirming that Narcisse Forceur’s deposition “states to the same effect, as the preceding made by Hilaire Gilbeault” — both dated July 30, 1842. Forceur’s own deposition is not in the file; only Douglas’s note of it.

The deposition establishes: (1) Hilaire’s HBC employment status and location — “a servant in the employ of the Hudsons Bay Company, stationed at a Farm on the River Cowelitz”; (2) the names of two fellow servants — Narcisse Forcier and Narcisse Moussette; (3) the substance of Moussette’s proposal to murder Charles Forrest, the Cowlitz Farm clerk; (4) Hilaire’s immediate rejection and reporting of the threat; and (5) James Douglas’s personal oversight of the investigation. Forrest remained in charge after the incident: on January 29, 1843, he stood godfather at the Cowlitz mission as “Charles Forrest Clerk in charge for the Honorable Company” (B-872), the same day Hilaire stood godfather there. By September 1847 the farm journal was being kept by William Roberts.

Search the Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest

The Catholic Church Records of the Pacific Northwest, Vancouver Vol. I (Munnick & Warner, Binford & Mort, 1972) was searched for all Guilbault entries. The register returned Hilaire on the following pages: M-2 (marriage, April 21, 1842); B-876 (godfather, January 29, 1843). The entry immediately before M-2, B-854, is the baptism of his bride the same day. The Munnick annotation A-34 provides the biographical summary for both Hilaire and Paul Guilbault (I) on the same page.

B-854 and M-2 (April 21, 1842), both by Father Demers: Louise, Walla Walla by nation, aged about 30 years, was baptized, with Jean Baptiste Lajoie as godfather; she then married Hilaire Guilbeau after the publication of one bann and the dispensation of two others. At the same ceremony, Hilaire formally adopted four children of the bride — names not given. Witnesses: Jean Baptiste Lajoie and Alexandre Pambrun, who “have not known how to sign.” The marriage entry does not name the place; Lajoie and Pambrun appear repeatedly as witnesses on the surrounding pages, alongside Cowlitz Prairie families such as Plamondon, Bouchard and Cotnoir.

B-876 (January 29, 1843) records Father Bolduc’s baptism of François, legitimate child of Paul Guilbeau and Catherine, Walawala by nation. Godfather: Hilaire Guilbeau. Godmother: Louise Walawala by nation. Neither could sign. Munnick notes that the entries from B-866 to the end of Vol. I are those of the Saint Francis Xavier Mission at Cowlitz, so this baptism took place at the mission serving the farm where Hilaire worked. This is the primary document that confirms the family bond between the two cousins in the Oregon record.

The M-2 and B-876 records together establish a nine-month kinship arc: Hilaire married Louise in April 1842; Louise stood godmother with Hilaire for Paul’s son in January 1843. The same day’s entries show Paul and Catherine standing sponsors in turn (B-879) and Charles Forrest standing godfather (B-872). The two families were bound by the Catholic bonds of marriage and godparentage across both lines.

Confirm Oregon Settlement Through Civil Records and the Cowlitz Farm Journal

The Early Oregonians Database (Oregon State Archives) carries Hilaire’s Oregon record: death June 24/26, 1849, St. Paul, Marion County; marriage April 21, 1842, Vancouver County (spouse Louise, surname unknown); provisional land grant March 8, 1847, Lewis County, Vol. 4, Pg. 205. Sources cited: Vancouver I; St Paul II 21-S11; findagrave. The database is a compiled index, not an independent witness: “Vancouver I” is the same Munnick volume already cited above, and the St. Paul burial entry it cites could not be found (below). The land grant is the one item it adds that no other source here carries.

The Roberts Cowlitz Farm journal entry (September 6, 1847) is now a primary source in hand. The published journal entry names Hilaire directly — “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” — and footnote 44 on the same page provides a biographical note: “Hilard Gilbeault, middleman and farmer, 1847-48, Cowlitz Farm employee list, H.B.C. Arch. He was at the farm as early as 1842 (HBRS VI:66n).” The footnote names a Cowlitz Farm employee list in the HBCA (not yet directly consulted) that may provide contract terms and service details the Name File search has not returned. Its 1842 statement rests on HBRS VI:66n — the Hudson’s Bay Record Society edition of John McLoughlin’s Fort Vancouver letters, second series, 1839–44, the volume that covers the 1842 Stikine murder. That note has not yet been consulted, and it may itself rest on the 1842 Cowlitz incident; until it is traced, it is not counted as a witness independent of B.47/z/1.

The Early Oregonians Database cites “St Paul II 21-S11” as a source for Hilaire’s death and burial record. St. Paul Mission Vol. II was searched in its entirety; the S-11 entry for Hilaire was not found. This is documented as negative evidence, not a gap. The death date and burial location are carried by the Early Oregonians Database and Munnick’s annotation; the burial register entry itself remains unlocated in any surviving St. Paul Mission register.