Born in the Pays d'en Haut

The Challenge

Joseph Claude Guilbault was born in June 1797 somewhere in the pays d'en haut — in the interior fur trade country, before his family came down to the St. Lawrence. His father Gabriel Guilbault was a voyageur. His mother was Marie Josephte Abitakijikokwe, an Anishinaabe woman whose January 1801 baptism at Oka records her as de la nation Sauteuse sur le lac supérieur. Joseph Claude was baptized at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie on October 10, 1798, at sixteen months of age, and the priest noted the unusual fact: né et ondoyé dans les pays d'en haut. Born and privately baptized in the upper country.

He was one of three children born there — his brother Gabriel and his sister Angélique were carried down from the upper country and baptized beside him that same October day. What set him apart was not where he began but that he alone never settled. Gabriel fils came home to Quebec, farmed, married, and was still calling himself voyageur in the 1851 census at sixty. Angélique married at Rigaud in 1815 and was buried there four years later with her father standing at the grave. Joseph Claude never came back except to die.

The name Joseph Guilbault is not rare in this generation. The extended Guilbault network — centred at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie and L'Assomption, spreading through the Lanaudière parishes — produced at least five men of the name in overlapping years. Unsourced online trees have attributed the Oka burial to three of them.

• Paul's son Joseph (b. 1786, m. Rosalie Lescault) — eliminated by his children's births. He married at Verchères in 1811, fathered children in Quebec through the 1840s, settled in the Joliette area, and never carries a voyageur designation. He cannot be the man buried at Oka in 1833.
• The nephew Joseph (b. 14 December 1798, son of Joseph Louis) — eliminated by a conception interval. His first child was born 2 December 1820, conceived about March 1820. A man in Lower Canada in March could not have been on the upper Peace River by mid-May, and that is where the 1820 contract was passed.

The challenge here is not that the records lie. It is that for a man who spent his adult life in the pays d'en haut, the Quebec parish system was not built to document his existence. Parish registers capture baptisms, marriages and burials in Quebec parishes. A man baptized at sixteen months, never married in a Quebec church, and returned to Quebec only to die will leave almost nothing.

The obvious remedy is to go to the archives of the companies that employed voyageurs. That was done. What follows is what was found there, and what it turned out to be worth.

The Evidence

The renewal clause is solid and valuable: it establishes an 1819 engagement that exists and has not been retrieved.

The opening clause states the engagé's parish of origin, and on the plate it reads de la paroisse Larivière a Lagraise — the parish of the Rivière à la Graisse, the old name of the Rigaud River, on which Ste-Madeleine-de-Rigaud stands. The archive's name index gives only the first words, Can La Rivière.

Rigaud is where this family lived. Marie Josephte was buried there in June 1813; Angélique married there in January 1815 and was buried there in April 1819, a month before the contract's renewal clause implies an 1819 engagement; Gabriel fils married there in 1823; the second family's children were baptized there from 1815. A son of this household, asked his parish in 1820, would name Rigaud.

That makes the clause consistent with Joseph Claude, and the 1815 marriage puts him in that household in that parish five years earlier. It still does not identify him. The clause names no parents. The two Gibeau households of Rigaud have been checked and neither had a Joseph of working age in these years, but other Gibeau and Guilbault households of Argenteuil, Vaudreuil and Deux-Montagnes have not.

Two Montreal engagements of a Joseph have now been read from the notary's own minutes. On 5 January 1816, before John Gerbrand Beek, a Joseph Gibbeau d'Argenteuil engaged to the North West Company as a milieu to winter three years, at 750 livres; a François Gilbeau Argenteuil signed the same terms the same day. Argenteuil was where Gabriel's household lived, and three winters from 1816 runs to 1819, the year the Colville contract renews. But the act gives no age and no parents, and Gabriel had no living son François, so the pair is not explained by this family. In August 1815 a Joseph Guilbault joined a crew of fourteen hired at Montreal for a single summer round trip to Michilimackinac, at 250 livres, with no parish given. Either could be Joseph Claude. Neither can yet be called his.

A second contract belongs beside this one. On 23 February 1821, at Fort Wedderburn on Lake Athabasca, a José Gilbeau engaged to George Simpson as gouvernail — steersman — for one year in the Athabasca department, at 1,700 livres, with l'équipement d'un boute ordinaire. Same company, same department, signed in the winter of the 1820 engagement for the year following, a bowsman's place exchanged for a steersman's. He may be the same man re-engaging. Nothing in either document proves it. The Hudson's Bay Company's servants' accounts for 1821–22 carry this José in the Athabasca at his 1,700 livres and mark him gone to Montreal in 1822, with about 1,838 livres in his favour. The account for 1820–21, which opens his balance, has not been read; it is the place to see whether one man's account runs from Colville into Wedderburn.

The entry names no parents. The PRDH card carries a single rank — age 040, male — with no father, mother or spouse. Every element of it is consistent with Joseph Claude and none of it is probative of parentage. The identification is an argument from convergence of occupation, approximate age, place and timing, and it is offered here as one.

The Result

• Born June 1797 in the pays d'en haut, privately baptized there, to a voyageur father and an Anishinaabe mother — stated, 1798 baptism
• Baptized under condition at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie, 10 October 1798, aged sixteen months, with his brother Gabriel and sister Angélique — stated
• Named as a son, aged four, at his parents' marriage at Oka in January 1801, which legitimized the four children then living — stated
• Present at Rigaud on 6 February 1815, aged seventeen, at his father's second marriage, as Joseph Guilbeault son fils — stated
• A Joseph Guilbeault, Voyageur, aged about forty and recently arrived, buried at Oka 31 January 1833 — consistent, parentage not stated
• No Quebec marriage and no children found for him in any parish

No fur trade record has yet been shown to be his. The ledger account is another man's. The 1820 contract names his family's parish, but not his parents. The Red River entry may or may not be compatible with his death. Between October 1798 and January 1833 — thirty-four years, the whole of his working life — one entry places him: Rigaud, February 1815. Nothing else can be attributed to him with confidence.

The burial gives environ quarante ans against a documented birth in June 1797 — an overstatement of five years, and the priest hedged it. Set beside the rest of this family it is unremarkable: Gabriel père's 1833 burial gives ninety-three against a documented seventy, an error of twenty-three years; Joseph Morin's 1781 burial gives ninety against seventy-one; Gabriel fils's 1880 burial gives ninety-two against ninety. Four generations, four overstatements, and Joseph Claude's is the smallest of them. A stated age is only as good as the person stating it, and at a burial nobody is stating it.

Louis Pierre Constant Pinesi is Grand Chief Pierre Louis Constant Pinesi (1768–1834), the forenames transposed by a French-language priest. He had been recorded as premier chef of the Algonkins of the Lake of Two Mountains since a petition of July 1798, and in February 1830 the Crown, in the name of Sir James Kempt, formally designated him Grand Chief — a title conferred from outside, on a printed form with the name and date filled in, which added nothing to the standing he already held among his own people. He petitioned the Crown for recognition of Algonkin land rights across four decades and was never answered. He was chief of the bande de la Tourte, and he signed with the mark of a passenger pigeon. He died of cholera at Oka on 13 August 1834 with his wife Marguerite Nipawikwe, eighteen months after standing at this grave, and both were buried the following day.

Simon Kakiuttawelch has not been identified. He is not the Grand Chief's son Simon Chawanasiketch: Chawanasiketch's attested renderings are Chawanasiketch, Chawenassiketch, Constant and Pinesi, and Kakiuttawelch is not among them. The 1823 Oka census does list a son as Simon Constant — but the burial gives an Algonkin surname where the census gives a French one, so the two records share only a forename. Simon is not distinguishing here: the Grand Chief's brother was Simon Chimaganich, a chief in his own right, and his son-in-law was the Nipissing chief Simon Kiwekwato. Either would also be a man of standing at such a burial.

What remains is the part that mattered. The phrase depuis peu domicilié en cette mission has always read as the priest barely knowing the man he was burying — and the corrected margin, where he wrote the surname, struck it through and wrote it again, says the same thing. That stands. But the most prominent Algonkin leader in the Ottawa River watershed attended the burial, with a second Algonkin man beside him. A voyageur who arrived at Oka in his last weeks was unknown to the French priest and not unknown to the Algonkin community. That does not require the son.

The extended Guilbault network put more than one man into the trade — Gabriel himself, and his first cousin once removed Paul "the Canadian," whose line ended in Oregon. Gabriel had a Quebec place to return to, and he came back to it: a mason at Rigaud and Argenteuil for more than a decade. His brother Paul père never left it. Three Quebec documents place him at home in the years when a North West Company servant called Paul Gibeau was wintering in the interior, and he was buried at St-Paul-de-Lavaltrie in 1831 as cultivateur. Their Quebec identities were intact.

Gabriel was the only one who took an Anishinaabe wife and had children in the pays d'en haut. Joseph Claude is the consequence, a generation on. He had no Quebec household to return to because he had never really had one.

He is often said to have come home to his mother's community. That needs stating carefully. Marie Josephte was baptized and married at Oka in January 1801, is described as de cette mission in January 1802, and buried two of her children there. But by 1806 the family is recorded in the seigneurie d'Argenteuil, and she was buried at Ste-Madeleine-de-Rigaud on 25 June 1813, her husband present and styled mari de la défunte. When her son was buried at Oka in 1833 she had been dead twenty years and gone from that mission for nearly thirty. It was a community she had belonged to. It was not one she was waiting in.

When Gabriel Guilbault père was buried at Saint-Benoît on April 8, 1833, the register called him journalier du lieu — a day labourer of the place. He had been a maçon in the Rigaud and Argenteuil records from 1802 through 1815; by the end he was a labourer in the parish where he died. His brother Paul died in 1831 at Saint-Paul-de-Lavaltrie: cultivateur. Different endings, but both men had a Quebec place and a Quebec trade to be recorded by.

Joseph Claude died on January 29, 1833 — ten weeks before his father, and about ten miles from him. There is nothing in the record to say whether either knew of the other's death, and the closeness makes that silence harder to explain rather than easier. When Durocher recorded the burial he wrote one occupation word, Voyageur, because it was the only identity the man had brought to Oka with him. Whether the trade records will ever show us that work is a question this page cannot yet answer.