Update 10: Under Water

Hopefully the next update I share will be an announcement that we’ve secured grant funding to complete the manuscript next year. In the meantime, I have been busily working through dozens of legal documents and reading secondary sources.

A Key Theme: Debt and Disposession

Recently, my attention has been focused on Benjamin’s and Genevieve’s earliest years. What were their childhoods like? When and how did their parents acquire the farms on which they grew up? What else can I discover that might inform my understanding of the economic situations in which they were raised?

Well, the more records I transcribe and translate, the more debt becomes the defining element of Benjamin's and Genevieve’s childhoods. Their parents rarely if ever had a net worth above zero. They were frequently behind on payments for land, seeds, rent, or services, and some members of the family were absolutely buried by insurmountable levels of indebtedness.

In fact, looking at the narrative as a whole, the endless struggle against debt and dispossession might be the key theme of the entire book.

19th-century print of French-Canadian farmers plowing in the Saint Lawrence valley. (I've been unable to trace the original source.)

The Gervaises

First, I have clarified the series of events that led the Gervais family to leave Ste-Geneviève-de-Batiscan for Rivière-du-Loup in 1804. In 1791, months before the death of Benjamin’s paternal grandfather Francois Gervais, his father Jean-Baptiste and uncle Benoni inherited the old farmstead. This is where Benjamin was born in 1792 and where he spent his first twelve years.

Events on the other side of the family help explain the move to Rivière-du-Loup. Following the death of Benjamin’s maternal grandfather Prisque Jouineau in March 1804, Benjamin’s mother, aunts, and uncles all ceded their claims to the estate back to their mother (Ben's grandmother). She immediately promised the estate to Benjamin’s uncle Ignace Jouineau, explicitly cutting all the other children out of it. This decision seems harsh on the surface, and it may reflect underlying conflict within the family. Alternatively, it could be as straightforward as Ben’s grandmother said it was: Ignace cared for her and Prisque, and the marginal land they farmed could only support one family. It was only right that Ignace and his wife should inherit it. In the negitionations over estate rights, Benjamin’s parents were the only ones to ask for money from grandma Françoise in exchange for ceding their future claims on the estate.

The same month, March 1804, Benjamin’s father sold his share of the Gervais land (which he had inherited in 1791) to Ben’s uncle Joseph Gervais. Together, these transactions show Ben’s parents gathering cash to make a big move. In November, they purchased a small plot of land in Rivière-du-Loup from Ben’s maternal uncle Alexis Jouineau. Thus, at age 12, Ben’s family moved onto this new, mostly wooded lot. Unfortunately, Ben’s father fell behind on payments and eventually defaulted on the land. A saving grace—if it can be called that—is that the lot was actually 16% smaller than promised. In 1808, Alexis Jouineau and Jean-Baptiste Gervais came to an amicable settlement in which Jouineau forgave the remaining debt and Gervais forgave the 9 square arpents (7.62 acres) of missing land. (The two men agreed instead to sue the man who had first sold the faulty lot to Jouineau!)

However, even as the third and final payment for the land was coming due in 1807, Ben’s father took out another loan to purchase seeds for the year’s wheat crop. He would default on that loan too and ultimately take four years to satisfy the debt.

Thus, I have discovered that while Benjamin’s parents were able to hold onto their small farm, their finances were often precarious. Benjamin watched his father and a maternal uncle repeatedly take each other to court until reaching an agreement that finally settled the matter. His father took four years to pay back the purchase of seeds, a debt which in an ideal world should have been repaid from a bountiful harvest later the same year.

"Habitant Family with Horse and Sleigh" by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1850s.

The Laurences

As for Genevieve, her family was even more of a mess. A couple weeks ago, I worked through the legal agreement of Genevieve’s parents, a fairly typical prenuptial contract that enumerated the dower or dowry, established the community of property between the couple, and offered the wife an escape hatch should her husband die in debt. (This contract was written by notary Barthelemy Faribault, father of Minnesota fur trader Jean-Baptiste Faribault. The two families obviously knew one another, although there was a Grand-Canyon-sized class divide between them.) Unfortunately, it appears the couple wound up so much in debt that the best Genevieve’s mother Angelique could do upon her husband’s death was escape with nothing and start over.

Evidence of Genevieve’s father’s debt comes from a newly found court case dating to 1808, wherein Jean-Baptiste Laurence and a cousin found themselves before the Court of King’s bench in Montreal facing default on a massive £392 debt owed to a master carpenter in Montreal. It is probably significant that the carpenter’s wife Rebecca Stockton, who is also named in the case summary, was previously the widow of Berthier Seigneur James Cuthbert. (I have ordered a copy of this case, but don’t have it yet.)

If you’ve read my last couple updates, then you probably know that Genevieve’s move to the Red River Settlement in 1818 was precipitated by a £9 debt her widowed mother Angelique owed in back rent to a landlord. This debt resulted in the family’s eviction from their Montreal apartment and seizure of all their moveable possessions.

Genevieve’s uncle Antoine Desrosiers dit Lafrenière was an indebted innkeeper who lived only a couple blocks from Angelique’s former apartment. A year after Angelique and the girls left for Red River, Antoine joined the same 1819 canoe brigade as Benjamin Gervais, both men trying to make a quick buck as independent merchant voyageurs supplying the Red River Settlement from Montreal. Unfortunately, Antoine died later in 1819 or in 1820, perhaps during the return voyage. His estate inventory shows him more than £200 in debt. For context, that is equivalent to the annual salary of the governor of the Red River Colony—or about eight years income as a common voyageur. Antoine owed money to the seigneur in Berthier, to the man who owned the building in which he and his wife leased space for their inn, to his son-in-law for a large loan, to the merchant from whom he had purchased trade goods for the Red River trade, to a doctor, a tailor, and others. At the time of his death, the value of his debts was 13 times that of his assets, and more than half the value of his assets was assigned to a single fancy clock.

These people were deeply insolvent and must have felt perpetually broke. Engaging as a voyageur was probably a strategic financial decision to bolster family finances against the risk of a poor harvest and ensure at least some income that could be used to pay creditors. Voyageuring came with its own risks, and, as we know, led to many deaths among men in Genevieve's family. I have since thought that Part 2 of the book, the section about Genevieve's childhood, could be titled "Under Water: Debt and Drowning in the Fur Trade." I won't, because it feels insensitive (and I have a better, shorter Section title), but it would fit!

William Henry Bartlett, "Burial Place of the Voyageurs," 1841. BAC-LAC.

In Context

Without context, details about these families' debts exist in a vacuum. To better understand how the Gervais and Laurence stories fit into the broader history of Lower Canada, I rely on books like Fernand Ouellet's Economic and Social History of Quebec, 1760–1850, Bettina Bradbury's Wife to Widow: Lives, Laws, and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Montreal, and essays in an edited collection by Bradury and Tamara Myers called Negotiating Identities in 19th- and 20th-Century Montreal.

My goal for the book is a historical synthesis that works both ways. It will use well-established historical interpretations to contextualize the challenges, decisions, and mentalité of my protagonists, while, conversely, examining how the lives of Benjamin and Genevieve might challenge historical consensus or push scholarship in new directions.

Certainly, there is merit in studies like Ouellet's, which seek to uncover deep historical trends. Such works allow us to understand macro-level changes and see how most people reacted to them. They are absolutely necessary to establish an interpretive framework.

But no individual or family is "average" every way. Unique personalities, upbringings, and local circumstances shape individual responses. In this case, the combination of critical levels of debt, untimely deaths, age, gender, war, rapidly changing economic opportunities, the penetration of capitalist ideas into a semi-feudal system of land tenure, and a very specific sequence of events taking place on the Western prairies conspired to create the truly unique early lives of my subjects. The integration of macro and micro, as I just described, is, I believe, the primary value of biography as a technique for exploring history.

Finally, I aim to walk folks through all these changes in a way that feels natural. I want the stress, drama, and excitement of Ben's and Gen's experiences to come to life for my readers. In the context of this blog post, that means making my readers feel the deep, persistent anxiety that comes from always being behind on payments, forever worrying about losing one's land, home, and posessions.