Update 13: The Bottle that Built St. Paul
- John Vanek
- Mar 16
- 7 min read
Updated: Mar 17
A Gervais Family Artifact Unseen for 132 Years
In this update: a major discovery at the Minnesota Historical Society, new revelations about Genevieve's widowhood, and several opportunities to see me speak!
See Me!
Saturday, March 21, 10:00 – 11:00 AM
The Incredible Origins of Little Canada
This coming Saturday, I will be presenting a 60-minute talk at the Little Canada Historical Society entitled “The Incredible Origins of Little Canada.” If you attended my 2019 talk about the Gervais family, this presentation features many remarkable discoveries made since then. It will also be a much tighter talk, with less focus on individual sources and a faster pace through the story.
I will stick around for Q&A afterwards. I hope to see you there.
Saturday, May 30, 8:00 AM – 6:00 PM
French Heritage Corridor Conference Bus Tour
The French Heritage Corridor Conference is coming to Minnesota, and I strongly encourage you to register! Friday May, 29, will feature a day of presentations and breakout sessions at Alliance Française–Minneapolis. Then on Saturday, May 30, I will be one of several local guides on a bus tour of French heritage sites in the Twin Cities.
We’ll be covering the Twin Cities’ French foundations, fur-trade history, Catholicism, famous architects past and present, French-language education, and an international conflict over Roquefort cheese, among other fun things. Lunch at the Little Canada Historical Society will feature music performed on the historic Gervais fiddle that was donated last year thanks to my research outreach.
Perhaps most exciting of all, visitors on the bus tour will have the opportunity to paddle a replica voyageur canoe at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers! (Weather permitting...)
The day will end with dinner, music, and dancing at a soirée at the Fort Snelling Visitor Center.
Register for the conference and bus tour here.
New Discoveries
A Gervais Family Artifact of Foundational Minnesota History
The city of St. Paul—and therefore the Twin Cities themselves—exists because of a battle in the late 1830s between whiskey sellers at Hidden Falls Park, led by Joseph R. Brown, and corrupt military officials at Fort Snelling. Plympton used the presence of a liquor shop so close to the fort and Indian Agency to justify his plan to expand the Fort Snelling military reservation miles beyond its original area. In truth, Plympton had a squatter's claim on land at St. Anthony Falls and intended to use the expanded miltary boundaries to force competors (like Brown) far downriver.
As a result, in May 1840, the Gervaises and other innocent east-side settlers had their houses pulled down by the army. Benjamin Gervais immediately headed east where he purchased a new land claim from one-eyed whiskey dealer Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant.
While the city of St. Paul overstates the importance of Parrant, it is nonetheless perfectly reasonable to say that our state capital was borne from the tap of a whiskey keg.
A couple months ago, I stumbled across a 1927 newspaper article in the Duluth Herald. The article led me to a hidden artifact that comes directly from the heart of the conflict mentioned above, and that further links the Gervaises to it.
On Wednesday, September 4, 1839, Genevieve Laurence gave birth to a baby boy the family’s tamarack cabin east of Fountain Cave. They named the child Basile, after Genevieve’s brother who was still steering York Boats on the Saskatchewan River for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The same day, Benjamin purchased a quart of whiskey to celebrate, and he kept the bottle to commemorate the birth of their first child since arriving at the Mississippi River from Red River two years before. (They did not yet know they would they would lose their home and land claim mere months later.)
Eventually, baby Basile himself inherited the bottle. In 1894, he donated it to the Minnesota Historical Society, where it became one of the earliest artifacts in their collection. Its accession was recorded in the “red book,” the oldest record of the society’s collections.
At the time of donation, Historical Society staff wrote a note about the bottle’s history and glued it to the glass. The Historical Society acquired the bottle because it belonged to “the first white child born in St. Paul,” an interpretive framing that had currency well into the twentieth century. Since this colonial interpretation went out of vogue decades ago (even Basile Gervais himself distanced himself from it) the bottle has—as far as I am aware—never been put on public display, certainly not in the last half century.
The bottle cannot be found in the Society’s online collection. It is only documented in an internal database. Without that century-old newspaper article mentioning it, I would never have known the bottle ever existed or that it still exists today. I may be the first person, other than MNHS curators moving collections, to see the bottle in 132 years.
The conflict between Major Plympton and Joseph R. Brown played out between September 1839 and May 1840. Another major event in early Minnesota history took place over exactly the same timeframe—the murder of John Hays and the arrest the legal proceedings against Edward Phelan. Benjamin, Genevieve, and Alphonse Gervais were key witnesses at the initial hearing. From testimony by other witnesses at the hearing, we know that Benjamin's brother Pierre Gervais worked as a voyageur for Joseph R. Brown. In fact, the hearing notes tell us that Pierre was in a canoe carrying whiskey upriver to Brown's tavern on the morning of Friday, September 6, 1839—just two days after the birth of Basile.
While this is not definitive, it provides strong circumstantial evidence that the whiskey bottle Benjamin bought to celebrate Basile's birth likely came from Brown's supplies. Benjamin's brother Pierre, who shared the tamarack cabin, worked for Brown and can be placed with a whiskey shipment destined for Brown's tavern less than 48 hours after the birth.
Finally, the bottle is so much more than a family artifact. It embodies the foundational event in the creation of the Twin Cities. It is a whiskey bottle from Brown's grogshop that dates to exactly the moment when his liquor business contributed to the sequence of events that put St. Paul where it is on the map.
If this hypothesis is incorrect, and the whiskey bottle did not come from Brown, then the second-most-likely source is Pig's Eye Parrant, which would be equally significant to St. Paul history.
I emailed the MNHS exhibits department to discuss the possibility of putting the bottle on display with this new interpreation. We'll see if that goes anywhere.
Genevieve in Red Lake Falls
Pierre Bottineau is often credited with founding Red Lake Falls in 1876. Like almost everything else Bottineau did in his life, a Gervais was by his side. Among the other influential settlers and developers of Red Lake Falls that year were Benjamin and Genevieve's sons Isaiah Gervais and Benjamin Gervais, Jr. These men and several of their sons acquired land and helped lay the foundations of a new French-Catholic community. Isaiah Gervais acquired water power rights and helped set up a railroad company. This much was already known.
I have recently uncovered evidence that Genevieve was there too, at least some of the time.
If one looks only at census records after Benjamin's death in 1876, it appears the widow Genevieve simply lived out her life in Little Canada, cared for by son Severe until her own death in 1885. However, land and immigration records from Polk County show that in 1880 and 1881, and possibly 1882, Genevieve was in Red Lake Falls.
On August 18, 1880, with help from grand-nephew Daniel Bottineau, she officially located 160 acres astride the Clearwater River southeast of town, a claim she sold to her grandson Charles J. Gervais a month later. The same day, she declared her intention to become a U.S. citizen. Whether or not Benjamin had ever completed the naturalization process, it seems Genevieve did not have a certified document to prove her citizenship to the court in Crookston. She was therefore forced to declare her intention to become a citizen in order to claim the above land with Supreme Court Scrip, which she had probably acquired from a local land agent like her grand-nephew Jean-Baptiste Bottineau.
The next summer, July 1881, Genevieve was either still in Polk County or had come back north again, this time making a cash entry claim on 160 acres west of Red Lake Falls for her son Benjamin, Jr. In both cases, the official patents would not clear until the second half of 1882.
What matters for my story is not so much the details but the clues they give about Genevieve's character. Genevieve was not buying land in Polk County for herself. She was using her agency as a widow to try—yet again—to set her sons and grandsons on a path toward economic stability, a path that had eluded her and Benjamin too many times to count, most recently in Little Canada. Even in her late 70s—she turned 77 in June 1881—Genevieve never gave up hope and never stopped working to improve her family's lot in life, even if it meant traveling hundreds of overland miles to be at a land office in some dusty frontier boomtown.
Finally, the revelation that Genevieve was herself in Red Lake Falls inspired me to reach out to Red Lake Falls legend Virgil Benoit, a native son and professor emeritus who knows more than anyone about the history of Francophone communities of northwestern Minnesota. I will be visiting Dr. Benoit in May and hope to soak up as much of his wisdom as I can. (You can get a sense of Dr. Benoit's deep knowledge and enthusiasm from this radio interview he gave seven yers ago.
Until next time...
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