Update 9: A Bawdy House, a Lewd Pseudonym, and Livestock Lost & Found

The final grant application is in. More scholars are lining up to support the project. And shocking new evidence Genevieve’s mother once ran a brothel. All this and more in my September update!

Initial Thoughts

In September 1839, one-hundred-eighty-six years ago, Genevieve gave birth to a son named Basile in a little cabin along the shores of the upper Mississippi River. The same month, dominoes began to fall all around the Gervais family. Initiated by acts of jealousy, greed, and corruption, the first dominoes triggered a cascade of events that ultimately left the family homeless, powerless, and stamped as unwelcome foreigners. Genevieve was only 35 years old, yet—depending on how you look at it—this was already the third or fourth time in her life that she had lost everything and had to start over.

I think often about the events of September 1839 (and their consequences in the spring of 1840) because, more than any other moment in the Gervaises’ lives, their reactions so clearly demonstrate their agency, their resiliency, and their fundamental humanity. Although they were surrounded by murderers, scamps, crooked businessmen, and unethical government officials, they responded with humility and courage.

The next phase of their lives saw them earn their biggest fame—as founders of the city of St. Paul—through acts of humble piety. Like the poor widow from the Bible, even when the Gervaises were at their lowest, they still found ways to give back to their community, to build it up when others tore it down. They could easily have decided, given all the evidence before them, that success in the United States could only be achieved by dishonorable means. But they chose not to follow the example of their avaricious American neighbors. They stuck to their core principles of honesty and decency.

Many writers would be drawn to the devious characters rather than the good, quiet farmers. I think that’s all the more reason to tell the Gervaises’ story. Readers will still learn about all the crooks and scoundrels, but I think they will identify more with the main characters. Most of us are just regular folks trying to achieve a life of modest comfort. It is a breath of fresh air to read about people just like us who overcame far more hardship that most of us will ever experience.

Grant Application Submitted!

Since my last update, the Little Canada Historical Society received feedback regarding its pre-application for a large grant to support writing the book next year. In order to comply with state hiring laws about which we were previously unaware, they had to make some significant revisions. However, LCHS is confident they submitted a very strong proposal and like their odds to earn funding. (And I like my odds of being hired as the writer.)

Assisting with the grant application was my last significant non-research-related task of the year.

New Discoveries

Was Genevieve’s Mother a Brothel Keeper?

There is mounting evidence that Genevieve’s widowed mother Angelique ran a brothel in Montreal during the 1810s. Court records which I recently transcribed totally re-contextualize Angelique’s decision to take herself and two teenage girls—one in her third trimester of pregnancy—on a dangerous canoe voyage across the continent in the summer of 1818.

As it turns out, Lord Selkirk’s offer of land in the Red River Settlement came at a serendipitous—and critical—time for Angelique. Her former landlord, a Montreal merchant, had recently forced her to shut down her brothel. Armed with a writ to recover a relatively small debt Angelique supposedly owed the former landlord in back rent, bailiffs had stormed into her apartment and confiscated nearly all of her worldly possessions, leaving her with two teenage girls and little else. March and April 1818 were dark days for the Laurences. Lord Selkirk offered an escape, a new opportunity, deliverance.

No source says outright, “Angelique owned a brothel.” So how did I come to that conclusion? There are four lines of evidence. All are circumstantial and, individually, each is rather ambiguous. But taken together there is really only one interpretation that fits.

1. Julie was a prostitute

• Genevieve’s older sister/Angelique’s daughter Julie had a relationship with a man who regularly paid her for sex, and she became pregnant. (She was barely 16 when she became pregnant.)

• The man's friends talked him out of marrying someone like her for the damage it would do to his career and his standing before God.

• Julie gained a reputation as a “woman of poor character.”

  • All the men who wrote about her used the kind of “fallen woman” language common in this period when referring to prostitutes.

  • A few years later, one influential man wrote explicitly that Julie “has been and is still a common prostitute or the next thing to it.” (On the other hand, it is worth noting that this author was not particularly close to Julie, and his motives for saying such a thing are suspect.)

• Julie’s affair could be explained as a one-off incident, opportunistic extortion (think Maria Reynolds and Alexander Hamilton), and/or as a lustful man beginning to financially support a young woman he initially planned to marry. No matter the details, at root it was an exchange of sex for money.

  
  

2. Extra beds

• When bailiffs raided Angelique’s apartment and confiscated her belongings, they were under strict orders not to take the bed in which she slept. Nonetheless, the inventory of confiscated goods shows that they removed three beds—two of straw and one of hay. How do we explain this?

  • The bailiffs erred. (Possible but unlikely.)

  • The beds were where Julie and Genevieve slept. (However, in this period and given their financial situation, I highly doubt Angelique, Julie, and Genevieve had the luxury of sleeping in separate beds.)

  • The extra beds were available for “customers.” They were Angelique's most important business asset.

    
    

3.     The excessive force brought against her

• The bailiffs sent to seize Angelique's belongings arrived at night, broke the locks and entered her apartment by force, roughed up the people they found inside ("we . . . mistreated them badly"), and threw them out of their home and into the street.

• Angelique owed £9 in rent to her previous landlord. According to Angelique's court filing, the bailiffs confiscated moveable goods worth £400!

• Someone was clearly out to get Angelique. It has the appearance of a legal system that could not directly punish her for running a brothel but which found a way to ruin her with a different charge.

• We can infer that she ruffled the wrong feathers. Some Montreal brothels stayed in business for ten years or more. Brothel owners could steer clear of the law as long as they kept a low profile and their businesses did not become a nuisance to neighbors. Perhaps Angelique’s brothel was too noisy or attracted the wrong clientele. Or maybe she just ran into a persnickety landlord.

  
  

4.     Angelique used an alias with a (likely) double meaning

• When Angelique’s landlord first filed suit to go after the £9 debt, his target was one “Marie Boucher alias Maria Laurence.” Only when Angelique countersued following the seizure of her possessions did it become clear that “Marie Boucher” was actually Angelique Lafrenière, widow of Jean-Baptiste Laurence.

• Why would she use an alias when most brothel keepers in the city operated under their given names?

• The word “boucher” has two meanings in French. As a noun it means “a butcher.” (This is the origin of the common surname Boucher.) As a verb it means “to block, to clog, to plug, to fill, or to cork a hole or passage.”

• Her pseudonym Marie Boucher was an obvious pun, a crass innuendo to the primary physical activity that took place at Madame Boucher’s. This was a place a man could boucher, where he could quite literally roll in the hay.

There may be other explanations. But, given the available evidence, the simplest explanation is that Angelique ran a brothel, that one or both of her teenage daughters were put into service as prostitutes, that Julie became pregnant from a sexual relationship that in all likelihood commenced at the brothel, and that the confiscation of Angelique’s belongings was a way of putting her out of business. And for those of you who are sure to ask about Genevieve, she is completely invisible in the records. We only know she was there by inference. She was 13 when all this went down, perhaps barely young enough to have escaped the plight of her older sister. Certainly, she never garnered the same shameful reputation as Julie.

William Hogarth's famous six-image series called A Harlot's Progress (1731) traces the fall of notorious London prostitute Kate Hackabout from respectable young seamstress to death from venereal disease. The third frame, above, depicts a magistrate and bailiffs entering her room to arrest her. A similar scene played out in Montreal late on the evening of March 14, 1818. In Angelique's case, we know the bailiffs broke down the door, roughly treated those they found inside, and forced everyone out into the street. Wikimedia Commons.

Alan R. Woolworth Papers

The past couple weeks I’ve been digging through boxes of research folders compiled by Alan Woolworth, a longtime Minnesota Historical Society curator, archaeologist, and historical researcher. Most of his research centered on 19th-century Minnesota and Minnesotans.

Some things I find are quite mundane but help paint a picture of daily life. For example, the folder containing Woolworth’s research on Jean Baptiste Faribault includes a letter from Methodist missionary Samuel Pond to his brother Gideon about the Faribault family’s activities following the death of Olivier Faribault in 1850. What caught my eye wasn’t anything to do with the Faribaults but instead a funny side story in which Samuel complained to his brother about a cow and calf that kept escaping despite his best efforts to contain them.

How is this relevant to the Gervaises? Well, less than a year later Benjamin was a party in the very first case to come before the Minnesota Supreme Court. It wasn’t an intricate case or a challenge to some core constitutional principle. It was simply the last appeal in a debate over whether Ben deserved compensation for the time and money he had put into caring for a stray cow before its owners reclaimed it. (This was a different stray cow.)

The Pond letter is a humorous anecdote I can weave into the narrative to give readers a sense of the daily struggle many people faced during Minnesota’s territorial years. And it ultimately gets at a core theme of the book: for Ben and Gen, the most ordinary things—like finding a stray cow in 1849—often turned into something more significant. In this instance, it made Benjamin the very first plaintiff to have his case heard by the highest court in Minnesota.

Stuff like this happened to them all the time! Almost all the things that make Benjamin and Genevieve noteworthy were not the result of extraordinary ambition or talent or force of will. Time and again, they just happened to be at the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on one’s perspective). Occasionally, extraordinary lives are made from strikingly ordinary building blocks.

I am not exaggerating. Territorial Minnesota was little more than a livestock lost and found. This is the bottom of a single newspaper page from 1849. The milch cow at the heart of Ben Gervais's later Supreme Court case is featured at the bottom. Minnesota Pioneer, October 25, 1849, pg. 3.

Scholarly Support

Over the past couple years, I have kept up intermittent correspondence with Mary Anne Poutanen, Professor Emerita from McGill University in Montreal. She is a leading expert on the history of prostitution in the city.

Last week, Professor Poutanan agreed to meet with me (virtually). I laid out the evidence above regarding the possibility that Angelique was running a brothel and asked for her opinion. She generally agreed with my interpretation, offered kind words about my project, and made a few good suggestions. She is yet another scholar who is now eagerly awaiting the finished publication.

While you all wait for my book to be finished, I recommend grabbing a copy of hers: Beyond Brutal Passions: Prostitution in Early Nineteenth Century Montreal.

A Regular Schedule

Now that all the travel, off-site experiences, and grant work is behind me, I can finally focus my full attention on research. I’ve come up with a tentative weekly plan to get everything done by the end of the year. Here’s the schedule:

Monday          Primary sources (transcriptions, translations, note-taking)

Tuesday           Primary sources (transcriptions, translations, note-taking)

Wednesday     Secondary sources (read for historical context and interpretations)

Thursday         Secondary sources (read for historical context and interpretations)

Friday              Minnesota Historical Society Archives (gather the last outstanding primary source material)

Expect future updates to feature interesting ideas or new discoveries from this research.  As always, thanks for reading and thank you for your support!