Another theory on the origin of our "Beaulieu brothers."

I opened my Facebook page last weekend to find a friend had posted a quote that was perfect for me that day.
I had spent the day on my blog posting my notions of where the men I call "Our Beaulieu brothers" might have come from.
The quote was written by George Orwell in 1946, and said: "The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
"Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time; the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

As genealogists, our false beliefs might not bump up against solid reality on a battlefield, but they can, and do, create plenty of heated arguments as we descendents search in different places for our ancestors' trail.
One descendent searches the Minnesota archives for stories about his Rondeau/Beaulieu ancestors, another "Old Man Beaulieu" descendent collects stories in the Athabasca district, while I search fur trade records and French-Canadian genealogy records on the PRDH and ancestry.ca.
None of us are successful in finding out who our ancestors are, but we have plenty of discussions and we share our information with all other family members, so they can enter the discussion.
I think we may just be confusing them, but that, too, is okay.
We are all confused.

I have searched the PRDH and the Drouin records and set up family trees online which have not collected any new information.
I have now come to the conclusion that either our brothers are not brothers at all and we have been chasing false leads through fur trade history -- or our three brothers were born in the wilds outside Quebec, and were probably already Metis.
One other Beaulieu descendent agrees with me on this, and has collected stories that support that belief, and shared them with us.

She says that when the fur trader Peter Pond arrived at Great Slave Lake on his first visit, he met the child, Francois "Old Man" Beaulieu, and his uncle Jacques.
She suggests that the voyageur who accompanied Alexander Mackenzie on his trip to the Pacific Ocean in 1793 was the father of Francois "Old Man" Beaulieu.
She also suggests that this elder Francois had a French father and a Cree mother, and was a former employee of the Compagnie des Sioux, begun in 1827.
And another titbit -- there were said to have originally been three Beaulieu brothers in the region, and suggests that their names were Jacques, Francois, and Pierre.
The Beaulieu family was already well established in the area for some years when Cuthbert Grant and Peter Pond arrived there.

So, let us look at our story this way:

Our story evolves around Peter Pond's arrival at Great Slave Lake -- when did his first visit occur?
As a twenty five year old, Pond left Milford, Conn., to join the fur trade in the Detroit area.
By 1776 he was in the area south of the Athabaska and wintered at Sturgeon River, Saskatchewan.
It was not until 1778 that he pushed north into the Athabasca and wintered on the Athabasca River 40 miles from the lake -- Athabasca lake, I presume, not Great Slave Lake.
In 1781-2 he wintered at Lac la Ronge, Saskatchewan; it wasn't until the spring of 1783 that Pond returned to the Athabasca, and learning the location of Great Slave Lake came into contact with the Beaulieu brothers there.
In 1784 he left the Athabasca and never returned.

I am not sure if anyone is really certain of the date of Pond's visit to Great Slave Lake, but let us work with 1783.

A French Canadian named Beaulieu, an employee of the Compagnie des Sioux, arrived at Great Slave Lake some years before Peter Pond arrived there -- maybe 1760?
He took a Cree Wife, and by 1783 -- when Pond visited -- was well established with a family of three sons.

If the first of these three boys was perhaps Jacques or Zacharie, born about 1765 -- this boy would have been about eighteen years old when Peter Pond arrived at Great Slave Lake.
He would have been mature enough to take charge of the situation.
But we have always said that he and his two brothers were French Canadians -- in this scenario these three brother are already French-Canadian & Cree Metis.

The second of these boys might have been Francois I, who took a Chipewyan woman named Ethiba as a wife and had children who would have been young when Alexander Mackenzie arrived there in 1793.
If he was about twenty five years old when he accompanied Mackenzie to the west coast, he was born about 1768, and he would have been fifteen when Peter Pond arrived.
But it was his son, Francois II (Old Man Beaulieu) who claimed to be fifteen years old when Peter Pond arrived at Great Slave Lake!

The third boy might have been younger -- too young to join his brother on the voyage west with Alexander Mackenzie in 1793.
If he was born about 1775, he would have been eighteen years old when Mackenzie came to Great Slave Lake, and eight or so when Peter Pond arrived.
Was his name Pierre, or was it Joseph???
If Joseph, he was old enough in 1801 to have joined the fur trade and gone to Red River to be counted in the North West Company's Red River records -- twenty six years old.
In 1805 he was experienced enough in the fur trade to be labelled a voyageur contre-maitre -- "master voyageur."
In 1807 when he met David Thompson he was thirty two years old, and had a daughter, Charlot, born in 1805 when he was thirty years old.
His second daughter, Josephine, was born in what later became Montana, in 1809 or thereabouts when he was 34 years old.
In 1811 he was thirty six years old and a free trapper.
In 1818 his eldest daughter Charlot married James Birnie, and Birnie heard the story that this Beaulieu's brother had accompanied Alexander Mackenzie from Great Slave Lake to the west coast in 1793.

A slight interruption: I think that is important -- I think that this Joseph Beaulieu was present when he saw his older brother leave Great Slave Lake with Mackenzie.
These French Canadian voyageurs were not literate; his presence as a child in the Athabasca district helps explain how he knew of his brother's adventures.

To continue his story: This Beaulieu brother remained in the territory west of the mountains until about 1820, when he was forty five years old and relatively old for the hard work of a voyageur and a free trader/trapper.
Sometime after Charlot's marriage to James Birnie, he disappeared and "returned to Montreal."
I wonder where he really settled down.
His older brother, Francois, also disappeared from the Athabasca.
I wonder what was "Home" to them?

All this is theory, but I think we need to consider this story as a possiblity.
The only hitch in the story is Francois II's claims that he was at the North West arm of the Great Slave Lake when Peter Pond arrived in 1783.
I think he adopted his father's memories and wove them into his own.
I like this story.
It explains how there was a well established French Canadian and Metis community at Great Slave Lake when Peter Pond arrived.
It explains how these men were adult enough to have been established at Great Slave Lake for a number of years before Pond arrived, and still be young enough to have enjoyed the adventures that Francois I celebrated with Alexander Mackenzie, and Joseph with David Thompson.
I think it all works.
But I think we'll never be able to prove it.
I think I have created a false belief that will, eventually, bump up against solid reality -- and that solid reality will be this: that we can only guess where these men come from, but we will never be able to prove it.

The Search for Beaulieu

As a family historian I always knew where I came from -- sort of.
My great grandfather Alexander Caulfield Anderson married Betsy Birnie, daughter of James and Charlotte Birnie, first settlers at Cathlamet, WA.
James Birnie we knew came from Scotland, but it has been Charlotte's story that has always intrigued me.
I knew she was French Canadian and Cree, born in Red River about 1805 -- but how did she come to be west of the mountains?
I had no chance of knowing who her mother was, but who was her father?

In his "History of the Northwest Coast," (a mixture of writing old and new) A.C. Anderson wrote in 1864: "Mr. Birnie was a Scotchman by birth. He was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, in the year 1800.
"In 1816 the ambitious lad left his native heath and emigrated to Montreal, Canada. Here under the tutelage of a Catholic Priest, he studied the French language for about two years, at the end of which time he entered the employ of the North West Fur Company as one of its clerks and was sent across the Rocky Mountains to Fort Spokane, where he arrived toward the close of 1818.
"The fort at this time was in charge of a Mr. Halden[e], with whom Mr. Birnie remained for several years.
"He then went to the Kootenai country where he was married to the daughter of a Frenchman, Mr. Beaulieu, from Manitoba.
"Here he spent several years trading with the Indians, buying furs, etc., and then returned to Fort Spokane."

Anderson's report is not entirely accurate, and I am not sure he was certain of Beaulieu's name -- but that is not the point.
His son, James Robert Anderson, wrote another account which appears to be even less accurate:
"James Birnie, my maternal grandfather, was born in Aberdeen in Scotland in 1800 and came to America in 1818.
"He resided in Montreal for two years with the object of acquiring a sufficient knowledge of the French language to enable him to carry on the work of an officer of the North West Fur Company, whose employees were mostly French Canadians.
"Taking service with that Company he spent several years in the Red River country now known as Manitoba, where he married the daughter of an officer of the Company, a Miss Beaulieu.
"The family acquired considerable wealth in Montreal where they afterwards resided."

So did Birnie meet his future wife at Red River, where no French Canadian named Beaulieu was a partner in the North West Company?
Or did Birnie meet and marry his wife at Spokane House after 1818?

One of my aunts visited the town of Cathlamet many years ago, and returned with a note: "James Birnie and Charlotte Beaulieu remarried by Beaver Nov. 8, 1838, at Fort George.
"Charlotte's father, Beaulieu, trader in the Kootenai for many years.
"Mother, Cree from Red River."
And the most intriguing line of all .... "One of Beaulieu's brothers was Francois Beaulieu who was one of six voyageurs with Sir Alexander McKenzie, May 9, 1793."

Ten years ago I took those words as gospel, but since then understand that these are secondary sources.
Secondary sources are those which are written down after the fact, or recorded by other persons after the fact.
In these cases the words came well after the fact -- stories that James Birnie told his children, and that Birnie's children told a local historian, who passed on the story to her daughter without writing it down, and her daughter passed on the story to her son -- Cathlamet historian David K. Hansen.
It was probably David's mother who gave the story to my aunt.

Both A.C. Anderson's and his son, James' accounts come directly from James Birnie, and neither recorded the story at the time they heard it.
And even if they had, it was still a secondary source -- a story recorded years after the fact, by people other than the men involved directly in the story.
If James Birnie had recorded the story in 1820, when he heard it directly from the man named Beaulieu, it might be considered a primary source.
But he didn't.

In 2002, David K. Hansen, then in charge of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, told me that "Charlotte Beaulieu spelled her name Beauleu -- the same spelling we had but without the i."
He also confirmed that Charlot was descended from the brother of Francois Beaulieu.

I knew that our Beaulieu was a freetrader in the Kootenays for many years.
As a British Columbian, I have a very solid idea of where the Kootenays is -- somewhere around Castlegar or Trail or ... well, you know what I mean.
That is all I knew, and I did little research on Beaulieu.
Instead I kept busy researching both James Birnie and Alexander Caulfield Anderson in the Hudson's Bay Company Archives records.
In early days one of my most rewarding method of researching these two men was to spend hours in bookstores picking up books and searching their indexes.
I searched for Anderson and Birnie, and I also looked up Beaulieu men who may have been in the Kootenays in the early 1800's.
And suddenly I found him!

I picked up a book edited by Barbara Belyea, called Columbia Journals: David Thompson [Montreal: McGill UP, 1994].
"Beaulieu" was listed in the index!
This Beaulieu was one of David Thompson's men, and he crossed the Rocky Mountains with Thompson in 1807.
In July 1807 Beaulieu helped Boisverd make a large canoe [p.49]; a few days later Thompson recorded that "Beaulieu has been these ten days so very ill that he could not help us, & at length so much that we dispaired of his Life -- his complaint a violent dry Colic & Pain under his Ribs on the [left].
"This morn perceiving a small swelling close under his left Ribs mid of the side to be enlarging, he was feeling it with attention, & by his fingers feeling something rough he sent for me.
"It appeared to be a small splinter -- I extracted it, & to our great surprise found it was a porcupine Quill, that had made its appearance from the inwards -- it was of the short thick ones on the Rump & Tail of the Porcupine.
"It can be accounted for only by supposing that, when he eat part of the Dog the day we passed the Height of Land, he had in eating the Meat swallowed the Porcupine Quill in the meat, as he is a voracious eater."

This book kick-started by search for Beaulieu -- was this our Beaulieu or not?
Could it be possible that our Beaulieu came across the Rocky Mountains with David Thompson fifteen years after his supposed brother, Francois, paddled to the west coast with the North West Company explorer Alexander Mackenzie in 1793?
The search began then, and continues to this day.