Jacques Legardeur De Saint-Pierre: Officer, Gentleman, Entrepeneur

Preface

PREFACE The translation into English of significant, hitherto untranslated manuscripts illuminating the French and Indian history of the Michilimackinac post is a basic goal of the French Michilimackinac Research Project. Michilimackinac's vital role in maintaining and expanding New France's upper colony, particularly around the western Great Lakes and to the northwest, is reflected in many kinds of correspondence from, to, and within the region during the French regime. When I began work on this project, my prior fifteen years of research on the French and Native Americans of the upper country had already familiarized me with the appropriate French and Canadian archives and with the broad outlines of Michilimackinac's history. It was necessary, however, to approach the vast and complex topic in a focused and manageable fashion. The initial inquiry consisted of a search delimited primarily to the fort's French commandants, whose names were known and whose successive commands covered the French occupancy of the post from 1683 to 1761, the year the post was occupied by the English. Most previous American research on officers of the Troupes de la Marine on assignment in what is now the United States has been limited primarily to their military role. This inquiry, however, sought to provide a more rounded picture of the officers through examining-in addition to the official correspondencecivil and business records and personal correspondence housed in the Canadian archives. Most of these officers spent a significant part of their lives with their families in Montreal or Quebec, and many engaged in business with their wives as active partners. The portraits envisaged by the French Michilimackinac Research Project would provide a fuller and more human understanding ofthese French officers who, while calling the lower St. Lawrence Valley their home, influenced so markedly the eastern half ofNorth America. xv xvi Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre Peter Laurence Cook has expressed well the importance of examining French traders' activity in the upper country (the Great Lakes Basin) in the context of their orientation to the lower colony. What he said about French traders applies to the many French officers who, like Saint-Pierre, traded in the West: It should be remembered that French traders represented a largely transient population in the pays d'en haut, and their actions there cannot be understood without reference to their positions and projects in French colonial society. Like the Algonkian hunters with whom he dealt in the west, the French trader was a fully formed social being, and not a tabula rasa ready for the imprint of exposure to the values ofan alien society. For the trader, the signing of notarial contracts and the mortgaging of land and property were powerful constraining symbols which bound him to the orbit of colonial society, as did his religion, loyalties, and family ties.1 Documentary biographical narratives of these officers would contain a rich selection of annotated translations from both the upper and lower colonies. English-speaking scholars would thus have direct access to a broad range of newly uncovered primary-source documents, enabling them to avoid the "neglect" identified by Cook. The project was designed with four phases: (1) organization of research; (2) archival field work; (3) translation and annotation; and (4) dissemination. My first challenge was to uncover "new" documents in widely scattered archives in North America and Europe. I began by studying published inventories, guides and calendars of archival collections in Canada, France, and the United States that were likely to contain French-language manuscripts relating to the key French post at Michilimackinac and its dependencies. The preliminary research included the compilation, from a variety of sources, of a list of some two dozen French officers who commanded Michilimackinac from 1683 to 1761. Similarly I prepared a list of the French Jesuit priests who served in the Michilimackinac region from 1671 and another of a large number of civilian traders and others who had lived or been at the post during the French regime. Their names and the dates when they were at the post permitted me to recognize them as I examined published and, later, unpublished (in-house) archival inventories, and finally, the manuscripts themselves. Priface xvii By the summer of 1991, this initial effort resulted in the identification of over 1000 relevant manuscripts (not folios) as well as several major collections for which no inventories had been published. I spent several months during the summers of 1991 and...