In Alma, a 63-year-old worker with a tall, scrawny appearance was crushed by the iron wheels of a wagon at the entrance to the L’Isle-Maligne hydroelectric power station. Thus died a century ago, on January 12, 1924, Alexis le Trotteur.
A legendary Quebec figure, he evokes the resistance of humanity against mechanization as much as the Greek myth of the centaur, reincarnated by characters at the Forrest Gump, the film by Robert Zemeckis. “The centaur, the horse-man, has very ancient roots in the history of humanity. Men, for a long time, identified with the power of horses,” says ethnographer and singer Michel Faubert.
At the beginning of the 20the century, a struggle against modernity is taking place. “The machine replaced human force more than ever. Identifying with a man who had the characteristics of a horse meant that, whatever happened, human beings would never let themselves be overtaken. » Faubert sees in the stories attached to the life of this Canadian centaur the magnified expression of a malaise which strikes an entire society placed at the dawn of modernity, but where the horse continues, as a reference of strength, to be at the heart of everyday life.
When Alexis is caught under the wheels of the train, workers rush to his aid. He lies on his stomach; blood spills. His left arm and leg are completely crushed. The wheels also went over his lower right leg. This suffering body, still alive, is wrapped in blankets then hoisted onto the train.
The locomotive leaves. She crosses the bridge which spans the Grande Décharge. The old centaur’s tattered body is taken to the infirmary. “When I arrived, he was lying on a rustic table in his work clothes,” writes Abbot Cimon. His legs, which had made him famous, were like two rags, and the intestines could be seen through the large gaping wound. » The Trotter lies in agony for 90 minutes before passing away. The company doctor notes the death, then sews up the large wound on the trunk, before folding the tattered legs over the body, which gives it the appearance, it is noted, of a “quiver”.
In the deceased’s pockets, a one-dollar bill and an American-made watch, attached to a chain made of 10 five-cent coins. This is the entire fortune of this penniless man.
What happened ? Had Alexis launched a sort of challenge to this iron horse, as some continue to imagine?
Drama scene
Born in La Malbaie in 1860, Alexis Lapointe, known as le Trotteur, worked in all professions, in his country as well as in the United States. Poor among the poor, easy to fool, encouraged by derision to indulge in aimless races where legend has it that he constantly triumphs, he falls into the vague category of those who were considered at the time to be crazy villages, those that Pamphile Le May, in a famous book, describes as original and deranged.
Beyond his own legend, this man who plays the neighing quadrupeds built clay bread ovens. He uses his bare feet to mix water with clay, as recounted by Félix-Antoine Savard in The abatis (1943).
In 1924, at the time of his death, the character was known to everyone. His name is repeated by the echoes of the times. The fact remains that he is a simple construction worker at this hydroelectric power station which promises to be the most powerful in the world. Every lunchtime, he crosses the Grande Décharge bridge to eat in the cafeteria. This viaduct supports two parallel railway tracks. They extend for nearly 600 meters inside the installations. A sidewalk separates the railway tracks for the entire distance.
This January 12, the locomotive no 106 sets off at the same time as the pedestrians to reach the other bank. The machine driven by Jos Berger pushes four flat wagons at an estimated speed of 6 km/h. The locomotive, however, accelerated as it approached the bridge, some witnesses claim, reaching a speed of around 32 km/h.
Lapointe then walks on the sleepers of the left railway track. He hears the cry of his colleague Alphonse Wagner. Believing that the train is coming straight towards him, the Trotter jumps onto the central sidewalk. His momentum, however, carries him towards the right railway track, where he slips under the wheels of one of the wagons.
According to another version, Lapointe fell from a wagon while trying to climb it to cross the viaduct more quickly, like many day laborers. One of them, according to a third version, would have suggested to the locomotive engineer to accelerate to challenge the Trotter to a race. The horseman would not have heard the train coming due to his deafness. This late version would explain why one of the witnesses to the tragedy said he saw men running away during the accident.
The fall
On a cold November morning in 1966, it was snowing. Moisture from the St. Lawrence River transits. An undergraduate student in physical education from the University of Ottawa, Jean-Claude Larouche, 22, is there. He is obsessed with the legendary figure of the Trotter. He claims to have permission from a nephew of Alexis Lapointe to exhume his remains.
But what to do with it? He intends to encourage his fellow citizens to practice physical exercise in general, and running in particular. How can we speak and make Alexis the Trotter speak, while trying to explain, in the name of science, his supposed performances?
Joined by The duty in 2006, Jean-Claude Larouche said this: “We never had authorization to take it out of the ground. » Then, faced with the hubbub caused by the exhumation of this old story by The dutyhe told Radio-Canada that he had the guarantee of a doctor and that he had all the necessary authorizations to extract bones from the cemetery.
In 1924, Trotteur’s body was placed in a special type of coffin, used at the time to contain broken bodies. The interior is metal. A small glass hole allows you to see the face while hiding the rest of the body. It is with these elements in mind that Jean-Claude Larouche probes the mass grave of the La Malbaie cemetery, in an astonishing blind quest in the place where the remains of Trotteur lie among many others. “We stuck our metal rods both through the lids of the coffins as well as through the bottoms of the beers. And this, not out of sadism, God forbid, but rather to reassure ourselves that there was no metal there. »
After feeling a certain resistance, Larouche and his acolyte dug to a depth of two meters: they discovered the walls of a metal coffin damaged by the weight of another wooden coffin. The bottom of the grave is filled with bones and broken glass. For Larouche, these are the remains of Trotteur. Bones are collected at near-darkness. But parts of the skeleton are missing: Larouche will return there. To help him this time, he asks for help from a tractor which does not come. The driver doubts the legitimacy of the company, but Larouche insists: “The scientific work that I am pursuing is in no way grave robbing. »
Is it really the bones of the Trotter that he has in his hand? The 1924 autopsy report does not agree with these hastily collected bones. “If this report is true […], the skeleton that we dug up is not that of Alexis Lapointe,” recognizes Larouche. Trotteur’s left femur, tibia and fibula were crushed by the train. And yet they are intact on the skeleton exhumed in 1966. Like the right tibia which should also be broken…
But the young researcher is in a hurry. He rejects these objections out of hand. Under what pretext? “Did the investigating doctor really take the trouble to search through this so-called shredded meat to detect the broken bones? » asks Larouche. “Without wishing to be subjective, after a fairly in-depth investigation into the person of the doctor who made the report and whose name we will not mention, it emerges from this that we can doubt, with supporting evidence, the professional integrity of this character, who is dead today. » In other words, the young student asked to be taken at his word to invalidate the work of a doctor.
What should we think of the scientific rigor of Larouche’s own approach? For his part, he considers that his hunt was good. The bones were placed in the trunk of his car. As he passed hunters on the road, the amateur researcher said to himself “that he too had game that he would not trade for all the moose in the world.”
After the Trotteur’s death in 1924, his legend began to run much faster than him. In this peasant and devout society, maintained in a perpetual state of economic, social and political inferiority, everyone seeks material to grow, to valorize themselves through their real or sublimated physical prowess. So much so that the mythology based on the life of Alexis Lapointe continues to run, ahead of the passing of time, until today.