Behind a whole part of the United States are the traces left by adventurers, coureurs des bois, artists, entrepreneurs, lumberjacks, Franco-American, Creole or French-Canadian métis travelers whose names have sometimes been altered and history erased. At the time of the American presidential elections, the series Destins Américains invites you to follow the trail of some of the characters of a forgotten Franco-America.
François-Xavier Aubry: this man symbolizes, before the arrival of the railway and the development of road transport that would accompany it, the beginning of rapid communication routes to the American West. Intrepid horseman, convoy leader, this little man concerned with his reputation ensures his own publicity and knows how to take advantage of it. It is thus, unlike his peers, that he manages, before being stabbed to death at the age of 29 by Major Richard Weightman, to carve out a place for himself in the mythology of the Far West. Aubry symbolizes all by himself the entire romanticized enterprise of the rapid messengers of the Pony Express.
Born in 1824 in Saint-Justin, near Louiseville, François-Xavier Aubry came from a family of farmers. What destined him to become, by becoming one with his horse, a sort of trucker before the letter, the fastest, one might say, in all the West? Nothing and everything at the same time. Families like his, where resourceful adventurers can be found, French Canada has hundreds of them.
Fourth in a family of thirteen, François-Xavier Aubry received a basic education. At the age of 12, he was no longer in school. He found himself a clerk in a general store in Maskinongé, linked to an old grain mill called a “trompe-souris”. This colorful name mocked unproductive mills: imagine the big belly of such a building not even being able to feed that of a poor mouse…
François-Xavier Aubry moved to another general store. He was employed by the aptly named Mr. Marchand, in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. From there, so close to the border with the United States, did he feel more the call of the plains and mountains of the West that everyone was talking about?
The road takes Aubry to St. Louis, Missouri. This is the Illinois country, where “Canayen” travelers have been known since the time of New France. Aubry works for a general store whose sign displays French names: Lamoureux & Blanchard.
To (re)read, in the same series
The Francos of the West
In the West, historian Gilles Havard recalls, there was a time when many men, if not the majority, spoke the language of Molière. It was not a theatrical language, but rather a dialect whose body was sometimes mixed with indigenous languages. “This state of affairs contravened the idea of ’manifest destiny’, this pre-established narrative pattern of American history in which the daring settlers who crossed the continent from one end to the other could only be English speakers.”
Which partly explains why figures parallel to this enchanted story have found themselves relegated to the side of oblivion.
The conquest of the West, a major epic in the founding story of the United States, would not exist without several of these figures of the Francophonie. They have been willingly set aside, by anglicizing their memory or by forgetting the primary linguistic affiliation of people who, in this way, found themselves merged into a vast collective story made up of an interweaving of tiny lives.
The roads of the West
In 1846, during the Mexican-American War, Antoine Leroux had guided a battalion from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to California, in the company of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau. François-Xavier Aubry heard about these difficult roads of the West, probably in French. He in turn threw himself into the adventure by becoming a conveyor.
His bosses, Lamoureux and Blanchard, finance him. Their goods will, thanks to him, be able to bring in big money. Aubry finds himself at the head of convoys of carts and cattle. He multiplies the expeditions. To ensure the success of the operations, our man uses advertising in the newspapers, in English and Spanish. François-Xavier Aubry, basically, is a trucker responsible for a fleet of trucks…
These are goods, but also parcels and letters that Aubry transports. The trail he takes passes through indigenous territories. There are many clashes. There are deaths.
Between the city of Independence in Missouri, his starting point, and Santa Fe in New Mexico, he had to travel more than 1,300 km. Aubry managed to reduce the duration of the journey. First record, on January 5, 1848: 14 days. He would beat his own record later: 8 and a half days.
Aubry forges his resplendent legend through writing. He leaves traces. They affirm that he is the fastest rider in the West. You just have to believe it since it is written! Dolly, his favorite mount, becomes almost as legendary as he is.
His image overlaps with some of the heroic figures of American folklore. Thus, it is said of Aubry that his importance rivals that of Kit Carson, trapper, merchant, military man closely associated with the larger-than-life story forged for the benefit of the mythology of the West. It should be noted that the famous Kit Carson worked for a descendant of French Canadians: John Charles Frémont, founder of the Republic of California, a territory he helped to wrest from the Mexicans. This Frémont, incidentally, would engage in several massacres of Native Americans and would be accused of mutiny, before he returned to the good graces of President Lincoln’s administration.
Tiny Lives
The story of François-Xavier Aubry was written in his own way by the journalist Joseph Tassé in the 1870s. Before becoming the director of The Minervaa major conservative newspaper in the 19th centurye century, Tassé published serially, here and there, portraits of several Canadians who had set out to conquer the West. There is, in Tassé, the expression of a sadness towards America, in a sort of melancholy kneaded by a disappointed continental hope.
More than a century later, Serge Bouchard, in his radio stories devoted to those he calls his “remarkable forgotten ones,” also speaks of Aubry. The anthropologist makes him a hero among others, capable of expressing the greatness of the mixed and traveling America that he cherishes.
The fact remains that regarding François-Xavier Aubry, there would be serious research work to be undertaken on his universe, on the world of French-speaking travelers that he symbolizes. In the depths of this life would undoubtedly appear those, tiny and almost invisible, of several of his peers, beings capable of making us better understand the epic of the Far West.