French America | The Press

(Milwaukee) Driving between Minneapolis and Mankato this summer, a fleur-de-lis on a water tower caught my eye. I took the exit.

Faribault, Minnesota (25,000 souls), was missing from my culture. On the doors of the town hall, on the banners in the old town center, in the municipal emblems: the symbol of old France is everywhere, even if no one speaks French here anymore.

We know the epic tale of the French and Quebec explorers, the ancient Canadienswho have left their traces everywhere in what is now called “the United States” since the 18th^e century.

But the Faribault who gave his name to this once prosperous town was not from the generation of European discoverers. Alexandre Faribault arrives 200 years later in history. He is part of another generation of “travelers”, trappers, coursers of the woods and traders. Those who colonized the Midwest after it became American – Napoleon having ruined this immense territory in 1803.

Alexandre was in fact an American, son of a notary from Berthier who came to make his fortune in the fur trade around the Great Lakes, and of a Métis woman from the Dakota Nation.

It was a time when borders were fluid, crossbreeding was natural. But from the Great Lakes to the Plains and even to the Rockies, the dominant European language was French, explains Gilles Havard, in his History of the wood runners (Tempus, 2021). Havard even recounts that French-Canadian trappers told the “Indians of Upper Missouri” that the French were the real owners of the United States.

But when the time came to take sides between the Americans and the English, these “French” people on the border sided with the Americans, even if it meant being imprisoned by the British.

This is the town of Nicollet, Minnesota. The history of Quebec has retained the name of Jean Nicolet, with only one “l”: trapper and explorer, he traveled to Lake Michigan in 1634. But who is this Nicollet-with-two-l?

This one was born in France, like the other, but 200 years later. Mathematician, astronomer, discoverer of a comet, he had a certain notoriety in the scientific circles of Paris… Until he fled for America, after having lost everything on the Stock Exchange, in 1832. He was not so not a government envoy or explorer sent to America, but a man who wants to escape his creditors and imprisonment for debt.

He found himself in Saint-Louis, a city that had become American, but still culturally French, and left to explore the Upper Mississippi, to map it, which he did with great precision, in addition to noting the names given by the indigenous peoples. . His work was authoritative.

In 1835, a New York newspaper claimed that an astronomer had seen animals and humanoid forms on the Moon using a new telescope, and Nicollet was unfairly accused of being behind the hoax. He died without anyone knowing in France what he had accomplished in the United States, and without anyone knowing in the United States what he had achieved in France.

“He who knows how to reconcile the advantages of the past and the needs of the future will triumph,” we can read on his tombstone.

Before it was called Chicago, the capital of the Midwest had been visited by Marquette and Joliet. But it is not so long ago that Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable was celebrated as the founder of the city.

Born apparently in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) around 1745 to a father who came from New France and a freed slave, he found himself in Louisiana, then in Saint-Louis, where he launched into the fur trade. Also. Married to Kittiwaha, the daughter of the Potéouatami chief, he ended up setting up a supply station for the “travelers”. Their daughter, born in 1796, is believed to be the first to be born in what would soon be called “Chicago.” He made several trips to Quebec.

He died in complete anonymity, except that it is said that a black man is buried in the cemetery of Saint-Charles in Missouri, without even a stone retaining his name.

The city now recognizes him as the founder of Chicago, a bust of him is installed in the city center and the American post office dedicated a stamp to him.

While running overlooking Lake Michigan in Milwaukee, I saw a not-quite-round wooden cabin, a replica of the home of Laurent Salomon Juneau, the city’s founder.

A guy from Repentigny, this Juneau, born in 1793. He left to earn his living with the Hudson’s Bay Company, he was also married to a mixed race from the Midwest and ended up settling in this bay which was to prosper .

Juneau also, by the way, prospered, and he became the city’s first mayor when it was founded in 1846, and he was remembered in official history. His nephew, Joe Juneau, of Saint-Paul-L’Hermite, gave his name to the capital of Alaska, where he went to look for gold.

It must be homesickness, but I can lose myself for hours in these stories of “remarkable forgotten people”, as Serge Bouchard said. They show me an America that we were not taught, or that we did not want to glorify. That of slightly crazy adventurers, iconoclasts, disobedient, inventors of a new way of living, mixed, off the path of conformism.

Like tiny touches on the American map, their memory is everywhere.

Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Butte des Morts, Fond du Lac, Bay Minette, Lac Qui Parle…

These words full of history become a kind of highway poetry.

They open up an infinite imaginary and nostalgic territory to the “traveler” of 2024, knowing that the word itself has degraded, when we think a little about what a Traveler was…