Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place Read online

  My grandmother, Phoebe Brisson, was also descended from the LaBarges. The LaBarge connection led back to Robert Laberge of Normandy, “a native of Columbière in the diocese of Bayonne” born in 1633. He came to Québec and settled in Montmorency where he married in 1663. His great-great-grandson, Joseph Maria LaBarge, born in L’Assomption, Québec, in 1787, left home in 1808 at age twenty-one. Hiram Chittenden wrote:

  He traveled by the usual route, up the Ottawa River and through the intricate system of waterways in northern Ontario which leads to Georgian Bay and to Lake Huron. Thence he went by way of Mackinaw Strait and Lake Michigan to Green Bay, and along the Fox and Wisconsin rivers to the Mississippi, which he descended to St. Louis. He used a single birch-bark canoe all the way, with only eight miles of portaging.2

  In St. Louis he married “a Creole descendant of both the Spanish and French elements in the settlement of the Mississippi Valley” in 1813.3 Later he answered a newspaper advertisement calling for one hundred good men to trap fur in the American west. So he became a member of General William H. Ashley’s fur expedition of 1828, and a western Wyoming stream, La Barge Creek, near the town named La Barge, now bears his name. His name was attached to the creek and the town because of reports that he was scalped there by an Arickaree camping with or near the trappers. Although James Clyman and that wild liar James Beckwourth said that LaBarge had been killed, he was not killed.4 Hiram Chittenden, in his biography of the son, Captain Joseph LaBarge, reports that the father carried a tomahawk scar on his head—perhaps from the Wyoming attack, although he was in other Indian fights on the Missouri. On that first westering trip Ashley’s notes refer to the bluff west of Pass Creek to the south of Elk Mountain. Although there is no way to be sure, if the trappers were following the North Platte, that bluff was probably Bird Cloud’s cliff, a notable landmark.

  Joseph Maria returned to St. Louis, took up charcoal making, ran a boardinghouse and recruited young men for Ashley’s fur-trapping enterprises. He fathered seven children. Three sons, Joseph (b. 1815), Charles S. and John B., were all steamboat captains. Joseph at age seventeen bound himself for three years to Pierre Choteau’s ruthless American Fur Company as “voyageur, engagé, or clerk,” advanced rapidly to steamboat captain with a deep knowledge of the great river’s shifting channels.5 He became celebrated as the premier Missouri pilot and is said to have influenced Mark Twain’s knowledge of steamboat captains.6 In his first year of employment he spent the winter of 1832–33 in a Pawnee village in the vicinity of Council Bluffs, learning the language and ways of the tribe.

  In 1837 the American Fur Company’s ill-starred steamboat St. Peter’s brought smallpox to the Mandans on the upper Missouri and lit the disease fire that decimated the western tribes in the following decades. LaBarge was not involved in this horrific encounter—Bernard Pratte, Jr., captained the St. Peter’s on that trip. But LaBarge had his own experiences of epidemics. In 1833, in his second year of employment with the American Fur Company, he was on board the Yellowstone captained by Andrew Bennett. On board as passengers were the German naturalist and early ethnographer, Prince Maximilian of Wied, and the Swiss painter Karl Bodmer. A cholera epidemic was roaring through the country and broke out aboard the Yellowstone. The crew was hard-hit and Bennett was forced to go back to St. Louis to find new men, leaving the Yellowstone in the hands of young LaBarge. Local residents came to the riverbank and shouted that if the boat did not leave the state of Missouri immediately they would set it on fire. Both the fireman and the engineer were dead. Eighteen-year-old LaBarge fired up the boiler alone and navigated the boat to the west shore above the Kansas river. His reputation was made.

  He alternately worked for the American Fur Company or quit them to make his own way, suffering several financial disasters. During his career LaBarge knew many of the famous people of his time. As a young boy he met Lafayette. Audubon—whom he disliked—was once his passenger as were the Jesuit missionaries Fathers Christian Hoecken and Pierre-Jean De Smet.7 He knew Brigham Young. Although Captain LaBarge’s brother Charles died in 1852 in a steamboat explosion and brother John collapsed and died while making a boat landing at Bismarck, North Dakota, thirty-three years later, Joseph LaBarge lived to be eighty-four, an illustrious St. Louis citizen, dying in 1899. When I sent my father this information he had no comment. It might have mattered to him when he was a child, but not when he was close to his nineties.

  The Brisson connection was less glamorous. Three early Brissons came from France to New France. Only one of them settled in the Laprairie–St.-Constant–St.-Rémi area—Sebastien Brisson dit Laroche, and according to the genealogist Richard De Gruchy, who worked on our problem, all the Brissons of St.-Rémi were descended from Sebastien, born around 1671 in Bordeaux, Guyenne, France. He married Marie-Marguerite Larivière in June 1722 in Québec.

  Although I give little credence to the family belief in an Indian connection, I can see how descendants thought the Brissons were the link. Olivier, or, as he called himself, “Levi” Brisson, my father’s maternal grandfather, came from St.-Rémi, a rural Francophone village in Napierville County south of Montréal, to Connecticut in the 1860s. St.-Rémi is near Kahnawake, the northern New York State Mohawk reserve on the St. Lawrence River. Levi settled in East Killingly, Connecticut, on the Rhode Island border and gained considerable local fame claiming to be the father of forty or more children with three wives, all scattered in a trail from Québec to Minnesota to Connecticut. Several interviewers took down his story (reproducing his broken English in the standard caricature of the little French Canadian). We hear his voice:

  I know I have feefteen child leeveing, how many more in Minnesota, Canada, y’odder place, O do not know. One time a was a well off, but a have so much seeckness, so many funeral, eet make me poor. Mon dieu, when a feller raise t’ree beeg fam’ like a raise, she don’ save much eef she leeve on farm. In se factory eet ees differaint. A feller she can put hees boys and girls in ze mill an save money ’n bimeby she kin go back to Canada and leave on her fa’m. Zat leetle girl here’s ze youngest one. Ma wife, he have one m’ but she ain’t leeve. She bo’n dead and she have no place in ze church.”8

  From a cousin in Florida I have a copy of a photograph that shows the hawk-faced little man, reported to weigh only 110 pounds, sitting on his doorstep with five of his children. Strings of dried apples, which my relative was pleased to call bear claws, hung on the side of the house. My grandmother, about five years old, sits in the front row. At the time of the interview Levi Brisson was reputedly between eighty and ninety years old. They were living rent-free in an old schoolhouse by agreement with the school district. The Brisson children would maintain the pupil population necessary to keep another school and teacher going in accordance with Rhode Island regulations.

  Monsieur Brisson and his family are not squatters, as they have been represented, or misrepresented. They are, it is true, living on a part of the public domain, occupying a public mansion, but they are giving an equivalent, which, instead of making them, as they have been made to appear, semi-paupers, makes them really public benefactors, inasmuch as their accession to the district population makes possible the continuation of a seat of learning within its borders.9

  The articles provide most of what we know about this man. The Providence Journal reporter paraphrased him as saying “he was born in the parish of St. Remick [St.-Rémi], near Montréal, in 1820, but could not recall the day of the month. He had lived in the States more than 40 years, half of that time within a dozen miles or so of Danielson, Conn. He was married three times. His first wife, Clemence Benjamin, bore him six children, including one pair of twins. His second spouse, Mary Cyr, was the mother of 21, including two pairs of twins, and his third and pregnant wife, Maggie LeBarge, has borne him 11, of which four are dead.”10 If he had lived today he could have had his own television program.

  Levi Brisson died five months after the interview, and the Windham County Transcript ran the following obituary:

/>   Levi Bresson [sic], whose familiar figure was so often seen on our streets, died at his home November [illegible]. He was a Canadian half-breed and his Indian blood was very conspicuous in his features and loping gait. He was born near Quebec between 80 and 90 years ago. He clung to his Indian habits of living and always seemed to prefer some little cabin for a home near the edge of a forest. Reporters have made him famous on account of the great number of his descendents, he being the father of 42 children. He was quaint and original in his sayings, voluble and social in his manner. The burial was Friday.11

  However, newspaper reports are poor evidence, and the researcher Richard De Gruchy did not turn up any Indian connection at all, though speculating that because St.-Rémi was very close to the Mohawk Kahnawake Reservation perhaps the Brisson family had friends there, and “because of this somehow the notion of an Indian connection arose.”12 Diane L agreed that there was no solid proof of any Indian connection. Although several of his descendants, including my grandmother, my father and his cousin, Richard Brisson (a collector of Indian artifacts), believed in an Indian ancestor, the idea that Levi Brisson was a “half-breed” is not substantiated. My sisters and other relatives still hold onto the Indian ancestor.

  Despite genealogical work in Connecticut and in Québec, Peter Ovila Proulx, my father’s father, has not been tracked to his end and probably never will be. It no longer matters. My own father, George, said that he knew the man was lame, that he had had infantile paralysis as a child, that he was a skilled silk weaver. He always believed his father’s family had come down from Trois-Rivières. The 1900 Connecticut census says Peter Ovila Proulx was then fourteen years old, could read and write, spoke English and was employed as a cotton spinner. He limped badly and was called “Turkey” Proulx because of his lurching gait. His World War I draft registration notes that he was short, had brown hair and eyes and was a “cripple.” The divorce record says that Phoebe divorced him after three years of marriage “for habitual intemperance.” From somewhere there came the unsubstantiated story that after the divorce he stole a locomotive and returned to Canada. No death records have turned up the name of this Ovila Proulx. There was a small flurry of excitement when a record of an Ovila Proulx from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, who fought in the First World War turned up, but the description did not fit. Peter Ovila simply disappeared, as so many men have done.

  A child begins to think about his or her name and perhaps subconsciously reacts to it. Alan Lightman is a physicist-

  novelist; Raymond Seed became a biologist; there is a plants-man named Peabody and a rancher named Vaca. Jeffrey F. Brain chose psychotherapy as an occupation and Sonny Grouper was the developer of shark repellent. Oakes Ames (George Plimpton’s grandfather) became a Harvard botanist. I do not know what Proulx (or Prou in the original form or Preault) means. No doubt there is a descriptor in genealogical name lists—some flattering phrase such as Brave-in-Battle or Steadfast. I don’t know.

  Mr. De Gruchy backtracked Ovila to our original Jean Prou, the first ancestor to come to North America. “His name was Jean Proulx. He was the son of Jean Proulx and of Louise Val-lee of the parish of Notre-Dame-de-Nantilly, in the City and Arrondissement of Saumur, in the Bishopric of Angers, Anjou (today in the department of Maine-et-Loire), France and he arrived here sometime before 1672 for he married at Québec City on the 5 June 1673 to Jacquette Fournier.”13

  Although Jean Prou’s employment contract has never been found, the census lists him as “a domestic in the service of Louis Couillard, Sieur de l’Espinay, Squire and Seigneur of Montmagny. Louis Couillard lived in the lower town of Québec, on rue Notre-Dame. The house was full of people; 5 children between the ages of 2 and 14, the queen of the hearth, Geneviéve Després and two domestics, both named Jean. The two domestics, both 22 years old, were working out their indenture for the Seigneur. . . . Thus we may conclude that Jean Prou arrived in 1666, was 22 years old and worked as a household domestic.”14 After three years he was allowed to own less than three acres “comprised of high woods” on the river la Caille. For this he paid an annual homage to the seigneur of “1 sol in ‘cens,’ 3 live capons and 9 silver livres in ‘rentes,’ and 9 days of work on the seigneurie.”15 He also had to give one tenth of all the fish he caught to the seigneur, altogether rather tough terms. The land had to be cleared by hand, and he was still at it two years later. When, in February of 1671, Guillaume Fournier offered him 150 livres for his property he sold it and went back to Québec City. In 1672 Noël Morin, the seigneur of St.-Luc at Montmagny, granted Jean Prou some land at St.-Luc and an easier contract. He could keep his fish, but had to fell and cut four arpents of trees (an arpent is 0.85 percent of an acre) over the next year and live on the place as well. In 1673 he married Jacquette, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Guillaume Fournier. So he became one of the early settlers in Montmagny on the St.-Laurent. Jean Prou stayed in Montmagny.16 The census of 1681 lists him as owning a rifle and twelve head of cattle and working six arpents of land. He and Jacquette increased the population of Montmagny with fourteen children. But something went wrong. The historian Thomas Laforest wrote:

  There is a twenty-year hiatus during which Jean Prou is never mentioned in official or civil documents. He surfaced on 14 October 1701, completely run down and out. Had he tried his hand in the fur trade? On his return to Québec, Marie-Anne Fortin, widow of Jean Picard, a provisions merchant, was waiting for him. She demanded, before the notary Chambelon, that he pay his debt of 700 livres and 16 sous for provisions furnished, which he admitted owing her. This debt was settled only after his death, from the proceeds of his estate.17

  He died at age fifty-nine, March 1, 1703, leaving his widow with many children and a debt. She sold half the farm, including the house and barn, and moved in with her twenty-four-year-old son Joseph. The remaining assets were few—some land, one horse, one cow, three sheep, twenty-five chickens, four rifles, three sickles. By the time my father, George Napoleon Proulx, was born 250-odd years after his ancestor’s arrival in the New World, all memory of Jean Prou had vanished from the family consciousness.

  Through all of the Proulx baptism, birth, marriage, death records runs a black thread—“imbecile,” “mulatto,” “habitual intemperance,” “her mark”—words one doesn’t want to see in a family history, but they are there. It was a poor, mostly illiterate, rural clan of laborers unable to break out of the loop of continuing poverty and misery until my father, George Napoleon Proulx, managed it. Maybe he was right to put behind him all blood ties, to forgo the history, the Québec language, culture and religion, to make his own world as so many Americans have done. I don’t think any of his children understood how he saw himself, his ambitions, his life.

  The Chicano word “rasquache” comes to mind. It has two meanings. The negative meaning is of poor, low-class, uneducated, disorganized and dirty people. The other meaning has been adopted by art critics to describe a vigorous Chicano sensibility, expressing resistance, resourcefulness and adaptability, irony and defiant energy. My father came from roots characterized by the first meaning and reinvented himself as an upwardly mobile white-collar American. His perpetual toast—“here’s to bigger and better jobs and more money”—was one man’s version of the American Dream. My conjectures about our vague French Canadian connection and the immigrant experience in general led to research for the novel Accordion Crimes.

  A year after our father died my sister Roberta found a report in a January 1889 issue of The New York Times headlined they left him to die. The event took place 117 years before my father’s death in 2006.

  MONTREAL, Jan. 10—Last Sunday the body of George Proulx was found completely frozen in the woods near St. Maurice and was conveyed to Piles, where the Coroner has opened an inquest, but it was adjourned till Jan. 17 owing to the absence of important witnesses. The whole story is strange and melancholy, and recalls the adventures of early colonizing times. About the end of last November the deceased went to work in a lumber shanty nea
r the source of the St. Maurice River. He fell sick, and when it was found he could not recover, the overseer determined to send him to Three Rivers. Having no conveyance two men were sent to help the invalid.

  They started at the time when the cold was the severest at the beginning of the Winter. A heavy fall of snow followed, and the trail became impassable, when the travelers were in the dreary district of Tuque, about 100 miles from their destination, with only a few scattered shanties on the way.

  In the middle of the storm the two protectors abandoned their charge on the River Bauke and left him to die. The dying man made an attempt to follow, but he was overpowered by cold and buried in the snow.

  When these two men arrived at Piles they said nothing of the incident, but suspicions arose and a searching party was organized. Sandy Adams and Hercule Deseletz of Rivière Aux Rats found the body and conveyed it on a litter to Piles.

  The conduct of the two men has caused great indignation, and when inquiry was instituted they could not be found.18

  This unknown George Proulx joins the man in the fabric shop as another family mystery.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lodgepole Pines and Houses

  2003–2004

  God knows I had had plenty of experience of houses and apartments from New England to Newfoundland, North Carolina to Japan, helped build several structures, rented some, bought and sold others, renovated and endured. With Bird Cloud, I saw the house rise from what I thought were good ideas. The intentions were good at least. I still do not know where things went wrong or even if they did go wrong. After years of wrestling with awkward domiciles I thought I knew what I needed in a house. I’m afraid I still don’t know, which is another way of saying that for me there is no perfect house.