By 1680,[i][ii]
fifteen years after seven colonists of Ville-Marie contracted with the crown
and with each other to settle on the St. Peter River, Jean Chicot had died and
bequeathed his land along the Côte-des-Argoulets to his widow Marguerite and
their only son, Jean-Baptiste. Marguerite remarried
a man much closer her age, Nicholas Boyer, with whom she would have several
more children. Others of the original
inhabitants of Verdun had also died, leaving their descendants fertile land and
a more peaceful island; Ville Marie had gone from a few dozen citizens to a few
hundred, and was growing. Some of the
Argoulets were still around though, and one of them was Étienne Campeau. He had taken the charge to develop his land
very seriously, perhaps too seriously, eventually landing himself in a legal dispute with the other settler of Ville-Marie.
When the original occupants of the
Côte-des-Argoulets received their concessions, each contract specified the
shape, size and location the land to be given.
The seven original land grants were all long rectangular farms with one
short side along the river, and the long sides bordering their neighbors. Additionally, the concessions made an
apportionment for the commons, an area of land to be left to pasture for the
grazing of animals. This was a standard
practice in agricultural societies, and in the case of the Côte-des-Argoulets
the governor specified that the commons would be taken from the riverside of
each farm, such that the commons ran lengthwise along the river, perpendicular
to the concessions. The contract
specified that the commons would remain available to the Argoulets, as well as
a standard inclusion to allow the local nuns and monks the use of the pasture
for the maintenance of the church property and livestock. All of this seems pretty straight-forward.
In fact it seems so straight-forward
that it’s hard to imagine how Étienne Campeau managed to make himself the
defendant in nothing less than a colonial class-action law suit brought before
governor by all of his neighbors in June of 1680. All of Étienne’s neighbors complained and
swore testimony that in the fifteen years since he had originally received his
concession, he had consistently violated the terms of his concession by
ploughing and planting crops on the commons on the portion between his land and
the St. Peter River. They sought to have
the governor, Jacques du Chesneau, issue a special interdiction against
Étienne’s farming and have the land made fallow again to allow for pasturing.
Étienne did not go along quietly. First, he argued that the Commons belonged
exclusively to the seven original Argoulets that had not received land grants
from the crown but also contracted with each other concerning the development
of the land. He claimed that this
restricted view of the commons applied to the original seven and only them, to
the exclusion of all newcomers and inheritors.
As for the planting of crops on the land he claimed that the governor
who gave him the land, Paul Chomeday Sieur de Maisonneuve, had told him that he
could and should develop all the land, including the commons. He even claimed that M. de Maisonneuve had
written a letter to this effect, signed by the governor and read by other
Argoulets. According the Étienne, the witnesses
to the letter unfortunately included those Argoulets who had already died, and
though we would have certainly produced the letter itself, as his luck would
have it, a fire had destroyed the letter years ago.
Not to be outdone, Étienne’s opponents
(including Marguerite Boyer) also proffered as evidence the testimony of M.
Maisonneuve which was also witnessed by persons deceased. The governor could fairly well verify the
fact that the commons ought to have remained a commons by reading the original
land grants[iii],
but the spurious testimony of M. de Maisonneuve also specified that he intended
for the commons to provide pasture for all present and future inhabitants of
the Côte-des-Argoulets.
If all of this he-said-she-said sounds
like your last Christmas with family, you wouldn’t be too far from the
mark. You see, while you know that
Marguerite Boyer was the widow of Jean Chicot, you may not know that one of
Jean’s great-great-grandchildren, Joseph Baptiste Cicotte had another
great-great-grandfather, Étienne Campeau.
So if you’re an American Cicotte, you’re probably related to both. As it turns out, being related to a verified
Argoulet comes at a price, the price that he was disliked and kind of a cheat.
In the end Governor du Chesneau ruled
that the contested land should remain part of the commons, ordered that Étienne
Campeau plough under the farm (notwithstanding he allowed Étienne the time to
harvest what he had already planted that spring), ordered that the commons
belonged exclusively to the seven original Argoulets or those who had purchased
or inherited those plots of land only, and fined Étienne Campeau 150 pounds.
This episode reminds me that as much as I love to honor our ancestors, they were a lot trashier, racist, sexist, smelly, etc., than I like to believe, though settling Montreal is still a big accomplishment, personal faults aside.
[i]
Many thanks to Maddy Cicotte for doing the leg work on this post and retrieving
the source document (Ordonances,
Commissions, etc., etc., des Gouverneurs et Intendants de La Nouvelle France
1639-1706). I’ve been trying to
identify the original source of the story of the Côte des Argoulets for about
six or seven years now.
[ii] I
took the content of this post entirely from the work mention in note i. Instead of citing each fact page by page
(especially since the document is in French), I simply refer the reader to the
sources section below. Those pages
detail the testimony and decision of the then governor of Ville-Marie.
[iii]
Most of the original land grants still exist and can be viewed in the National
Archives of Quebec in Montreal, QC. A
photo of such a grant can be found in Part I, with a transcription in Part II.
Sources:
Roy, Pierre George. Ordonnances, Commissions, etc., etc., des Gouverneurs et Intendants de la Nouvelle-France, 1639-1706, pg. 266-275. Beauceville: L'"Eclaireur", 1924. Book.
No comments:
Post a Comment