King Louis's New France then was the historical background of the French Colony in the year 1665 when young André Robidoux arrived on the shores of Quebec. We do not know exactly the date of his arrival in New France. He first appears in the Quebec census of 1666. In 1665 André was just twenty-two years old--a fitting age for a young Frenchman to sow his oats and reap what harvest he could from the world.

In fact, a veteran regiment of Royal regulars arrived in Quebec that year of 1665, sent by King Louis to defeat the Iroquois and defend the frontier. They soon established forts along what was then the frontier of French colonial civilization: at Chambly, on the Richelieu and at Sorel, strategic points defending "the pathway of the raiding Mohawk." Soon afterwards settlers began following them in their wake up this valley. Young André may even have participated in the conquest of the Iroquois and in the establishment of these early military forts. He was certainly in this area about this time and became one of the first settlers on the Northeastern shore of the St. Lawrence across from Montreal.

New settlers were already being sent to New France by the King, who had assumed more direct control two years before. In doing so the King's hopes were manifold. He wanted to extend the reach and dominion of the crown over the colony, and to improve the situation for the colony. He sought to increase the population there, which was miniscule compared to the surging populations of the Dutch and British colonies further south. He also had to provide protection of his new colonists from the raiding Mohawks. At the same time, he wanted the crown to have the lion's share in the vast profits accruing from the trade in furs coming from his colonies. Thus he deliberately wrested the control over the colony from the previous Catholic missionaries and Fur Trading factories, by dispatching regular soldiers there and declaring it a "Royal Colony."

But the young French men and women who found themselves in New France after a long and sometimes hazardous voyage, were never so loyal to their crown that they did not soon seek and gain the new opportunities of the frontier even in violation of royal restrictions and edicts. The independence and freedom of wide-open spaces, of lands bound only by the customs of exotic Indian tribes, presented to them possibilities that they had never known or even realized existed in their previous lives in France.

The King proved to have an always difficult time keeping the young colonists on a long leash. They would just not settle down as he had planned them to become productive and simple farmers paying their rents to the overlords who had been granted title to large tracts of land by the King. Nothing the King could do or send to New France was not soon "corrupted" by the burning desire to seek a fortune in furs on the frontier, which at the time spread in every direction from their small colonial outposts and farmsteads. Few newcomers to the colony, whether they were counts or soldiers or just simple craftsmen, remained unaffected by the pioneering qualities of their new homeland. From the edge of the wilderness, the calls and commands of the King of France seemed distant, remote, and most often unanswerable.

Agricultural interests and development, always a priority of the French Government, took second place to the French Canadian involvement in the fur trade, and in such a situation the real capital and initiative rested in the hands of a bourgeois class of petty merchants who controlled the trade in peltries.

The seigneurs found generally that they could acquire more wealth by managing trade in furs than by exacting rents from the habitants as tillers of the soil. These seigneurs made it their business to become friends of the Indians and to arrange to trade with them. They encouraged their tenants to become traders, supplied them with trading goods, and took their furs in exchange. They lived like feudal lords and carried on wars with rival seigneurs. As they became less like farmers and more like traders, they also acquired the title of bourgeosie or master of the trade. They held close supervision over their coureurs du bois and often themselves traded with the Indians. (ibid.; 92)

Lack of agricultural productivity became an increasing problem, and many habitants illegally sojourned into the forests to trade with the Indians. Referred to as the most romantic and poetic character ever known to American frontier life, "They were irresponsible and improvident, but clever and adaptable. From their manner of living they came to be called 'coureurs du bois' or 'wood runners.'" (ibid.; 91). It was policy for the Jesuit missionaries to accompany trapping parties of the coureurs du bois into the forests to christianize the Indians with whom they traded. "The success of the missionaries increased the friendliness of the red men for the white traders, and missions and fur posts often rose together." (ibid.; 92)

André was referred to as "the Spaniard," not only for his dusky complexion, but the fact that he was actually born in Burgoes, Spain, to a Basque mother and a Frenchman, and thus was probably as much Spanish in culture as he was French in character.

Twenty-two was a fitting age for a young French man to cast his fortune and find his lot in the world. What he found in Quebec, still more than a century before the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolution, was still a remote and primitive fortified city, built mostly of logs, on the edge of a vast and as yet mostly uncharted wilderness. Small French settlements dotted the wide St. Lawrence up and down within a ten to twenty mile radius, almost entirely on the Northwest shore. About the only access between these settlements would have been by pirogue or boat, and in Winter time when the lake was frozen over, "wind ships" tacked across the wide ice between land marks and destinations. These were boats converted into sleighs blown by the wind.

André soon gained a competence under the employment of Eustace Lambert, a prominent fur trader and interpreter. He served as a "sailor" of the great inland waterways, or, in fur-trade parlance, a voyageur. He earned the equivalent of 10 cents per day with room and board--even if this often really meant sleeping in a canoe. It meant that he was part of a small company of men whose mission was to regularly ferry goods and supplies up and down the St. Lawrence during the Spring and Summer months and beyond to the distant tribes of Indians who demanded black powder, weapons, beads, blankets and other trinkets, in exchange for what was then plentiful and easily obtained--the hides of beaver and other North American fur bearing mammals.

During wintertime, these men either remained at home on the farmsteads of their families, often joining in the New Year's celebrations and enjoying the comfort of their wives' company. (later, this pattern of fur trading came to reverse itself, with engagees typically "wintering" with their native American families, and returning to their white families in the Summer after the ice had broken and cleared from the waterways.)  Increasingly, they signed contracts with their fur-trading captains, or burgeous, for "wintering" with the distant Native American tribes where they frequently found new beds to keep warm in. 

At that time, the French had established permanent allied relations with the great Huron of the North, the Sac and Fox of the Great Lakes, and even the Ojibway and the Sioux nations further west. They stood in ambivalent relation with the other Iroquois nations of the New Brunswick, then known as Acadia, and the New England Region, and they found themselves at times inbetween the warring parties of competing Indian nations.

What would it have been like for a young French man to spend his first winter only with one or two partners amidst a tribe of Indians very foreign and different from themselves? Strange it must have been for young André, apprenticed to an older fellow like Lambert, to live among a tribe of Huron. Insecure would they have been, without the protection of their own kind, completely at the mercy of their often unpredictable hosts. And this was a pattern of wintering and summer sojourning that was to become the central feature of the French fur trade for the next two centuries.

Eustace Lambert, André's employer, had come to Canada sometime in the early 1640's, and he is found first on record on a return voyage from Huron country in 1646 (Romme, 1991). Sainte-Marie-des-Huron was the "favorite meeting place for the Huron and Algonkin fur-traders passing rough Qyuebec, and a Jesuit mission." Lambert was apparently affiliated with this mission until 1651, the year he accompanied Father Chaumont to Ile D'Orleans and Tadoussac. Lambert acquired land at Pointe-Levy in the Lauson seigneury, building a house called Sainte-Marie in honor of the mission. He paid off his seigneury dues of 300 livres (half in money and half in beaver) in 1671. He was the owner of the Merchant's bank of Quebec. He may have helped found in conjunction with the Jesuits, St. Lambert, the hamlet of La Prairie where Andre Robidoux had resettled his family the year before in 1670. He died in Quebec in July of 1673.

Census in 1667 reveals a band of population of about 4000 souls distributed unevenly along the north shore from ten miles above Quebec to twenty miles below it. Settlement was pushing up the Saint-Charles river and a new village of Charlesbourg. The Ile d'Orlean's had about 450 people, and there were about 200 people at Trois-Rivieres, with another 350 people scattered along the north shore for twelve miles downstream of this village. There were about 800 people at that village of Montreal on the Ile de Montreal. The south shore of the St. Lawrence was almost devoid of settlement.

André remained associated with Quebec at least a couple of years after his arrival. He married Jeanne Denote in Quebec City on May 16, 1667. Denissen gives the date of their marriage as June 7th 1667. Romme gives their date of marriage as July 7th, 1667, but notes that a marriage contract was signed before notary Duquet on May 16, 1667. Not having obtained first hand access to the original documents, it is impossible to tell which date is correct.

Jeanne was the fifth daughter of Antoine Denote and Catherine Leduc, of St. Germain of Auxerre, diocese of Paris, France. According to Romme(1991) she may have been an orphan sent by the King of France (Filles du Roy, or "daughters of the King") for marriage in New France. At the time the estimated sex-ratio of New France was about six men to every woman. The King recruited these women from orphanages and poor houses, primarily in Paris, and provided them transportation, clothing and even a dowry of between two and three hundred French pounds. About 774 such women were sent to Quebec between 1663 and 1773. About 31 percent were from Paris and 58% were between the ages of 15 and 16.

André and Jeanne Denote Robidoux then settled in St. Lambert, La Prairie, Quebec, in 1670. According to the Tanguay Records, as cited by the Orral Messmore Robidoux text, André and Jeanne settled on a farmstead in the concession of St. Lambert in the Parish of La Prairie, Quebec, on the 7th of June. This date may have been confused with their marriage date in later accounts. No doubt this resettlement was a reflection of ties of employment, consociation and allegiance within a vast and competitive fur-trade network. It provides vital clues to the early fur-trading pattern of the Robidoux. The genealogical record as reconstructed by Clyde Rabideau shows thatAndré Robidoux and Jeanne Denote had five children--three girls and two boys--who were in order Romaine, Marguerite, Jeanne, Guillame (William), and Joseph. There may in fact have been other children, especially ones who died in their youth or infancy but who for one reason or another have not been reported. Baptism dates are often confused with birthdays in records, and baptisms sometimes did not occur until several years after the birth of a child, there being relatively high infant mortality rates at the time (almost 30% for children under 15 years of age).

Romaine, the oldest girl of André, was born in Quebec City on the 11th of July, 1669. (LeBoeuf, 1957: 605)  She eventually married married Jean Roux on Nov. 8, 1683 at La Prairie. She would have been fourteen years old at the time of marriage. She is found in the records (LeBoeuf, 1957:605) marrying one Jean Patenote on Dec. 10th, 1686 in La Prairie, and it can be presumed that her first husband perished young. She died in La Prairie on Sept. 1st, 1697, at the age of 28 years.

The second daughter, Marguerite, was born in La Prairie on Nov. 10th, 1671, and died two months later, on Jan. 15th, 1672. The third daughter, Jeanne, was born in La Prairie on Sept. 19th, 1673. She married one Gabriel Lemieux in La Prairie on Dec. 5th, 1690, at the age of 17. She died in La Prairie on April 12th, 1736, at the age of 63.

The fourth child, Guillaume, was born on Nov. 28th, 1675 in La Prairie. He married in Montreal one Francoise Guerin on June 11th, 1697. He was twenty-two years old and Francoise was seventeen. They had thirteen children. This was the line that extended down to Joseph Robidoux IV and formed the central cord of our story. By their third child, they are shown to have resettled from LaPrairie to Longueuil. He died on July 1st, 1754, in Montreal at the age of seventy-nine years, and was buried the next day, on July 2nd.. She died three years later in, 1757, at the age of seventy-seven.

The fifth and last known child of André and Jeanne, was another boy whom they named Joseph. He was born on Jan. 13, 1678, in LaPrairie. André died in 1678, the same year of the birth of the youngest son.

It is evident that André and Jeanne moved their family to the village of La Prairie de la Magdeleine on the south shore across the Saint Lawrence from the Isle de Montreal not long after the birth of their first child. He must have been one of the earliest settlers of this seigniory, possibly one of the first four families there on the south shore of the Saint Lawrence, which was by this time mostly unsettled forest. Most settlement before this time was restricted to the northern shores of the St. Lawrence River, in part for protection from invading Iroquois. The land for La Prairie had been granted by the seignior of La Citire to the Jesuits in 1647. This same seignior granted the arrire-fiefs of Longueuil, Saint-Francois des Pris, Ile Sainte-Therese, and Ile Saint-Paul. La Prairie soon became one of the most populous seigneuries and the cens-de-rentes were among the highest in Canada, being commonly a rate of one sol per square arpent and one capon per arpent of river frontage, or a rate of five livres per year for a roture of land that was two by thirty arpents. 

An arpen is a Mississippi French term which is defined as "the common spelling for "arpent" or "a unit of linear or square measure. As a unit of linear measure the arpent of Paris equaled 10 perches or 180 feet. Read states that an arpent is 'roughly equal to 192 feet.' This explanation of this apparent confusion is that Clapin means French feet and Read, English. The exact figure is 191.838 feet.... As a unit of square measure the arpent of Paris equaled .8449 English acre." (McDermott, 1941: 15-6). A "pied du roi" was the French foot, a standard unit of linear measure which equaled 32.5 centimeters or 12.7893 English inches. (ibid, 117).

Jesuits tried to attract settlers to La Prairie de la Magdeleine by effectively reducing this rate to three and a half livres for a common roture for two decades after 1673, but otherwise the rates of rent were quite stable for most rotures. This rent reduction was effective in inducing young families from other seigneuries to settle there, when the number of roture concessions made by the Jesuits jumped from four previously to the rent reduction to over forty rotures afterward. The majority of the rotures of La Prairie contained clearings of less than ten to fifteen square arpents of land, representing relatively small farmsteads compared to other seigneuries.

There was a commons in La Prairie for use of its inhabitants. Its land was set aside for a compact village along the Saint Lawrence, but settlements and houses spread along the road to Chambly and on individual farms to the east of the church. Such a village constituted a center of a parish, and the parish church of the Jesuits was the prominent building there, lacking a parish manor.

These villages were small "service centers" for the surrounding settlement of farmers, and the central place of residence for many of the peasants--usually having grist mills for the grinding of wheat and "bakeries" for the marketing of grain and wheat, which was the principal commodity exchanged from the farms, as well as barns, stables, and many kitchen gardens. Many of the inhabitants who had homes, rotures and families in Saint Lambert developed and held rotures in La Prairie and used its common. In 1675, the Jesuits let their domain at La Prairie for the exorbitant rate of five hundred livres a year payable in bushels of wheat, plus one hundred and eighty more livres per year for each priest living in the seigneurie.

In fact, very little of the land around Montreal had been put to the plow or used productively, in proportion to what was available. Drainage was a problem in many areas, and clearings tended to be small and patchy, but not even problems with marketing their produce could fully explain why they hadn't more strongly committed their limited resources to farming the land. "La Prairie de la Magdeleine, the Jesuits' seigneurie opposite Montreal, had been settled in the 1670's but clearings were still small and patchy sixty years later......As La Prairie de la Magdeleine lay across the busy fur route from the upper St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers to the Richelieu River, La Champlain and Albany, it is a fair guess that the fur trade, rather than agriculture, was the principal interest of most of its population." (Harris, 1968: 149)

It is evident then that André settled his young family early on the south shore of the St. Lawrence opposite the Isle de Montreal for the main reason of participating in the fur trade, much of which activity was probably beyond the purview of control by the Canadian authorities of the time. It was evident that by 1833 land at La Prairie was still undeveloped, with rotures being only sporadically spread across the landscape--all the rotures there by that year had only one house upon it, indicating that the principal interest of the offspring of these first families was not the development of new land there, nor in the partitions by their fathers, but either in the fur trade, or in the development of land in other seigneuries. "In those seigneuries good land was still available in many undeveloped rotures and in the seigniorial domain, and in this situation, rotures were not broken up into permanently separated farms." (Harris, 1968:135)