- Today, we are pleased to introduce Mary Antoine
as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
Mary Antoine was born and raised in Prairie du Chien,
and has worked for 40 years in the history museum field.
She's the president of the
Prairie du Chien Historical Society
and the curator of collections at Villa Louis Historic Site.
Mary has written numerous articles and books
on Prairie du Chien,
including two volumes with Arcadia Publishing.
She's the author of The War of 1812 in Wisconsin:
The Battle for Prairie du Chien,
and her book, Frenchtown Chronicles of Prairie du Chien:
History and Folklore from Wisconsin's Frontier,
was recently released by
the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.
She lives in a French-Canadian home that dates
from the early 19th century which she helped to restore.
Here, today, to discuss folklore from Wisconsin's frontier,
please join me in welcoming Mary Antoine.
[clapping]
- Thank you, and thank you for joining us here today.
As the introduction said, I grew up in Prairie du Chien,
and Frenchtown was very much a part of the community
when I was growing up.
There was Frenchtown Road, and, as children,
we'd get on our bicycles, go pedal up it.
It was basically a country lane, although it was paved.
Stop at the old French cemetery,
and then go all the way up to Gremore Lake
and go fishing for crappies and sunfish.
There were lots of smaller houses along Frenchtown Road
and farm fields.
And we never asked why it was called Frenchtown Road.
It was just, that it was.
Well...
Albert Coryer had a lot to do with Frenchtown.
He was an older man,
and he lived at the north end of Prairie du Chien.
And, I understand he was quite a character.
Well, for many years,
I lived and worked in upstate New York,
and I returned to Prairie du Chien.
And I was only home a few days
when I went to the local bank,
and one of the tellers I knew there,
said to me, "I have something I know you'll like."
And she said, "Next time you come, come on in
and I will give it to you."
So the next time I went,
she handed me a photocopy
of many, many pages of handwritten notes.
And she said, "You know, Vera Coryer gave this to me.
You know Vera, don't you?"
And I said, "Sure."
And she said, "It's just full of stories
about the early French people.
You'll love it."
And I did.
And it was loaded with information
that is not recorded anywhere in published histories.
And it told about the life of ordinary people.
It's something that we don't get a lot in history.
We get the history of people who made a name for themselves.
And a lot of information and history of ordinary people
gets lost at the time of their death.
But Albert Coryer preserved
a lot of this information over the many years.
And there are more of Albert's writings
that, little by little, I began to find.
And another person, Lucy Murphy,
and myself said,
you know, these stories are absolutely wonderful.
Everybody else should be able to read them,
not just the few of us who know where they are.
And so we convinced the Wisconsin Historical Society Press
to share Albert's stories.
So, if you read the book,
pretty much of it is Albert's own words.
So the question is: What is Frenchtown?
Louise Kellogg wrote a book many years ago
on the French regime in Wisconsin, and that dealt
pretty much with early history of the 1600s and 1700s,
when what is now Wisconsin was controlled by
the country of France.
And she mentioned a little bit about
Green Bay and Prairie du Chien.
And those were the two communities that
had a very, very distinct French character.
They were permanently settled in the 1760s and the 1770s,
and the people who lived there engaged in
the fur trade and farming.
Well, one of the communities
that were the first settlements in Wisconsin
was Prairie du Chien.
It's literally a prairie,
and it ran from nine miles from the Wisconsin River,
all the way up to where the bluffs come back together
and join the Mississippi River.
And the major part of the prairie was farmland.
But there were also three villages on the prairie.
One was on the island,
and that was the Main Village.
And then, across the Marayers slough,
was the Village of San Friol.
And then up north, was the Upper Village.
And so Prairie du Chien was quite larger than,
than it is today.
Well, in the 1840s and 1850s,
Yankee speculators began coming to the prairie
and buying up a lot of the farmland
that was owned by the early French settlers.
And they purchased heavily in the Main Village
and the Village of San Friol and the southern farm lots.
And the community began to lose its French identity,
as the farm lots were surveyed
and broken up into blocks and lots
and streets and alleys.
But the north part of the prairie
remained pretty much untouched
by 19th century development.
Right down here is the old French cemetery
and the Upper Village.
And that part of the community really maintained
its French character.
It's not part of the city of Prairie du Chien.
It never was.
And the French name stayed there.
[speaking French]
And then, in the 1840s and 1850s,
there was a migration of French-Canadians
from the Quebec area into the Upper Mississippi.
Most of them were farmers.
They came for the farmland.
And in the Prairie du Chien area,
some settled at Prairie du Chien
and some settled right across the river
in Clayton County, Iowa.
And so more French names were added to this area.
[speaking French]
Stram, even though it doesn't sound French is.
[speaking French]
And so this is what became Frenchtown.
Everything from the French cemetery
to the very north end of the prairie.
And the Coryer family lived there with their relatives,
and, through marriage,
a lot of them became related.
Well, Albert was born in 1877.
And he was born and raised in Frenchtown.
He knew all the families there.
As I said, many of them were related by marriage.
And, in the evening, what was there to do but to gather.
And when families gathered after all the work was done,
they would tell stories, they'd play cards, they'd dance.
And so Albert, as a young boy,
heard all of the stories from these families.
There's stories of being part of the fur trade.
There's stories of farming.
There's stories of coming to Wisconsin from Quebec.
And he remembered them
very, very well,
and he wrote them down.
We have found at least five manuscripts
that were written by Albert,
and they have been saved by
a variety of people over the years,
along with photographs of three generations of the family.
And so these were the basis for Frenchtown Chronicles.
Very much Albert's words.
In some ways, he wrote all of his stories
almost as stream of consciousness.
He would start a story, which would lead to another story,
which would lead to another story,
quite often without any form of punctuation.
He was getting down, you know, what he remembered.
So, Lucy Murphy and I took these five manuscripts
and we found that some stories were repeated
between manuscripts, but there were extra details.
The stories were never 100% the same.
And so, what we did is we took all of the stories,
did a little grammar editing
for these, and we ordered them into topics.
And so, the first one talks about rural life,
and then the Frenchtown people and their culture.
The third is really interesting.
It's A Voyageur's World,
and it's a story of Albert's grandfather,
who was in the fur business for the American Fur Company,
but in the Missouri River district.
And the fourth chapter is called Beyond the Natural World.
There was a belief in faith healing,
and also, the presence of spirits
that you find in his stories.
What we did is we provided an introduction to each chapter,
and then let Albert tell the stories himself.
And so, all the stories begin with Julian Coryer.
Julian was born in Quebec,
south of the Saint Lawrence River.
And he was born very close to L'Acadie.
And the people who lived there had lived in Acadia.
And when that area was taken over by the British,
some migrated to this area of Quebec,
others went to what became New England,
others went down to New Orleans.
And Albert's father,
whom he never names, it's always his father.
Unless you do genealogical work,
we're not too sure what his name is.
He did say that his father
made his living as a painter.
So I would assume he would be a house painter.
And they lived in the small village.
And Julian, himself, was the eldest
of a very large family.
Well, at the age of 16, he was a young man,
and he wanted to go courting young ladies
and go to a dance.
And he and his father had a disagreement
over who was going to use the one horse.
His father said he needed it
and Albert thought he could take it.
And so this disagreement led--
I meant Julian.
Led Julian to think maybe it was time
he made a life on his own, and he decides to go venturing,
and goes to Montreal.
And there is an agent there for
the American Fur Company,
recruiting young men to work in the fur trade.
And so, Julian signs and engagement to work for
the American Fur Company in the Missouri River region.
And throughout Albert's stories,
he always refers to the Company.
Now, the Company was what the employees
of the American Fur Company always called the business.
And this is where you have to start
putting yourself in somebody else's shoes.
Albert assumed, in the 1950s,
that the Company meant the Hudson Bay Company.
Well, the Hudson Bay Company never operated
in Wisconsin or Missouri.
So, you know, as you read Albert's stories,
there's a slight footnote there explaining
that whom Julian really worked for
was the American Fur Company.
And so Julian starts off,
a 16-year-old with a bunch of hardened voyageurs,
and after a day of paddling,
he realizes he made a big mistake.
[laughing]
But the older men tell him,
"Don't worry, you'll harden up."
And so, they paddle westward through the Saint Lawrence,
through the Great Lakes,
and end up on Mackinac Island.
And this is from the account book of
the American Fur Company,
and you can see that Julian already owes
something to the American Fur Company
and he hasn't made it even to the Missouri River yet.
From there, they paddle the Fox-Wisconsin Waterway,
and they stop at Prairie du Chien.
And Julian gives us a little description
of Prairie du Chien in 1829, 1830.
He talks about some of the people that live there,
the houses that are scattered around,
and he would have been there at the time
when the American troops were moving out of
the first Fort Crawford,
which you see here which was a wood fortification,
and they were building the new fortification
out of stone on the upper lands.
And so, they just do a small stop there.
They stop for the agent of the American Fur Company
in Prairie du Chien, who would have been Joseph Rolette.
And then they continue on down
the Mississippi River to St. Louis.
And by the time Julian gets to St. Louis, he's hardened.
He's got callouses on his hands now.
He's developed the muscles and has learned
how to tote and haul those packs of trade goods.
They don't stay in St. Louis very long.
They repack all of their goods on to flatboats,
and they go up the Missouri River.
The one chapter
is all on Julian and all of his adventures in the fur trade.
He goes through two engagements.
We haven't been quite able to figure out how many years,
but it's probably four to six years he works
for the American Fur Company in the Missouri River region.
And he tells lots of stories about the hardship,
about how the men had to rely upon each other,
about the difference in class between the trader
and the clerk and the ordinary voyageur.
Again, Julian is very vague on the details
of exactly where he worked.
Again, he talks about the Company,
but he also talks about the captain.
And from reading between the lines,
we can figure out that he was stationed at
Fort Union on the Missouri River,
which was an American Fur Company post.
And this is an image of Fort Union.
Kenneth McKenzie ran it.
He was always called the captain.
And in Julian's reminiscences that he told Albert,
he talks about one incident where
one of the employees of the American Fur Company
steals a horse,
and a daughter from one of the chiefs.
And how, by doing this,
the man endangers everybody that's at Fort Union.
And Kenneth McKenzie debates about whether or not
he's going to give this man to the Indians,
to save everybody else.
Well, this is a true incident.
It's documented.
So, again, in reading the stories,
you can tell exactly where Julian was.
So he spent much time at Fort Union.
He had saved enough money,
and he felt that now he had enough money,
he should go home and apologize to his father.
Well, he gets down to St. Louis, he gets sick.
He has to stay in the headquarters
of the American Fur Company in St. Louis.
And they let him stay there,
but he has to pay for all of his healthcare.
And so, therefore, he has no money
to go back to Canada and see his family.
Well, while he was there,
and again this is a little vague, he meets a young lady.
Her name was Leocadie Lessard,
and in 1836 they get married in St. Louis.
They're married, but money is needed,
and so,
Julian signs up again for another term of engagement
with the American Fur Company.
He works for the Upper Missouri outfit
and then later on for the Sioux outfit,
both of which are run out of St. Louis.
Well, Leocadie comes from a very large family.
Her mother, Marie Lessard, had brought all of her children
from Quebec to New Orleans, and little by little,
they made their way up to St. Louis.
And Leocadie has a brother, Jean Baptiste.
And Jean Baptiste has already been up to Prairie du Chien.
He's sold wild horses there.
And he must have convinced Julian and Leocadie
that they should go up and settle at Prairie du Chien,
and so they do.
They come up to Prairie du Chien.
They buy land in Limery Coulee.
This is the Domesday map.
This is the coulee at Prairie du Chien,
and right above that is the land that Julian buys.
And he buys land, the Lessards buy land,
and he has an extended family there,
along with members of the Gauthier family.
Julian and Leocadie's only child, Joseph, is born
in 1845,
and he marries a young girl whose family had come from Ohio.
Her name was Malvina,
and her family had settled in Crawford County.
And Joseph and Malvina have three children.
Joseph and Malvina are sitting in the front,
and, from the back, starting on the left, is Albert,
he's the oldest, his sister Della,
and his brother, George.
And Prairie du Chien is changing.
It's becoming more anglicized,
and the name over time
changes from Carriere to Coryer.
And so they spell it in an English way.
They live on the family farm,
and they have lots of neighbors.
Marie Anne Lessard, Leocadie's sister,
had married Francois Gauthier,
and they lived just up the coulee from them.
So the Lessard and Gauthier families
are related by marriage.
Next to them lives the Charier family.
And before Mr. Charier settled down,
he went out to the gold rush in California.
So there's stories about Jean Baptiste Lessard
and Mr. Charier going out to the gold rush.
And so Albert is growing up, and he's remembering
all of these stories from his grandmother Leocadie,
his parents, the Gauthier family, the Charier family,
and other people that lived in Frenchtown.
Well, Albert has heard stories of
both of his grandfathers' adventures,
and he wants to go adventuring, like his two grandfathers.
And he wants to enlist in the Spanish-American War.
But his mother convinces him to stay on the farm
because his father is not well.
But after the death of his father, he goes adventuring.
He goes out to Colorado and purchases some land.
Then he goes on to California,
and even works in the construction of the buildings
for the Pan-California Exposition.
Returns to Prairie du Chien for a while,
for his sister's marriage,
and then he's off to Omaha
and then down to Florida to pick oranges.
So he does get to live some of his adventures
later on in life.
When he finally returns, he and his mother
buy a house next to his sister, Della, who's married.
And once his mother dies,
Albert moves in with Della and her family.
And this is where he begins to tell his stories.
And he tells the stories to his nieces and nephews,
and then he also tells the stories to
his great-niece and nephew, both of whom are still alive.
And, so I talked to his great-niece,
and this is what she said about Albert's storytelling:
"Albert loved to reminisce about the old days.
"His hand movements were as much a part of his tales
"as his word, rising and falling with the action,
"resting on his knees during the dramatic interludes.
"He spoke slowly and deliberately,
"the words carefully chosen to emote their desired tone."
So he was a great storyteller.
But someone in the family must have convinced him
to write his stories down.
And we have found that he would write his stories
on anything he found that was a piece of paper.
So these stories are in an old daybook
given out by a local insurance company.
And they were written for his family.
And that's why he titles it:
The Grandson of Two Runaway Granddads.
And he tells the story of both of his grandfathers,
Julian Coryer and Thaddeus Langford.
Well, Florence Bittner, to the left,
who used to be curator of the Villa Louis in the 1950s,
heard about Albert's stories, and she thought
the Wisconsin Historical Society should record them.
And so, in 1951, Florence interviewed Albert
and talked to him about life in Frenchtown.
And the transcripts of those interviews still exist,
and the transcripts were also used
in the production of the book.
And so, he wrote, again, another manuscript
for Florence Bittner.
There was an article in the newspaper
that this was going to be published into a book,
but his stories were never published.
They always stayed in manuscript form.
In 1954, at the age of 76,
Albert married for the first time.
He married Mary Veronica Welch,
a lady who lived in her neighborhood,
and, according to what I've heard,
he thought somebody needed to take care of her.
And so they were married in the Catholic church.
But he must have thought a lot of her,
whom they called Vera,
for it was for her
that he wrote these stories of Frenchtown.
And this whole manuscript is only on the people who lived
in Frenchtown, and again, was included in the book.
And along with the manuscript that he wrote for Vera,
he also produced a map on old brown paper.
It's even got some food stains on it.
And the map accompanies his stories.
And what he did
is he drew Frenchtown.
The map is literally this long.
It's just been broken up into parts for you to see here.
And he drew in every house
that he could remember,
those that still existed, those that did not exist,
and then labeled them as to who lived there
in the 1860s, the 1870s, the 1880s.
Frenchtown Road is between three and four miles long,
and so all of these homes were located.
Today, if you go on Frenchtown Road,
they're all gone, but for two.
And so, again, it's Albert's record that helps us.
In 1888, he retired.
He had worked as a janitor/custodian
at the Catholic boys school in Prairie du Chien,
Campion Jesuit High.
And so he retired in 1965,
and three years later he died.
But his stories have lived on,
and, if you would like, I'll read a few of them to you.
We've got some time, yes.
Okay, we're going to read about
the French people of Prairie du Chien.
And these are Albert's words.
"Well, the old French settlers
were a humble class of people.
They didn't try to accomplish very much,
but they always had in mind of being generous
and friendly to one another and enjoying themselves.
They would help one another whenever it was needed,
in case one would get sort of handicap some way,
through sickness or hard luck of some kind,
and get backwards with their work.
Why, the others would just all pitch in and help them.
This was so that the other man
would be up to his work, compared to the others
when he was well.
And also the womenfolk.
If the woman of the household would happen to be sick
and get backwards with her work and needed help,
the women of the neighborhood would all come
and help her and get her back to
where she should be with her work."
"And also, as far as enjoying themselves,
they were a class of people that
tried to be together as much as they could."
"They enjoyed one another's company,
and they would get together especially during the holidays.
From New Year's to Ash Wednesday was really the time
they enjoyed themselves the most.
And they had more time then, of course,
because they didn't have to be out in the fields
doing so much work outside,
and they could spend more time
in trying to enjoy themselves.
They'd start on New Year's Day,
generally by going to the oldest of the neighborhood
or family, and have dinner with them.
And then, from there, in the evening,
they would go to another older couple, or a house where
the people had been living there the longest,
and enjoy themselves during the evening.
And from New Year's, then, two or three times a week,
they would get together and enjoy themselves
by having dances and songs and playing cards.
The young people would dance, and
the older women would get in a room and talk and play cards.
And the men, some of them,
would get together and sing songs.
And to keep themselves up in the right spirit,
they would have a little alcohol,
which was their main drink.
They'd dilute it.
They'd have pure grain alcohol and dilute it.
Half water and never was any of them drunk.
They'd just merely take enough so that
it'd give them pep, so that they could enjoy themselves.
At about 12 o'clock, they'd have a real meal,
with nothing missing you might say.
It was a real feast.
And after they'd all ate their fill,
they'd spend their time,
from then until two or three o'clock in the morning,
enjoying themselves, dancing, playing cards,
and talking and visiting with one another."
"But Ash Wednesday, this all stopped,
and the time of Lent began.
And they'd devote their time as they should during Lent.
And as far as wanting to accomplish very much,
as far as earthly gains or laying aside much wealth,
it seems none of them tried to do that.
They didn't seem to care to do that.
All they wanted to do was just live along,
have a good time, and not worry."
So those were the people that Albert grew up with.
But, quite often,
there would be visitors to
the Coryers and their neighbors.
And sometimes Julian would have to go out.
And so here's a story about some of their visitors.
The French people got along quite well with the Indians,
and there's quite a few stories about
sharing of culture in here.
"The evening Julian left about sunset,
Mr. Drew hurriedly came in saying,
'You are about to have visitors for the night, Mrs. Coryer.
'There are many Indians coming over the hill,
'coming this way.'
On looking, Mrs. Coryer noticed many Indians coming.
So she told Mr. Drew to be good to them,
and refuse them nothing they needed,
to let them camp there if they desired,
and it so happened that Julian had plenty of hay,
which they wanted for their ponies,
and also to put on the ground to lay in their tepees
The chief asked Mrs. Coryer if the women,
who had small papooses,
could get in the hut with her for the night.
Mrs. welcomed them in."
"It was very good that Mr. Drew understood
and could speak the Indian language.
There were several mothers with babies,
which crowed the hut very much.
The babies were not accustomed to
the warm indoor temperature
and, on being indoors for a while,
they all started to cry.
The mothers took them outside about naked,
and tossed them about in the cold air.
This caused the babies to go to sleep."
[laughing]
"By laying them on deer hides
that were stretched on the floor.
Mrs. Coryer managed to get food
for the mothers in the house.
Those outside in teepees cooked their own food.
The Indians were fond of potatoes, and so it happened
that Julian had harvested and stored away in his cellar
many bushes of potatoes.
The Indians asked Mr. Drew for potatoes,
which he did not refuse them,
and for every one-half bushel of potatoes,
they gave Mr. Drew a quarter of venison,
which Mrs. had them pile in a corner of the log hut.
By the time the Indians had enough potatoes,
Mrs. had several quarters of venison."
"The night passed, the morning came,
the Indians were once more satisfied with food,
and then they packed up to leave on their way south.
But before leaving, each mother that had slept in the hut
gave Joseph, the young boy, a string of beads,
which loaded his neck to a breaking point,
and also thanked Mrs. very much
for welcoming them as she did."
So the Indians are the Ho-Chunk.
Because they used to come to the neighbors
very, very much, and so, as I said,
there's other stories in here about them.
One more.
Mrs. Bittner, when she interviewed Albert,
was very curious about something
that was part of the French-Canadian culture.
Some called it faith healing, and some called it charming.
And Albert was a faith healer.
So Mrs. Bittner asked him if he could tell
a little bit about this faith cure.
"Well, this cure couldn't be handed down to most anyone.
It had to be a man of good character,
and not a man that was addicted to drinking very much.
Of course, they could take a drink but not get drunk,
and get out of their minds,
so that they would use this when they couldn't use it,
and also abuse the use of prayer."
"And they could teach only three.
Each man that knew the cure could teach three others,
and no more, before his death."
"And, of course, the different generations were first.
As I said, Mr. Limery brought it here."
"He was one of the first settlers at Frenchtown,
and then he taught it to Mr. Basil Gagnier.
And then Mr. Gagnier taught Mr. Joseph LaRock
and Charles Valley.
And then Mr. Charles Valley taught his son, Joe Valley,
and also taught myself, Albert Coryer.
And then I taught the two grandsons of Mr. Valley.
And they are the last ones
that have been taught this from Mr. Valley.
Mr. LaRock taught William Valley and also Albert LaBonne.
And, at this time,
Albert LaBonne is still living in Prairie du Chien.
And that is the way this prayer has been handed down,
this cure has been handed down.
But of late, it's not used much.
Now, this cure just isn't for something
like rattlesnake bites,
but for any ailments that you could have,
and the healer is not supposed to
collect or expect any money as payment.
They're not supposed to make a money racket out of this.
Oh, it's not a money-making concern at all.
You're not supposed to use it for making money,
and it has been proven
that where a man said the prayers, or did the healing,
and accepted or asked for pay,
the cure didn't affect the one being doctored."
And, it explains the stories some more.
So that's a little bit about Albert,
and the stories that he learned from
his grandparents, his parents, and his neighbors.
It's great oral tradition.
And without Albert, all of that would have been lost.
So, if you get the opportunity,
I hope you get to read all of his stories.
Thank you.
[clapping]