♂Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur

Jean Baptiste Richard dit Lafleur (19 March 1682 – between 1731 and 1737) was a blacksmith and interpreter of New France who served at the French post of Ouiatenon on the Wabash River and married the Métis daughter of the explorer Pierre You de La Découverte. He was the eighth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Agnes Richard Dit Lafleur (1719–1778).

Early life

He was baptized at Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern tip of Montreal Island, on 19 March 1682, the son of Guillaume Richard, a former soldier of the Carignan-Salières regiment, and of Agnes Tessier. The register describes his father as a former churchwarden of the parish, and the people named in the act include his mother’s parents, Urbain Tessier and Marie Archambault. He was the second son of the family to be called Jean-Baptiste; an elder brother of the same name, born in 1680, had been buried in 1688. His father died in 1690, when he was eight.

Ouiatenon

As a young man he went west into the fur country. He worked as a blacksmith and as an interpreter at the post of Ouiatenon, among the Wea, a Miami people, serving under the Sieurs de Vincennes, father and son. There he lived with Marie-Anne You, the daughter of Pierre You de La Découverte and of a Miami woman named Elisabeth. By the summer of 1718 they had a daughter, Susanne, born in January 1717, and they traveled to Montreal, where they were married at Notre-Dame on 15 August 1718 on a dispensation from all three banns. Banns were the announcements of an intended marriage read in church on three Sundays beforehand; waiving all three was the parish’s way of quickly regularizing a couple already living together.

He was recorded as 36 years old and living at Pointe-aux-Trembles, and his bride as 24; the register describes her, and her mother, as “sauvagesse”, the latter a Miami. Their eighteen-month-old daughter Susanne was baptized the same day, in the entry directly after her parents’ wedding. Marie-Anne’s father was buried in the same church less than two weeks later.

Return to the Wabash

The couple stayed in the Montreal area for some four years, and two more children were born there, among them Agnes in 1719. Marie-Anne was often ill away from her own country. On 3 September 1722 the governor, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, granted a congé (the official license then required to travel into the western fur country) to “the man named Jean Richard, formerly interpreter and blacksmith at the post of the Ouiatanon”, giving him leave to take his wife, “who is of the Ouiatanon nation”, and their three children back to the post by canoe, with hired paddlers and a load of flour, biscuit, brandy, powder, cloth and trade goods. The family returned to the Wabash.

On 15 June 1731 the governor, now the Marquis de Beauharnois, licensed “the sieur Jean Baptiste Richard” to leave Montreal with a canoe and four men for the post of the Ouiatenons, carrying provisions and trade goods, and to be back by the end of September of the following year.

Death

He was alive on 12 November 1731, when he sold land with his wife, Marie-Anne You, and a deed of 23 March 1737 speaks of his estate, so his death falls between those two dates. The place of his death is not known. A family compilation of 2002 states that he was killed by Native warriors while returning from Baton Rouge with supplies after taking a load of furs downriver, ambushed at Cave-in-Rock on the Ohio River, and gives the date as about 1732; other family trees give 23 February 1730, which would fall before his license of 1731, and others about 1735. He was dead by 9 July 1759, when his daughter Susanne remarried at Detroit as the daughter of “the late Jean Baptiste Richard, interpreter for the King”. His widow and daughters later appear in the registers of Vincennes.

Notes

A second family attached to his name in earlier versions of the family record held marriages in 1739 at Rivière-Ouelle and in 1752 at Saint-Vallier. The registers show both grooms to have been other men of the same surname, with different parents, and they have been removed.

The license of 1731 names no wife, trade or nickname; that it is his rests on its destination, the post he had served since its founding, and on his departure from Montreal. Another Jean Baptiste Richard, a merchant known as Le Parisien, traded in the Illinois country in the same years.