♂Pierre You Sieur de la Découverte

Pierre You Sieur de la Découverte (1658 – 28 August 1718) was a French soldier, explorer and fur trader of New France. He served with La Salle, signed the act taking over the Arkansas country in 1682, later took his title as one of the discoverers, and ended his life as a merchant and colonial officer at Montreal. He was the ninth great-grandfather of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through his daughter Marie-Anne You de la Couverte (1694–1766).

Early life

He was born in 1658 in the parish of Saint-Sauveur at La Rochelle, France, the son of Pierre You, a mason and stonecutter from Saint-Denis-la-Chevasse in Bas-Poitou, and of Renée Turcot, who had married at La Rochelle in January 1647. His father was buried at Saint-Sauveur in July 1675, aged 62. Pierre was one of at least seven children; four of his sisters married at La Rochelle between 1669 and 1684.

With La Salle

The first record of him in New France, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, is from 1677, when La Salle’s land grant to the Recollets^W described its neighbor as the Sieur You, a sergeant of the garrison at Fort Frontenac^W, on the site of present-day Kingston, Ontario. He became La Salle’s^W habitual companion on the expeditions of discovery, and La Salle called him “a very worthy fellow”. In March 1682 he was among those who signed the act taking possession of the Arkansas country for the French crown. The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that the following year, “by virtue of the privileges granted by the king to the discoverers”, he adopted the title of Sieur de La Découverte, “of the discovery”, a title that was afterwards given to him in official government records.

Chicago and Montreal

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records that in April 1693, at Chicago, he took as his wife a Miami^W woman named Elisabeth, and their daughter Marie-Anne was born about 1694. The union was not a church marriage: when he married at Montreal on 19 April 1697, the register described him as single. Marriages made “in the custom of the country” between French traders and Native women were common in the west, but in New France only a marriage performed by a priest counted in law, so in the eyes of the Montreal parish he had never been married. That had three consequences. He was free to marry a Frenchwoman without any annulment or explanation. His daughter Marie-Anne was, by the same rule, born outside marriage, although no surviving record uses such a word of her; when she herself married at Montreal in 1718 the register named her parents simply as her father and “Elisabeth … sauvagesse Miami”, without calling Elisabeth his wife. And the word means the register recorded no earlier marriage of his. The register says nothing of how he regarded the Chicago union, or whether Elisabeth was still living. His bride there was Madeleine Just, aged 35, a native of Brèves in Burgundy and the widow of the merchant Jérôme Le Gay. He was then an ensign of the colonial troops^W quartered in the town. They had five children, of whom two sons outlived him.

At Montreal he became a substantial merchant. Between 1701 and 1714 he was a creditor in more than twenty notarial acts before the notary Antoine Adhémar. By 1705, the Dictionary of Canadian Biography records, he held a lot on Rue Saint-Paul with a house so large that it looked like a storehouse, and in 1711 he had a two-story house built on a lot on the Place du Marché.

His property dealings are also recorded in the notarial acts. On 2 February 1704 he made a building contract with the carpenter Honoré Dasny, and on 3 October 1704 a second with René Alarie. On 4 February 1711 he made a contract with Pierre Couturier, and on 25 April that year he bought from Louis LeCompte-Dupré. In 1713 he made two more purchases: from Louis Roger dit Labrie on 10 February, and from Jean Jacquière dit Lagenois on 6 April.

From 1703 he held a grant near Fort Senneville^W at the western end of Montreal Island, and he leased the trading post on Île-aux-Tourtres from Governor Vaudreuil^W. The same biography says that the remote grant made clandestine fur trading easier, and that his sons traded furs despite the ordinances, even as far as New England. The Montreal merchants complained of his arrogance, but Vaudreuil praised him as a man who had “always served with distinction” and was disabled in one arm from a wound received in the last war, and appointed him adjutant at Montreal.

Death

On 5 August 1718, three weeks before his burial, he is said to have been named as an officer of the marine in the register of Ste-Anne-du-Bout-de-l’Île, the parish at the west end of Montreal Island. He was buried at Notre-Dame in Montreal on 28 August 1718, recorded as an officer of the marine and aged 60. His daughter Marie-Anne had been married in the same church less than a fortnight earlier. On 17 August 1735, before the notary Porlier, the court gave sentences for the sale of his goods and for sharing out the proceeds of his estate and that of his late wife, Madeleine Just.

Notes

The ages in his own records disagree. His 1697 marriage gives 28, which would place his birth about 1669, but he was already a sergeant in 1677; the burial’s age of 60 agrees with the 1658 birth given in the standard biography. A modern emigrant file gives “about 1655”. The same biography calls his father a tanner, where the emigrant file, compiled from the La Rochelle registers, gives mason and stonecutter.

The notarial acts

The creditor count, the 1704 and 1711 contracts, the 1713 purchases and the 1735 sentences come from Antoine Roy and Pierre-Georges Roy’s Inventaire des greffes des notaires du régime français, a printed calendar of the notarial acts. The calendar does not say what was bought from Louis LeCompte-Dupré.

The Ste-Anne entry

The 5 August 1718 entry comes from Désiré Girouard’s 1893 local history of the Lake St. Louis district, a secondary source, so the sentence hedges it.