Joachim Lafleur
This is a detail from the Larry Hunter mural in downtown Summerland, showing the Brigades in the bench-lands above the modern city of Summerland.
Joachim Lafleur worked at Fort Okanogan in the 1840s, when Alexander Caulfield Anderson was in charge of Fort Colvile. In fact, Lafleur was Anderson’s assistant during the Fort Colvile Brigades. I have written about this interesting man before on my blog, but the post is unworkable and I deleted it and am now entering the information again.
Bruce Watson, in Lives Lived West of the Divide, has Lafleur as a Canadien, born in Lower Canada (Quebec) about 1806. He joined the HBC and was middleman at Thompson’s River [Kamloops] from 1828-1834. He spent his time at either Kamloops or Fort Colvile and was sometimes placed in charge of Fort Okanogan, with Francois Duchoquette as his companion. (We ran across Francois Duchoquette at the Similkameen post, if you remember.) Lafleur retired from the HBC in 1854, and built a little store near the settlement of Marcus (close to Fort Colvile). As I may have mentioned before (and certainly will do later) storekeeping is a business that many HBC men transitioned into after they left the HBC.
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So if Lafleur came into the district in 1827, he would be mentioned in Edward Ermatinger’s York Factory Express Journal for that year. He is not mentioned in the list of men that worked the canoes up the Athabasca River from Fort Assinboine in 1827, and so I presume he did not come in that year. In 1828, Ermatinger did not return to the Columbia distric, there is, therefore, no list of the men who rowed the boats. Joachim Lafleur was probably there, however.
Lafleur is not mentioned in the Express journals until 1848, when Thomas Lowe arrived at Fort Okanagan, when he was bringing in the Express.
[October] 25, Wednesday. Fine weather. Arrived at Okanagan in the evening, and encamped here. Lafleur was absent, having started yesterday for Colvile for goods.
Joachim Lafleur did not travel out with the York Factory Express, or at least not in the later years. That job was preserved for the younger men, and the older travelled out with the HBC Brigades to headquarters, whether Fort Vancouver or Fort Langley. James Robert Anderson, son of A. C. Anderson, remembers Lafleur clearly and writes about him travelling out to Fort Langley in the 1850 brigade. So, from James Anderson’s “Memoirs,” written many years later and stored in the B.C. Archives, we have this story:
In conformity with the preceding letter from Mr. James Douglas [which advised Anderson his Fort Colvile brigades could travel separately from the New Caledonia brigades] in June 1850, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s brigade in charge of my father, conveying the season’s outfit of furs, started from Fort Colvile for Fort Langley. Accompanying our father were my eldest Sister [Eliza Charlotte Anderson], and myself, on our way to the only available school in those days, viz. that presided over by the Reverend Robert John Staines and Mrs. Staines at Fort Victoria.
This is Reverend Staines’s story: https://nancymargueriteanderson.com/reverend-staines/
Crossing the Columbia River below the Kettle Falls in boats, the horses belonging to the brigade were crossed by swimming. A description of the order of march of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s brigades, as they were called, may here be given. Preceding everyone else, the gentleman in charge rides; his duty was to keep the track and should anything occur by which the trail becomes impassible or hostile natives appearing, to halt the brigade in time.
On occasion, hostile First Nations did attempt to block the path which led through their territory. Orkneyman John Greig, who is featured in the now-published book, The York Factory Express, told the story of the Fort Colvile brigades being blocked, likely by members of the Similkameen First Nations. He thought the brigade was in some danger, and so he hauled out his fiddle and played it, and the First Nations men relented and let them through. I don’t know the truth of this story, but this is one of the stories Greig told in his old age, when he talked about his experiences with the Express, and with the HBC Brigades. So, back to the 1850 brigade, where we find a short story about Lafleur:
Next [in the brigade] is a superior servant whose duty it is to keep up communication between the officer in charge and the brigade. This personage on the occasion of which I write was a French Canadian called La Fleur, whose inordinate fear of snakes used to cause us much amusement. A dead rattlesnake which my father had one day killed and hung on a bush was the cause of great excitement. La Fleur on coming up to it, immediately set spurs to his horse and on his appearing in sight, riding furiously and waving his arms, the natural supposition was that the brigade has been attacked. “Un couleuvre, monsieur!” explained the situation…
And so, Lafleur was ignored, poor man. He was probably also teased, as that is what the Canadien and Métis voyageurs were likely to do. But I don’t blame him for being afraid of the snakes. This was rattlesnake country, and when he was at Fort Okanogan he must have had to deal with them all the time.
Anyway, to continue with James’s description of the Brigade, in which Joachim Lafleur was the “superior servant” who kept up communications with all the smaller “brigades” of fifteen horses or so under the care of two men, generally, that made up the larger Fort Colvile Brigade of up to a hundred horses. It was no small job…
Then follow the pack animals conveying the necessary impediments in the shape of tents, provisions, bedding, etc.; then the first detachment of what was known as the brigade consisting of certain number of pack animals attended by two men, and then the second and possibly a third detachment. The finding of a suitable camp where water and fodder were obtained often entailed a long wearisome day’s journey over arid plains; on the other hand it sometimes happened that in order to reach suitable locations, a short day’s march compensated for the possibly long day preceding or following. On dismounting the first duty was to light a fire and for this purpose the flint and steel were altogether used as matches were non-obtainable in those days; the few that I have seen were looked upon as curiosities and only used on the very rare occasions as an exhibition of the white man’s power amongst the natives…
I love the fact that James’s writings bring in stories that no one else would know, or at least write. By the way, Alexander Caulfield Anderson’s flint and steel are in the Royal British Columbia Museum — another artifact that I had forgotten about. To continue:
The weary pack-horses as they arrive on the ground quickly recognize that the resting place is reached and as soon as the packs of furs are removed, take a roll and then devote their energies to feeding, or if flies and mosquitoes are much in evidence, crowd round the smoke of the camp fires. Tents are pitched and soon the evening meal is ready, the seniors smoke a pipe, the weary youngsters tumble into bed and ere long the camp is wrapped in sleep.
And there we have a bit about Jachim Lafleur, and the work that he would have done in the HBC Brigades.
Copyright, Nancy Marguerite Anderson, 2025 (Updated from 2019). All rights reserved.