Francis Archambault (Janeaux)

October, 2011

Dear Children,

I think of you often and wish the distance between us was not so great. Your grandmother shares news of you and how quickly you are growing up. She tells me that you are taking an interest in your family history. To start, you should know that the Missouri River that borders your state is part of your heritage. It is the path that brought your grandmother’s great-great grandfather, Francis A. Janeaux, to the West. His son had a daughter and she gave birth to your great-grandfather.

Your great-grandfather, whom you know only from pictures, had a flair for sharing stories on summer afternoons. We would huddle in the living room of our modest home while thunderstorms broke the heat of a Southern day.

Stories of ghost trains and passages quoted from Robert Service poems were part of his selection. Once in a while he would make the comment that his great-grandfather, Janeaux, had founded a small town in Central Montana. Since this statement was often knitted in with the fantastic stories our father shared, we would turn to our mother and ask, “Is that true?”

She would always smile and say, “I don’t know. Ask your father.”

Sometimes truth is difficult to find. It most often requires a leap of faith and can lead to a revelation about ourselves, our family and our friends. History is a strange science. In searching for facts, we hope to find the truth, when all we really find is bits and pieces of a puzzle we try to fit together. This is the truth as I perceive it based on the facts that I have found; you may be challenged to find the facts for yourself.

Your ancestor’s story begins in the small village of L’Assomption, in the Province of Quebec, in the country of Canada, where there lived a large family in a stone house. It was a blended family. Jean Baptiste Archambault was a widower with several children when he married Angelique Durand. They had several children of their own. Among the group were two brothers who were always close. The oldest, Francis, was born in 1839. His brother, Odilon, was a couple of years younger.

As young men, Odilon settled into the life of a husband and father; Francis chose a different path. By age 18, he was in the western territories of the United States – first via St. Paul, then down to St. Louis. From there the Missouri became his home for many years.

What appears at first to be a major change may not have been. The village of L’Assomption is located just north of Montreal, on the Saint Lawrence River. Fur trading was an early part of the lives of people living in the area. We can only assume that Francis may have known or worked with some of the fur traders who lived in the area. It was the fur trade industry that gave him work on the Missouri River.

Francis, who was now using the name Avila, entered an unpredictable business with roots that go back to colonial times on the North American continent. Trading posts could be setup in one area and within a short period of time abandoned, burned or disassembled and moved to another location a few miles away.

I don’t know much about his life during the first decade on the river. He was with his family during the 1861 Canadian census. His mother died in 1860 and perhaps he came home for a short period of time or perhaps the Civil War years were not a good time for fur trading. He did return to the Missouri and in 1870 he was working at Fort Stevenson in Dakota Territory.

I must stop and put this letter in the mail.

Love to all –