Very interesting. Thanks for sharing. Vickie (Franker)Buettner -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2003 8:16 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ILSTANNE] Migrations from St. Anne Hi Listers The following article was given to me by cousin Kathye Knight, who has been researching our St. Anne - Allain line. I thought it was quite interesting. Mary Boudreau <start article> The following article was written by Norma Meir of Clifton, Illinois. She is a well respected genealogist for the Kankakee and Iroquois Counties of Illinois. It brings to light many of the challenges the ancestors in this book encountered: THE CLIFTON, ILLINOIS ADVOCATE November 13, 1980 Page 9 Written by NORMA MEIR ONCE UPON A TIME... French Canadians sought their fortunes in Kansas Once Upon A Time ... the townspeople of L'Erable shouted "Adieu! Adieu!" to the two departing wagons heading west toward Ashkum. The date was September 9, 1880. Peter Ponton and David Lagesse were going to Kansas to join their fellow countrymen in the settlement of French-Canadians in Cloud and Clay Counties. They were ten years behind the first of their countrymen who sought their fortune on the prairies of northern Kansas. They were several years ahead of their friends and relatives who followed by train. Peter and David's trek west differs in that written notes of their journey exist. These early pioneers who settled at Concordia, Clyde, Aurora and St. Joseph, Kansas, had three common bonds - they were Roman Catholics devoted to their church, they or their parents before them were once the habitants of Quebec Province just southeast of Montreal, and they had first emigrated to Illinois. Straggling down from Canada by wagon or coming by boat across the lakes, the French-Canadian farmers sought new land in Illinois. In 1850, many stopped first at Aurora, then filtered south to populate Bourbonnais, Beaverville, L'Erable, Irwin, Manteno, St. Anne and St. George. Following the civil war, stories of Kansas lands available for homesteading begin to filter back to pioneers here. Forerunners of these Kansas-bound pioneers were area families who settled in the flint hills of eastern Kansas. Jeanne Baptiste Chevalier Dessery left the L'Erable area for Tonganoxie, Kansas, in 1867. Jeanne was a native of France and widow of Jacques Dessery. She traveled in covered wagons with eight of her children and when they arrived in Leavenworth County, they built a stone house in the side of a limestone canyon. When the Indians invaded her house, she chased them out with a kettle of boiling water. David Regnier and his family, perhaps from Beaverville, left for Kansas about the same time, but he settled a bit further west in Pottawatomie County. Joining him was Louis Regnier from Irwin, who arrived at Wamego in 1869. The first French-Canadians to arrive in Cloud County, Kansas were Hillaire Lanoue, Joseph and Fred LaRocque, Noel Delude, J. N. LeCuyer, Celestin Guilbert, Henry Demers and Nicholas Lagesse. All were from Kankakee County and the year was 1870. Nicholas had left his farm at Irwin to take up blacksmithing out west. "They all wrote such glowing accounts of the new country back to their friends and relatives at Kankakee, Illinois, their former home, that soon a stream of French settlers began to trickle into the county. Most of these settled in the country south of Clyde." Father Mollier visited Cloud County in 1871, established a parish at St. Joseph and sent the word for more French-Canadians to come westward. The Allains and the Soucies both left from St. Anne for Kansas. Antoine Allain, Jr., forded the Mississippi River and after seven weeks arrived in Clay County in 1872 where he homesteaded. Until the late 1870's, farmers, cattlemen and railroaders were endangered by Indian raiding parties in Kansas. It was a land of cowtowns - a land where farmers fenced the range to keep out buffalo - and land seeking homesteaders. In the French-Canadian settlement at Irwin in Otto Township, Kankakee County, Jean Baptiste Lapolice loaded his wagon and set out for Aurora, Kansas, in 1871. Louis Lafleche left Irwin for St. Joseph in 1872. Gregoire, Joseph and Marcel Balthazar left Irwin in 1873, arriving by covered wagons in Clyde. They were followed by an exodus of French-Canadians from Otto Township, for in 1876, a wagon train of 15 families was made up in Irwin. Among them were Pierre Lagesse, Laurent Charbonneau, Francois Begnoche, Octave Souligny, Pierre Provost, Charlot Fortin, the Bechard, Bachand and Racette families. They settled at Clyde, Aurora, St. Joseph and Concordia, with the majority in Shirley Township in Cloud County. Shirley Township was bounded on the north by the Republican River and on the east by Clay County. Ambroise Patenaude left Irwin in 1878 and settled near the Regniers at Wamego. The migration to Cloud County continued. Frank Landrie, Joseph Morissette, Joseph Denault, Narcisse Gervais, George Bachant, Edmond Brosseau, Joseph Dumas Sr. and Matthias Tremblay left from the Irwin area. Edward Valcour, Joseph Lagacy and the Dallen family left from Kankakee. Joseph Fortier and Louis Dion probably left from L'Erable. Possibly the first French-Canadians to leave L'Erable for Cloud County were John Baptiste Cote, his wife, Marcelline Lagesse, and their children. J. Emile Michaud and his new wife, Ozilda Lagesse, left for Kansas following their marriage in L'Erable early in 1880. A brother of L'Erable's physician, Emile was a druggist and opened a drugstore in St. Joseph when he arrived. In the late summer of 1880, David Lagesse III, his wife, Sophia Valcour, his brother-in-law, Peter Ponton, and Peter's wife, Amelia Lagesse, had made their decision to try their luck in Kansas. David's account book gives a neat listing of supplies needed for the trip west and for survival through the coming winter, "pare shoe $1.00, pare shoe $2.25, 15 yard print $1.20, cotton flanel 25 cents, sack flour $1.50, 1 dry goods box 50 cents, roap 8 cents, 1 pockit book 25 cents, 1#nails 5 cents, peging shoe 5 cents. " He paid his blacksmith bill of $1.25 and was ready to go. Another page in David's account book is headed, "L'Erable, Ills. Sept 9 1880 bound for Kansas David Lagesse and Petter Ponton, name of places has follow: Sept 9 Ashkum, Sept 10 Piper City, Sept 11 Chatwerd (Chatsworth)" ... and the list continues, naming each town they drove through across Illinois, Missouri and Kansas. They crossed the Mississippi at Keokuk, Iowa, on September 20th, eleven days after leaving L'Erable. Early fall days found the wagons crossing northern Missouri. There were the bad days when the wagons covered only six or seven miles. There were good days, too, when they shortened the road by 30 miles. They reached St. Joseph, Missouri, by October 1st and their wagon tracks deepened the ruts still to be found on the outskirts of that town famous as a gathering point for wagon trains. Their destination was Clifton, Kansas, in Clay County, and they arrived there on October 12th, 34 days after leaving L'Erable. David's first entries in his account book after reaching Clifton, Kansas, surely explain themselves, "Oct 13 Whiskey 45 cents, Oct 14 Whiskey 50 cents, Oct 18 gaugle 25 cents, Oct 19 pare shoe $1.00 and 3 yd mold skin cloth $2.00, Oct 24 Whiskey 10 cents, 1 fine saw $1.50, 1 hames $1.00, Oct 27 5 bu. corn 85 cents, Nov 5 bought one horse $40.00, Nov 13 postage 10 cents, Nov 26 1 tub 75 cents, 4 bar soap 25 cents, Dec 1 1 sack flour $1.25, 1 galion Syrup 60 cents, 8 # beef 40 cents, thread 10 cents." Other L'Erable families began planning a migration westward; some were to make the journey by train, the railroad lines finally reaching into Cloud County in 1878. Some were to fail, give up the fight against drought and grasshoppers and return to their former homes in Kankakee and Iroquois Counties. In 1884, John Baptiste Simoneau, his wife, Mary Rosseant, his brother, Peter Simoneau and Peter's wife, Delphine Bechard, left the Clifton area for Kansas. The brothers went by train, accompanied by their stock, and they were to homestead in Rooks County at Damar, 100 miles west of Concordia. Peter Simoneau's daughter, 90-year old Sister Mary Edmund of the Sisters of St. Joseph, spoke about those days in an interview at the motherhouse in Concordia this summer. "My father came with his brother, they came by train. He had his horses with him. My mother didn't come right away. He told my mother, 'If I like it, I'll send for you.' She had five children by then. My uncle went back, but my father homesteaded there. He built a soddy. There were several people from Illinois who homesteaded there ... Balthazars and LaPlantes. My father came in the early '80's." John Baptiste Hubert and his wife, Josephine Ducat, sold their land in Iroquois County for $1,200 in the early 1880's and went by wagons, with others from the area, to Damar, Kansas. Their daughter, the late Eugenia Hubert Boudreau, recalled in an interview in 1978 when she was 91 years old, "They lived in a dugout house in Kansas. There was no crop in the seven years they were in Kansas, the heat and wind burned up the crops. They held a sale and the only thing that sold was their dog, and it brought $7, a lot of money! Enough to buy their train fare back to Illinois, and they settled at Clifton." It was Eugenia who recalled the true reason why so many gave up and returned to Illinois. Drought, heat, and wind. Not to mention grasshoppers! The obituary of Joseph F. Dessery, who was only ten years old when he went by wagon to Kansas, tells: "He often related interesting stories of the grasshopper invasion: how the insects came in swarms, obscuring the sun and destroying the green vegetation and of remembering seeing them piled five feet deep against a rock fence west of Tonganoxie." Some of those who came back to the Kankakee area were Frank Landrie, Joseph Denault, Joseph Boudreau and some of the children of Pierre Lagesse. John Baptiste Simoneau returned with his family to Clifton. In an interview with Jon A. Simoneau he recalls, "My grandfather (John D. Simoneau) was about 12 years old when he came back from Kansas. While he was in Kansas, he remembered going out in the morning and he would sit in the grassland watching the cattle and when night came they'd bring the cattle back home. We used to ask him where he was from. He always said he came from Kansas - my great-grandparents and my grandfather. He came back here in an ox cart with his parents." (Note: I have hesitated to write briefly on this topic and in these lines have only managed a summary of fascinating and bookworthy subjects. The names mentioned here are only a few of the many French-Canadian names which were to appear in those Kansas counties. It is a fact that the names in the Cloud County phone book nearly match the names in the Clifton phone book. The oldest photographs treasured by these Kansas families often bear the imprint "Kankakee, Illinois", just as the families here find photographs bearing the imprint of "Clyde" or Clifton, Kansas." And, although some of the pioneer surnames mentioned in this article have long since faded from our area their family lines live on in countless hundreds of descendants and relatives living here today. Incredible, but true, some of those families separated by 100 years and 600 miles still maintain contact. There is an ever-growing movement to records as much history as possible about the migration of French-Canadians from the Montreal area to Illinois, the groups who went on to settle in Indiana and Minnesota, and the major migration from Illinois to Kansas.) <end of article> ==== ILSTANNE Mailing List ==== Please tell your fellow St. Anne area researchers about this list. 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