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Date of birth: Place of birth:
Callings:
The North West Company, created in 1784, was intended to compete with the Hudson's Bay Company, which until then had held a monopoly over an immense territory. The North West Company at once retained the services of many francophones who were familiar with the customs and usages of the indigenous populations. Laurent Leroux was one of those knowledgeable francophones. |
Gravure : Bibliothèque nationale de Paris
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Laurent Leroux was the son of
Germain Leroux d'Esneval and Marie-Catherine
Vallée, the widow of Pierre Beaudin. Germain
Leroux was a merchant, originally from Paris, who
had come to New France as a soldier. He was living
in L'Assomption in 1759, where his name is recorded
as that of one of the village's more prosperous
inhabitants. Bu 1776, his son Laurent could read,
write and keep books sufficiently well to be hired
by the Montreal merchant Pierre-Louis Chabouillez
as a clerk in Michilimakinac, in what is now
Michigan. In 1784, Laurent joined the fur traders
Gregory, Macleod and Company.
In the fall of 1786, Laurent
Leroux's superior, John Ross, gave him the job of
establishing a trading post for the company on
Great Slave Lake. Leroux became the first white man
to reach the Lake, where he founded Fort
Resolution. At the request of Alexander Mackenzie,
the explorer who discovered the river that bears
his name, with whom he was travelling, Leroux
established a second trading post in 1789: Fort
Providence, on Yellowknife Bay. He made many visits
to the Amerindian people, to encourage them to
trade their furs with his company. He married,
after the fashion of the country, a member of the
Ojibwa tribe, by whom he had four daughters.
In 1792, he left the West for
good, to take over his late father's grain and
provisions business. Four years later he married
Marie-Esther Loisel, by whom he had another
daughter. With an associate, Leroux was the sole
supplier of ceintures fléchées to the
North West Company. In 1758 he opened a potash
works in L'Assomption and diversified into
hardware. Toward the end of 1790, he purchased an
impressive number of rental properties. In 1817, he
was one of the few French Canadians to hold shares
in the new Bank of Montreal.
Laurent Leroux was a justice
of the peace, a captain in the L'Assomption Militia
(1802-1810), a major in the Militia (1819),
treasurer of the L'Assomption elementary school
(1825) and a grand juror of the Court of King's
Bench (1826). In 1827, he became one of the two
Members for Leinster in the House of Assembly of
Lower Canada, but he did not stand again in 1830.
Indifferent to honours, Leroux preferred to devote
his free time to reading and his business, which he
continued to own until his death in 1854, at the
age of 95. The first white man to have explored
Great Slave Lake, he was able to build on the
inheritance left to him by his father. His flair
for business and his propensity to take calculated
risks made him by the end of his long life a very
wealthy man. Unusually for a merchant of the time,
he bequeathed to his heirs not only a sizeable
fortune but a well-stocked library. In his honour,
the francophone social and cultural centre in
Yellowknife bears his name.
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