12Soldat du Regiment Carignan, Compagnie de Chambly

12234. Poupard dit Lafleur, René, né vers 1647 à Plessé (Temple protestant de Blain), Loire-Atlantique, Pays-de-la-Loire, fils de Pierre et de Marie Bouté. Arrivé le 19-06-1665 sur Le Vieux Siméon. Soldat de la compagnie de Chambly au régiment de CarignanSalières, marié à Boucherville le 06-04-1679, avec Marie Gendron, Canadienne, née en 1666 à Montréal, Canada. Décédé vers 1708 au Canada, 61 ans, 9 enfants. Ménage établi à Contrecoeur et Montréal. Agriculteur. (FO, n o 450000) (DGFQ, p. 941) (CS, p. 442)

2TUE AVEC SA FEMME EN NOUVELLE-ANGLETERRE A L'HIVER 1707-1708 DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES INCONNUES. SOURCE: MARCEL FOURNIER, "DE LA NOUVELLE-ANGLETERRE A LA NOUVELLE-FRANCE, P. 190

50One of the most intriguing possibilities about the settlement of Saratoga in the decades before 1745 concerns the earlier trading activities of René Poupar dit Lafleur and his subsequent family history� Despite the intolerance of French Catholics displayed during the time of Leisler’s rebellion, Lafleur and his family appear to have stayed in the New York colony for at least five to six more years� His wife, Marie Gendron dit la Rolandière, born in 1666 in New France, died in 1695—still living in the New York colony—just a few years after the birth of the couple’s fourth child, Elisabeth Isabelle Lafleur in 1690� 105 A 1696 land transaction shows that René had purchased a tract of eighty acres in Richmond County (Staten Island) from Daniel and Elizabeth Perrin, two French Huguenot settlers there�106 Around that time, René married his second wife, Marie Perrin� The end of the King William’s War in 1697 may have given René and Marie Perrin the opportunity to voyage to New France, for he eventually died in Montréal in 1708�


50In 1665, Louis XIV sent a regular army unit, the Carignan-Salières Regiment, to New France with the mission of attacking the Five Nations and defending Canadian settlements along the St� Lawrence� 37 One of the soldiers in that regiment—René Poupart dit Lafleur—would later have a central role in the history of early Saratoga� He was born in Rennes, Ille-et-Vilaine in Bretagne, France, sometime in or before 1655� Like many veterans of the Carignan-Salières Regiment, René permanently settled in New France, married Marie Gendron dit la Rolandière of Boucherville, and later began to search for economic opportunities in areas where he may have campaigned�38

Two remarkable French leaders—Daniel de Rémy de Courcelle, the governor-general of New France, and the Marquis Alexandre de Prouville de Tracy, the commanding general of the king’s forces in North America—brought a new martial determination to defeat the Five Nations� In 1666, they each led punitive expeditions from Canada against the Mohawks, moving armies up the Champlain Valley and lac St� Sacrament in long-distance strikes� It is possible, but not definitive, that Courcelle’s Expedition in the winter of 1665–1666 passed through Saratoga (and also possible that the young soldier René Poupart dit Lafleur gained his first understanding of the region’s geography, assuming that he participated in the expedition with the regiment)� The French stalled out without achieving their objectives in the vicinity of Schenectady, where Courcelle learned that the English had recently conquered the New Netherland colony in the Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–1667� A second expedition in the fall of 1666, led by Courcelle and the Marquis de Tracy, was modestly successful in destroying four Mohawk villages and achieving a temporary peace on the borderlands that lasted from 1667 until the 1680s� Perhaps most important, the French had demonstrated a new ability to bring war to their enemies’ doorsteps—whether they be Mohawk or Anglo-Dutch�39
By the 1680s the struggle over the fur trade and alliances had shifted to the upper country in the west, or le pays d’en haut as it was known to the French� The Glorious Revolution in England and the outbreak of the War of the League of Augsburg (1689–1697) inaugurated a century of intermittent warfare between England and France, a “Second Hundred Years’ War” for imperial supremacy� The borderland between New York, New France, and the Five Nations again became a battleground because of events in Europe—an important way that the places and peoples of the borderlands were increasingly shaped by outside forces�

Upon hearing news of the war with France from their English allies, Five Nations warriors again struck at the heart of Canada in 1689, destroying the settlement of Lachine near Montréal and killing or taking captive over one hundred settlers� Devastating raids
once again came to the St� Lawrence Valley� But the incoming governor-general, the Comte de Frontenac, initiated numerous reprisals aimed at punishing the Mohawks, Onondagas, and the English colonists in New York who armed them� In 1690, a force of around two hundred French and Indians attacked and destroyed the town of Schenectady in the Mohawk Valley, killing around sixty Dutch citizens and taking nearly thirty as captives� In 1693 and 1696, the French sent more punitive expeditions southward to destroy League Mohawk and Onondaga towns� Even the 1697 Peace of Ryswick, ending the War of the League of Augsburg in Europe, brought no peace in North America� 40 Decades of sustained warfare had taken a toll on the French and the Five Nations alike, but population losses from epidemics, migration, and battle had brought the Iroquois to an especially weak and vulnerable moment� As much as one-half of the Five Nations’ fighting strength had perished, along with a significant percentage of its total population�41

As historians José António Brandão and William Starna observe, the Iroquois “managed to secure by diplomacy what they could not, at least for the present, secure by military might�” At Montréal in 1701, emissaries of the Five Nations met with French officials and Native nations from the far west� Approximately thirty-nine different Indian nations had journeyed to Montréal, hoping to end the chronic warfare of the seventeenth century� The Great Peace of Montréal, as it became known, was one of the most important and consequential treaties in American history� The Five Nations metaphorically planted a tree of peace at Montréal with the French and their Native allies, securing important recognition of Iroquois trading and hunting rights� At the same time, the Iroquois also renewed and strengthened their alliance with the English at Albany� Together, these treaties constituted a “triumph of Iroquois diplomacy,” according to Brandão and Starna� Perhaps most important, the Five Nations pledged to remain neutral in future wars between England and France, which gave them leverage as well as security� It was a pledge that profoundly shaped the borderlands near Saratoga, as the French refrained from any direct attacks on the Five Nations, lest they shift their still formidable power wholly to the English orbit in retaliation� Years later, the English writer Peter Wraxall observed that the Iroquois commitment to neutrality had changed America’s geopolitics, as “the Balance between us and the French is the great ruling Principle of Modern Indian Politics�”42

Having secured peace with the Five Nations, and for their allies in the pays d’en haut, the French were empowered to pursue their economic and imperial ambitions against the English colonies in North America� In the decades following 1701, the French under
King Louis XIV pursued a policy of containment of the burgeoning English colonies� They cemented numerous alliances with Indian peoples across the continent, established fortified trading stations along interior waterways, and established key posts at Detroit, Niagara, and in Louisiana� Nearly a century of chronic warfare had also given rise to Canadian proficiency in wilderness warfare� The governor general Marquis de Denonville, who served from 1685 to 1689, also established the practice of awarding commissions in the troupes de la marine to worthy Canadian seigneurs or nobles� By the early 1700s, the officer corps of the troupes de la marine had far excelled any of their English counterparts in the conduct of unconventional war (or petite guerre) and long-range expeditions, both of which depended on their ability to cooperate with Native allies�43 In the first half of the eighteenth century, New France significantly advanced its claims to the Champlain and Richelieu valleys with extensive fortification, seigneurial land grants, and limited pockets of settlement (one of those seigneurial grants, north of Missiquoi on Lake Champlain, was held by the Beauvais family—the same family that provided a scout for Marin’s 1745 expedition)� To improve the flow of supplies from Montréal, the French constructed a supply road leading from La Prairie southeast to the Richelieu River� Along that river, the French had constructed a network of fortifications such as Fort Chambly, Fort Sainte-Thérèse, and Fort Saint-Jean� Like other outposts across New France, these were intended to anchor French claims and to strengthen alliances with Indians in the region, not dispossess them� The French military presence was such a light footprint that real control of the borderlands remained with the Indians� Nonetheless, a trickle of French settlers came into the Richelieu Valley, including René Poupart dit Lafleur and his Marie Gendron dit la Rolandière, who settled at Saint-Louis de Richelieu and later at Chambly where some of their first children were born� As early as 1679, René was noted as having “been at Orange” (Albany) and “gone to Lake Champlain to hunt for Ranontons” (raccoons)� Pierre de Saurel, one of his old officers in the Carignan-Salières Regiment, had gained a seigneury in the vicinity of Sorel� According to the French governor general, Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, Saurel had “5 canoes and 10 men in the woods carrying on the fur trade�” Lafleur was likely one of those men� 44 As early as 1689 there was an intrepid trio of “French that live towards Sarachtoge,” where they were trading peaceably until King William’s War erupted: René Poupar dit Lafleur, Pierre de Garmeaulx dit Villeroy, and François de Lafortune�45

50One of the most intriguing possibilities about the settlement of Saratoga in the decades before 1745 concerns the earlier trading activities of René Poupar dit Lafleur and his subsequent family history� Despite the intolerance of French Catholics displayed during the time of Leisler’s rebellion, Lafleur and his family appear to have stayed in the New York colony for at least five to six more years� His wife, Marie Gendron dit la Rolandière, born in 1666 in New France, died in 1695—still living in the New York colony—just a few years after the birth of the couple’s fourth child, Elisabeth Isabelle Lafleur in 1690� 105 A 1696 land transaction shows that René had purchased a tract of eighty acres in Richmond County (Staten Island) from Daniel and Elizabeth Perrin, two French Huguenot settlers there�106 Around that time, René married his second wife, Marie Perrin� The end of the King William’s War in 1697 may have given René and Marie Perrin the opportunity to voyage to New France, for he eventually died in Montréal in 1708�