Date Published:
February 2005

L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia

Nicolas Montour

Montour, Nicolas (1760?-1808), fur trader, was born about 1760, and went to the west, apparently in 1777, as clerk to Barthélemi Blondeau. Later, in 1782, he was described as "clerk to the Messrs. Frobisher". He became a partner in the North West Company in 1784, when he seems to have been given two shares in the sixteen-share concern of that year. Most of his time in the West he spent on the Saskatchewan. He retired from the fur-trade about 1790; and in 1795 he bought the seigniory of La Pointe-du-Lac, Lower Canada, where he built a manor house likened to "the Chateau of the Middle Ages". He was elected a member of the Beaver Club in 1790; and from 1796 to 1800 he represented the county of St. Maurice in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada, where he generally voted with the English party. He died "at his manor of Woodlands" on August 6, 1808 ; and he was buried "in the new cemetery of Three Rivers". He left behind him in the West a halfbreed son, named also Nicolas Montour, who was a clerk at Fort des Prairies in 1804-6, was stationed in the Kootenay country in 1813, and was discharged on the Saskatchewan by Sir George Simpson (q.v.) in 1823. After his return to Lower Canada, the elder Montour married in 1798 Geneviève Wills, who died on April 2, 1832, aged 64 years; and by her he had three daughters. See E. Fabre Surveyer and F. J. Audet, Les députés de Saint-Maurice et de Buckinghamshire (Three Rivers, 1934).

Source  : W. Stewart WALLACE, ed., The Encyclopedia of Canada, Vol. IV, Toronto, University Associates of Canada, 1948, 400p., p. 325.