LA CORNE DUBREUIL, FRANÇOIS-JOSUÉ DE, officer in the colonial regular troops; b. 7 Oct. 1710, son of Jean-Louis de La Corne* de Chaptes and Marie Pécaudy de Contrecœur; d. in Quebec on 17 Oct. 1753.

François-Josué de La Corne Dubreuil, like his older brothers, was involved in the military and commercial life of the interior of the colony in the 1740s and 1750s. In 1739 he served as second in command at Michilimackinac while François de Couagne looked after his financial affairs in Montreal. Two years later he was commandant at Fort Kaministiquia (Thunder Bay, Ont.) on the northwest shore of Lake Superior. Dubreuil evidently exercised his permission to trade at this post, for in 1741 alone he borrowed over 2,000 livres’ worth of powder and cloth from Joseph de Fleury de La Gorgendière, agent-general for the Compagnie des Indes.

That same year friction among western Indians led to indecisive intertribal warfare, and in the fall of 1742 Dubreuil had to use diplomacy to convince the Ojibwas in the Kaministiquia area not to attack their enemies. His rhetoric was so persuasive that in the winter of 1742–43 the Ojibwas hunted peacefully alongside their enemies, the Sioux and the Sauks, in the Snake River region west of Lake Superior.

In Montreal on 28 Dec. 1745 Ensign Dubreuil married Michelle Hervieux, daughter of a family involved in the western trade. He remained in Montreal for five or six years and then returned to the west where, with the rank of lieutenant, he pursued his career in the Ohio country. In June 1753 he contracted a serious illness while surveying the portage at Fort de la Rivière au Boeuf (Waterford, Pa.). His condition rapidly deteriorated, forcing him to leave the Ohio valley and return to Quebec. He died in the capital on 17 Oct. 1753. Dubreuil was survived by his wife and their only child, François-Michel, who was probably the cadet “La Corne Dubreuil” drowned with his uncle Louis de La Corne in the sinking of the Auguste in November 1761.

C. J Russ

AN, Col., C^11A, 79, pp.157–59 (PAC transcripts). ANQ-M, Greffe de J.-C. Porlier, 12 juin 1741. “Les congés de traite sous le régime français au Canada,” APQ Rapport, 1922–23, 196. Le Jeune, Dictionnaire. Tanguay, Dictionnaire. Champagne, Les La Vérendrye, 262, 298–301. Nish, Les bourgeois-gentilshommes.