Manicouagan

Personality

Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau, legendary hero of the North Shore, was a naturalist, geologist, ornithologist, postmaster, telegraph operator, photographer, author, healer, and even a midwife, hunting and fishing inspector, guide, trapper, traveler, and river guard.

His Acadian ancestors were Pierre Comeau and Rose Bayols of Port-Royal, some of whose descendants settled in New Brunswick around 1730 in the Trois-Rivières region: Chipoudie, Petcoudiac, and Memramkouke. Comeau and Marie Babineau, Napoleon-Alexandre's grandparents, were living in Petitcodiac at the time of the 1752 census. In September 1755, following the attack by the English who came to destroy the Acadian hamlets on the Petcoudiac River, several Acadian families managed to flee with Officer Boishébert to Miramichi, then to Quebec City in 1756. Comeau and his family took refuge in Saint-Gervais de Bellechasse in 1756, where they were granted land.

Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau, son of Antoine-Alexandre Comeau, an employee of the Hudson's Bay Company, and Mary Lucie Hall, known as Bédard, of Irish origin, was born on May 11, 1848, at the Îlets-Jérémie trading post (Colombier, Quebec).

Napoleon-Alexandre is a man of extraordinary intelligence. At a very young age, he demonstrated impressive language skills. As a teenager, he was fluent in French, English, Montagnais, Naskapi, and Inuktitut. At the age of 12, his knowledge of flora and fauna and his personal skills qualified him as a supervisor of the Godbout River (one of Quebec's salmon rivers, which at the time was a private fishing territory), a position he held for 60 fishing seasons.

On June 14, 1871, in Betsiamites, he married Marie-Antoinette Labrie (who died in 1889), then on November 23, 1889, in Rivière-Pentecôte, he married Victoria Labrie, his sister-in-law, with whom he had 12 children. He died on November 17, 1923, in Godbout.

Thanks to his self-taught anatomical knowledge and basic training from two doctors at Jeffery Hale Hospital in Quebec City, he provided basic care to dozens of pioneer and Indigenous families. During his career as a recognized "wise man," he delivered some 200 babies. The government encouraged him by providing equipment and medicines.

Towards the end of the 1870s, he held various administrative positions for many years: he was simultaneously postmaster, fisheries agent, and telegraph agent for the hamlets in his region. He collaborated with researchers from Laval University in Quebec City and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., particularly through his inventory of birds in the Pointe-des-Monts region, published in 1882 in the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In January 1886, the Labrie brothers were caught in a storm in the turbulent waters of the St. Lawrence River. Napoléon-Alexandre and his brother came to their rescue and battled extreme weather conditions for two days. Aboard a simple canoe, after traveling more than 60 kilometers, they landed at Cap-Chat, on the south shore, where they were welcomed as heroes. The Canadian government decorated Napoleon-Alexandre and his brother for their acts of bravery.

Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau published numerous articles in National Geographic Magazine in Washington and Forest and Stream in New York. In 1909, he published a book in English entitled Life and Sport on the North Shore of the Lower St. Lawrence and Gulf , which was republished in 1923 and 1954 and translated into French in 1945. This book demonstrates his great expertise in ornithology and the fishery resources of this region and Labrador.

The federal government appointed him co-leader of an investigation into the fisheries of the Hudson Bay region in 1914. In the years that followed, he played an active role in developing the Canada-U.S. Migratory Birds Treaty. He was an active member and speaker for the Provancher Society of Canadian Natural History, which he helped found in 1919, and for the American Ornithologists' Union.

In 1927, four years after the death of Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau, the Provancher Natural History Society of Canada unveiled a monument in his memory at the entrance to the municipality of Godbout. A replica of this monument was installed at the Quebec City Zoo in 1933. A commemorative plaque, installed in the Îlets-Jérémie chapel in 1948, marks the birthplace of Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau. On August 15, 1998, Canada Post issued a stamp to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. In 2011, the Montreal Fly Fishing Museum established the Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau Foundation to fund its activities. In Godbout, the Amerindian and Inuit Museum, founded in 1978, occupies the first post office, a nearly century-old building that belonged to the family of Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau.

The Maison du patrimoine Napoléon-Alexandre-Comeau (Baie-Comeau), the Comeau Teaching and Research Forest (a 3,000-hectare area in Minganie), and Comeau Street in Sept-Îles honor the memory of Napoléon-Alexandre Comeau. The toponymy of the city of Baie-Comeau is linked to his family: the name of the city and Boulevard Comeau.

Text written or compiled by Jacques Gaudet