BRISEBOIS . EPHREM - FIRST POLICE AND FOUNDER OF CALGARY (60 ENG --59 fran)

 

 BRISEBOIS, EPHREM  - CALGARY’S FOUNDER

Founded by a police officer, Calgary, Alberta, for a while, was named  Fort Brisebois.

Ephrem Brisebois -  son of Joseph Brisebois and Henriette Piette

                               Born 1850-          Durham-South, QC

                               Mar.  1881-09-23 Cath. St-Boniface, MB - Adèle Malcouronne

                               Died 1890-02-03  Durham-south, QC

Better educated than the average person, Ephrem Brisebois crossed the boundary of the United States in 1865, aged 15, and joined the American army of the Union forces during the Civil War against the Confederate South.

Once he returned to Canada in 1867, he enrolled with 507 pontifical Canadian Zouaves who went to defend the papacy.  Therefore in 1868 he was in Rome.

Once his experience with the Zouaves was over, Brisebois returned to the province of Quebec, and in June 1872, thanks to his father’s political contacts was given the position of being a federal civil servant in charge of the first census of the Canadian population.  But the job of armaments fascinated him so on September 25, 1873, Ephrem Brisebois, 23 years old, and thanks to the influence of Sir Hector Langevin, francophone leader of the Conservatives during this era, Brisebois became  one of the first agents of the new North-West Mounted Police and the only francophone member. Once he arrived in Manitoba, he learned that he was promoted to the title of inspector.

In April of 1875, he received the order to establish an outpost near the Bow River exactly where the city of Calgary is now-a-days. An extensively long dispute with an American entrepreneur to whom the construction of the fort had been given,  consistently slowed down the work, and it is only in December 1875 when the police who had not been paid, for a whole year and who had been forced to live in a tent all through the autumn, that they could not settle down.

In the new abode, they shivered as much as in the tent, for the wind entered from everywhere.  So did smoke enter through the cracks in the overly-quickly built stone chimney except in the spacious area where Ephrem lived with a young Indian girl and where he had installed the only cast-iron stove allowed in the out-post.

Discontent was manifested everywhere.  Brisebois was accused of serious disciplinary discrepancy; he was too pre-occupied with trying to end the destruction of the bison which he felt would bring famine to the people.

And worse than that, he considered naming the little withdrawn outpost Fort Brisebois. This was not too extraordinary since it was often seen that a fort was name after its commanding officer.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back!  The commanding officer, Colonel A.G. Irvine (his name appears in the history of Batoche) blamed his subordinate and suggested that the outpost be named Calgary and that’s what the Government accepted.

But before Brisebois could be removed from his post as a commanding officer, in June 1876, it took seven months and the Brisebois outpost became Fort Calgary, then Calgary.

On July 3, of the same year, Brisebois resigned from the Mounted Police..

Upon returning to Durham-South, Ephrem Brisebois campaigned for the Conservatives and beat Wilfrid Laurier in Drummond-Arthabasca.  In 1880 the Conservatives in power finally rewarded and named Brisebois Conservative member of the Lands and Titles office in a little known corner of Manitoba  where he accomplished a lot.

In 1885 when the Louis Riel rebels revolted, Ephrem Brisebois regained work.  He was even given the command of  a reserve-unit quartered in Edmonton.

Once the rebellion was over, he returned to his former role of pen-pusher, but the Conservatives lost their power in Manitoba, and in 1887 the Liberals abolished his position.

Even though he protested vehemently, he had not found any monetary work when Death mowed him down on February 13, 1890.  He was only 40 years old.

Only a few yellowed documents are preserved preciously by one of his descendants, Captain Maurice Brisebois, former director of advertising in the La Press and veteran of the liberation of Holland in 1945 as a member of the Maisonneuve regiment. A few other historical articles are reminders of him.

It is however symbolic that it is at Fort Brisebois, Calgary, a city of the Canadian West founded by a Quebecois and French-Canadian police officer that the First Ministers’ in English Canada tried to re-start the constitutional debate and to find a solution to the never-ceasing “Quebec question”.

 ref: This article was found in my papers, written by Pierre Vennat of the “Presse Montreal”, September 1990,  
Translated by Lilian Paul Béland