Retourner à la fiche de: Leon Bertrand

Leon Bertrand emigrated to Kankakee County, Illinois i n1851 from Quebec with his brother, Eusebe. The brothers came by boat through the Great Lakes to Chicago. leon later sent for Aglae and their six children born in Canada. The area in which they settled was described as "a wide stretch of land covered with high prairie grass (4 to 5 feet) as far as the eye could reach, with no trees of any kind, except south in Pilot Grove, and north following the Kankakee River....". The prairie had many "swamps and sloughs which were hotbeds for miasms or germs, the cause of sickness" and winters were severe with "blizzards often lasting for three days and causing high snow drifts". Leon built a log cabin and settled some land fom which he had to move after five years when it was discovered he was not on his own land. He had purchased 80 acres of railroad land for $8 an acre on ten years time. "In his early farming days he worked for fifty cents a day of 15 hours labor, walking every day six miles to Pilot Grove during threshing and harvesting season. Threshing in those days was done with a flail and the oats and wheat separated from the chaff with a van. He drove many a hundred hogs to Chicago, the nearest market, where a year's household supplies were bought. He owned the first team of horses in this district." Leon and Aglae had eleven more children born in Illinois, the last in 1866. We know that Leon returned at least once to Canada, for after Aglae's death in 1877, Leon wed Celine Chaput in 1883, in his old home parish of St. Jacques de Montcalm, Quebec. He died in Kankakee County and is buried in a cemetery near Sacred Heart Church at Goodrich.

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