Background
Michel Branamour Menard was born on December 5, 1805 at Laprairie, Lower Canada. He was the son of Michel B. and Marguerite (DeNoyer) Menard.
Michel Branamour Menard was born on December 5, 1805 at Laprairie, Lower Canada. He was the son of Michel B. and Marguerite (DeNoyer) Menard.
When Michel left home at about the age of fourteen he had received little, if any, formal education, but during the next four years, while in the service of a fur company with headquarters probably at Detroit, he gained a mastery of woodcraft, the technique of the Indian trade, and an insight into Indian psychology that was to make possible his career.
In 1823 Menard arrived at Kaskaskia, Illinois, to take employment under his uncle, Pierre Menard, as a trader among the Delaware and Shawnee in the vicinity of Sainte Genevieve, Missouri. Humiliated by the contrast between his own untutored state and the comparative elegance of his cousins, he applied himself diligently to study and in three months he learned not only to speak but to read English. It was his custom thereafter to read while on trading expeditions, and eventually, he passed as a well-informed man. He lived among the Shawnee on the White River in the Arkansas territory, by whom he was adopted and elected a chief. Years later he is reported to have said that he almost succeeded in uniting the northwestern tribes into an Indian nation, making himself their king, and moving them to California and Utah. However that may be, he moved southward with the Shawnee and in 1826 was in the vicinity of Shreveport. When the Indians pushed into the region between the Trinity and Red rivers in Texas, he received permission from the Mexican officials to settle at Nacogdoches, where he traded with Mexicans as well as Indians and became prominent as a land operator. In 1833, with Thomas F. McKinney and Samuel M. Williams, he established a sawmill on Menard Creek, forty miles above Liberty on the Trinity River. There he also maintained a trading-post and continued to acquire lands in various parts of Texas. As a representative of the municipality of Liberty in the consultation at Washington-on-the-Brazos, he signed the Texas Declaration of Independence on March 2, 1836, and was a member of the committee that drafted the constitution of the Republic. President Burnet selected him to make sure the neutrality of the Shawnee and other Indians in northwest Texas during the struggle with Mexico. After two missions to the Indians with A. J. Yates, he tried unsuccessfully, as Texas commissioner, to negotiate a five-million-dollar loan for Texas in the United States. The First Congress of Texas validated, for $50, 000, Menard's claim to a league and a labor of land, about six square miles, which he had located in 1834 on the east end of Galveston Island. In 1838 he organized and became president of the Galveston City Company, which issued one thousand shares of stock at a book value of $1, 000 each. Generous terms were offered to attract settlers and donations of land were liberally made for public and charitable purposes. Shares, which at one time sold for ten cents on the dollar, were at par at the time of his death and fourteen years later were worth $10, 000. He was also president of the wharf company and actively engaged in various commercial enterprises. He lived to see the population of the city he founded approach 7, 000. He represented Galveston County in the Fifth Congress of Texas from 1840 to 1842 and was considered one of the best authorities in that body on the vexed question of Texas land titles. He also advocated the scheme of public finance known as the "exchequer system, " which was adopted after he retired from Congress. He held no other political office. In the 40's he erected, on a ten-acre lot in Galveston, a large residence, where he dispensed a lavish hospitality to his white and Indian friends. After his death, which resulted from a carbuncle, his body was buried in the old CatholicCemetery at Galveston.
Menard was a man of powerful physique and was counted a delightful raconteur.
Menard was four times married: first, in 1832, at Sainte Genevieve, Missouri, to Marie Anne (Diane) Leclere, who died the next year; second to Adeline Maxwell, of Kaskaskia, his second cousin, who did not long survive; third to Mary Jane Riddle, of St. Louis, who died in 1845; and fourth to Mrs. Rebecca Mary Bass, of Georgia, who, after Menard's death, married Colonel J. S. Thrasher.
