François-Antoine Larocque

Who was François-Antoine Larocque?

François-Antoine Larocque was a Quebec businessman involved in the fur trade.

He was born in L'Assomption in 1784, the son of François-Antoine Larocque, and studied at the Collège de Montréal. After his father's death in 1792, he went to the United States and learned English. He joined the XY Company as a clerk and worked in the Assiniboine River region. However, when the North West Company took over its short-lived competitor in the fall of 1804, he traveled south to the Mandan and Hidatsa villages along the Upper Missouri. There Larocque met the Lewis and Clarke Expedition, dined several times in the company of the Captains, and asked leave to borrow their translator, Toussaint Charbonneau. Larocque returned to the Assiniboine at some point during the spring of 1805 before beginning an exploratory excursion in the Rocky Mountains to ascertain the possibility of trade with the Absorokas in current day Montana and Wyoming. He is the first well documented trader known to reach the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Francois-Antoine Larocque later published the Journal of Larocque from the Assiniboine to the Yellowstone, 1805. He returned east to Montreal in 1806.