Jean-François-Benjamin Dumont de Montigny was born in Paris and educated in Jesuit grammar schools there. His father was a lawyer and the family was rising into the “noblesse de robe” or class of aristocrats who had acquired noble titles by virtue of administrative functions. As the youngest of six sons, however, Jean-François received the middle name Benjamins and was destined for a career in the military. He went to Quebec in 1715, and then after a brief spell in France got a commission as a sub-lieutenant and engineer in Louisiana. At this moment in 1719, investment and emigration in Louisiana, which was controlled by the financier John Law and his Company of the Indies, had reached a speculative bubble. It collapsed in 1720 and the disgraced Law was forced into exile. Many new colonists who found themselves in Biloxi and New Orleans in the early 1720s died before they could clear land, build shelter and grow food along the swampy, malarial bayous. Dumont, however, lived in Louisiana until 1737, shifting between New Orleans, Pascagoula, Natchez, and the Yazoo River area. He did not acquire a large plantation, and did not rise through the military ranks. In fact, his defiant behavior toward Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville, the governor of Louisiana during much of this period, and Chépart, the commandant at Natchez during the cataclysmic revolt of that tribe in 1729, led to demotions and brief periods of incarceration.
Dumont published a two-volume history of the colony, Mémoires historiques sur la Louisiane (1753) edited by the Abbé Le Mascrier. This book has not been widely used by American historians, however, because no full English translation has ever been published. The book is only loosely based on the manuscripts that Dumont composed and that survive today. During the period from 1750-1753 he evidently lived in Paris and tried to build a career as a writer, as well as seeking appointment as an officer or explorer of Louisiana. In August of 1750 he wrote a letter to the French royal cartographer, Philippe Buache, describing his experience on an exploration of the Arkansas River in 1722, and offering advice for a future expedition to that region. In 1752 he published four brief articles in the Journal Œconomique, at the same time that the journal was publishing a twelve-part series about Louisiana by Le Page du Pratz.
Until recently we knew nothing about his life after 1753 nor about his death, but in January 2012, with help from colleagues Alexandre Dubé and Erin Greenwald, I learned of a document in the archives of the Company of the Indies that records Dumont and his wife sailing to the colony of Réunion, and then to Pondicherry, India, in 1754-55. He died in India in 1760, and left behind an estate containing much more money than he had been able to amass during his life in Louisiana.
Dumont’s greatest contribution to the documentary history of French Louisiana comes from his manuscripts. Three of Dumont’s lengthy manuscript works are extant, and these offer a much more personal and artistic account of his time in Louisiana. He wrote two versions of an epic poem about Louisiana which appears to have penned in the early 1740s. One version is at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the other at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, a branch of the Bibliothèque nationale located in the former home of the poem’s dedicatee, Marc-Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy, Comte de Weil-Argenson. The poem’s title, in the latter version, translates as Verse poem on the establishment of the province of Louisiana or Mississippi, with all that occurred there from 1716 to 1741: The Massacre of the French at the post at Natchez, the Manners and Customs of the Indians, their dances, religions, etc.; and all that concerns that land in general. I have translated an excerpt from the first canto that recounts the 1729 uprising of the Natchez Indians, in which more than 250 French were killed. The translation is based in part upon one by Henri Delville de Sinclair done as part of the WPA writers project in 1940.
The third manuscript is held at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois, as Ayer MS 257. It bears the title Mémoire de L___ D___ which I believe is a mask for “Lieuténant Dumont.” I collaborated with Carla Zecher, director of of the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry, and Shannon Dawdy of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago to edit and publish this text. With support from two NEH grants we published first a French edition that appeared in 2008 from Septentrion publishers of Québec. In 2007 I began working on an English translation of the manuscipt, which was published in November 2012 by the University of North Carolina Press, as part of the series of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. The books include color reproductions of many of the 23 illustrations that accompany the manuscript.