General Notes

Name Suffix:<NSFX> Sieur De Carufel
Having embarked on his military career at an early age,  Jean Sicard was only 19 when he went into the services of Francois-Marie Renaud d'Avesne des Meloizes, a Captain in the regular French forces.  The Company was recruited by the new Governor General of Canada, Brisay de Denonville. The small army embarked at La Rochelle on board tiny, filthy vessels and crossed the Atlantic in indescribable conditions.  Scurvy and typhoid took sixty victims while at sea and upon their arrival in Quebec on August 1, 1685, 80 more were hospitalized.  Denonville allowed only a few weeks of recovery before departing for Ft. Frontenec oin a reconnaissance expedition.
By June 1687 the Governor of new France, Jacques-Rene de Brisay, Marquis de Denonville, was prepared to strike a blow against the old enemies of New France. Denonville gathered troops and Indian allies in Canada and marched against the Iroquois of Western New York.
Governor Denonville spent the summer of 1687 engaged in an impressive, if futile, campaign against Seneca villages in the Genessee Valley near the site of modern Rochester, New York. Houses and crops were destroyed , but few warriors were captured or killed. To complete his attempt to pacify the Iroquois, Denonville moved his army to the mouth of the Niagara River. There he established a fort. Within a few weeks a stockade enclosing eight buildings had been erected and christened Fort Denonville. Then, leaving one hundred men, including Jean Sicard under Captain Pierre de Troyes to hold the post for the winter, the Governor and his army returned to Montreal.
Fort Denonville, the first truly military outpost on the Niagara River, was sturdily constructed. Its palisades, however, provided little protection against the most sinister enemies: isolation, cold, starvation and disease. Cut off from supplies and reinforcements and surrounded by hostile Senecas, the garrison sickened and died. By April only twelve soldiers, including Jean Sicard, remained alive.
Those few men were saved by a relief force which arrived in the Niagara River on Good Friday, 1688. The horrified reinforcements did what they could for the emaciated survivors. Their chaplain, Jesuit Father Pierre Millet, erected a tall wooden cross in the center of Denonville’s fort and offered a mass of thanksgiving for their survival.
Fort Denonville was regarrisoned, but the lesson had been learned. The post was too far from the center of New France to be maintained in the face of Iroquois hostility. In September the troops pulled down the stockade and left the buildings to the elements. It would be thirty-eight years before French soldiers again occupied the site.