Quebec’s first major leaguer Eugene Vadeboncoeur broke in with the 1884 Philadelphia Quakers.

By Peter Morris

Eugene Vadeboncoeur became the first native of Quebec to play major league baseball when he took the field for Harry Wright’s Philadelphia team in a National League game at the Polo Grounds on July 11, 1884.

Although his big-league career lasted only four games, as is often the case, that brief tenure as a major leaguer was only the tip of the iceberg of a pro playing career that lasted for most of the 1880s.

Eugene was born on Sept. 5, 1859, in the town of Rivière-du-Loup – renamed Louiseville in 1879 – in Quebec’s beautiful Mauricie region. There is some confusion about his birth name, beginning with the order of his given names, which were either Onésime Eugène or Eugène Onésime.

There is a particularly good story behind his picturesque family name. According to family historian Roger Verboncoeur, Vadeboncoeur was not used as a surname in France until the 17th century when the French Army began requiring soldiers to have distinct names in order to avoid confusion.

Soldiers with common surnames were obliged to adopt noms de guerres or dit names and one of the most popular choices was Vadeboncoeur, which literally translates as “go with a good heart” but whose idiomatic sense more closely corresponds to “proceed with great courage.” A select number of soldiers became so attached to that bold moniker that they retained it in civilian life, and eventually one such family emigrated to the New World and settled in Mauricie.

Adding yet another wrinkle, the Vadeboncoeurs in that region elected to drop the first e, spelling it Vadboncoeur. When Eugene was about eight, his parents, Joseph Onésime Vadboncoeur and the former Angele Arsenault, moved their rapidly growing family to Syracuse, NY, where their name was a source of enough puzzlement that more modifications were made. Most family members seemed to have restored the Vadeboncoeur spelling, while some began colloquially using an abbreviated version: “Vady.” With the name “Onésime” also unfamiliar to Americans,

Eugene dropped it entirely and always gave his name as Eugene F. Vadeboncoeur.

According to SABR member Alexandre Pratt, baseball was not introduced to the Mauricie region until 1884, when an American student taught the game to his classmates, so it can safely be assumed that if the family had remained in Quebec, the game would never have played a significant role in Eugene’s life. But in Syracuse, he soon became an enthusiast, and no doubt his proficiency at the national pastime helped him to feel more at home as he struggled to master a new language and a new culture.

In light of his surname, it was apt that Eugene felt most at home where great courage was most needed: in the catcher’s position. When the 1880 census was taken, the 20-year-old was living in the town of Otsego in western Michigan, where he was one of several young men who boarded with the Wesley family and worked at a local chair factory. Impressively, the census-taker managed to spell the young man’s name correctly, although “Vadeboncoeur” filled up all of the room allotted on the form for both names, forcing him to improvise by slotting “Eugene” in what little space remained in the upper right corner.

Exactly what brought Eugene to Otsego is unknown, but he may well have been pursuing a career in baseball. Although the population of Otsego has never risen significantly above 4,000, it would later launch the careers of native son Phil Regan and Rube Foster, who used a 1902 stint with an independent team in Otsego as the springboard to the Hall of Fame career that included founding the Negro National League. It had a similar effect of Eugene Vadeboncoeur’s budding career, with a Grand Rapids reporter writing in 1911 that a “catcher named Vandeboncoeur [sic] and a pitcher and outfielder Yclept Blackburn, both from Otsego, were probably the first of the army of mercenaries which has in the interval of 30 years accepted Grand Rapids money for diamond feats. They were given soft jobs in the furniture factory on days when there were no games, to keep them in training, doubtless.”

So perhaps the job in the Otsego chair factory was likewise obtained on the basis of ball-playing abilities. In any event, Eugene Vadeboncoeur used his stint in Otsego as a stepping-stone to Grand Rapids and then to Port Huron in 1883, where he was part of a remarkable team dubbed the “little Michigan champions” for its dominance of the midwestern baseball scene. When he was paired with pitcher Frank Hengstebeck that season, one reporter quipped that there would be no space left over for market reports when they formed the team’s battery.

From Port Huron, Vadeboncoeur moved to a pro career during which he spent time in such strong minor leagues as the Northwestern League, the Eastern League, the New England League, the Eastern New England League and the Central League, in addition to his brief time in the National League. He also seems to have been a popular, well-regarded figure, as there were regular notes about him in the sporting press. But by 1890, his playing days were winding down, and even with the existence of a third major league yielding plenty of jobs that season, a note that “Catcher E.F. Vadeboncoeur is disengaged, residing in Pascoag, RI” failed to result in an offer.

Later that year, the Syracuse correspondent for Sporting News reported that Eugene had recently visited his parents and that he was now living in Denver, but gave no indication of what he was doing there. And with that, the catcher with the memorable name vanished, leaving an enduring mystery.

Some of the 1884 Phhiladelphia Quakers.

At one point, a 1935 death in Haverhill, Mass., made its way into the encyclopedias, but Bob Richardson proved the listing to be erroneous. While that man shared Eugene Vadeboncoeur’s distinctive name and was born in Rivière-du-Loup/Louiseville within a year or two of the ballplayer, he did not arrive in the United States until the 1880s, which ruled him out. There was also good reason to believe that the ballplayer died young. For one thing, efforts to identify his post-1890 whereabouts in censuses and city directories proved fruitless. The failure of those efforts was hardly conclusive, since he could have finally tired of seeing his name butchered and changed it.

More telling were the absence of his name from the list of survivors when both parents and two siblings died between 1893 and 1911 and the lack of known references to Eugene by a nephew who became the baseball reporter for the Syracuse Journal.

Of course, caution must be exercised in making inferences from omissions, but two clues were more difficult to explain away. The first was an article in the Lawrence (Massachusetts) Tribune on September 6, 1912, tracked down by the indefatigable Bob Richardson that stated that Vadeboncoeur, who had played in Lawrence in 1885, had died in Providence “about nine years ago.”

The second was that Hall of Fame historian and diligent biographical researcher Lee Allen had once contacted another of the ballplayer’s nephews, who told him that Eugene died of pneumonia at a YMCA while still an active player, but did not know the details. While efforts to find a death certificate or obituary in Providence or anywhere else proved unsuccessful, it certainly appeared that Eugene Vadeboncoeur had died within a few years of the last known mention of him in 1890.

But when or where had he died? All attempts to answer that question proved futile until Tim Copeland began using wildcard searches of various newspaper databases in hopes of finding articles about Eugene that misspelled his troublesome surname. He was able to find two promising articles in February of 1891 that placed him in Denver, one of which stated that the former ballplayer was opening a barbershop in that city, while the other detailed a medical treatment provided to a man named “Vadeboncouer.”

In conjunction with the 1890 Sporting News article, this made a convincing case that Vadeboncoeur was out of baseball and living in Denver in 1891. Since 19th-century doctors often recommended the mountain air of Denver as a cure from a wide range of maladies, it also appeared that his health was failing.

No further mentions of the ballplayer in Denver could be found, but Tim then picked up a promising trial 900 miles farther west. In September of 1892, an “E.F. Vadebuncaen” was one of the signers of a petition published in a Sacramento newspaper, and then three months later a “Mr. Vadebonconor” was one of the performers in a Christmas play staged at Sacramento’s First Baptist Church on Ninth Street. In a neat coincidence, “Mr. Vadebonconor” played a character named Mr. Keepall, while the next character listed was named Miss Kindheart.

Four months later, on April 19, 1893, that church was the site of a far more somber event – the funeral of a young man named Eugene F. Vadeboncoeur, who had died of stomach cancer. According to a brief obituary published in the Sacramento Record-Union that day, Vadeboncoeur had passed away in that city three days earlier at the age of 26. The age was confounding, as the ballplayer would have then been 33, but other details pointed strongly to the conclusion that this was indeed the man who had been a major leaguer less than nine years earlier.

In addition to spelling his name correctly and providing the middle initial that the ballplayer had adopted, both the obituary and a burial record at Sacramento City Cemetery indicated that he had been born in Canada, with the obituary more specifically giving his birthplace as Quebec. Even more convincingly, the obituary included a note requested that it be reprinted by newspapers in Syracuse, New York, and Blackstone, Mass. – the former city being the ballplayer’s adopted hometown, while the latter town being just outside of Providence, one of the cities with which his career had been most closely associated.

Unfortunately, it does not appear that newspapers in those towns or any other reprinted the obituary, which no doubt helps to account for the longstanding mystery surrounding the ballplayer. To date, no other confirmation that this was the ballplayer has been found, and it seems unlikely that additional evidence will surface, so this remains a circumstantial case. Nevertheless, in light of his unusual name, the well-established timeline of his life, the strong indication that he died in the early 1890s, and the telltale clues in the obituary, it seems very clear that Tim Copeland has at last tracked down the elusive Eugene “Proceed With Great Courage” Vadeboncoeur.

Historian Peter Morris, who grew up in Toronto now lives in Lansing, Mich. where he does sleuthing for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). He has tracked, researched players and their stats for almost 45 years. Morris managed to find Eddie Kolb, a pitcher who gave up 19 runs in his only major-league appearance; Ed Clark, who fought in the Spanish–American War and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery; George Bristow, whose real name was not Bristow but Howlett; and Harvey Watkins, manager of the 1895 New York Giants, who ran Barnum and Bailey Circus.

A winner of the Henry Chadwick award, he’s written five books: Early Baseball in Michigan (2003), A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball (2006), Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball (2007), But Didn’t We Have Fun? An Informal History of Baseball’s Pioneer Era, 1843–1870 (2008) and Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero (2009). His mother, Ruth received the Order of Canada as an activist for peace, racial justice, and antipoverty causes.