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DANEAU DE MUY, NICOLAS, officer in the colonial regular troops, knight of the order of Saint-Louis; b. 1651 in Beauvais, France, son of Jacques Daneau and Catherine Driot; d. 28 Jan. 1708 at sea.

Nicolas Daneau embarked on a military career, was commissioned lieutenant in 1674 and appointed captain in the Régiment de Normandie in 1678. He entered the service of the colonial regular troops as a captain in 1685 and that year came to Canada with the reinforcements brought by the Marquis Jacques-René de Brisay de Denonville, the recently appointed governor general of New France.

Between 1685 and 1687 Daneau was stationed at Montreal, where the garrison troops of the city’s governor, Louis-Hector de Callière, were strengthening the fortifications of Montreal with a palisade. The young captain found time nevertheless to pay court to Geneviève Bissot, widow of the surgeon Louis Maheut*, with whom he had a child in January 1687. Yet on 17 May of that year he married Marguerite Boucher (1663–98), the third daughter of Pierre Boucher, former governor of Trois-Rivières and seigneur of Boucherville. The widow accepted 350 livres ​as compensation. Following his wife’s death on 30 June 1698, Daneau married Catherine d’Ailleboust Des Muceaux (1669–1755), sister of Pierre d’Ailleboust d’Argenteuil, on 18 Feb. 1702 in Montreal. A son by the first marriage, Jacques-Pierre* (1695–1755), followed his father into the military and received the cross of the order of Saint-Louis in 1754.

In 1687 Daneau took part in Denonville’s expedition against the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), an affair which brought no credit to the commander and little to the troops. He was present at Quebec when the city was besieged by Sir William Phips* and in the following year, 1691, he was one of the men assembled by Callière at La Prairie de la Magdelaine to guard the country against hostile incursions from New York. One hundred and sixty men were placed under the command of Philippe Clément Du Vuault, sieur de Valrennes, and sent to Chambly to watch the line of the Richelieu. On 11 August they were attacked by Major Peter Schuyler’s Albany militia and their Indigenous allies. Although Valrennes’ men were for the most part inexperienced, they successfully routed the enemy. Among those specially mentioned for their coolness and bravery on this occasion was “the Sieur de Muyet.” His good work then and subsequently led the Comte Louis de Frontenac [Buade*], governor general of New France, to write that Nicolas Daneau de Muy was one of his “bravest officers,” and he had “distinguished himself during the ten years he has been in the country.” The priest Pierre-François-Xavier de Charlevoix* said of him that he was “an officer of merit and one of the ablest then in the colony.”

There was scarcely an action during the years that followed in which Daneau was not a participant. He was captain of a company of regulars who formed part of Philippe de Rigaud de Vaudreuil’s command during Frontenac’s expedition against the Onondaga in the summer of 1696. No sooner was this expedition brought to a conclusion than he was placed in charge of a contingent of Canadians and sent to Placentia (Plaisance) to take part in the operations against the English settlements in Newfoundland. Not only did Daneau acquit himself creditably in the military operations that followed, but he also displayed his political talents by helping to reconcile the rival commanders, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and Jacques-François de Monbeton de Brouillan, governor of Placentia. When the conquest of the island was completed Daneau did not follow Iberville to Hudson Bay but went with his contingent to Quebec in the summer of 1697.

Sometime after Daneau’s return from Newfoundland he was made commandant of Fort Chambly, an appointment which he held for several years. In 1703 it was proposed to elevate Chambly from a simple fort to an administrative sub-division of the government of Montreal and to place Daneau in charge. He was, however, appointed garrison adjutant at Quebec on 14 June 1704. Believing that he was entitled to a more senior appointment, Daneau returned to France in 1705. As a result of his solicitations he was offered the post of king’s lieutenant of the colony at Cayenne (French Guiana). He hesitated to accept an appointment that would take his wife and family from Canada to the small colony on the coast of South America. About this time – the date is uncertain, probably 1706 or 1707 – he was awarded the cross of the order of Saint-Louis. In 1707 he was nominated governor of Louisiana. He never took up this appointment; he died at sea near Havana, Cuba, in January 1708, while en route to Mobile.

George F. G. Stanley