Northland by Porter Fox

Author:Porter Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

9

THE BOUNDARY WATERS WAS THE EDGE OF THE WORLD IN EARLY AMERICA. Étienne Brûlé and Jean Nicolet ended their missions across the northland at Lake Superior. La Salle’s journey on Le Griffon stopped at the border between Lakes Huron and Michigan. West of Thunder Bay, a wall of cliffs, waterfalls, rivers, swamps, and lakes form a natural barricade. There were no reliable maps of the area in the nineteenth century, and no way through. Except the route that voyageurs had been paddling for a hundred years.

Voyageurs were the first truckers of inland America. The French Canadian canoe men carried goods to remote trading posts and brought furs back. They followed Brûlé’s path and extended it west through the Boundary Waters. They knew more about the American West at the time than anyone except western Indians. The millions of pounds of furs they carried financed British and French colonies. When delegates sat down to draw the US-Canada border at the Treaty of Paris, they charted it right along the voyageurs’ route, so that the fur trade in both countries could continue uninterrupted.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, demand for fur was insatiable. Hats were not accessories back then. They were essential garb, like wearing pants or a shirt today. Hat sales in England in 1688 reached 3.3 million, plus 1.6 million “caps”—or about one hat per person. In 1700, 69,500 beaver hats, made from American furs, were exported from England. In 1760, that number grew to a half million. In all, between 1700 and 1770, England exported 21 million beaver felt hats.

Voyageurs were expected to paddle fourteen to eighteen hours a day. Most came from farms around Montréal and were accustomed to hard work. There were hundreds of portages on the route. One across Wisconsin was forty-five miles long. Voyageurs carried an average of two bales of furs—180 pounds total. The more bales they carried, the more money they made, so some loaded up four or five. A legendary freed slave named La Bonga carried seven bales for a half mile once. The average life span of a voyageur was thirty-two. The most common cause of death: strangulated hernia.

The voyageurs’ uniform was a red wool cap, deerskin moccasins, leggings, and an Indian belt. At night they sang and danced and warded off swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies with smudge fires, until Indians showed them how to make bug repellent from bear grease and skunk urine. There was no time to hunt, so the men carried salt pork and a dried-pea concoction called rubaboo. They ate two meals a day and smoked a pipe every hour. Distance was often measured in pipes.

The Frenchmen paddled halfway across America when most of the continent had yet to see a European footprint. Caravans could be as large as thirty canoes or as small as two. Voyageurs blessed each trip at a monument to Saint Ann, protector of travelers, set on the western tip of Montréal Island. They doffed their red caps when passing wooden crosses placed at rapids where fellow paddlers had died.

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