The coureurs de bois differed much from one another, but all were part of a great historical process that had a long reach in time and space. In the seventeenth century they advanced beyond the eastern woodlands to the great plains and the mountains in the middle of the continent. They followed the western rivers into the Mississippi Valley as far south as Louisiana, always in pursuit of furs and skins, which they gained by trading, hunting, and trapping. In the interior parts of North America, their small camps and trading posts grew into towns and later great cities that honor their memory. They became iconic figures in the cultural identity of North America and were living examples of the mixing and merging of people, in the spirit of Champlain’s dream. At the same time they became symbols of other ideas that Champlain did not share—of liberty and freedom on the western frontier.
French officials tried to limit the flow of these free spirits by a system of licenses called congés, which literally meant permissions to leave the settlements of New France. But the numbers kept growing. At Montreal and Detroit alone, 2,431 traders were licensed in 1777, according to records. Many more went west without asking anyone’s leave. One estimate reckoned that more than 5,000 coureurs de bois were functioning in North America during the late eighteenth century. French merchants organized this trade. A proprietor who had capital enough to invest in trading goods and supplies was called a bourgeois. He in turn hired workers who were called voyageurs. The voyageurs were divided into several types. Seasonal workers who returned every year to New France were called mangeurs de lard, pork eaters. Others who went farther into the west and stayed for more than a single season were called hivernants, the men who wintered in the wilderness. The culture of the fur trade was dominated by these voyageurs.
One traveler, Alexander Ross, met an old voyageur and recorded his memories. “I have now been forty-two years in this country,” the voyageur recalled. “For twenty-four I was a light canoeman; I required but little sleep, but sometimes got less than I required. No portage was too long for me; all portages were alike. My end of the canoe never touched the ground till I saw the end of it. Fifty songs a day were nothing to me. I could carry, paddle, walk, and sing with any man I ever saw…. over rapids, over cascades, over chutes, all were the same to me. No water, no weather, ever stopped the paddle or the song. I have had twelve wives in the country, and was once possessed of fifty horses and six running dogs trimmed in the first style…. No bourgeois had better dressed wives than I; no Indian chief finer horses; no white man better harnesses or swifter dogs…. There is no life so happy as a voyageur’s life; none so independent; no place where a man enjoys so much variety and freedom as in the Indian country. Huzza, Huzza pour le pays sauvage!”
“After this cri de joie,” Ross added, “he sat down in the boat and we could not help admiring the wild enthusiasm of the old Frenchman. He had boasted and excited himself till he was out of breath and then sighed with regret that he could no longer enjoy the scenes of his past life.”52
These voyageurs drew upon European and Indian ways to create new cultures in America. They invented new vocabularies by a creative process of cultural fusion, and coined new terms to describe the new world, its inhabitants, and its flora and fauna. The expression “Mush!” as a command of dogsled drivers, comes from the French Marche! for “Walk on.”53 The place name “Ozarks” derives from the French Aux Arcs, which was a slang word among voyageurs for the place of the Arkansas Indians, whose name in turn was an Indian slang word for the people who called themselves Quapaw and lived near the Arkansas River.54
This process of linguistic mixing produced not only new words but new languages. French and Indians invented hybrid contact-languages, part European and part Native American. Early hybrids emerged on the fishing coast in the form of pidgin speech, which was nobody’s native tongue. Pidgins are improvised contact languages with simplified grammar and vocabulary.
Other Franco-Indian contact languages developed in a form very different from pidgin speech. An example is Michif, or Métif, a combination of French and Cree, with elements of English, Assiniboine, and Ojibway. It emerged by the early nineteenth century on the western prairies of Canada and the United States. Michif was not a pidgin language, nor was it what linguists call a creole language (a pidgin that becomes a native tongue), which also has simplified rules of grammar and syntax. Informed observers have noted: “The Michif language is unusual among contact languages, in that rather than choosing to simplify its grammar, it chose the most complex and demanding elements of the chief languages that went into it. French noun phrases retain their lexical grammar and adjective agreement; Cree verbs retain their polysynthetic structure.” Linguists conclude from this pattern that “people who devised Michif were fully fluent in both French and Cree,” and they invented a new language by combining some of the most complex elements in several others.55
This mixing of language developed from a mixing of people. Champlain’s interpreters, the coureurs de bois and voyageurs formed families of combined Indian and French ancestry. These unions multiplied rapidly in the early and mid-seventeenth century. Some were made by Frenchmen of high rank. A leading example was the Baron de Saint-Castin, who came to Quebec with the Carignan-Salières regiment in 1665 and married an Indian woman whom he called Marie-Mathilde Madokawando. Her father was an Abenaki sachem, and she was described as “a beautiful and accomplished woman.” The baron made his home close to his Indian relations. Some of his many children and grandchildren married other Indians; others were wed to French nobility. There were many similar stories of mixed unions in the La Tour family of Acadia; the Denys family on the fishing coast; and the Le Tardif, Nicollet, and Prévost families in Quebec, to mention but a few. These mixed marriages were actively encouraged by French leaders and were blessed by the Catholic clergy. French Catholic leaders after Samuel Champlain were more tolerant of marriages with Indians than of unions with Protestants. A Mohawk whom they called the “Flemish bastard” was denounced as “the monstrous offspring of a Dutch heretic father and a Pagan woman.” The “pagan woman” was not a problem for them, but they were incensed by the fact that his father was Calvinist.56
Champlain actively encouraged the intermixing of French and Indians. Within his lifetime, the children of these mixed unions began to be called “Métis,” a term that was recorded as early as 1615. By the late eighteenth century, that word also acquired another meaning. It referred to an entire population of French-Indian descent.57 In the nineteenth century it began to be used in a third way to describe communities and cultures. A scholar who has studied narratives of western travel, reports, “During the 1820s, Englishmen and Americans travelling into the Great Lakes fur-trade universe discovered to their surprise that they had entered a foreign country.”58
In that region “Métis” became a term of pride. Métis writer Duke Redbird observes: “The Métis are the only ethnic group indigenous to the continent. All races, including Indian and Inuit, came from elsewhere.”59 Where Métis formed communities, as they did in both Canada and the United States, they also created societies in new forms, with distinct patterns of stratification, family life, material culture, and architecture. In the nineteenth century some Métis communities were nomadic wagon trains that followed the buffalo and were guided by leaders with flag signals. Others were circles of small cabins built around a large central building for meeting and dancing. Music and dance combined Indian and European forms in creative combinations. Their dress ran to highly patterned and richly decorated buckskin coats and leggings, blanket coats for men; and black dresses with bright shawls and sashes for women.60 Creative political systems were invented, as open and free as those of the Indians, but with a chief called le gouverneur and elected leaders called les soldats. This culture was marked by a very strong sense of liberty and freedom. American Indians sometimes called the Métis people otipemisiwak. Jennifer Brown explains that this complex Indian term “means ‘free people’ or ‘their own boss,’ and is a Cree
rendering of gens libres.” It is a word drawn from the old French fur trade for engagés who served their time and went free. This idea of a people living in freedom was applied to entire mixed populations on the frontier of New France.61 Ross wrote on his travels: “While enjoying a sort of licentious freedom they are generous, warm-hearted and brave…. Feeling their own strength, from being constantly armed and free from control, they despise all others; but above all they are marvelously tenacious of their own original habits. They cherish freedom as they cherish life.”62
In the year 2001, the Canadian Census reported that 292,310 people in Canada identified themselves as Métis, and there are many more in the United States. These self-identified Métis have founded associations in every Canadian province and five American states. And yet they are only a fraction of North Americans who have both Indian and European ancestors. Demographers have reckoned that more than 750,000 Canadians are descended from Métis. Even those estimates do not come close to the full extent of intermixing. In 1970, a Canadian biologist reckoned that 40 percent of Canadian families had both Indians and Europeans in their family trees, which would yield eight million people of mixed ancestry in 1970, and twelve million in 2005. DNA analysis might soon be able to test the accuracy of these estimates.63
Other North Americans in even greater number have a cultural identity with Champlain’s interpreters, coureurs de bois, voyageurs, and Métis. A web survey turns up a large number of organizations who claim that heritage in our own time. That tradition is flourishing in the twenty-first century. It rose from Étienne Brûlé, Nicolas Marsolet, Olivier Le Tardif, Jean Nicollet, and behind them all was Samuel Champlain, four centuries ago.
Champlain thus had a pivotal role in founding three different francophone cultures in North America: Quebeçois, Acadian, and Métis. One could also add a fourth culture on the fishing coast, with early settlements at Miscou, the Bay of Chaleur, Cape Breton, and Placentia Bay in Newfoundland.
Each derived from different parts of France, and developed a distinct population, language, and material culture through a complex process of persistence and change. All of them began to crystallize in a pivotal moment of deep change, circa 1632–1635. Champlain played a seminal role in every one of them. In that special sense he can truly be called the father of French Canada.
25.
CHAMPLAIN’S LAST LABOR
The End as a Beginning, 1635
I did not lack materials…. Truly he led a life of great justice and equity.
—Paul Le Jeune, on his funeral oration for Samuel de Champlain, 16361
IT WAS OCTOBER, 1635, and another glorious fall had come to the St. Lawrence Valley. The air was crisp and very clear. In the strong autumn light the great river turned deep blue and sparkled like a stream of liquid sapphire as it flowed to the sea. On its banks the forest was ablaze with scarlet swamp maples, yellow birch and hickory, russet oaks, golden tamaracks, and dazzling orange sugar trees. To this display, the French habitants had added new colors of their own creation: the vivid green of expanding pastures and meadows, and gleaming whitewashed cottages that were multiplying on the land.
In the autumn of 1635 the future of New France seemed as bright as the colors of its countryside—brighter than ever before. Its right to exist was recognized by other Atlantic powers. In France itself, the colony was supported by Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu. The Company of the Hundred Associates was flourishing with its many subsidiaries. The fur trade was highly profitable, and the French fisheries were larger in 1635 than ever before, or since.2 Agriculture was taking root in seigneuries along the St. Lawrence Valley and behind the aboiteaux of Acadia. Settlements were spreading east on the fishing coast, south along the coast of Acadia, and west into the interior of North America. In 1635, the French habitants were at peace with all Indian nations except the Iroquois.
In Quebec, Samuel Champlain regarded this record with satisfaction, as well he might have done. More any other individual, he had made it happen. Through the last three years he had ruled the colony wisely and well. In 1633 and 1634, he had traveled up and down the St. Lawrence Valley from Tadoussac to Trois-Rivières. He had made his presence felt in the missions of the Gaspésie, in the new fishing settlements at Cape Breton, and among his truchements and traders to the west. In his advancing years he was loved by those who knew him in New France: habitants, missionaries, and traders. The Indians held him in high regard. They respected him as a warrior, valued him as a peacemaker, and most of all, they trusted his word. As Gabriel Sagard had written, “In all the years he had dwelled among these native people, he had never been suspected of any dishonesty.”3
But after many years of labor, Champlain was growing weary. His spirit was strong, but his physical strength was beginning to ebb. During the spring and summer of 1635, he appears to have made no journeys on the river—a major change for him. A steady flow of correspondence from Jesuit missionaries throughout New France reported that Champlain was active in his oversight from Gaspé to the Great Lakes. But he was more sedentary than ever before and rarely left the settlement at Quebec. Everyone knew he was not well. Reports filtered back to France, and leaders there began to think about a successor.4
Then, in mid-October Champlain suffered a stroke. Its effects were severe. He lost the use of his legs and was unable to rise without assistance. He was carried to his bed, and the paralysis spread to his upper limbs. One report described his condition as including a perclus de bras, a crippling of the arms. For ten weeks Champlain remained a prisoner of his infirmity, locked within an immobile body and unable to move by himself.5 His servant Jean Poisson tended him, as did the Jesuit fathers and others in the colony.6
Champlain fought against his affliction. His vital organs continued to function, and his mind remained active. He tried to attend to his official business, but the documents were drafted by other hands. Some were signed by Champlain, with help from friends who guided his fingers across the page. His painful signature was mute evidence of his infirmity.
Even as he lay paralyzed in his bed, Champlain embarked on one final project. In his last months on this earth, he dedicated himself to a spiritual quest with the same restless energy he had brought to his worldly pursuits. In his accustomed way, he had already begun to prepare for this last labor. Jesuit father Le Jeune wrote that “he was not taken unaware in the account which he had to render unto God.”7 Champlain’s faith had been growing through the years. He had gathered a library of devotional volumes: the Fleurs des sainctz, the Pratique de la perfection chrestienne, the Triple couronne de la bienheureuse Vierge, the Chroniques et instruction du père Sainct-François. Probably he and the Jesuit fathers read these books together. In that age of faith many Christians found deep solace in confessions of faith and acts of devotion.8
In his last months Champlain renewed his faith in an extraordinary way. He began by making a confession. His friend Le Jeune tells us that it was no ordinary effort. Champlain “prepared a general confession of his entire life, which he made with great contrition.” His confessor was Jesuit father Charles Lalement. The two men had become good friends. We are told that “the father comforted him throughout his malady, which lasted two and a half months, and did not leave him until his death.”9
People close to Champlain were awed by the intensity of his faith. Some began to understand for the first time the strength of spiritual striving that had driven him through his career. “At his death, he crowned his virtues with sentiments of piety so lofty that he astonished us all,” Father Le Jeune wrote. “What tears flowed from his eyes! How ardent were his affections for the service of God!”10
In that soaring faith and zeal for God’s work, Champlain returned yet again to his dream for New France, and to his grand design. He did so on his deathbed in a spirit of Christian caritas for the French habitants and Indian friends who came to visit him. Father Le Jeune wrote of his last days: “How great was his love for the families here! He kept saying that it was nece
ssary to assist them with all power for the good of the country (le bien du Pays), and to support them and give them solace in every possible way.” He turned to his confessor and said “he would do it himself if God gave him health.”11
Through the bright October days Champlain hoped for a recovery, but his condition did not improve. As he lay abed the seasons were changing, and so was his mood. Every year, North America has two autumns. The first is October’s glorious fall. The second is what Herman Melville called the “damp November of the soul,” when the incandescent colors fade and the world turns drab and gray. Earth and water, sea and air, mist and rain, dormant trees and living creatures all became different shades of gray. In Quebec a cold wind stripped the dead leaves from the trees, and dark branches rose like twisted fingers toward a leaden sky. Overhead, low scudding clouds oppressed the spirit, and a cold light etched the surface of the St. Lawrence River with silver lines that chilled the soul.
In mid-November, Champlain decided that the time had come to make his will. He summoned his friends and associates, and eleven of them gathered around his bed to serve as witnesses. They made a cross-section of New France. Some were highborn French aristocrats of the old noblesse d’épée. At his bedside was Marc-Antoine Bras-de-Fer de Châteaufort, a nobleman and Knight Chevalier of Malta. He had come to Quebec in 1634 as Champlain’s lieutenant—and Richelieu’s informant. Champlain had won him over, and by 1635 they were fast friends.12 Others were of the noblesse de robe, such as Champlain’s kindred spirit François Derré de Gand, a member of the Hundred Associates and the company’s commissioner general of Quebec. In the colony Derré de Gand was known as a pious and charitable man who “sought God in the spirit of truth.”13
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