The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  For most modern people, that level of ongoing apprehension is unfathomable, as are the hardships the voyageurs underwent and the standards of living they experienced. Although he would never frame it in such terms, Lewis’s real achievement would be to produce the illusion of authenticity. Like a magician, his trick would only succeed if the audience was adequately impressed by the depth of the performance and ignored the strings holding it together. The entire undertaking placed an enormous burden on the crew members: look like rough voyageurs, but behave like civilized young men. No raiding villages, no sleeping with local wenches, no brawling to settle disagreements. As for boozing, there would doubtless be opportunities to drink on the expedition, and the legal age in Canada was 18. Across the United States it was more complicated since every state had its own laws. Just to be safe, all the parents were asked to sign a permission form stating their sons could drink, provided they behaved themselves.

  To help with the ban on physical altercations, Lewis worked with psychologist Will Kennedy to develop a team-building seminar. The group spent a weekend at Camp Edwards, an idyllic location in the Wisconsin woods. Surrounded by towering pines and snowdrifts, the group enjoyed indoor heating as it went through exercises on how to talk through problems and address conflict before it erupted. The key, Kennedy told them, was to go straight to the person and be honest without being combative. Gossiping about someone behind his back would only add tension rather than diffusing hard feelings. And most important, Kennedy said, was that you understand and accept yourself.

  “You cannot do a trip like this unless you can live with yourself,” he told them. A few scribbled the phrase down in their binders, even though being able to live with others seemed like it would be the more challenging ordeal. Just working on preparations with other people was already becoming somewhat problematic. Lewis was getting reports from the other teachers that Knecht, the director of the clothing project, was undermining Lewis’s leadership and credibility with the students. Plus, Knecht hadn’t kept up with the workload he’d been assigned. If the situation didn’t improve, Lewis would have to take action. For now, his attention was focused on two more-pressing concerns.

  The first was the Chicago Flower and Garden Show. The annual event held on Navy Pier at the end of March celebrated all things green, and Lewis had secured a spot for the expedition by creating a presentation called “La Salle Expedition II: Planting the Lily of France.” It was a loose interpretation of the exposition’s theme, but had been enough to gain the men entry. They needed a finished canoe to display, as well as members of the team in their outfits to answer questions, sing paddling songs, and demonstrate the finger weaving process they used to make their sashes. If the show were a success, it would help invigorate the community. It also had the possibility of securing more funds for the expedition, an area in which Lewis was struggling.

  Despite his continued efforts, fund-raising still ate up too much of his time with too few results. He regularly traveled to meet potential donors in person, because it made a stronger impression if they could see him in costume and look at pictures of the work being done. As one donor told him, “The problem with your expedition is that nobody believes it until they see it.” All the time away from the group was diminishing Lewis’s credibility with his crew. “We had almost a headless monster on our hands,” Lewis said much later of the power vacuum caused by the fund-raising debacle. He wasn’t around for group activities nearly as often as he would have liked to have been, and sometimes it seemed like he didn’t have the opportunity to develop as close of a relationship with the students as he’d have liked. “Everyone started doing things pretty much on their own and that became pretty much the tenor of the expedition.”

  That dynamic came to its climax in a confrontation with Knecht, who had continued to chip away at Lewis’s reputation when the leader wasn’t around. His antiauthority stance was appealing to the teenagers; he’d been suggesting that Lewis wasn’t such a great person to lead them after all, that maybe he should be replaced by one of the other adults. Lewis knew that if he didn’t remove Knecht from the expedition, he’d be faced with a rebellious crew during the trip. Finally, reluctantly, Lewis went to Knecht’s apartment to tell the man he wasn’t going to be part of the crew. Lewis brought Ron Hobart with him in case the situation went south. That bit of foresight turned out to be fortuitous when Knecht tried to hit Lewis after being informed he wouldn’t be joining the group on the expedition. But neither Hobart nor Lewis knew what to do when Knecht pulled out a gun from a desk drawer.

  Darting forward, Lewis was able to get behind Knecht and grab the gun. He couldn’t be sure whether it was an actual pistol or a starting gun (used at sporting events), but he wasn’t about to test it out. Lewis and Hobart called the police but didn’t press any charges. All three men agreed the situation had gotten out of hand. It was an emotional issue. No one was hurt and no one wanted to part with animosity. Lewis was simply relieved that he’d taken Knecht off the crew before it was too late and that he hadn’t been injured and forced to postpone the expedition.

  “Gauche, deux, trois, quatre. Droit, deux, trois, quatre.” The repetitive chant wove through the patter of rain and drew the attention of motorists around Elgin as twenty-three men marched slowly down the sidewalk. It was a dreary, humid Tuesday morning in late June, and cars rumbled by at a quick clip as the men on foot hefted their heavy loads down the concrete path.8 Wearing thin leather moccasins, the men chafed at their wool and canvas clothing, which itched despite being clean and new. Those carrying the four finished canoes also struggled to find a tolerably uncomfortable position to rest the sharp edges of the overturned boat on their shoulders. They tried to split the weight between four men, with two on either side bracing the gunwale somewhere between the neck and the shoulder, but even with the weight distributed between so many people, it was a painful task. They didn’t want the gunwale to come down on bone, but it dug painfully into the muscle between the clavicle and the scapula if it wasn’t braced on the sides with their arms. For the men who had been assigned to carry gear rather than canoes, it was equally challenging to find a way to transport the wooden chests and cast-iron cooking pots. Their shape just didn’t settle easily against the spine. It was nothing like wearing a backpack, with padded shoulder straps and an accommodating form. All in all, it wasn’t the most enjoyable way to spend a summer morning after school let out.

  The practice portage (a term for crossing land between bodies of water with one’s canoe and gear) was only a few miles long, but the unfamiliar weight of the gear and the slick streets and the stink of exhaust from cars that drove by made it feel much longer. They’d started the day at Camp WaDeDoDa, Cox’s name for the building where the group did much of its metal and woodworking outside Larkin High School. The overland trek would end in South Elgin. There, they planned to put the finished canoes into the Fox River and paddle to the National Street Bridge. As they marched, keeping rhythm with French commands, a photographer from the Daily Herald snapped photos. Drivers slowed down to watch the line of men. At one point, the group passed a garbage truck and one of the collectors stopped his work to gawk.

  Despite the misery of the portage, it was thrilling to elicit such reactions. To the men participating in the expedition and their family members, who had spent the past eighteen months helping sew clothes and knit socks and hats and scarves, it felt like the voyage was held together by shoestrings and force of will. Nothing was completely finished, including the crew itself. Only recently Lewis had been forced to find suitable alternate crew members. Originally he’d hoped to have two students travel with the four women of the liaison team, ready to jump in and fill a crew member’s place if any fell ill or were injured. But after several teenagers quit during the training and the original alternates were pulled in to join the permanent crew, he needed new people to fill the positions. Lewis ended up looking outside Elgin. He chose a teenager from Evanston named Sid Bardwell who agreed to travel
with the liaison team and take the name Castor Blanc or Nika, the Native American guide La Salle traveled with. Bardwell would sub in and out of the canoes whenever anyone got sick or injured, and would otherwise travel by car to help with advance publicity and setting up the sound equipment for the crew’s presentations.

  For all its moving parts and unsolved problems, the expedition looked like a fait accompli to outsiders. Members of the Elgin community had secured a float for the men to appear in the Fourth of July parade, planned a dinner with Mayor Richard Verbic to be hosted by the Junior Women’s League on July 10, and organized a send-off breakfast for the voyageurs on August 3. Letters from supporters had been pouring into the La Salle: Expedition II headquarters. The crew received endorsements from Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, Philippe Cousteau (filmmaker and son of Jacques Cousteau), and famed mountaineer Edmund Hillary. In 1953, along with Tenzing Norgay, Hillary was the first to reach the summit of Mount Everest, and he offered a few words of advice to the men preparing to go on their own quest: “The principles of expedition organizing are the same whether you are in the Himalayas or on the great rivers of America . . . careful planning, good equipment and a fit team, determination and enthusiasm, and the resolution to enjoy every moment of the experience.”

  Lewis was certain they were on track to have everything that Hillary advised. During the month of July, crew members worked frantically to complete any unfinished tasks before their departure. Lewis had to appear in costume for numerous events, write more grant applications, oversee the final stages of canoe construction for the last canoes, make last-minute changes to the schedule, buy vans for the liaison team to drive, and teach them to drive stick-shift since he couldn’t afford to buy automatic vehicles. The four women spent an afternoon in a parking lot trying to get the vans in and out of first gear, without much success given the limited space. It looked like driving was going to be a trial by fire as soon as they hit the highway to Canada. The crew members did a canoe capsizing drill dressed in their full voyageur ensemble to make sure everyone understood how to right an overturned boat and climb back into it from the water. During another practice drill, they wore the voyageur clothing along with life preservers and jumped into a pool. The life vests functioned as well as advertised, easily providing buoyancy despite the weight of the sodden wool clothes. The life vests would be worn underneath the men’s clothes during foul weather as a precaution.

  A few weeks before the departure, each man got his camp duty assignments. The six-boat expedition was comprised of three modules: red, gold, and green. Two of the modules each included eight men (four men per boat), and the third module had seven men (four men in one boat and three men in the other). Each module would have a cook, a fire starter, woodchoppers, shelter builders, and a quartermaster (to organize gear). Whenever someone finished his main job, he’d be expected to do anything else that needed to be done. In addition to sharing meals and dividing up chores, the men in each module would also sleep in a large tent erected by using one of the canoes. On land, they’d take care of all the cooking and cleaning; on the water, the eight (or seven) men in each module would keep an eye on one another and make sure they didn’t get separated from the rest of the group. The use of modules wasn’t inspired by anything Lewis had read about in a history book; it just seemed like the best way to delegate. Lewis was a firm believer in the divide-and-conquer method of organization. Giving everyone tasks that suited their skill sets would free up his time to do more public relations work and big-picture planning.

  While the members of the expedition went through all the items on their list of things-to-do-before-leaving-this-century, the rest of America reveled in its country’s two hundredth birthday. The longest, widest, heaviest American flag ever made was unfurled from the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. It was larger than half a football field, weighed around one and a half tons, and cost $45,000 to make. In Philadelphia, the biggest birthday cake ever baked towered over crowds, a five-story splendor of sugar and flour. The cake could serve 200,000 people. Half a million people gathered beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, a five-hour parade wound its way through Philadelphia, and New York City executed a fireworks display that incorporated Ellis Island, Governor’s Island, the Statue of Liberty, and all of New York Harbor.

  “If to cynics the bombardment seems excessive—jingoistic and ingenuous at best, at worst grossly exploitative—Americans should nonetheless take heart from it,” claimed Time magazine. “Only five years ago, in protest against the U.S. involvement in Indochina, the flag was being burned, burlesqued and spat upon. Today many of the selfsame Americans who chose then to disown their flag are hoisting it high. In a republic, the flag—not a royal family or the trophies of empire—represents in graphic form the experiences and beliefs of its people.”9

  Ironically enough, Lewis’s canoe would be carrying the flag of King Louis, a white banner patterned with golden fleur-de-lys. He didn’t see it as problematic. After all, French exploration conducted in the name of King Louis was part of what led to the birth of the United States.

  The morning of August 3 arrived hot and sunny. A crowd of three hundred people stood on the banks of the Fox River near the Hemmens Cultural Center in Elgin. The canoes came down the river in a close formation, surprising a flock of mallard ducks that had been floating on the calm water. The sound of paddles pulling through the water was masked by the men’s voices as they sang “Vent Frais,” hitting the gunwales of the canoes with the shafts of their paddles in time to the music. As they approached the shore, the six canoes swung effortlessly around to face their audience and fired off a musket salute. The crew members were exhilarated to be on the water, in their clothes, in the boats they’d built, after two years of practicing and sewing and building. The crowd cheered as the paddlers pushed their boats onto the muddy shore and hopped out to carry the canoes uphill to the concrete stairs of the Hemmens Center. One by one the boats were lined up, with just enough space between each for a person to wiggle through. Kids in football jerseys and bucket hats reverently touched the wooden gunwales and watched the strangely dressed young men wander around talking to family and friends. The group performed another paddling song, “C’est L’aviron,” before heading inside to enjoy their farewell breakfast.

  At the end of the meal, everyone gathered outside for hugs, well wishes, and tears. This was the crew members’ last chance to spend time with family members and enjoy the comforts of life indoors before embarking on their journey. When they returned to Elgin again, they’d be halfway through their journey and winter would be upon them. After the festivities at the cultural center ended, the men loaded the canoes up on trailers to be carted to the St. Lawrence, packed their gear into the cars and vans, said their final good-byes, and started the fourteen-hour drive to Montreal.

  Ready or not, they were going.

  Chapter Three

  THE LIFE OF A VOYAGEUR

  Montreal, New France

  August 11, 1681

  On the day that would mark the start of La Salle’s successful voyage down the Mississippi River, he signed his life away to his cousin. For the past three years, La Salle had relied on credit and loans from relatives to pay his travel expenses. He’d planned to pay off his debts and eventually turn a profit by selling furs he collected along the way. But every one of his financial ventures had sunk, some of them literally, leaving him little with which to persuade investors to give him more money. Fortunately, he still had the support of Governor Frontenac, and he’d been given loans from his cousin Francois du Plet when creditors came after his property on Lake Ontario.1 In gratitude for his cousin’s support, La Salle made his will out to du Plet. He had no way of knowing whether the upcoming expedition would finally lead to fame and fortune—based on his experiences over the last three years, he had good reason to doubt a positive outcome.

  When La Salle first returned from France in 1678, his immediate goal had been the construction of a ship.
The Griffon, a forty-foot vessel, became the first of its type to ply the Great Lakes. Before it was completed, La Salle sent men ahead to the northern tip of modern-day Michigan. But when he arrived with the ship and the rest of his crew in 1679, he learned that the men who had been sent ahead had all deserted for fear that La Salle’s mission would lead them to their deaths. After loading the Griffon with items to trade and sending it back east, expecting it would soon return with more supplies, La Salle sent Henri de Tonty to chase after the deserters while he and the rest of the men trudged through the snow to the St. Joseph River, more than three hundred miles to the south. La Salle instructed the voyageurs to construct a fort while they awaited Tonty’s return, since they would need shelter if they hoped to survive the frigid winter.

  It took three months for Tonty to return with the men he’d found. By that time, supplies were dwindling, and it was becoming apparent that the Griffon wasn’t coming back. Whether a storm or sabotage was to blame for its disappearance was unclear. What La Salle did know was that between the cost of the ship itself and the furs it was carrying, he’d lost 52,000 livres (nearly $4 million in today’s currency).2 With his voyageurs facing starvation, La Salle and a few men returned to Montreal by foot (nearly eight hundred miles) in March 1680 to resupply the outfit. He placed Tonty in charge of the men who stayed at Fort Crevecoeur (a name that translates to “heartbreak”). Shortly after La Salle left, most of his remaining men left as well. Tonty returned to the fort one day after surveying the area and found it ransacked and deserted. The only explanation for the voyageurs’ departure was a note that read Nous sommes tous sauvages, meaning, “We are all savages.”3 To top it off, when La Salle finally arrived in Montreal he learned that another ship coming from France and carrying about 20,000 livres worth of supplies for him had wrecked.4 The Frenchman had lost all his money and half his men.