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Du Lhut chuckled in his silent way as he looked back at the long orange glare in the sky. "They will need to swim for it, some of them," said he. "They have not canoes to take them all off. Ah, if I had but two hundred of my coureurs-de-bois on the river at the farther side of them not one would have got away." "They had one who was dressed like a white man," remarked Amos.
The total population living in the settlements of Assiniboia at that time was about twelve thousand, of whom nearly one-half were Métis or half-breeds, mostly the descendants of the coureurs-de-bois and voyageurs of early times. So long as the buffalo ranged the prairies in large numbers, they were hunters, and cared nothing for the relatively tame pursuit of agriculture.
Many of the coureurs-de-bois entered the trade with ample funds and emerged in poverty. Nicholas Perrot and Greysolon Du Lhut were conspicuous examples. It was a highly speculative game. At times large profits came easily and were spent recklessly. The trade encouraged profligacy, bravado, and garishness; it deadened the moral sense of the colony, and even schooled men in trickery and peculation.
Coureurs de risques they ought to have been called, as La Hontan remarks. But taken as a whole they were a vigorous, adventurous, strong-limbed set of men. It was a genuine compliment that they paid to the wilderness when they chose to spend year after year in its embrace. In their methods of trading the coureurs-de-bois were unlike anything that the world had ever known before.
Historians have magnified these bickerings out of all proportion. Squabbles over matters of precedence at ceremonies, over the rate of the tithes, and over the curbing of the coureurs-de-bois did not take the major share of the Church's attention. For the greater part of two whole centuries it loyally aided the civil power in all things wherein the two could work together for good.
Jenieve remembered all her toil for them, and her denial of her own wants that she might give to these half-savage boys, who considered nothing lost that they threw into the lake. She turned around to run to the house. But there stood Jean Bati' McClure's wife, talking through the door, and encouraging her mother to walk with coureurs-de-bois. The girl's heart broke.
From first to last these settlements on the Mississippi, the Wabash, and the Illinois had remained, in French hands, mere sprawling villages. The largest of them, Kaskaskia, may have contained in its most flourishing days two thousand people, many of them voyageurs, coureurs-de-bois, converted Indians, and transients of one sort or another. In 1765 there were not above seventy permanent families.
Sometimes it was an officer or an official on his way to the capital from Three Rivers or Montreal, sometimes it was a load of skins, with Indians or coureurs-de-bois conveying them down to be shipped to Europe, and sometimes it was a small canoe which bore a sunburned grizzly-haired man, with rusty weather-stained black cassock, who zigzagged from bank to bank, stopping at every Indian hut upon his way.
Both Amos and De Catinat looked with the deepest curiosity and interest at the famous leader of coureurs-de-bois, a man whose whole life had been spent in pushing westward, ever westward, saying little, writing nothing, but always the first wherever there was danger to meet or difficulty to overcome.
The posts were for use as the headquarters of the coureurs-de-bois, and usually sheltered a small garrison of soldiers during the winter months; they likewise served as places of defense in the event of attack and of rendezvous when a trading expedition to Montreal was being organized.
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