Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 6, 2025
The intendant might threaten and the priest might plead. It recked not to the coureur de bois when once his knees felt the bottom of the canoe. But of the seven thousand French who peopled Canada in 1672 it is probable that not more than four hundred were scattered through the forest. The greater part of the inhabitants occupied the seigneuries along the St Lawrence and the Richelieu.
Nicolas Perrot is a fine fellow, and a great coureur du bois, and helps to get the governor out of troubles to-day, the intendant to-morrow. He is a splendid fighter. Perrot is my friend." He said this, not with an air of boasting, but with a youthful and enthusiastic pride, which was relieved, by the twinkle in his eyes and his frank manner. "Who brought you here?" she asked demurely.
When Tracy or Denonville or Frontenac led an expedition against the Iroquois, it was fortunate that Canada could muster a cohort of men who knew woodcraft as well as the Indians. In days of peace the coureur de bois was looked on with less favour. The king liked to know where his subjects were at every hour of the day and night.
It was a mighty thing, this gathering of the Great Peace, this time when colonists and their king were seeing the first breaking of the wave on the shore of an empire alluring, wonderful, unparalleled. Into this wild rabble of savages and citizens, of priest and soldier and coureur, Law's friends, Pierre Noir and Jean Breboeuf, swiftly disappeared, naturally, fitly and unavoidably.
In Europe they "took the place of the pack-animal, the stage-coach, the goods-van that crowded all the highways between populous centers," whereas in the Mississippi Valley and beyond they succeeded the pioneer and pathfinder. The railroad outran the settler and "beckoned him on," just as the coureur de bois outran the slower-going migrant and beckoned him on to ever new frontiers.
To cover a distance of about two hundred and fifty miles, he had been obliged to travel about seven thousand! Hitherto we have seen Pierre Radisson figure as a mere coureur de bois. Now we shall see him in the more important role of a discoverer.
Over his evening pipe, when the sparkling forks of fire bursting from the crackling logs seemed to materialize before his eyes again the scenes of his venturous life in the wild, as if they had been imperishably imprinted in the old trunks which had witnessed them, the old coureur de bois spirit, and even accent, flashed out as he carried his listeners back into the gallant days of the men who founded the great seigneuries which still stretch along the thousand miles of coast from the barren Atlantic seaboard to the bold heights of Quebec.
"Captain Stephens has been tried by le chef's court martial, and is condemned to be shot. Le chef has only a few braves and bois-brules about him; and I could fetch you to the nest in an hour and a half by hard riding." When the coureur learnt that the force had been dispatched he rode away again. And we shall likewise bid good-bye to the poet and the colonel, and join Browninge.
First one hears that creditors have seized his fort of Frontenac, and then one beholds him sailing here in state, as though naught on earth could daunt him." "I would like service with him," said the other coureur de bois. His companion laughed. "Service with La Salle means the hardest marching and heaviest labor a voyageur ever undertook. I have heard he is himself tough as iron.
Now and again the history of the simple-hearted Scots was repeated; and a coureur was presently seen to bring a shy, witching Saulteux maiden from the tents of the Jumping Indians.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking