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The others were a finer breed, the true and daring coureurs de bois, or pioneers of the bush, who went west in comparatively light canoes, each carrying not more than a ton and a half, who hunted their own game, risked a fight with the Indians, and were to the duller 'pork eaters' what a charger is to a cart-horse or a frigate to a barge.
The French never wearied of extolling the wonderful influence of this symbol of brotherhood. Says Father Gravier, writing of his voyage down the Mississippi, in 1700: "No such honor is paid to the crowns and sceptres of kings as they pay to it. It seems to be the God of peace and war, the arbiter of life and death." Who were the Coureurs de bois.
Even the clerks who looked after the office routine of the company laboured with zest, for, if they were faithful and attentive in their work, the time would come when they, too, would be elected as partners in the great concern. The canoemen were mainly French-Canadian coureurs de bois, gay voyageurs on lake and stream. In the veins of many of them flowed the blood of Cree or Iroquois.
When Canada passed under British domination, and the old French trading houses were broken up, the voyageurs, like the coureurs des bois, were for a time disheartened and disconsolate, and with difficulty could reconcile themselves to the service of the new-comers, so different in habits, manners, and language from their former employers.
Thus civil war would have ensued, and the anger of the king would have fallen on both parties. On the other hand, if Perrot were left unpunished, the coureurs de bois, of whom he was the patron, would set no bounds to their audacity, and Frontenac, who had been ordered to suppress them, would be condemned as negligent or incapable. Among the priests of St.
When he started down the Ohio into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his household goods, and a considerable quantity of whiskey, he was going to treat, not as the coureurs de bois, with the Indians, the savage men of the forests; he was going to treat with the savage forces of nature themselves.
Within ten years so many different regulations were promulgated on the fur trade that it is almost impossible to keep track of them. In 1673 orders came from Paris forbidding French settlers of New France from wandering in the woods for longer than twenty-four hours. In 1672 M. Frontenac forbade the selling of merchandise to coureurs du bois, or the purchase of furs from them.
Examples such as these on the part of those in authority naturally found many imitators, indeed there was at this time a general disposition on the part of young men of the better families in New France to become "coureurs de bois," or rangers of the woods, rather than cultivators of the soil.
In answer to the stereotyped preliminaries he stated that his name was that of his father's, a descendant of the coureurs du bois. His mother with a shrug of the shoulders and flash of teeth was a breed. He was born somewhere in the Barrens, on a hunting trip, he did not know where. Ah, oui, men called him an old-timer.
Factors of the Hudson's Bay Company, coureurs de bois, and voyageurs had come among them at times, and once the renowned Father Lacombe, the Jesuit priest, had stayed with them three months; but never to this day had they seen a Protestant mikonaree, though once a factor, noted for his furious temper, his powers of running, and his generosity, had preached to them.
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