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Updated: October 24, 2025
A voyageur who gave flesh and bone and sometimes life itself for a hundred dollars a year, and drank that hundred dollars up during his month of semi-civilization on Mackinac, seldom had much about him with which to pay for his necessary mending. Léon Baudette swore at the price, being a discontented engagé.
Besides, he had taken to himself an Indian wife, and although the ceremony by which that was effected was frequently wanting in those accessories of bell, book, and candle so essential to its proper well-being, nevertheless the voyageur and his squaw got on pretty well together, and little ones, who jabbered the smallest amount of English or French, and a great deal of Ojibbeway, or Cree, or Assineboine, began to multiply around them.
Poor John smoked, biting hard on his pipe-stem. Ignorance, and the helplessness of a limited man who is more a good animal than a discerning soul; time, the slow transmission of news, his fixed state as a voyageur all these things were against him. He could not adjust himself to any facts, and his feelings sometimes approached the melting state.
Before going to bed I had some talk with my host about my adventures at La Brede before I applied to him for a night's lodging. There was actually a sparkle of mirth in his melancholy dark eyes, and his sunken cheeks were puckered up with a sort of smile. 'If you had been dressed in a black coat, said he, 'like a commis voyageur, they would have all found room for you. This was my opinion, too.
In spite of a reputation for embodying the vices of white man and red which gave him his unsavory title it seemed unlikely that the Hudson's Bay Company, now in the thick of an aggressive campaign against its great rival, and about to despatch an important flotilla from Montreal to Athabasca by way of the Nor'-Westers' route, would dispense with the services of this dexterous voyageur.
Yet not one word of complaint was uttered; and once, when the men were camped on a green along the portage, a voyageur got out his fiddle, and the sore feet danced, which was more wholesome than moping or poulticing. The boldness of the grizzlies was now explained. Antelope and buffalo were carried over the falls. The bears prowled below for the carrion.
'Twas your grandfather set the bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his hand, and his hand was iron Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false hand was a true hand of iron metal that made many a lazy voyageur bite the dust.
Gambler in England, gambler again in New France, now trading fur-merchant and voyageur, he was, as always, an adventurer. Du Mesne and his hardy crew hailed him already as a new captain of the trails, a new coureur, won from the Old World by the savage witchery of the New.
On Christmas morning, the stars and stripes were hoisted above Fort Mandan; and all that night the men danced hilariously. On New Years of 1805, the white men visited the Mandan lodges, and one voyageur danced "on his head" to the uproarious applause of the savages. All winter the men joined in the buffalo hunts, laying up store of pemmican.
They sat in a circle round the kettle, each man armed with a large wooden or pewter spoon, with which he ladled the robbiboo down his capacious throat, in a style that not only caused Charley to laugh, but afterwards threw him into a deep reverie on the powers of appetite in general, and the strength of voyageur stomachs in particular.
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