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Updated: July 24, 2025
Gode, who has been by turns a voyageur, a hunter, a trapper, and a coureur du bois, in our private dialogues had given me an insight into many an item of prairie-craft, thus enabling me to cut quite a respectable figure among my new comrades. Saint Vrain, too, whose frank, generous manner had already won my confidence, spared no pains to make the trip agreeable to me.
"Oh, to be sure," cried Peter. "I might have guessed that that was uppermost in your mind. Well, how much will you have?" Peter began to unwind the fragrant weed off a coil of most appalling size and thickness which looked like a snake of endless length. "Will that do?" and he flourished about four feet of the snake before the eyes of the voyageur.
This descent is effected not by a continuous decline, but by a series of terraces at various distances from each other; in other words, the river forms innumerable lakes and wide expanding reaches bound together by rapids and perpendicular falls of varying altitude, thus when the voyageur has lifted his canoe from the foot of the Silver Falls and launched it again above the head of that rapid, he will have surmounted two-and-twenty feet of the ascent; again, the dreaded Seven Portages will give him a total rise of sixty feet in a distance of three miles.
The sun marches over it distantly, and the man of the East the braggart calls it outcast; but animals love it; and the shades of the long-gone trapper and 'voyageur' saunter without mourning through its fastnesses. When you are in doubt, trust God's dumb creatures and the happy dead who whisper pleasant promptings to us, and whose knowledge is mighty.
The Metis laughed scornfully as he indicated the trampled brush, broken branches, greasy papers, and scraps of food. "Me, I think no! Railroad outfit. Voyageur not muss up camp lak' dat." Thirlwell agreed. A half-breed voyageur does not waste food, and with inherited caution seldom disturbs the bush.
In Wisconsin the age of the voyageur continued nearly through the first third of this century.
Bold would be the trader who would carry his goods to the far away Mackenzie River; intrepid would be the voyageur who sought a profit from the lonely shores of the great Bear Lake. Locked in their fastnesses of ice and distance, these remote and friendless solitudes of the North must long remain, as they are at present, the great fur preserve of the Hudson Bay Company.
There were old people and young folk; there were fat and lean, short and long. There were songs too ballads of England, pathetic songs of Scotland, alternating with the French ditties of Canada, and the sweet, inexpressibly plaintive canoe-songs of the voyageur.
Huge and innocent primitive man was Charle' Charette. He could sleep under snow-drifts like a baby, carry double packs of furs, pull oars all day without tiring, and dance all night after hardships which caused some men to desire to lie down and die. The summer before, at nineteen years of age, this light-haired, light-hearted voyageur had been married to 'Tite Laboise.
With the ebb-tide of French military power, however, the trader's hold on these western lands began to relax, and before the final overthrow of New France it had become greatly weakened. In establishing commercial relations with the Indians, the French voyageur on the St. Lawrence had several marked advantages over his English and Dutch neighbors.
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