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Updated: June 16, 2025
"An assassin, perhaps!" replied Mediana, turning his back to Fabian to show that he did not wish to reply to his question. During the dialogue which had taken place between these two men of the same blood, and of equally unconquerable nature, the wood-rangers had remained at some distance.
Naught but ancient tribal jealousies held the savages apart. With these tribesmen were many prisoners, captives taken in raids all along the thin and straggling frontier; farmers and artisans, peasants and soldiers, women raped from the farms of the Richelieu censitaires, and wood-rangers now grown savage as their captors and loth to leave the wild life into which they had so naturally grown.
But a more numerous class than these stationary traders were the so-called coureurs de bois, or wood-rangers. These were wild fellows whom the love of adventure lured into the wilderness not less strongly than the love of gain.
She had left the house where she was employed that morning, to transact some errand connected with her work in the town; she must have been followed, and dogged on her way back through solitary wood-paths, for some of the wood-rangers belonging to the great house had found her lying there, stabbed to death, but not dead; with the poniard again plunged through the fatal writing, once more; but this time with the word 'un' underlined, so as to show that the assassin was aware of his precious mistake.
But on the second day a party of wood-rangers attacked them with guns and captured them; and back they went, and were condemned to six years in irons. This, as it turned out, didn't amount to much; for, while they were waiting to be marched off to the galleys, their jailor came with news that a son was born to the Emperor, and they were pardoned in honour of it.
To the south-west and west of us the French have erected a considerable town, near Fort Thoulouse on the Moville river, and several other forts and garrisons, some not above three hundred miles distant from our settlements; and at New Orleans on the Mississippi river, since her late Majesty Queen Anne's war, they have exceedingly increased their strength and traffic, and have now many forts and garrisons on both sides of that great river for several hundred miles up the same; and since his most Christian Majesty has taken out of the Mississippi Company the government of that country into his own hands, the French natives in Canada come daily down in shoals to settle all along that river, where many regular forces have of late been sent over by the King to strengthen the garrisons in those places, and, according to our best and latest advices, they have five hundred men in pay, constantly employed as wood-rangers, to keep their neighbouring Indians in subjection, and to prevent the distant ones from disturbing the settlements; which management of the French has so well succeeded, that we are very well assured they have now wholly in their possession and under their influence, the several numerous nations of Indians that are situated near the Mississippi river, one of which, called the Choctaws, by estimation consists of about five thousand fighting men, and who were always deemed a very warlike nation, lies on this side the river, not above four hundred miles distant from our out-settlements, among whom, as well as several other nations of Indians, many French Europeans have been sent to settle, whom the priests and missionaries among them encourage to take Indian wives, and use divers other alluring methods to attach the Indians the better to the French alliance, by which means the French are become throughly acquainted with the Indian way, warring and living in the woods, and have now a great number of white men among them, able to perform a long march with an army of Indians upon any expedition.
Then came the Conquest, with the downfall of French trade in the north country. But there remained the coureurs-des-bois, or wood-rangers, the Metis, or French half-breeds, the Bois-Brulés, or plain runners so called, it is supposed, from the trapper's custom of blazing his path through the forest.
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