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Updated: July 11, 2025
When one of these wood-runners had obtained a quantity of furs, he made them up into packs, loaded them carefully in his canoe, and set out for the distant settlements, Montreal, Three Rivers, or Quebec.
France and England were at peace; but the Chevalier de Troyes, a French army officer, and the brothers Le Moyne, dare-devil young adventurers of New France, asked permission of the governor of Quebec to lead a band of wood-runners overland to rescue Péré on the Bay, fire the English forts, and massacre the English.
The second class of traders, known as coureurs de bois, or wood-runners, were very different from the first. Speaking generally, they were young men, sometimes of good family, who found life in the older towns and settlements prosaic and uninteresting, and when they went to the interior did not care to be tied down to the humdrum existence of the trading forts.
At that I was both startled and disgusted; but it was well-nigh impossible to prevent certain of our riflemen who had once been wood-runners from treating the Iroquois as the Iroquois treated them. And they continued to scalp them as naturally as they once had clipped pads and ears from panther and wolf.
But, while all this preparation was in course at home, sixty-six swarthy Indians and thirty-three French wood-runners, led by the Chevalier de Troyes, the Le Moyne brothers, and La Chesnaye, the fur trader, were threading the deeply-forested, wild hinterland between Quebec and Hudson Bay.
French fur-traders, wood-runners, voyageurs had drifted North and West, men of infinite resources, as much at home with a frying-pan over a camp-fire as over a domestic hearth, who could wrest a living from life anywhere. English adventurers of similar caliber had drifted in from Hudson Bay.
Ice must have obstructed him, for he did not anchor before Nelson till September 3. The place was held by the English and he could find no sign of his other ships. He waited two days, loading cannon, furbishing muskets, drilling his men, of whom a great many were French wood-runners sick with scurvy.
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