Canadian Transport Sourcebook

2

FRENCH FUR TRADERS

SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN who advanced the French exploration of the St. Lawrence Basin as far into the interior as Lake Huron, was aware of the exploits of Frobisher and Davis, and had visited the Isthmus of Panama, which he recommended should be cut through by a canal so as to facilitate communication with the South Sea. He was not tempted to undertake any northern passage by sea, and reported to Henry IV, his King, in favour of a route to China free from the disadvantage of northern ice or the heat of the torrid zone. This resulted in the commission of 1612, appointing him governor of Canada and enjoining him to prosecute the discovery of an easy route to China and the East Indies by way of the St. Lawrence River.

From the information of natives, Champlain surmised that the source of the Saguenay River was near a salt sea, clearly the southern indentation of Hudson Bay. This had been suggested seventy years before by Roberval's pilot, Alphonse, as reported in Jacques Cartier's third voyage. Champlain's hope, however, was to find an overland or river-and-lake passage westward to the salt South Sea, the coast of which was already Spanish territory and the commerce of which was the world's desire. The route which he developed diverged from the north bank of the St. Lawrence River to ascend the Ottawa River, from which it turned westward up the Mattawa River to Lake Nipissing, a large body of water with outlet into Lake Huron through the French River. This became the established route of the succeeding missionaries and fur traders into the interior. The French River, now a popular resort for anglers, won its name through association with the route of the early French explorers and voyageurs. An astrolabe identified with Champlain's first trip was discovered on its banks in 1867. He was in favour of intermarriage of French youths with Indian girls, and his sympathetic treatment of the Indians contributed to the support given by Hurons and Algonquins to French exploration and expansion in their hunting grounds. In r63q Champlain sent Jean Nicolet on an embassy to Winnebagoes, a tribe of Indians on Lake Michigan. The word Winnebago means "stinking water," and Champlain apparently deduced from this that these people lived on a sea that was salt. Nicolet was an interpreter from Three Rivers who had lived for a number of years among the Indians of Lake Nipissing. In the hope that these might be the subjects of the Grand Khan, he went on his mission equipped with "a robe of Chinese damask, decorated with flowers and birds of many colours," and was greeted by the Winnebagoes as a new type of medicine man.

Colonisation and the fur trade now occupied most of the attention of the French in Canada, but the Jesuit missionaries were ardent in the pursuit of scientific knowledge, which included geography, and in the course of their activities they mapped Lake Superior. Colbert wrote from France to the Intendant Talon suggesting that a reward might well be offered for the discovery of a passage to the South Sea through New France, with the result that in 1673 Joliet and Marquette were sent by Governor Frontenac to investigate the story of a river greater than the St. Lawrence flowing westward into the sea. If this should prove to be a river flowing into the Gulf of California or Vermilion Sea, a passage to China would have been found. Louis Joliet was Canadian born and played the organ in church at Quebec when he was not fur trading or exploring. Pere Marquette, a Jesuit who could speak six Indian languages, had founded a Mission at Sault Ste. Marie, on the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Superior. Joliet and Marquette reached the Mississippi, but discovered that its outlet was in the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and not the Gulf of California.

Henri IV

From a painting in the Uffizi Gallery.

Hitherto, the French route to the west had followed the Ottawa-Mattawa-Lake Nipis sing waterway to Lake Huron, through Huron and the Algonquin Indian territory, as the route through Lake Ontario and Lake Erie was barred by hostile Iroquois. Count Frontenac, aided by La Salle, conceived the plan of continuing up the St. Lawrence past the mouth of the Ottawa River, and in July, z673, erected Fort Cataraqui (the present Kingston) in the presence of astonished delegates from the five Iroquois nations, shortly afterwards placing La Salle in charge. From Cataraqui, La Salle sent La Mothe de Lussiere, in 1678, with the Recollect Father Hennepin, who built Fort Niagara as advance guard of La Salle's own expedition to the Mississippi. This expedition La Salle had undertaken under a patent from the French King, who wrote

"We have nothing more at heart than the exploration of this country, through which, to all appearance, a way may be found to Mexico."

In 1702, the fort of Detroit, commanding the straits between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, a strategic point for control of the fur trade by this route, was founded by de la Mothe Cadillac.

La Salle had dreamed of a route through Canada to China by way of the Vermilion Sea, and in ridicule of his fancy the French Canadians nicknamed his seigneury near Montreal "La Chine." By this time they were much more interested in the profitable fur trade or possible share in the gold of Mexico than in the rumoured wealth of any far distant Cathay. The seigneury was accompanied by a patent which La Salle hoped to use to further the discovery of some river running into the Vermilion Sea. He reached the Gulf of Mexico on April 6, t682, and took possession of the basin of the Mississippi in the name of King Louis, but his hope of further discovery was never fulfilled.

The rich territory added to the French Crown by La Salle was not appreciated by King Louis, who wrote to Governor La Barre that

"the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless, and such enterprises ought to be prevented in future, as they tend—only to diminish the revenue from beaverskins."

Thirty years later, however, La Salle's Louisiana became curiously connected with the orgies of speculation known as the South sea Bubble. The South Sea Company was founded in zprz, pos;ibly at the suggestion of the imaginative fiction-writer, Daniel Defoe, in the hope of reducing the English national debt through-he profits of trading monopolies with South America and the islands of the Pacific. There was, too, a French imitation in he Compagnie de la Louisiana ou de 1'Occident, later known as ihe Compagnie des Indes, and in England as the Mississippi Company, organised by John Law, which in r7z5 was granted a monopoly of the fur trade of Louisiana, and the right to buy Canadian beaver at a fixed price for twenty-five years. The gait held out to the gulls in Paris was that Louisiana was just as rich in gold and silver as Mexico and Peru. The fortunes made in speculation helped the market in furs, still the outward insignia of success and good breeding. Montreal came into the octopus grasp of the Mississippi Company, for after the death of Claude de Ramesay, Governor of Montreal, the Compagnie des Indes used the Château de Ramesay for its fur trading. This short route to the wealth of Cathay by way of the Stock Exchange, however, could only lead to disaster.

Samuel de Champlain

From the Statue by Paul Chevré on Dufferin Terrace, Quebec

For the next two hundred years, exploration in these northern areas was more or less incidental to the fur trade, which was as good as gold to the European merchant. Beaver skin was the foundation of that trade, both Cavalier and Puritan in England requiring it for headgear. Even the common sailor wore a high fur hat in Queen Elizabeth's day. In Pepys' time high-crowned beaver hats were worn both indoors and out. Pepys' references to beaver hats indicate their importance in the costume of his time. For an ordinary hat he paid thirty-five shillings, but for a beaver eighty-five. On April 19, 1662, he notes in his diary:

"In the evening did get a beaver, an old one, but a very good one, of Sir W. Batten, for which I must give him something; but I am very well pleased with it."

"After dinner, to horse again, being in nothing troubled but the badness of my hat, which I borrowed to save my beaver."

Garraway's coffee house was an auction house for furs in London, and the link with Cathay was unconsciously indicated by the serving of the new beverage of China tea. Garraway's in its time was a centre of South Sea Bubble speculation, as one can gather from Dean Swift's satirical ballad

"Meantime secure on Garway cliffs,
A savage race, by shipwrecks fed,
Lie waiting for the founder'd skiffs,
And strip the bodies of the dead."

Robert Cavelier de la Salle

From an engraving by Waltner.

One coffee house auctioneer added a novelty to the sport by setting up thin candles with pins stuck in them at intervals. When these were lighted, bids were taken at each pin as the candle burned down, the furs going to the one who made the last bid before the candle went out.

As the variety of wild life of the northern forests became better known, and the trapping of other animals was developed, beaver was supplemented by martin, otter, fisher, fox, muskrat, mink, wolverine, lynx, black, red and silver wolf, and bear to the particular enrichment of women's costume.

Thomas Middleton, in the year 1619, wrote of the expectant market:

Charles II in beaver hat

From a contemporary sketch.

"Ermine, fine, sables, martin, badger, bearre,
Luzernne, budge, otter, hipponesse, and hare,
Lamb, wolf, fox, leopard, mink, stot, miniver,
Racoon, moashy, wolverine, caliber,
Squirrel, mole, cat, rriusk, civet, wild and tame,
Cony, white, yellow and black, must have a name,
The ounce, rows gray, ginnelt, pampilion,
Of birds the vulture, bitter, estridge, swan;
Some worn for ornament, and some for health,
All to the Skinners' art bring fame and wealth."

The routes of rival French and English fur traders ran crisscross from the St. Lawrence Basin and Hudson Bay to the foothills of the Rockies and up to the seal-hunting Eskimos of northern Arctic shores, and then broke through the passes of the Rockies to meet the sea-otter hunters and traders of the Pacific coast.

Two Breton fur traders, Radisson and Groseilliers, play a romantic part in the early stages of this map making. They had ranged without license out of Three Rivers from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay, but returned only to have their canoe-loads of pelts confiscated. Sailing to France for redress, they were cold-shouldered into England, where they entertained King Charles II at Oxford with travellers tales so intriguing that Prince Rupert, the King's "dear and entirely beloved cousin," was given the charter of the "Governor and Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay" and dominion over the unmapped continent of Rupert's Land with "the sole Trade and Commerce" of the seas with Hudson's Strait and the territories covered by the adjacent coasts and tributaries. The company had the English Court behind it the first (1670–1682) governor being Prince Rupert, the second (1683–1689) James, Duke of York, afterwards King James II, and the third (1689–1691) John, Lord Churchill, afterwards Duke of Marlborough.

Dryden, the poet laureate, wrote

"Late it was Gold, then Beauty was the Spur; But now our Gallants venture but for Fur."

Pierre de la Vérendrye

From the statue by Bailleul at the Parliament Buildings, Quebec.

Then it was in and out for French and English till the Treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, when France gave up her claims and the Hudson's Bay Company was left in undisturbed possession of that avenue to the northern fur country.

The demand for fur in France creased with the vagaries of fashion. In the reign of Louis XIV, Princess Palatine, Charlotte Elizabeth, who was the Grand Monarch's sister-in-law, introduced the so-called "Palatine" or fur cape. Muffs became the mode for men as well as women, the latter adopting the fashion of wearing muffs large enough to carry lap dogs. When Louis XV, in 1725, married Marie Leczinska, the Polish hongreline, or frogged fur bodice, captured the fancy of ladies of fashion, and fortunes were spent on fur cloaks. Jean Antoine Watteau, one of the Court painters of the

time, painted a portrait of himself in costly fur-trimmed coat. In the year 1755 the records show that the annual value of furs shipped into France was one hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds, or six hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, as compared to ninety thousand pounds imported into England.

In the meanwhile, the French coureurs de bois were pushing

west by way of the Great Lakes and the inland island-dotted water-ways of Rainy River and the Lake of the built himself a trading post for the winter of 1688 on the Rainy River. Du Luth was sent by Count Frontenac, Governor of New France, in 1678, to secure for the French, at Montreal, the fur trade of the Sioux at Fond du Lac, the head of Lake Superior, and succeeded in diverting this source of revenue from the Hudson's Bay Company. One of the forts he built was at Lake Nipigon, erected in 1684. At Fond du Lac the Indians told him of a great water twenty days journey distant, giving him salt from this water which he believed must come from the Vermilion Sea or Gulf of California. The city of Duluth owes its name to this early pioneer. There he met Assiniboines from the prairies, who spoke of men who were white and bearded and rode on horseback. Stirred by De Noyon's reports, Governor Vaudreuil and Intendant Talon recommended the Duke of Orleans to grant fifty thousand livres for the building of three posts in le pays d'En Haut (the Upper Country) as a basis for an expedition to the Western Sea. They said that some savages had brought to Count Frontenac pieces of silver which appeared to have Chinese characters on them. They said they obtained them from a ship with which they had traded at the seashore. The Duke was in a genial mood in these days, for he was coining money in the Mississippi Company. One trading fort was built in Roxy, at Kaministiquia (now Fort William), on the site of an old post established by Du Luth in 1678. The second was erected on Rainy Lake, but lack of funds delayed further progress.

Pierre Gaultier de la Verendrye, a Canadian by birth who had crossed to France to fight against Marlborough at Malplaquet, returned to seek fortune as a fur trader in the West. He brought back with him and handed on to his voyageurs the chanson sung in the French Army

"Malbrouck s'en t va-t-en guerre
Miraton, miraton, mirataine,"
etc., etc.

This overland expansion of French interests in the West naturally cut into the fur-trading preserves of the English, to whose forts on son Bay the Indians east of the Rockies had hitherto brought their annual harvest of pelts. When Anthony Hendry, with a flotilla of canoes, left York Factory in 1754, on an exploring expedition to winter on the Red Deer River, half-way between the present Calgary and Edmonton, he came across the French post of Fort a la Come, on the Saskatchewan, and lost valuable furs which his Indians appear to have traded for liquor.

Goldsmith's Chinese traveller found the reason for the war of 1759 between France and England as

"all upon account of one side's desiring to wear greater quantities of furs than the other. The pretext of the war is about some lands a thousand leagues off a country cold, desolate and hideous... the savages of Canada claim a property in the country in dispute... their native forests produced all the necessaries of life, and they found ample luxury in the enjoyment. In this manner they might have continued to live to eternity had not the English been informed that those countries produced furs in great abundance. From that moment the country became an object of desire; it was found that furs were things very much wanted in England; the ladies edged some of their clothes with furs, and muffs were worn both by gentlemen and ladies. In short, furs were found indispensably necessary for the happiness of the state; and the King was consequently petitioned to grant... the country of Canada to the subjects of England in order to have the people supplied with the proper quantities of this very necessary commodity.... The French, who were equally in want of furs (for they were as fond of muffs and tippets as the English) made the very same request to their Monarch... who generously granted what was not his to give."

This seven years' war waged for dominion over the country of furs ended in the capture of Quebec and Montreal, the occupation of Detroit, and finally the Treaty of Paris, which gave to Great Britain domain over the territory formerly owned by France.

With that cession the old voyageur chanson A la claire fontaine took on a new meaning. Hitherto it had been merely the ballad of a lover separated from his mistress because he had been careless of a bouquet of roses. Now the song came to have the symbolical meaning of the people of New France separated from their old land and as such it was sung with a new intensity from the shores of the Atlantic along the waterways that carried the voyageur's canoe into the far northwestern interior.