Voyageurs and the archaeology of the fur trade at Voyageurs National Park

The old Voyageur's Highway was a 3,000-mile canoe route linking the Great Lakes with the northwest interior of Canada, with some 120 portages, 200 rapids and 50 lakes along it. Voyageurs National Park straddles a key segment of it. The men who paddled it proudly carried the title of voyageurs.

Illustration from the National Park Service's page.

Life on the move

Lower- and middle-class French-Canadian men took the route to meet European demand for beaver pelts, and also for the promise of adventure. In the northern wilderness they worked through obstacle after obstacle, made up lively songs to entertain themselves, and exchanged goods, languages and practices with Native American peoples. Some songs and anecdotes survive in firsthand sources, and the voyageurs' movements and exchanges also show in the archaeological record.

Fur trade in the area is reported to have begun in 1688, when an independent French trader wintered at Rainy Lake. French maps show knowledge of the major routes around the Rainy Lake hub before 1700, so exchanges through middlemen probably came several decades before direct French contact. Records are thick and detailed from 1713 through the 1750s. By 1717 France had started expeditions from Montreal to set up formal trading posts, and activity peaked between 1731 and 1736 under strong leadership at Fort St. Pierre, on Rainy Lake less than 10 miles from the park's western edge.

Crews set out when the lakes thawed. Their canoes, designed and often built by Ojibwe from birch bark, cedar, spruce resin or spruce roots, weighed about 300 pounds and measured about 25 feet long and 4 feet wide. They needed constant upkeep, so delays were frequent, and bad weather, mosquitoes and fatigue were common. Even so, most voyageurs enjoyed the work.

It was never a solo job. Crews of four to six handled each canoe, and canoes traveled in groups called brigades. Each man had a role: the avant guided the canoe from the front, and the commis was a clerk, usually from a higher social background.

Along the way, voyageurs traded with Cree, Assiniboine, Ojibwe and Sioux peoples, mainly European goods for furs and skins, and second for food and supplies in what was called the provisioning trade. The trader Jonathan Carver credited a group of Ojibwe with saving his party from starvation in 1767, and every post relied to some extent on Native American peoples for dried fish, animal fat, berries and other essentials. Historian accounts describe voyageurs wearing French striped cotton shirts with moccasins, French-Canadian men adopting the Ojibwe diet and semi-nomadic way of life, and Native American people celebrating New Year's alongside traders.

What archaeology has found

Archaeologists looked for temporary camps at river mouths, where these encounters may have happened. At least 23 archaeological sites in the park have fur trade elements. An underwater investigation where Crane Lake meets King Williams Narrows turned up ceramics and French, British and American trade goods, including a French clasp knife and two marked trade axes, dating to the mid-1700s.

A Micmac pipe found at the park (NPS photo).

Many artifacts sit in private collections, because locals and tourists removed them from exposed beaches around the reservoir lakes, before and after that became illegal. One analyzed collection holds parts of inexpensive Northwest guns made for the trade, small lead brooches and inset finger rings known from other major fur trade sites. A Thunderbird-shaped ornament cut from kettle metal shows European goods and Native American culture blending. The Robert Bolstad Collection at the Koochiching Museums includes Jesuit rings, brass rings that became popular for non-religious use in the fur trade after the 1700s. Another private collection has cobalt-blue and white man-in-the-moon beads, linked with French colonial presence between 1700 and 1750.

Why the picture is incomplete

• Many trade goods were organic or consumed, while the survivors are mostly metal, glass and stone.
• Collectors miss or fail to recognize some artifacts and favor metal and bright beads, underrepresenting glassware, nails and building hardware.
• It is already too late to document many private collections systematically. The original collectors have often died, collections are scattered, and records of where and when items were found are lost.
• Dams built in the early 1900s reshaped shorelines and islands and moved artifacts out of their contexts.

The recovered artifacts appear to tie short-term camps of the fur trade era in the park to Native American peoples rather than French Canadians or other European traders. Most, if not all, of the studied sites suggest Ojibwe occupation. But most fur traders were laborers with few possessions who did not settle, so they may simply have left little. Because campsites were used by people from many backgrounds, the same objects could be read as French, English or Ojibwe.

The park's rocky lakeshores, forested uplands and winding waterways still look much as the voyageurs knew them.

Sources

• National Park Service, Voyageurs National Park, "An Economy of Adventure: The Life of a Voyageur", https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/economy-adventure-life-of-a-voyageur.htm; images credited to the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.