American Society for Ethnohistory
Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 2006.
French Canadian workers who paddled canoes, transported goods, and staffed the interior posts of the northern North American fur trade became popularly known as voyageurs. Scholars and public historians alike have cast them in romantic roles of rugged and merry heroes who paved the way for European civilization in the wild northwest. This book looks past the stereotypes and reveals the contours of voyageurs' lives, world views, and values. Making the Voyageurs' World argues that voyageurs created distinct identities shaped by their French-Canadian peasant roots, the Aboriginal peoples they met in the northwest, and the nature of their workplace as indentured servants in diverse environments. Voyageurs' identities were also shaped by the liminality inherent in their constant travels and by their own masculine ideals that emphasized strength, endurance and daring. Although voyageurs left few conventional traces of their own voices in the documentary record, an astonishing amount of information can be found in descriptions of them by their masters, explorers and other travelers.
My interest in voyageurs began with a desire to contribute to the history of plebeian peoples who did not leave a documentary record, yet who had a significant impact on the social and cultural landscape of early North America. French Canadian voyageurs traveled vast distances over the continent and left a significant legacy. French was one of the main languages among Europeans and Euro-Americans in the Montreal fur trade until the mid-nineteenth century, and its presence today is reflected in place names across the continent. Many voyageurs formed kinship ties with Aboriginal people and settled in the northwest to raise their families. A large portion of métis people had French ancestry. Dozens of francophone communities exist in northwestern North America today and a large part of these descended from fur trade families. Today, voyageurs are highly visible as colorful caricatures in popular culture and history, but they have rarely been the subject of serious study. The fragmented nature of sources on voyageurs, and their subjugation in commercial and political arenas has confined them to the peripheries of most historical narratives. This book places French Canadian voyageurs squarely in the center of historical narrative as serious people with compelling stories and lasting consequences. The book devotes considerable attention to Aboriginal and mixed-blood or métis peoples, but only in the context of their relationship to French Canadian voyageurs.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction: Sons of the Farm, the Trade, and the Wilderness
2. Leaving Home: Family and Livelihood in French Canada and Beyond
3. Rites of Passage: Voyageur Cosmology
4. It is the Paddle That Brings Us: Voyageurs Working in Canoes
5. The Theater of Hegemony: Masters, Clerks, and Servants
6. Rendezvous: Parties, Tricks, and Friendships
7. En Dérouine: Life at Interior Fur Trade Posts
8. Tender Ties, Fluid Monogamy, and Trading Sex: Voyageurs and Aboriginal Women
9. Disengagement: Going Home and Going Free
10. Conclusion: Carrying the World
