Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade

Gratien Allaire is a professor of history at Laurentian University in
Sudbury, Ontario.

Canadian historians have long described voyageurs as libertine
adventurers attracted by nature and Aboriginal women. Carolyn Podruchny
draws a much more nuanced picture of the thousands of men—a minimum of
3,000 in peak years—who were involved with the Montreal fur trade
between 1763 and 1821.

There were three distinct groups of voyageurs. The pork eaters
travelled yearly to the Lake Superior rendezvous and were initiated
(“baptized”) where Deep River meets the Ottawa River. The north men
lived in the northwest for years and were “baptised” when crossing
the height of land west of Lake Superior. The Athabasca men went further
west, in the Mackenzie River basin, after their “baptism” at Portage
la Loche.

Since these illiterate men left almost no records, Podruchny draws on
the writings of companies bourgeois and clerks, and travelers dispersed
in many depositories, including the particularly rich Masson collection
divided between McGill University Libraries and Library and Archives
Canada. To overcome the biases of their authors, she uses the
sophisticated methods of reading beyond the words: taking into account
the varying contexts, discerning broad patterns, reading against the
grain, and unpacking the meaning of voyageur rituals.

Podruchny frames her analysis with the concepts of “liminality” and
masculinity. Thus, voyageurs “journeyed between cultures, on the
margins of French Canadian society, on the thresholds of Aboriginal
societies, and under the authority of their predominantly British
masters.” Theirs was “a space in which canoes, dogs, horses,
courage, risk, women, and freedom were central,” and the social order
they created was “neither static nor homogenous.”

Making the Voyageur World provides a well-documented and convincing
portrait of the “plebeians” who had “a significant impact on the
social and cultural landscape of early North America.”