Fur Trade History Comes Alive at the Lester River Rendezvous! (Enter a Rafflecopter Giveaway!)

Rats! I missed the firing of the cannon. Three times! Every time the reenactors prepared to fire the cannon last weekend at the annual Lester River Rendezvous, I was engrossed in some other amazing learning experience and didn't get to watch. I sure heard it though! I had been anticipating the rendezvous most of the summer, not unlike the northerners of a bygone era.

For nearly a century, primarily in the 1700s and early 1800s, trappers, traders, Native Americans, Métis, Frenchmen and Scots, British and American -- among them the flamboyant voyageurs -- arrived from points scattered throughout the wilderness for the yearly festivities called the rendezvous. Rendezvous took place at important forts all throughout the Great Lakes region. At these locations, men who'd lived a rugged existence in the wilderness harvesting furs, company clerks, or bourgeois company men arriving from the east, came together to engage in the exchange of pelts for goods. In the process a fortune was made for the North West, XY, and Hudson's Bay companies. But the rendezvous was also a time when all these wilderness folk enjoyed revelry, feasting, gaming, and occasionally brawling. The event would last for several weeks in summer, then just as quickly when it ended, everyone would disperse. The hunters and trappers returned to the forest and native villages, the clerks to their posts, the voyageurs to winter in the Upper Country or back to Montreal with canoes mounded with bales of pelts, eager to satisfy the European hunger for fur.

This last week I attended a re-enactment of one of those events just north of Duluth, Minnesota on the Lester River where it twists and tumbles over rocks and down the hill. There it spills into magnificent Lake Superior. I couldn't absorb the experience any more eagerly! Here are some highlights.

This fellow went by the rendezvous name of Jacques LeChristian. I asked him right off if he was a bourgeois trader, and his eyes brightened. "Why, yes I am!" he said. Later in the day I purchased a CD of voyageur legends told by my new friend Monsieur LeChristian.

The  Lester River Rendezvous is set up mostly as an educational village open for two days to school groups, and then one day for the general public. Thousands of visitors enjoy free entrance onto the site where they can partake in food and music, and most excitingly, a visit to the Voyageurs' Village.

Here I am on the river, experiencing the excitement of the rendezvous which has so much to do with the time and setting my new novel Mist O'er the Voyageur coming out next Wednesday.                                                                                                         

             

I enjoyed a number of demonstrations of how people used to live during those times while I strolled through Voyageur Village at the rendezvous. In future posts, I'll give some of the "how to" details I learned for everything from rendering bear fat to starting a fire with char cloth and flint.

The lady above was of Métis heritage. I enjoyed hearing her talk about her ancestors and the vital role of the Métis in the fur trade and voyageur era. She also sewed all these beautiful costumes!

This lady was busy tanning hides. She described various processes to do it, depending on the type of finished product. Here, she is softening a rabbit hide. She also had a large number of other interesting items on display including this box of glass beads. Beads were a popular trade item during for many years.

 

The lady in the photograph above is making sour dough cinnamon rolls. Not so unusual in itself. However; she's also teaching about the process of making and keeping sour dough, and she's baking them over the fire in a "Dutch oven". More on that in a future post!

This red-hatted fellow was so engaging! He had the children and adults enraptured as he demonstrated the method used to build fires back in a time when matchsticks hadn't been invented. He had to take special precautions with that beard! 

Above we have the tinsmith selling his wares, and below is the blacksmith. I wish I could have invested in the beautiful ax or some of the gorgeous knives he created. I settled for a lovely little robe hook for $2. Now that's an affordable souvenir!

Talk about a pot of soup! This big kettle was called the chaudier by the French voyageurs. Brigitte Marchal, the heroine in my tale, becomes very familiar with that piece of equipment! (I could use one of these for family gatherings.)

Though this was not a real birch bark canoe (this one was "disguised" as a real canoe so that the kids could get inside and learn to paddle) I had to get a picture standing next to the North West Company emblem.

Have you attended any rendezvous re-enactments? Next on my schedule are the Forts Folle Avione Rendezvous on the Yellow River in Northwest Wisconsin, and the Great Grand Portage Rendezvous in Grand Portage, Northeastern Minnesota. Living History provides a learning environment of discovery and engagement in a way that reading a history book can't provide. Whatever part of history you're curious about, from the French and Indian wars, to the Civil War, to visiting an historical speakeasy -- it's a vivid way to dig deeper into history that you don't want to miss!

Now it's time for a drawing!

With my novel, Mist O'er the Voyageur coming out in less than a week, I'm celebrating with 3 chances to win an e-book and the opportunity to win the Grand Prize Drawing at month's end. Use the Rafflecopter below to enter. (The book is also available for pre-order until it releases.)

Catch you again in the pages of history~
Naomi Musch

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Meet the Métis

Hi there! I’m Naomi Musch, a new member of the Colonial Quills blog team. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to be here. I write in a variety of time periods, but the American colonial period is where my heart beats strongest, especially when that story is set on the frontier. In light of that, I have a new book coming out next month titled Mist O’er the Voyageur. In it, the heroine, Brigitte Marchal, is a Métis girl from Montreal who sets out traveling west by voyageurs brigade into the Lake Superior wilderness where dangers, mysteries, and romance await. With her in mind, I’d like to introduce you to the Métis.

WHO ARE THE MÉTIS?

The Métis are an aboriginal people group who emerged during the North American fur trade that took off in the 1700s when French and, sometimes, Scottish freemen (those without a company contract, also referred to as coureur des bois) began to travel into the unsettled interior of the continent via the Great Lakes waterways in search of better furs. Many of these men, who learned the practices and habits of the Native people, soon established families with First Nations tribes around the lakes. As they began to intermarry, they grew into a distinct people with their own established culture, history, territory, and language known as Michif.

Woodcut of a French Coureur des Bois
by Arthur Heming

From their beginnings, it wasn’t long until the Métis no longer saw themselves as extensions of either their maternal (First Nations) or paternal (French/Scottish) ancestry, but rather as a separate, distinguished nation. The Métis were some of the first settlers of Winnipeg, Canada, though they were eventually forced from their lands during the War of 1812 and for many years strove with Canada for their home lands and rights. The Métis have spread throughout the upper Midwest and Northwest since, making their settlements along the waterways around the Great Lakes, Ontario, and in other areas known as the historic Northwest including parts of the northern United States. Historically, many of the Métis remained involved in the fur trade as trappers, traders, and were often employed as voyageurs on the Great Lakes.

There have been many notable people among the Métis, from activists and politicians, to frontiersmen, authors, film-makers, and poets -- even body-builders and hockey players! The Métis were responsible for breaking the fur trade monopoly held by the Hudson’s Bay Company, who had been behind a lot of their early troubles. One Métis man, Louis Riel, became known as the father of Manitoba.

Louis Riel

In Mist O’er the Voyageur, my heroine Brigitte Marchal is born of this unique Métis heritage. She was born to an Ojibwe mother and a French fur-trader father. After the age of six, when her mother passed away, she was taken to Montreal to be raised by her French aunt and uncle and educated by the Sisters of Notre Dame. During her adventure paddling with the voyageurs into the western regions of Lake Superior to find her father, Brigitte has ample opportunity to meet other Métis people and learn more about her heritage and traditions along the way – as well as discovering some long-kept secrets.

Join me again next month, when I share some interesting bits about the Great Lakes Voyageurs and what it was like when they all gathered for the annual fur trade Rendezous.

NaomiMusch.com