Voyageurs and the Fur Trade

In the spring, you could hear them coming before you could see them. The voyageurs, French-Canadian paddlers who carried the fur trade across the North American interior, moved in brigades of eight to twelve canoes, each birchbark craft loaded with ninety-pound packs of beaver pelts or trade goods, each crew singing in coordinated rhythm to pace the paddle strokes across the open lake crossings. The songs were functional before they were beautiful: the tempo set the pace, and the pace kept the men from thinking too carefully about the cold water beneath them.

The trade that moved through what is now Minnesota was enormous by the standards of its era. Beaver fur was the currency of early modern Europe's hat industry. Felt hats made from processed beaver underfur were a mark of status, worn by merchants and politicians and military officers across England and France and the Netherlands. The demand was constant, and the supply lay in the waterways of the north.

The French built trading posts on the margins of this territory beginning in the late sixteen hundreds. The most strategically placed was Grand Portage, on the western shore of Lake Superior, which became the great annual meeting point of the trade. Every summer, Montreal-based canoe brigades carrying European trade goods arrived at Grand Portage from the east. Brigades of wintering voyageurs, who had spent the year in the interior lakes trapping and trading with Native communities, arrived from the west and north. The goods and furs were exchanged, accounts were settled, contracts were renewed, and the brigades departed again. The North West Company, a Montreal partnership that dominated the trade from the seventeen eighties until eighteen twenty-one, made Grand Portage its summer headquarters until the partners voted in eighteen oh two to move it north to Fort William, the center of a commercial empire that stretched from Lake Superior to the Pacific slope.

The portage itself was about eight and a half miles of trail climbing over the Sawtooth Ridge above the lake to the Pigeon River, bypassing a series of impassable falls. Voyageurs carried their full loads, two ninety-pound packs apiece was the standard, over that trail. The men were typically short and muscular, chosen in part because shorter men took up less room in the canoe. They sang, they competed with one another for endurance, and they died young from hernias and drowning and the accumulated damage of a life lived at the extremes of physical capacity.

The trade collapsed when beaver populations in the interior were exhausted and European fashion moved away from felt. By the eighteen thirties, the era was essentially over. Grand Portage is a national monument today.