Adventurers in the New World: The Saga of the Coureurs des Bois (review)

This excellent book covers four hundred years of the history of the French in North America, from the time of Champlain to the end of the nineteenth century. Both the settled colony in the St Lawrence Valley and the survival and growth of French culture and people after the takeover of the colony by the English are bit players in the story related here. Rather, this book focuses on the French in the rest of North America, outside the agricultural settlements of the St Lawrence. Here, in the pays d'en haut, the French encountered the unfamiliar civilizations of North America's Aboriginal peoples. The French, and more particularly the coureurs de bois, co-operated and lived with the Indians. These coureurs de bois were the first Europeans to explore most of the interior of North America. The book argues that these adventurers, appropriately termed indiens blancs in the French version of the title, achieved a unique, close, and mutually beneficial accommodation with Aboriginal peoples they encountered.

This argument is not new. Michelet went so far as to claim that the French flag had defended an admirable and true America, the America of the mixture of European and Indian created in the pays d'en haut by the mélange of coureurs de bois and Indian, against the Iroquois, the Spanish, and above all against the destructive exclusivity of the American colonies. But it is a relatively new argument in the historiography of French Canada, which has been dominated by authors such as Lionel Groulx who regarded the coureurs de bois as pernicious and dangerous libertines who, having imbibed the 'philtres of sauvagerie,' defied authority, even indulging in banditry, to the point that they became 'a poison for the race in formation.'

The period of the coureurs de bois, and this book, begins in 1609 with Champlain sending Étienne Brulé, a nineteen-year-old Frenchman, into the North American wilderness with a band of Huron. The book ends in the late nineteenth century with the Métis of the Canadian West taking up arms to defend their freedom: 'In the long history of humanity, it was the Métis who gave us the model of an egalitarian and tolerant society founded on respect for both individual and collective values. Their life was a creative act. The social model they developed is still alive - and still eminently worthy of emulation' (159). In between it provides many brief essays on diverse topics related to the encounter of French and Indian in the pays d'en haut, including Indian culture, the natural history of North America and particularly the beaver, the economics of the fur trade, and many other related topics. The book does not go into Michelet's further argument, later expanded by Chinard, that this egalitarian and tolerant spirit derived from Indian cultures in the pays d'en haut had a formative influence on European thinking about freedom and equality.

Many historians, like Grace Lee Nute, have followed the same path as Groulx and made a strict distinction between voyageurs as authorized travellers in the pays d'en haut and the coureurs de bois as illicit traders who ventured into the wilderness without licences. This book makes much less of this distinction. It identifies many categories of French in the wilderness, including interpreters, donnés (indentured servants of the Jesuits), voyageurs, engagés, trappers, petty traders, other Frenchmen living with the Indians, and Metis. It makes it clear that one person could belong to several of these categories during his life, moving from licensed to unlicensed trader or from hired man to independent trader, and back again. Persons filling any of these roles could be, and at the time were, termed coureurs de bois...