- Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade
Carolyn Podruchny takes on the fur trade’s familiar persona, the hardy voyageur, by looking past clichés to profile the experience of thousands of real men, the continental truckers of their day. She dates the stereotype from the mid-nineteenth century and cites the influence of Alexander Ross’s reminiscences published in 1855. Scholars have marginalized these men because ‘most major works focus on elites.’ Podruchny sets herself a double task: to focus on the voyageurs and to move beyond the stereotype.
Podruchny’s investigation begins with the only known voyageur document, a letter dating from 1830. After outlining the Montreal trade, she describes the voyageurs’ way of life – their work, their songs and rituals, their relationships with the bourgeois and with Native women. The shape of the book is a long tour of duty, from engagement at Montreal to years spent in the network of posts beyond Lake Superior. Podruchny assembles a great deal of information in her elegant presentation. In all of this material I noted only three questionable points. A canoe is not built by ‘stretch[ing bark] over a wooden frame’ but by fitting gunwales, splints, and ribs to the bark envelope. Une pose is not a pause but the nominative form of poser, ‘to set down’; it applies only to portages, not to paddling. And the statement ‘Hommes du nord were better than mangeurs de lard’ oversimplifies: canoeing the Ottawa River and Lake Superior was always dangerous, required great skill, and commanded respect; the northmen’s claim to superior status and more pay was their year-round service in the wilderness.
Since voyageurs were generally illiterate and ‘left few records’ other than X-marked contracts, Podruchny turns to the journals, letters, and memoirs of company partners and clerks, as well as to accounts by travellers (botanists, artists, naval explorers, and a duke) who followed the trade routes. However, she cautions, using this material ‘generates a host of methodological problems. These texts contain layers of multiple meanings and multiple perspectives. We must “read beyond the words” . . . and . . . see beyond their biases.’ Podruchny adopts what has [End Page 280] become a familiar ethnohistorical approach: selecting certain texts from a mass of documentation and deconstructing them in order ‘to discern broad patterns’ and to reinvest details with new values.
Podruchny’s clear exposition and meticulous notation make this a commendable scholarly book. At the same time her ethnohistorical approach generates its own ‘host of methodological problems,’ chief of which is a reluctance to ‘read . . . the words.’ History can be compared to cartography: the map is not the territory, but its design represents the territory; there must be some sort of analogy between the two. History must have a firm textual basis and reflect the range of evidence rather than work mainly by inference and a bias that excludes relevant documents. Podruchny’s study is filled with inferences, announced by locutions such as ‘no doubt,’ ‘may have been,’ ‘probably,’ and ‘perhaps’ – because, she maintains, ‘the documentary record is too thin.’ In fact, despite an impressive bibliography, Podruchny works closely with a fraction of the documents relevant to her subject. Half her references are to the texts of eight nineteenth-century traders. Of these, by far the most frequently consulted are the papers of George Nelson; also prominent are the retrospective Adventures of Cox and Ross (inventor of the voyageur stereotype). No reason is given for privileging Nelson. David Thompson’s daily record of fifteen years as a North West Company clerk and partner, a record filled with relevant information, rates just two references to a single journal. Comments on the North West Company workforce by rival Hudson’s Bay Company traders have not been traced in hbca documents.
Podruchny is strongly influenced by the ‘intellectual guides’ she names in her acknowledgements, all of whom are leading Canadian historians of the last thirty years. There is considerable variety of emphasis and accomplishment in such a widespread practice...