Voyageur

IX. THE VOYAGEUR AS EXPLORER

IX THE VOYAGEUR AS EXPLORER 225 226 IX PROBABLY the greatest contribution of the voyageur to the development of the continent was the knowledge of the wilderness and its ways that he put freely and with no hope of recognition at the disposal of the great explorers of the West and North. It may be said without fear of gainsay that practically every exploring trip in western Canada after the British conquest made use of voyageurs. The exact proportion of the success of those ventures that was due to them cannot be gauged, but it was great. Voyageurs were useful in exploration even during the French period. Mention has been made of Radisson's recognition of them. La Verendrye, Lahontan, Le Sueur, Du Lhut, St. Pierre, Perrot, La Salle, Nicolet, and others must have found them indispensable, since they are mentioned so freely in contemporary documents. The first explorer of note after the conquest was Alexander Henry. His narrow escape from the general massacre at Mackinac during Pontiac's uprising, his captivity and trading adventures during the next years on Lake Superior, and finally his advance into western Canada by the well-marked route via Grand Portage are all described in his book of travels. Now and then he mentions his voyageurs, who must have been his guides, since this was terra incognita to him; but his remarks are 227 THE VOYAGEUR not sufficient to enable us to gain any real knowledge of their services to him. In one brief passage he pauses in his narrative long enough to pay tribute to his subordinates: "And often, notwithstanding every exertion, the men went supperless to bed. In a situation like this the Canadians are the best men in the world; they rarely murmur at their lot, and their obedience is yielded cheerfully." 1 Another early explorer was the Massachusetts Yankee, Jonathan Carver. Long maligned, because his plagiarisms ended in casting doubts on the authenticity of any part of his N arratz·ve, he has come into his own since the discovery of his diary and the narrative based on it. These are now in the British Museum. We know from them and other documents that he was advance agent and draftsman of a party attempting to :find the "Ouragan" River and a waterway to the Pacific in 1766 and 1767. Though his writings mention voyageurs, especially one who accompanied him from Prairie du Chien to the St. Peter's River, again the evidence is too slight to form any estimate of the servant's contribution to the success of his master's journey. More unique and of more significance because of his explorations was another Yankee, Peter Pond. His description of voyageurs' customs has been given in part in an earlier chapter. His map of the Athabasca region and its environs, prepared, it is said, for the Empress of Russia, was admittedly drawn in part from the accounts of voyageurs. Since this map and Pond's accounts influenced Alexander Mackenzie to his two great exploring trips in the Northwest, the region especially mapped from the voyageurs' accounts, and because of the reputed use 228 THE VOYAGEUR AS EXPLORER of this map by Benjamin Franklin and others in making the treaty of 1783, it is obvious that North America owes much to a number of unknown voyageurs. Sir Alexander Mackenzie devotes a good deal of space to his voyageurs in the narrative of his explorations of 1789 and 1793. The naming of a mighty stream for him and a baronetcy were his rewards for these arduous adventures , but probably not one reader in a hundred remembers even the names of his voyageurs. His first trip, down the Mackenzie River, did not require so much of his voyageurs as the second. The perils and the labor of that voyage of exploration are almost unbelievable. Mackenzie himself refers in one of his journal entries to the "inexpressible toil these people had endured, as well as the dangers they had encountered." 2 It must be added that on several occasions only the leader's grim determination to go on held his people to their tasks. After a winter spent in the mountains on Peace River, Mackenzie with his six voyageurs, Alexander Mackay, and two Indians started on May 9, 1793, in a small birch canoe, twenty-five feet long and so light that "two men could carry her on a good road three...