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The Persistence of Travel and Trade: St. Lawrence River Valley French Engagés and the American Fur Company, 1818–1840
by
Nicole St-Onge
L'homme québécois has little more parish consciousness than frontier consciousness. The true locus of his continuity is more temporal than spatial: it is the family. Relatives—the extended family—who are scattered over the continent and not confined to the Laurentian Valley will welcome the family nomad.... The extended family is what creates the true network of migration, integrating the individual wherever he goes: it is in effect an invitation to go off without calamitous disruption. It is a homeland writ small, a movable homeland, and it provides a basis for solidarity ... and negates geography. Thus the people preserve their identity through their very instability.
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| —Christian Morissonneau1 |
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Up to this point, many studies have carved the North American fur trade into regional slices: the American Southwest trade, the trans-Mississippi trade, the upper Midwest trade, and the far North trade. Thus readers and perhaps even researchers have come to perceive the fur trade as a localized phenomenon rather than as an extensive and interlocking continentwide enterprise that engaged the attention of both European immigrants and Native populations for generations. Indeed, this problem is in part the understandable result of the sheer immensity of the logistical task involved in examining the fur trade on any scale exceeding the local or the regional. |
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This article and the larger research project from which it is drawn have one main objective. They seek to examine the fur trade on a continentwide, transnational scale by employing a clearly delineated chronology and focusing on a well-defined collection of historical actors, a restricted group of Canadian-born American Fur Company (AFC) employees. The AFC hired approximately eleven hundred Canadien men out of Lower Canada between 1817 and 1837.2 The research project follows employees from their birthplaces to the end of their working careers and beyond, thus transcending the traditional individual, regional, or even national boundaries limiting previous fur-trade studies. It will help to elucidate the workings and social influence of a company—and its French Canadian, Creole, and Métis personnel—that was based in New York, hired out of Montréal, and had centers of operation in the Great Lakes region, the valleys of the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and the cities of St. Louis and New Orleans. |
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The impetus for this project focused on American Fur Company voyageurs is a decade-long initiative examining people—the voyageurs—and process—the emergence of a clearly distinguishable Métis population in the Canadian Northwest having fur-trade-employee forefathers.3 One of the initiative's core components is the Voyageur Contracts Database, which contains more than thirty-two thousand notarized voyageur contracts signed in the Montréal-Trois-Rivières corridor between 1700 and 1822. These contracts are standard repetitive documents containing information that can be easily adapted to spreadsheet and database formats. The searchable database, which is scheduled to go online in late autumn 2008, will be accessible to all researchers. |
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