| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2006)

MOST SOCIETIES HAVE created a series of convenient stereotypes that represent in shorthand form crucial aspects of their shared history and sense of identity: John Bull and Jolly Jack Tar do the job for England, while Uncle Sam and possibly G.I. Joe or Huck Finn serve similar functions for Americans. In Canada, we seemingly rely on Mounties most in this regard, but voyageurs too are regularly invoked as symbols of a larger Canadianness.

Carolyn Podruchny begins this book by exploring the voyageur's "highly visible profile in popular culture and history." Since at least the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a succession of artists, including fiction and non-fiction writers, have portrayed the voyageur in a number of enduring archetypes. Podruchny notes a few, such as the voyageur as a willing workhorse, as a merry, reckless wastrel, and as a living embodiment of frontier freedom and lack of constraint. In fact, many voyageurs chose to portray themselves in similar ways when given the chance. For example, in the 1850s Alexander Ross quotes an old voyageur as claiming, "There is no life so happy as a voyageur's life; none so independent; no place where a man enjoys so much variety as in Indian country." This voyageur also boasted that he had spent everything he had earned on "the enjoyment of pleasure," that he had had 12 wives, 50 horses and six running dogs over his career, and given the chance he would "glory" in doing it all over again. (10)

Despite this attention in popular culture and history, voyageurs have actually received very little serious scholarly attention. In 1931, Grace Lee Nute published a study of voyageurs and their role in the fur trade, but since then academic historians have really limited their attention to a few very specific issues such as voyageur recruitment, the logistics of fur trade transportation, and more recently fur trade labour relations and marriage and family patterns. In the latter cases, voyageurs occasionally enter the story but they are rarely central to it. This book then represents a long overdue reappraisal of the lives of a very significant group of working men who collectively made the Montreal-based fur trade possible during the period from the early 18th to the early 19th centuries and especially between 1763 and 1821.

Podruchny's goal is not simply to provide a scholarly assessment of the relationship between voyageur myth and reality, but to try to squeeze the meaning out of the various bits and pieces of historical evidence that have survived about voyageurs and their world. The central problem is that there is precious little direct evidence from voyageurs themselves about their lives. There are almost no letters, diaries, memoirs, or other forms of direct voyageur archival records and few archaeological or other material culture objects with which to recreate the voyageur world. Instead voyageurs are largely seen through the eyes of other observers such as their employers.

As a result, Podruchny suggests that entry into their world can really only be undertaken through a process of "reading beyond the words," "reading against the grain" of existing archival materials, and "unpacking the meaning" of voyageur rituals and behaviours. (8–9) Using these methods, Podruchny offers a collective biography of an otherwise largely voiceless group, but it is one that relies more on Carlos Ginzberg than Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakhtin than Mikhail Bakunin. Her approach suggests to Podruchny that voyageurs' lives were shaped by three major influences: their Canadien peasant roots, their close and almost continuous contact with Aboriginal peoples, and their workplace experiences. Together Podruchny argues these influences ensured that voyageurs lived in a near constant state of transition, or liminality, that encouraged them to exhibit "fluidity, inventiveness, and an openness to different cultural practices." (15)

Podruchny uses the idea of transitions and voyages to structure the book, which begins with a chapter on "leaving home" – in essence voyageur origins and recruitment. She then explores voyageur rites of passage and rituals, particularly those that marked the transitions as voyageurs traveled deeper into the interior and more fully into a fur trade way of life, voyageurs' work and work relations, the social life and activities of voyageurs, post life, and voyageurs' relations with Aboriginal women. The book finishes with a final substantive chapter on the journey's end – leaving the trade to return home or take up a new life in the North West as what fur trade companies called "freemen." The latter, former fur trade employees who stayed on to work as independent trappers, tripmen, and sometimes traders, have recently attracted considerable attention from historians who see these "freemen," who were often former voyageurs, as crucial to the formation of a distinct Métis identity in the North West.

The result is a rich and complex study with some interesting methodological implications for future fur trade scholars. It subtly rebukes generations of fur trade historians for their rather literal, and unenterprising, readings of archival materials, and suggests that there are ways to use available documentation to reach deeper understanding of the lives of ordinary people who have not left many archival records of their own creation. In fact, despite a wide and very thorough survey of available archival and published primary documentation, Podruchny only found one letter written by a voyageur to his Canadien wife in 1830 in archival collections. Even this letter was probably penned by a clerk or missionary on behalf of its purported author, Jean Mongle.

Probably the best feature of this book, however, is its willingness to explore new aspects of the voyageur's world beyond the staple topics of different canoe types, trade routes, numbers of packs carried on portages, and the vast quantities of pemmican, corn, and pork fat voyageurs consumed on their journeys. The range of topics Podruchny covers in this book is impressive, but the problem on occasion is that not all are equally susceptible to her reading beyond the words and against the grain. For example, the short discussion of whether or not voyageurs could have engaged in homosexuality (196–98) seems forced. The documentary evidence is all but non-existent, and the only conclusion Podruchny can reach is that they might have – or maybe not. It seems hardly worth raising the topic. Sharp-eyed readers may also note the odd, very minor, error such as her claim (76) that Le Rocher de Miette, or Roche Miette, near Jasper means "small rocks." No one has actually identified the Miette of this considerable landmark, although the Lesser Slave Lake post journals mention a freeman named Miyette, but the name is almost certainly commemorative rather than descriptive.

These are the kind of minor issues reviewers often focus upon. The point really is that while this book is not perfect and it will not appeal equally to all readers, it is a very good and very welcome addition to scholarship on the fur trade. It is also an excellent object lesson to researchers that some old subjects are worth revisiting, and that fur trade records can be used profitably by scholars with an interest in labour, social, sports, cultural and other types of history besides the analysis of trade and trade relations.


MICHAEL PAYNE City of Edmonton Archives

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.