Coureur des bois
'"runner of the woods"') or coureur de bois (French: [kuʁœʁ də bwɑ]; plural: coureurs de(s) bois) were independent entrepreneurial French Canadian traders who travelled in New France and the interior of North America, usually to trade with First Nations peoples by exchanging various European items for furs.
[1] While French settlers had lived and traded alongside Indigenous people since the earliest days of New France, coureurs des bois reached their apex during the second half of the 17th century.
Yet, even while their numbers were dwindling, the coureur des bois developed as a symbol of the colony, creating a lasting myth that would continue to define New France for centuries.
[2] Shortly after founding a permanent settlement at Quebec City in 1608, Samuel de Champlain sought to ally himself with the local native peoples or First Nations.
Over time, these early explorers and interpreters played an increasingly active role in the fur trade, paving the way for the emergence of the coureurs des bois proper in the mid-17th century.
By the mid-17th century, Montreal had emerged as the center of the fur trade, hosting a yearly fair in August where natives exchanged their pelts for European goods.
[9] Of the new engagés (indentured male servants), discharged soldiers, and youthful immigrants from squalid, class-bound Europe arriving in great numbers in the colony, many chose freedom in the life of the coureur des bois.
[10] The companies that had been monopolizing and regulating the fur trade since 1645, the Cent Associés and the Communautés des Habitants, went bankrupt after the Iroquois war.
Finally, a sudden fall in the price of beaver on the European markets in 1664 caused more traders to travel to the "pays d'en haut", or upper country (the area around the Great Lakes), in search of cheaper pelts.
[12] Reports like that were wildly exaggerated: in reality, even at their zenith coureurs des bois remained a very small percentage of the population of New France.
Under the voyageurs, the fur trade began to favor a more organized business model of the times, including monopolistic ownership and hired labor.
[14] To survive in the Canadian wilderness, coureurs des bois also had to be competent in a range of activities including fishing, snowshoeing and hunting.
[15] As one Jesuit described them, venturing into the wilderness suited:The sort of person who thought nothing of covering five to six hundred leagues by canoe, paddle in hand, or of living off corn and bear fat for twelve to eighteen months, or of sleeping in bark or branch cabins.
Typically, they left Montreal in the spring, as soon as the rivers and lakes were clear of ice (usually May), their canoes loaded with supplies and goods for trading.
Such trading journeys often lasted for months and covered thousands of kilometers, with the coureurs des bois sometimes paddling twelve hours a day.
[15] Packing a canoe for such a trip was often arduous, as more than thirty articles were considered essential for a coureur des bois's survival and business.
[20] Pierre-Esprit Radisson and his companions, for instance, "struck agreeable relations with Natives inland by giving European goods as gifts".
This figure has achieved mythological status, leading to many false accounts, and to the coureurs des bois being assimilated with "Canadiens" (French Canadians).
If order and discipline were proving difficult to maintain in continental Europe, it seemed impossible that the colonies would fare any better, and it was presumed things would become even worse.
[2] Accounts of young men choosing a life where they would "do nothing", be "restrained by nothing", and live "beyond the possibility of correction" played into the French aristocracy's fears of insubordination[6] which only served to confirm their ignorance; and coureurs des bois became emblematic of the colony for those in the metropolis.
Finally, romans du terroir (rural novels) also added to the myth of the coureurs des bois by featuring them out of proportion to their number and influence.
The coureurs des bois were portrayed in such works as extremely virile, free-spirited and of untameable natures, ideal protagonists in the romanticized novels of important 19th-century writers such as Chateaubriand, Jules Verne and Fenimore Cooper.
[31] The coureurs des bois were renowned for their ability to trap animals for the fur trade but their overall reputation was negative for French Canadians.
In that same year, he was recruited by Samuel de Champlain, who arranged for him to live with a group of Algonquians, designated as the "Nation of the Isle", to learn native languages and later serve as an interpreter.
[42] Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut (1639–1710) was a French soldier and explorer who is the first European known to have visited the area where the city of Duluth, Minnesota is now located and the headwaters of the Mississippi River near Grand Rapids.
Du Lhut's exploration and trapping history could have been as successful as his rival René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle if he had been given permission to continue.
In James A. Michener's 1974 historical novel Centennial and the 1978–1979 NBC television mini-series of the same name, the colourful, French Canadian or French Metis, coureur des bois, from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, named Pasquinel, was introduced as an early frontier mountain man and trapper, in 1795 Colorado, Spanish Upper Louisiana Territory of Mexico, now the present-day state of Colorado.
The fictional character of Pasquinel was loosely based on the lives of French-speaking fur traders Jacques La Ramee and Ceran St. Vrain.
[46] The Revenant (2015), directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, depicts a group of uncharacteristically violent, anti-Indian coureurs des bois in North Dakota, which was contrary to these trappers, who embraced the culture and way of life of Native Americans.
Several fictional coureurs des bois are featured in this realistic action-drama filmed mostly on location in Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Ontario, Canada.
