by Nikki Rajala | May 9, 2026 | Voyageur
In 1793 John Macdonell left Lachine to serve as a clerk for the North West Company — and he kept a journal! While he commented on the trek up to Lake Winipic, I’m focusing on the first half of his journal — when his brigade left the Montreal area to their...
by Nikki Rajala | Apr 4, 2026 | Voyageur
Imagine traveling hundreds of miles from winding rivers and rapids to vast inland lakes, carrying everything you need in a vessel made entirely from bark, roots and wood — a birch bark canoe. They were genius — objects deceptively simple, yet perfectly engineered by...
by Nikki Rajala | Mar 12, 2026 | Voyageur
Once, a prime beaver pelt was money, the standard currency for the fur trade. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia: “Soon after its founding in 1670, the Hudson’s Bay Company found it necessary to devise a unit of value that would accommodate Aboriginal...
by Nikki Rajala | Feb 16, 2026 | Featured
For youth, Bigfork’s tiny public library had one short shelf of biographies, jacketed in red and yellow, illustrated with black and white drawings. After finishing the life stories of all the women (maybe 7 total), I kept on, reading about men like Lewis and...
by Nikki Rajala | Feb 7, 2026 | Voyageur
Tom H. Holloway, a research volunteer at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, sent me this piece. He’d been asked how common Hudson’s Bay blankets with a multicolored stripe (or candy stripe) were in the West Coast fur trade. To answer it, he did...
