by Nikki Rajala | Apr 21, 2019 | Featured
Imagine the array of specialty goods from 1800 — lace handkerchiefs, fragrant tea, violin strings, glass beads, printed calico, nutmegs, lacquered boxes, powdered vermilion, shiny knives and kettles — and feast your senses. Their uniqueness, their usefulness draws...
by Nikki Rajala | Mar 24, 2019 | Featured
Peter Pond, a larger-than-life voyageur, is responsible for the deaths of three men. Death wasn’t uncommon back then, but murder was rare. And three of them? On the credit side: Pond is one of the founders — the only American — of the North West Companywhich...
by Nikki Rajala | Nov 30, 2018 | Featured
Did voyageurs ever intersect with Quakers? In “Voyageurs: A Novel,” Margaret Elphinstone used that concept to tell the story of the fur trade, sharpening the differences between the two very dissimilar groups. The tale follows a young English Quaker who’s received a...
by Nikki Rajala | Nov 11, 2018 | Featured
The tag on my website is “Nikki Rajala: writer, speaker, voyageur descendant.” So, who are those voyageurs I descended from? More importantly for you, might there be voyageurs in your family tree? Confession: I haven’t yet pored through microfilms of...
by Nikki Rajala | Oct 26, 2018 | Featured
In discussing “Treacherous Waters” in a group with French-Canadian ancestry, I mentioned what I’d learned about Ste. Anne as a patroness of voyageurs. I felt so smug. Then Marie asked, “Which Ste. Anne? Ste. Anne de Beaupré?” Oops. More than one Ste. Anne? I...
by Nikki Rajala | Oct 18, 2018 | Featured
“Saint Anne is the patroness of the Canadians, in all their travels by water.” That’s what Alexander Henry (the Elder) wrote in his 1804 journal about his 1761 venture into Canadian fur country. I also read about her in various fur trade histories. So I believed...
