by Nikki Rajala | May 22, 2026 | Voyageur
John Macdonell was born in Scotland in 1768, and his family migrated to New York in 1773 and then to Canada. He began his first trading venture in 1793, when he was 25. His diary describes his impressions of voyageur life. In this section, he has been on the...
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 | 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...
by Nikki Rajala | Dec 9, 2025 | Voyageur
Q: How did voyageurs celebrate Christmas? A: Not like we do. Our favorite holiday traditions hadn’t been invented yet, so no Ho-Ho-Hos, no Santa, no tree or decorations, no cookies or concerts, no Nutcracker or Christmas Carol performances, no Grinch or Charlie...
