Voyageur’s Blog
Ask a voyageur a question
Here’s a blog to answer your questions, like what was life like during the 1800s in French Canada? Like who could or couldn’t be a voyageur? How big the canoes were? What trade goods they carried? What different furs were worth? What they used for medicine? I’ll answer these and more in the “A Voyageur’s Life” blog. Click on the button below to ask your question or go to the “Contact” section of this site — I’ll find the answers.
A short history of the fur trade era
A dozen events distilled from 200 years of fur trade history–your cheat sheet.
Winter games for voyageurs
For winter fun, voyageurs used a checkers board to play a variety of games.
The fur trade in 17 ‘P’ words
Lots of words about the fur trade begin with P: paddle, portage … Plus more, (Surprise: ‘plus’ is a descriptor!)
Best canoe paddles for 1785
Canoe paddles from voyageur times differ from paddles in current use. Here’s how and why.
21 voyageur books to hook younger readers
Books about voyageur life for younger readers.
Voyageur trading cards!
Voyageur contracts yield great info–and trading card stats, just like baseball.
No wonder Nikki Rajala writes about voyageurs—her French-Canadian ancestors paddled birch bark canoes on many fur trade brigades. One great-great wintered for 16 years in fur posts west of Lake Superior and threads of family stories infuse this book. On Girl Scout canoe expeditions as a teen, she explored Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park. Nikki loves rendezvous re-enactments, reading fur trade journals, visiting museums, tasting voyageur foods.
