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.
Examining Zebulon Pike’s legacy—maybe not a hero
Digging deeper doesn’t improve the legacy of Lt. Zebulon Pike. He’s more a wannabe than hero.
Why did so many voyageurs come from Sorel?
“Voyageur parishes,”like Sorel, had up to one-third of its men serving in the fur trade from the 1790s through the 1820s.
17+ voyageur events to ‘visit’ this summer
Summer festivals feature voyageur history with verve and fun. Visit the website if you can’t get there in person.
What Everyone Ought to Know About “The Great Northwest Fur Trade”
Fun and fascinating info in the book, The Great Northwest Fur Trade by Ryan Gale, packed with quotes from fur trade journals and photos of historical artifacts.
Vomits & Purges: Medicine in the voyageur era
Medicine for voyageurs was rudimentary—purges and vomits and blood-letting? Yikes!
“The Littlest Voyageur” — much smaller than Andre
A squirrel stows away on a brigade to the rendezvous in “The Littlest Voyageur, “ a light-hearted tale of the fur trade by Margi Preus.
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.
