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.
Larger than life — Minnesota statues of voyageurs
Guess what I finally found — the voyageur statue in Ely, Minnesota, plus the owner and the artist. (I've been trying to find it for a couple of years.) The Midwest's massive monuments to their uniqueness are pure fun. My community has a large largemouth bass, other...
Ray Mears on brand-new birch bark canoes
This video about the Hudson’s Bay Company’s role in Canada, narrated by Ray Mears, was recommended. Mears is an authority on the subject of bushcraft and survival.*It's SO worth watching! He speaks with the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, which...
1946 film: How Indians Build Canoes
“How Indians Build Canoes” is a color movie from 1946 that shows an Algonquin man and his wife and son building a birch bark canoe using native methods. At the very beginning, a young man wields a long stick—which becomes his ladder to scale a tall birch tree! What...
1973 film on Bill Hafeman, birch bark canoe-builder
Meant to watch Dan Boessel’s video a second time, it was so interesting. But I accidentally clicked on “Birch Canoe Builder.” This 7-minute film was made in 1973 about Bill Hafeman, who began his canoe- and boat-building venture in the 1920s. He demonstrated the...
Birch bark canoe-builder in the 1920s—Hafeman Boat Works
In researching Book 2 of “The Chronicles of an Unlikely Voyageur,” I learned a classmate, Bob Davis, was the great-nephew of Bill Hafeman, founder of Hafeman Boat Works in Bigfork, MN. Hafeman began building canoes in the 1920s. Bob's wife Diane alerted me to a great...
Tepees, lodges, bullboats and pemmican
We visited North Dakota’s Heritage Center and State Museum in Bismarck a few weeks back. I was admiring a Dakota lodge when a guide came by to offer more information. We then talked about tepee construction. What a gold mine he was! He said me the lodge I was...
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.
