Jolly Voyageur
Jul 23, 2010 9:30:58 GMT -7
Post by Steve Jajo on Jul 23, 2010 9:30:58 GMT -7
It's hard to escape the Jolly Voyageur. He's been a staple of paddling folklore since the nineteenth century. Take this well-known painting by Frances Hopkins, often titled "Voyageurs at Dawn."
It's a scene sure to evoke longing in any modern paddler. There they are, jolly voyageurs all, smoking their long clay pipes and relaxing around a breakfast fire, having just risen from their beds beneath the stars, refreshed and eager and looking forward to another day in the wilderness. Ah, Romance!
But things aren't always what they seem. It's reality-check time. The painting's familiar title is misleading. The voyageurs didn't breakfast at dawn. They paddled, instead, hoping to make as many miles as possible before the wind rose. They didn't eat until they'd been on the water for five hours. Even then, they didn't linger around the fire. Another twelve hours of hard traveling lay ahead of them before they could make camp again. And the following day would be no less rigorous.
In truth, the jolly voyageurs lived lives of drudgery and danger. They worked at least eighteen hours out of twenty-four, and the work was hard — paddling into the teeth of icy gales and slashing sleet, wading frigid waters, and hauling enormous loads over portages that alternated between sharp stones and deep mud, where clouds of biting flies threatened to bleed them white. Not even sleep brought respite. Their only shelter from the chilling autumn mists was a tarp or the upturned hull of a canoe; their only bedding, a couple of tattered blankets.
Some fun, eh?
The one break in the voyageurs' day came during the hourly "pipes," when they stopped paddling just long enough for a quick smoke. This wasn't exactly a healthy lifestyle, to be sure, but few voyageurs lived long enough to worry about cancer. They were expendable, after all. There was always another younger son of a Québec farmer to take the place of any man who died. And many did die. Clusters of simple wooden crosses once marked each portage between Lachine and Fort Chipewyan.
Portages. They were the real killers, outstripping even rapids and sudden storms. The voyageurs were small men: five foot five inches or so. It made economic sense. Small men ate less. That saved the Montréal partners money. Moreover, a light crew meant a bigger payload of furs. This made money for the partners, and making money was what the fur trade was all about. But each pound of baled fur still had to be humped over the many portages on the long road from Lake Athabasca to the St. Lawrence River. And time was money. The result? Human endurance was pushed to the limits. Every voyageur had to get six pièces from one end of each portage to the other. A pièce was a pack of furs weighing 90 pounds. Six pièces, six trips? No way! Any canoeist who's ever needed to get a big load across a portage will know the reason why. The first trip over a portage is a breeze because it's the first, and the last is bearable because it's the last. But the ones in the middle are pure hell.
Some of my ancestors were voyageurs and a few were coureur des bois ( runner of the woods). Many went west as well as south.
