The persistence of travel and trade: St. Lawrence river valley French engages and the American Fur Company, 1818-1840.

L'homme quebecois has little more parish consciousness than frontier consciousness. The true locus of his continuity is more temporal than spatial: it is the family. Relatives--the extended family--who are scattered over the continent and not confined to the Laurentian Valley will welcome the family nomad.... The extended family is what creates the true network of migration, integrating the individual wherever he goes: it is in effect an invitation to go off without calamitous disruption. It is a homeland writ small, a movable homeland, and it provides a basis for solidarity ... and negates geography. Thus the people preserve their identity through their very instability.

--Christian Morissonneau (1)

Up to this point, many studies have carved the North American fur trade into regional slices: the American Southwest trade, the trans-Mississippi trade, the upper Midwest trade, and the far North trade. Thus readers and perhaps even researchers have come to perceive the fur trade as a localized phenomenon rather than as an extensive and interlocking continentwide enterprise that engaged the attention of both European immigrants and Native populations for generauons. Indeed, this problem is in part the understandable result of the sheer immensity of the logistical task involved in examining the fur trade on any scale exceeding the local or the regional.

This article and the larger research project from which it is drawn have one main objective. They seek to examine the fur trade on a continentwide, transnational scale by employing a clearly delineated chronology and focusing on a well-defined collection of historical actors, a restricted group of Canadian-born American Fur Company (AFC) employees. The AFC hired approximately eleven hundred Canadien men out of Lower Canada between 1817 and 1837. (2) The research project follows employees from their birthplaces to the end of their working careers and beyond, thus transcending the traditional individual, regional, or even national boundaries limiting previous fur-trade studies. h will help to elucidate the workings and social influence of a company--and its French Canadian, Creole, and Metis personnel--that was based in New York, hired out of Montreal, and had centers of operation in the Great Lakes region, the valleys of the upper Mississippi and Missouri rivers, and the cities of St. Louis and New Orleans.

The impetus for this project focused on American Fur Company voyageurs is a decade-long initiative examining people--the voyageurs-and process--the emergence of a clearly distinguishable Metis population in the Canadian Northwest having fur-trade-employee forefathers. (3) One of the initiative's core components is the Voyageur Contracts Database, which contains more than thirty-two thousand notarized voyageur contracts signed in the Montreal-Trois-Rivieres corridor between 1700 and 1822. These contracts are standard repetitive documents containing information that can be easily adapted to spreadsheet and database formats. The searchable database, which is scheduled to go online in late autumn 2008, will be accessible to all researchers.

This Voyageur Contracts Database contains 32,414 contracts for voyageurs who signed up in the St. Lawrence River valley between 1700 and ca. 1822. Several caveats, however, must be noted before the database can be used properly. First, thanks both to the ready availability of certain notary fonds (individual notaries' papers) and researchers' initial assumptions, the original database is Montreal-centric. Most of the voyageur contracts in the database were signed in front of Montreal-based notaries, h is still received wisdom that most voyageur contracts were signed in front of notaries working in Montreal, which was the business center of the fur trade in Lower Canada. However, forays into the collections of notaries who practiced in smaller centers such as Trois-Rivieres and Sorel or even notaries based in traditional voyageur-recruitment villages such as L'Assomption and Laprairie revealed the existence of hundreds of additional contracts not entered into the database. Time and money do not allow inclusion of all of them into the original Voyageur Contracts Database at this time, with the exception of my group of AFC contracts, as noted below. This means that the online database will not include post-1822 contracts signed in Montreal of elsewhere with local independent traders of other firms such as the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). For example, dozens of contracts for the HBC's northwestern trade were signed in front of Sorel notary Henry Crebassa in the 1820s and 1830s. Hundreds more were signed in and around Trois-Rivieres for the fur trade in the upper St. Maurice River as well as points farther west. I will, however, be able to add the AFC contracts that were signed either in front of rural notaries or after 1822 into the voyageur database. Though the original Voyageur Contracts Database Project, with the addition of these AFC contracts, has probably captured a majority of surviving notarised voyageur contracts signed in Lower Canada, further omissions will no doubt be discovered in the future.

If the search for furs was as influential as historians have argued it was in the development of North America, then understanding the motives and worldviews of those who participated in the creation and persistence of this transcontinental trade is crucial. (4) A French river world based on the peltry trade emerged and endured from the early days of New France to the 1840s. Extending from Montreal southward to New Orleans and also westward to the Rockies, this river world calls into question one of the dominant paradigms of Canadian historiography. For decades Harold A. Innis's influential staples theory has emphasized western economic expansion and its relationship to the creation of the Canadian state stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But this east-west focus meant that the historical importance of commercial and social exchanges along a north-south axis was largely neglected as it failed to fit within a neatly defined national Canadian discourse. The concept of nation cannot serve as the principal unit of analysis in research dealing with the enduring phenomenon of commercial and social networks largely built upon French Catholic kin ties across a vast North American landmass where borders meant little. The French Canadians hired by the AFC were but the last manifestation of a system of kinship-based trading, employment, and travel that persisted in some form of other through the demise of empires, the emergence of nation states, and the creation of international boundaries. Not until the development of new, relatively high-speed communications and transportation links in the early 1840s and the subsequent "disappearance of the commons"--to use Irene Spry's famed expression--did the extensive social world predicated on the fur trade come to an end. (5)