50. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1: 137, 160, 176.
51. For a lively survey, see Georges-Hébert Germain, Les coureurs des bois: La saga des Indiens blancs (Quebec, 2003).
52. Alexander Ross, The Fur Hunters of the Far West (1885, Norman, Okla., 2001).
53. Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, The Story of French (New York, 2006), 102–103.
54. Mitford Mathews, Dictionary of Americanisms (Chicago, 1951), s.v., “ozark.”
55. Donna Evans, “On Coexistence and Convergence of Two Phonological Systems in Michif,” (North Dakota, 1982); Peter Bakker, A Language of our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French Language of the Canadian Métis (New York, 1997).
56. Jesuit Relations 35:213.
57. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, s.v. “métis;” Jennifer S. H. Brown, “Métis, Half-breeds, and Other Real People: Changing Cultures and Categories,” The History Teacher 27 (1993), 20.
58. Terms such as half-breed, métis, and métif began to appear with increasing frequency in the travel literature (Jacqueline Peterson, 39). The French called them “bois-brûlé” or burned wood, from the Chippewa wisahkotewan niniwak, “men partly burned” (Verne Dusenberry, “Waiting for a Day that Never Comes: Dispossessed Métis of Montana,” in Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. Brown, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America [n.p., Montana, 1958], 120).
59. Duke Redbird, We are Métis: A Métis View of the Development of a Native Canadian People (Willowdale, 1980), 53; quoted in Brown, “Métis, Halfbreeds,” 24.
60. Dusenberry, “Dispossessed Métis,” 121.
61. Brown, “Métis, Halfbreeds,” 24.
62. Alexander Ross, quoted in Bob Beal and Rod Macleod, Prairie Fire (Toronto, 1994), 17; Marcel Giraud, Le Métis canadien: son rôle dans l’histoire des provinces de l’ouest (1945), tr. George Woodcock (Edmonton, 1986); Jacqueline Peterson, “The People in Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of a Métis Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1830,” Ph.D. dissertation, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago, 1980); Jennifer S. H. Brown, “People of Myth, People of History: A Look at Recent Writings on the Métis,” Acadiensis 17 (1987), 150–62; films: Christine Welsh, Women in the Shadows (NFB, 1992).
63. Peterson and Brown, The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America (Winnipeg, 1985), 7.
25. CHAMPLAIN’S LAST LABOR
1. Paul Le Jeune, “Relation de ce qui est passé en la Nouvelle France en l’année 1635 …” (Paris, 1636), Jesuit Relations, ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland, 1896–1901) 9:206–09.
2. Charles de la Morandière, Histoire de la pêche française de la morue dans l’Amérique septentrionale, 3 vols. (Paris, 1962–66) 1:277–315, 248.
3. Gabriel Sagard, Histoire du Canada et voyages que les frères mineurs recollects y ont faicts pour la conversion des infidèles depuis l’an 1615 (Paris, 1636; rpt. Librairie Tross, 4 vols. (Paris, 1866) 4:830.
4. Benjamin Sulte, Histoire des Canadiens-Français, 1608–1880, 8 vols. (Montreal, 1882–84) 2:59, 107; Marcel Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France (Montreal, 1979) 3.1:142, n. 64.
5. Ibid. 3.1:141.
6. Le Jeune, “Relation” (1636), Jesuit Relations 9:208–09.
7. Ibid. 9:209.
8. Robert Le Blant, ed., “Inventaire des Meubles faisant partie de la Communauté entre Samuel Champlain et Hélène Boullé,” RHAF 18 (1965), 599.
9. Le Jeune, “Relation” (1636), Jesuit Relations 9:208–09.
10. Ibid. 9:207–08.
11. Ibid. 9:208–09.
12. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1:130, 142–46, 333, 446–47.
13. Lucien Campeau, Monumenta Novae Franciae (Quebec, 1967) 2:818; Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1: 122, 141, 147, 163; R. Douvelle, DCB, s.v. “Derré de Gand.”
14. Campeau, Monumenta 2:815–16, 824–25, 835.
15. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1:133n.
16. A. Godbout, “Poisson,” Mémoires de la Societé généalogique canadienne-française 3.3: 183–91.
17. Campeau, “Bonaventure, enfant montagnais,” Monumenta 2:803.
18. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1: xxvii, 132.
19. What follows is from the text of the will, which was discovered in the French National Archives in 1959. It is published in Robert Le Blant, “Le Testament de Samuel Champlain, 17 novembre 1635,” RHAF 17 (1963), 269–86.
20. David Hackett Fischer, The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (Oxford and New York, 1996); data reported in figure 0.01.
21. A partial inventory appears in Robert Le Blant, ed., “Inventaire des meubles,” 594–603; see also idem, “Le triste veuvage d’Hélène Boullé,” RHAF 18 (1965), 425–37. This evidence, as M. A. MacDonald observes, “reveals a modest financial situation, attesting to the honour and integrity of the great explorer.” I agree. M. A. MacDonald, Robert Le Blant, Seminal Researcher and Historian of Early New France: A Commented Bibliography (Saint John, N.B., 1986), 23.
22. A. Ledoux, “Abraham Martin, Français ou Écossais?” Mémoires de la Societé généalogique canadienne-française, 27, 162–64.
23. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1: 122, 141, 147; Le Jeune, “Relation” (1635), Jesuit Relations 7:302–03; Campeau in Monumenta 2:818.
24. Samuel E. Morison, Samuel de Champlain: Father of New France (New York, 1972), 224.
25. Jesuit Relations 9:206–07.
26. Ibid.
27. Paul Bouchart d’Orval, Le mystère du tombeau de Champlain (Quebec, 1951); Silvio Dumas, La Chapelle Champlain et Notre-Dame de la Recouvrance (Quebec, 1958). Research projects carried out in the 1980s yielded no results.
28. Le Blant, “Le Triste Veuvage d’Hélène Boullé,” 425–37.
29. Robert Le Blant, “L’Annulation du Testament de Champlain,” Revue d’Histoire des Colonies 131–32 (1950), 203–31.
30. Trudel, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France 3.1: 142–43.
31. J. E. Roy, “M. de Montmagny,” Nouvelle-France 5 (1906), 105–21, 161–73, 417–28, 520–30; Jean Hamelin, DCB, s.v. “Charles Huault de Montmagny;” Morison, Champlain, 225.
32. Morison, Champlain, 225.
33. Alain Rey, Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, 3 vols., rev. edition, Paris, 2006), s.v., “devoir,” “service.”
CONCLUSION
1. Morris Bishop, Champlain: The Life of Fortitude (New York, 1948), 341.
2. For a biography of Black Hawk see Roger L. Nichols, Black Hawk and the Warrior’s Path (Wheeling, Ill., 1992); a history of his nation is William T. Hagan, The Sac and Fox Indians (Norman, Okla., 1958); for the Black Hawk War of 1831–32, see Ellen M. Whitney, ed., The Black Hawk War, 1831–1832, 3 vols. (Springfield, 1970) with a helpful introduction by Anthony F. C. Wallace.
3. J. B. Patterson, Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak or Black Hawk … Dictated by Himself (Rock Island, Ill., 1833), with certificate of authenticity by Antoine LeClaire, “U.S. Interpreter for the Sacs and Foxes.” Other editions followed in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Mobile. The first scholars’ edition was edited by Milo Milton Quaife and published in the Lakeside Classics (Chicago, 1916). The best scholarly edition is Donald Jackson, ed., Black Hawk: An Autobiography (Urbana, 1995). Two centuries later, The Autobiography of Black Hawk is still in print, and much cherished as a major work of American literature. The text of the first edition is posted on line as part of the Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization project. Black Hawk’s warning appears on the dedication page. For a literary analysis see Mark Wallace, “Black Hawk’s An Autobiography: The Production and Use of an Indian Voice,” American Indian Quarterly 18 (1994), 481–94.%
A hostile critic named Thomas Ford alleged that the book was a fraud concocted by a “halfbreed Indian interpreter.” LeClaire was a Métis, with a French Canadian father and a Potawatomi mother. He learned French, English, and “a dozen Indian languages,” and hi
s name appears on many Indian treaties. He became a leading citizen of Iowa with a fortune of half a million dollars, was a founder of the town of Davenport, had his portrait put on the Iowa State Bank’s five-dollar bill, and was celebrated for his character. Winfield Scott wrote that “he has been faithful to both sides, to the Americans as well as to the Sac and Fox.” See Charles Snyder, “Antoine LeClaire, the First Proprietor of Davenport,” Annals of Iowa 3rd series, 23 (1941–42) 79–117. The critic Ford appears not to have read the book. Recent study by Donald Jackson confirms its authenticity.
4. Black Hawk: An Autobiography, ed. Jackson, dedication page.
5. The dates are uncertain, as in much oral history. Black Hawk (1767–1838) was translated as calling his ancestor his “great grandfather,” but said that Na-Nà-Ma-Kee’s meeting with the “white father” happened “a long time” before “the British overpowered the French” in 1759, and at a time when Black Hawk’s ancestors were “people who had never yet seen a white man.” The word that LeClaire translated as “great grandfather” may have been more accurately rendered as “forefather.” Probably Na-Nà-Ma-Kee would have been Black Hawk’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, six generations removed. It is known that in the early seventeenth century the Sauk nation lived with other Algonquin people in the Upper St. Lawrence Valley, that they were at war with the French by the beginning of the eighteenth century, and moved many times to Wisconsin, then to Iowa, back to Wisconsin and to Illinois.
6. Na-Nà-Ma-Kee’s story was an oral tradition, and it grew through the years by a process of accretion. Some of its elements were added later: for example the story mentions that among the white man’s gift to Na-nà-ma-kee were guns. Champlain did not give Indians guns, and often opposed the gift or sale of guns to Indians by Dutch and English traders. There is no evidence that Champlain gave medals to the Indians, a practice that became more common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
But most elements of the story point directly to Champlain and only to Champlain. Among them are the assertion that this white man was a Frenchman, that he had a special relationship with the king of France, that he was in the St. Lawrence Valley, that he was the first white man Na-Nà-Ma-Kee’s people had ever seen, that he was a soldier and a “great and brave general,” that he exchanged goods and presents more to establish trust and build a relationship than for a commercial purpose, which followed later; that he was an honest and honorable man who kept his word and treated the Indians with respect. No other French explorer matched this description of an encounter that happened “a long time” before “the British overpowered the French” in the eighteenth century, and at a time when Black Hawk’s ancestors “had never yet seen a white man.”%
Champlain repeatedly mentioned that in his early travels up the St. Lawrence Valley he met nations who had never before seen a European. Further, the substance of this oral history is true to the area in which Champlain traveled, and also to the way in which he worked with the Algonquin nations of the St. Lawrence Valley.%
Two American historians have studied Black Hawk’s autobiography. Both conclude that Na-Nà-Ma-Kee’s white man was Champlain. See Donald Jackson, ed., Black Hawk: An Autobiography (Urbana, Ill., 1955, 1964, 1990), 45n; and Gordon M. Sayre, Les sauvages américaines (Chapel Hill, 1997), 64, a monograph on Indian images in American literature. No biographer of Champlain or historian of New France appears to have been familiar with Black Hawk’s autobiography.
7. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York, 2005), 41; for more Indian memories of first encounters, see Sylvie Vincent et al., Traditions et récits sur l’arrivée des Européens en Amérique, published in Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 22.2–3 (Automne 1992) 1–180. Especially helpful in that collection is Denys Delage, “Les Premiers Contacts,” 101–16.
8. Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (New York, 1962), 49–73; Ola Elizabeth Winslow, John Eliot, “Apostle to the Indians” (Boston, 1968); 71–159; Henry W. Bowden and James P. Ronda, eds., John Eliot’s Indian Dialogues (Westport, Conn., 1980); Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949, rpt. Boston, 1965) 20–22, passim.
9. Ramsay Cook, ed., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Toronto, 1993), xxv-xli, passim.
10. It is most accessible in a bilingual edition, edited by H. P. Biggar in his edition of Champlain’s major works, sponsored by the Champlain Society, CWB 6: 253–346.
11. See appendix E below.
12. CWB 6: 297, 295, 314, 279, 269–70.
13. CWB 6:257–68.
14. CWB 6:261.
MEMORIES OF CHAMPLAIN
1. Gérard Malchelosse, Trois-Rivières d’autrefois: études éparses et inédites de Benjamin Sulte (Montreal, 1934); qtd. in Denis Martin, “Discovering the Face of Samuel de Champlain,” in Raymonde Litalien and Denis Vaugeois, eds., Champlain: la naissance de l’Amérique française (Quebec, 2004); tr. as Champlain: The Birth of French America (Montreal, 2004), 358.
2. For a short but very thoughtful survey of the literature, see Raymonde Litalien, “Historiography of Samuel Champlain,” in Litalien and Vaugeois, eds., Champlain, 11–16. General studies of Canadian historiography include: H.-A. Scott, Nos anciens historiographes et autres études d’histoire canadienne (Quebec, 1930); Serge Gagnon, Le Québec et ses historiens (Quebec, 1978), of which portions are translated in two volumes as Quebec and Its Historians: 1840–1920 (Montreal, 1982) and Quebec and Its Historians: The Twentieth Century (Montreal, 1985); and “The Historiography of New France, 1960–1974,” Journal of Canadian Studies 13 (1978), 80–99. Also useful are D. A. Muise, Approaches to the Native History of Canada (Ottawa, 1977); Bruce G. Trigger, “The Indian Image in Canadian History,” in Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic Age” Reconsidered (Montreal and Kingston, 1985, 1986, 1994), 3–49.
3. Marc Lescarbot, Histoire de la Nouvelle-France, published in Paris in 1609 with English translations in the same year and German in 1613; other French editions followed in 1611, 1612, 1617, and 1618; also, Marc Lescarbot, History of New France, 3 vols. (Toronto, Champlain Society, 1907), edited by H. P. Biggar with a translation by Oxford linguist W. L. Grant; La Conversion des Sauvages (Paris, 1610), rpt. in Jesuit Relations 1:49–113; and Relation dernière de ce qui s’est passé au voyage du sieur de Poutrincourt en la Nouvelle France depuis 20 mois ença (Paris, 1912) rpt. in Jesuit Relations 1, 119–91. See Éric Thierry, Marc Lescarbot (vers 1570–1641): un homme de plume au service de la Nouvelle-France (Paris, 2001); idem, “Champlain and Lescarbot: An Impossible Friendship,” in Litalien and Vaugeois, eds., Champlain, 121–34; Bernard Émont, Marc Lescarbot: Mythes et rêves fondateurs de la Nouvelle France (Paris, Budapest, and Turin, 2002); Louis-Martin Tard, Marc Lescarbot: le chantre de l’Acadie (Quebec, 1997); H. P. Biggar, “The French Hakluyt: Marc Lescarbot of Vervins,” AHR 6 (1901), 671–92.
4. Marc Lescarbot, Les Muses de la Nouvelle-France (Paris, 1618), 49. The first publication includes a note, “Fait aux iles de Câpseau en la Nouvelle-France.”
5. W. L. Grant, in Lescarbot, New France 2:27.
6. Champlain in Henry Percival Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain 6 vols. and a portfolio of maps and drawings (CWB), (Toronto, 1922–36, reprinted 1971) 1:452; Lescarbot, New France 2:169–70, 172; 1:30, 104; 2: 76, 83–84, 99, 108, 110–11, 141, 168, 172–76, 179, 234, 241, 359; 3:6, 34.
7. Lescarbot, New France 2:117, 22, 233, 342; 3: 6, 9–15, 17, 24–27, 28–29.
8. Charles Daniel, Voyage à la Nouvelle France du Capitaine Charles Daniel de Dieppe (n.p., 1629; rpt. Rouen, 1881; CWB 6:153–61. Pierre Victor Palma Cayet, Chronologie Septenaire (Paris, 1605), 415–24, included passages from Champlain’s Des Sauvages. Jacques-Auguste de Thou’s Histoire universelle depuis 1543 jusq’en 1607 was published first in a Latin edition and later in a French translation (Paris, 1739). For an example of periodical literature see Le Mercure François
19 (1633), 802–67.
9. Le Jeune, “Relation, 1636,” Jesuit Relations 9: 218–83; Morris Bishop, Champlain: The Life of Fortitude (New York, 1948), 341.
10. Gordon M. Sayre, Les sauvages américaines (Chapel Hill, 1997), 64; see Conclusion, above.
11. For some of these Montagnais stories see Sylvie Vincent, “L’arrivée des chercheurs de terres: récits et dires des Montagnais de la Moyenne et de la Basse Côte-Nord,” Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 22:2–3 (1992), 19–29.
12. Le Jeune, “Relation, 1637,” Jesuit Relations 12:86–87; 13:147; for Captain Aenon see Bruce Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660 (1976; new edition, Montreal, 1987), 474; and Jesuit Relations 20:19.
13. Bishop, Champlain: The Life of Fortitude, 340.
14. Ibid. 341.
15. David Knowles, Great Historical Enterprises: Problems in Monastic History (London, 1963), 3–62.
16. Gabriel Sagard, Le Grand Voyage du pays des Hurons (Paris, 1632), new edition (Tross, Paris, 1865); an English translation appeared as The Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons, tr. H. H. Langton, ed., George M. Wrong (Toronto, 1939). A scholarly edition with a French text was established by Réal Ouellet, and an introduction and notes by Réal Ouellet and Jack Warwick (Quebec, 1990); idem, Histoire du Canada (Paris, 1636; rpt. Tross, Paris, 1866), in four duodecimo volumes, still the edition of choice. It has not been translated into English or reprinted in a modern scholarly edition.
17. Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et la rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris 1913); Bishop, Champlain: The Life of Fortitude, 259.
18. Chrestien Le Clercq, Nouvelle relation de la Gaspésie (Paris, 1691); and Premier établissement de la foy dans la Nouvelle-France (Paris, 1691), in at least two other editions with variant titles. Both were published in English translations as First Establishment of the Faith in New France, ed. J. G. Shea, 2 vols. (New York, 1881); and New Relation of Gaspesia with the Customs and Religions of the Gaspesian Indians, vol. 5 in the publications of the Champlain Society, ed. W. F. Ganong (Toronto, 1910).
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