Upon returning to Fort Crevecoeur with more men in the late fall of 1680, having received word from Tonty that those left behind had deserted, La Salle discovered a massacre had taken place at one of the Illinois villages. For all La Salle knew, Tonty’s body could have been among the charred corpses he encountered in the area. Tonty, who had been injured but survived the conflict, fled to a Jesuit mission in northern Michigan and received information about La Salle that wasn’t much more encouraging. “We tried to pass the time as best we could,” Tonty wrote. “We were informed, however, by many Ottawa braves that M. de la Salle was dead, and they gave us proofs pertinent to make us believe it to be true.”5 Throughout the year neither man knew if the other had survived the Native American wars that erupted across the eastern half of the continent.
When La Salle got word that Tonty was still alive in early 1681, he returned to Montreal and once more began the process of recruiting men for the expedition. This would likely be his last chance to prove the value of the Mississippi River. After all, the king of France had only given him five years to explore the territory and hold a monopoly over trade in the regions he discovered. Those five years would be up in May 1682.
Montreal, Canada
August 11, 1976
He wore his red jacket with gold brocade cuffs and a black felt hat with a wispy feather spilling down the side. Nothing like getting decked out in French court finery to celebrate a momentous occasion. The August day was humid and gray. The flag of Quebec, royal blue with a white cross and four white fleur de lys—one for each field of blue—fluttered in the wind. René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, grasped the pen to sign his will. All his property would be transferred to his cousin on the event of his death. Death seemed quite likely in the coming months. It often is when you try something absurd.
The scene was almost storybook perfect. The assembled men could have passed for actors in a high-budget period film, as long as you ignored the crowd of people dressed in waist-high denim jeans and plastic sunglasses. And the microphones on stage. And the fact that this Robert Cavelier’s first language had been English, not French. But for an American playing a Frenchman, Reid Lewis spoke the language impeccably.
Colin Crevel, né Bob Kulick, surveyed the crowd. At six feet two inches and only 155 pounds, Kulick was one of the skinnier guys on the crew. His dad had told him that if he stood sideways he disappeared. Not that blending in was going to be an issue anymore, what with his getup. His wavy brown hair was beyond the length of needing a trim, his shirt had a ruffle on it, and his pants were held up below his knees with colorful ties. All the crew members around him were dressed similarly, though the ones playing nobles had nicer jackets and felt hats to wear. The costumes made for a cinematic performance.
They weren’t putting on a good show for the throng that turned out to see them depart, though, stumbling over the words they’d practiced for months. Nerves, probably. It’s not every day that one sets off on a 3,300-mile trek in handmade canoes across two countries, three lakes, and five major rivers all while impersonating 17th-century Frenchmen. Up until the moment they took the stage, the expedition hadn’t seemed real. Seeing Quebec City had been real, visiting Montmorency Falls and feeling its spray had been real, the swirling whirlpools of the Lachine Rapids had been real, and the unexpected culture shock of being an American in French-speaking Canada was still very real. But the voyage? It had never been inevitable until this moment on this stage in this waterfront suburb of Montreal. Now Reid Lewis signed a will as if he were La Salle, Marc Lieberman towered over him in a tricorn black felt hat as Henri de Tonty (sans prosthetic metal hand), and George LeSieutre ambled over to notarize the will the way Jacques de La Metairie once did. LeSieutre had been the class president before graduating high school two months earlier. Lieberman had been a student at Northern Illinois University, Kulick a senior at Elgin High School. Now they were French canoeists and explorers. They were voyageurs. Well, pretending to be.
“This guy is nuts,” Kulick and his friends had muttered to one another in the auditorium years earlier. They’d been high school juniors, and up on stage was French teacher Reid Lewis from their rival school, Larkin. Lewis had just explained how he planned to spend two years building six replica birch-bark canoes, then use them to transport twenty-three men and several tons of gear from one end of the country to the other—two years of intense planning and training, followed by eight months of camping, performing skits, and living three hundred years in the past.
“Now, who would be interested in that?” Lewis asked.
Everyone in Kulick’s row of friends raised their hands.
Somehow, only Kulick had followed through after the initial recruitment. He’d had to give up his job at Jewel, the local grocery store, and his free time had been gobbled up in chunks by expedition prep. None of his friends from Elgin had made the cut to be on the crew, and his relationship with his girlfriend, Kathy, had disintegrated as well. Though it hadn’t been easy at the time, he’d gained plenty of close friends on the crew, including Marc Lieberman and Sam Hess. Signing on to the expedition had meant giving up his old life for the promise of a new one, if impersonating someone who’d been dead for hundreds of years could be considered “new.”
Quebec Solicitor General Fernand Lalonde looked out of place in his brown suit as he unveiled the plaque that had been embedded in a small boulder for the occasion. All the young men standing around him wore woolen toques on their heads and leather moccasins on their feet. Colorful finger-woven sashes adorned their waists and leather pouches hung from their shoulders. Their canvas pants belonged to a very limited wardrobe.
The assembled audience had watched in varying stages of attentiveness as a small maple tree was planted. The plaque on the rock next to the tree described the maple’s symbolic value in French: ARBRE COMMÉMORANT LE DEPART DE L’EXPÉDITION CAVELIER DE LA SALLE II PROJET DU BICENTENAIRIE AMÉRICAIN 11 AOÛT 1976 (TREE COMMEMORATING THE DEPARTURE OF THE EXPEDITION OF CAVELIER DE LA SALLE II PROJECT OF THE U.S. BICENTENNIAL AUGUST 11, 1976). It was a nice gesture, albeit a strange one. A plaque and a tree to commemorate a voyage that was based off an earlier voyage that had begun 295 years earlier to the day. Layers upon layers of historical interpretation had accumulated, bringing the men to this point—the dedication of a plaque that would remain embedded in this rock for the foreseeable future. But Kulick wasn’t thinking much about his participation in an experiment on performed anachronism. He was more concerned with the immediate prospect of saying good-bye, then hopping into a canoe with three other men, and paddling against a strong current for hours.
LaSalle city officials and Quebec government representatives finished their speeches and the last dozen pictures were snapped. The heartfelt farewells began. Sons hugged their parents, husbands their wives. Kulick had been parting with people for almost a week, first in Illinois and now in Canada. His dad and sister Diane had come to Montreal to see him off, and he had a letter from his ex-girlfriend, Kathy, to carry with him. There would be more letters to come in the future, too, as long as their mail drop points worked out, and he’d see everyone again in several months when they reached Lake Michigan. But that was a thought for another day. Today they were perched with their canoes on the edge of the St. Lawrence, still unsure as to whether they’d actually be capable of paddling the loaded boats down the river. No one they’d talked to seemed to think it was possible for the man-powered vessels to overcome the current.
“Te Deum laudamus; Te dominum confitemur. Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur (Lord, we thank you. Everlasting Father, all the earth worships),” sang twenty-three voices at the end of a benediction from black-robed Father Loran Fuchs, playing the role of Pere Zenobe Membre. “Sanctus, sanctus,” they concluded. And then they were off, carrying their canoes down the grassy embankment into the reeds on the edge of the river. The water was cool, the sky bright but gray with clouds left over from the recent Hurricane Belle. Kulick hopped into his canoe i
n front of Reid Lewis and John DiFulvio and behind Rich Gross. Together, the four of them dipped their paddles into the water. Kulick had carved this paddle himself and burned the image of a feather quill pen into the blade, a symbol of his duty as the group’s journalist. Now he’d find out how well it worked paddling close to sixty strokes a minute for eight or nine hours each day.
As one of the middlemen (or milieu, as they’re called in French), Kulick didn’t have to worry about anything but pulling his paddle through the water. Gross, the curly-haired teen who’d grown up boating on the Fox River, sat at the front of the boat as the avant and was in charge of looking out for debris and hopping out of the boat upon landing. In the back sat John DiFulvio, a burly young man who’d played football throughout high school and had been attracted to the voyage for the physical challenge it presented. DiFulvio was in charge of steering the canoe and keeping it from weaving from side to side in the water, which wastes lots of energy. Compared to the other two, Kulick and Lewis had easy jobs: as milieux, their sole focus was providing power to keep the canoe moving forward. But this proved to be something of a challenge within the first half-mile of paddling.
The current on the St. Lawrence varies in strength depending on location along the river and the tide, but even for strong paddlers it can pose a problem. When the fleet of six canoes came around a bend in the river after only a quarter-mile of paddling, the rapids they faced were too daunting to cross, which meant the first portage of the expedition. Portages are the bane of every canoeist’s journey, as was quickly proved by this short trek. Land, unload, carry the 175-pound canoes and thousands of pounds of gear down gravel and concrete roads for a quarter-mile, make several more trips back for more gear, sweat, grunt, groan as the edges of the upturned canoes dug into the flesh of shoulders, and double-check that no gear had been forgotten. One of the men had misplaced his musket, but another grabbed it for him. Next time they’d assign gear to each canoe crew. For now, it was time to return to the water.
At first it was a relief to be back on the water after the portage. But after a few hours, paddling was no relief from walking. Kulick’s back ached and his arms burned from the strain of moving forward in a river that kept pushing them back. The grip and shaft of his paddle bit into his hands, scraping away skin unaccustomed to manipulating a wooden blade through the water for such an extended period of time. It was tiring, monotonous drudgery. Before the trip everyone had been required to run regularly (with the exception of Father Loran, whose arthritis made it too difficult; he biked) and do some strength training, but they’d done relatively little canoeing in preparation for the expedition, in part because their canoes hadn’t been finished. They’d never practiced the kind of distances they’d be covering in the coming months.
The canoes slid past houses and farms on the river, moving so slowly they might’ve been outstripped by a dog on a leash out for a walk. By the end of the day they’d gone nine miles and were two hours late for their landing in Chateauguay. Most of the townspeople who’d turned out earlier to greet them had already dispersed.
Despite their exhaustion and lack of audience, the crew was in a festive mood. They’d passed their first test. They were capable of paddling the canoes against the current on the St. Lawrence, no matter what people might have said about the probability of failure. Even if it meant blisters and aching muscles and growling stomachs. Fortunately, the hunger would be taken care of in town. Unfortunately, Chateauguay City Hall had planned a fancy meal of finger sandwiches and wine. It was universally agreed upon in private after the dinner: never feed finger sandwiches to hungry voyageurs after a hard day’s paddle. Even five sandwiches per man weren’t enough to make him feel entirely full.
After giving a performance to a small audience under the lights of a soccer field where mosquitoes feasted on anything that breathed, the crew returned to their camp along the St. Lawrence. One by one they crawled into their makeshift tents, comprised of a canoe turned on its side and covered with a nineteen-by-twenty-three-foot canvas tarp held up by three paddles and some stakes. It was eight men to a canoe-tent, each with his own modern sleeping bag, a concession made for the sake of safety. With all eight men in the tent, there was just enough room for everyone to lay flat on his back without his shoulders touching someone else’s.
Kulick stayed up to record the day’s events in his journal. In addition to their duties around camp, everyone had work to do on their educational projects. As the crew’s journalist, Kulick was charged with recording the official account of the expedition. That meant taking time away from sleep, but he took the job seriously. If everything went according to plan, his notes from the trip would eventually get turned into a book, and who knew, maybe even a movie.
“I am no longer Bob Kulick, I am now Colin Crevel, a voyageur,” he scratched into his notebook with a fountain pen. A bottle of ink was open next to him and he wrote by the light of the fire. “We have to forget our old ways, forget about jumping in a car to go somewhere, buying new shoes or new clothes when they wear out. Don’t think about what is to come, the cold of winter, the strain of portages, endless hours of work. Think rather of what you are doing now, live the life of a voyageur, live your life paddle stroke by paddle stroke.”
He closed his notebook after recording a few more details about the day. His head and torso were sheltered beneath the ribs of the canoe, his legs by the tarp. Some people snored along the row of men, others slept in silence. Peering up into the darkness, Kulick glimpsed a sliver of moon through a gap between the canoe and the tarp. The pale orb was waning gibbous; it had been full two nights earlier and now was slightly diminished. It was like a beacon from the past. The same moon shone on the French voyageurs in 1681, although their moon didn’t have human footprints etched into its dusty surface. But from this distance you couldn’t see the footprints anyway.
Cornwall, Ontario
August 16, 1976
“Allons les gars!”
Nearly a week into the expedition Lewis’s chipper wake-up call was becoming as grating as any alarm clock. His voice rang through the cool air as he went from one shelter to another. It was 6:00, the sun just rising and smearing light across the cold sky. Some men grunted and slowly extricated themselves from their sleeping bags, while others jumped up full of verve, ready for the day. Mark Fredenburg and Sam Hess belonged to the latter group. Fredenburg greeted each day with a loud, “Good morning, world!” while Hess, who slept in the same shelter, tossed away his sleeping bag and pulled out the leather pouch containing his flint and steel. As the fire starter for his module of eight men, the longer Hess took to get moving, the longer it would be before Fredenburg, the cook, could heat up a breakfast. No fire, no food.
Starting a fire with nothing but a jagged piece of flint and a small slab of steel is an art, one that was practiced for thousands of years before matches made their debut. It starts with a piece of steel or iron and a glassy stone such as quartz, jasper, or flint. The stones alone can’t conjure up fire; it’s their ability to release particles of iron from the steel striker and instantaneously expose the particles to oxygen that coaxes a spark seemingly out of thin air. It was a flashy trick in an age of lighters and matches, but for the crew of the La Salle expedition it was also a matter of survival.
Anyone could learn to make a fire, but Hess was gaining a reputation as the fastest and most reliable fire starter on the crew. He always carried tinder with him, doing his best to keep it dry even on the water. Frayed bark from a cedar tree was the best. He rolled it up into a little mouse nest and laid it at the bottom of the fire pit, then worked on drawing a spark out of his flint and steel. With one hand holding the angular flint with a small piece of cotton on the edge, Hess used the steel to strike down on the flint at an angle. The flint shaved a sliver of iron off, which reached a molten temperature and created a spark on the cotton cloth. The process took only seconds. Hess transferred the spark to the center of his tinder ball and brought his face up close to
the enveloped spark. He blew gently until ribbons of smoke curled out. Once the fibrous ball began smoking, fire was sure to follow. All hail Prometheus.
A tiny fire still needed assistance to grow. Hess fed twigs onto the tinder ball, then sticks, and finally larger pieces of wood. Eventually the crackling fire was hot enough to withstand a breeze and survive an invasion by a black Dutch oven containing the morning’s breakfast—unsweetened oatmeal or cornmeal made with water. Sometimes they had maple syrup to pour on top. Just a few days ago the ladies on the liaison team had gone to a store to buy them cinnamon. But there’d been some confusion between the French-speaking shopkeeper and the English-speaking shoppers, and only after the men poured the spice all over the pot of oatmeal did they realize the cinnamon was actually cloves. The taste was terrible, spicy and bitter, but most of the crew were hungry enough to stomach anything. Their food often had a sprinkling of grit mixed in as well. Sometimes the sand was leftover from cleaning the pot the night before, or it was blown in from the surrounding terrain. Hess had learned to chew quickly and ignore the disconcerting crunch.
With the morning’s fire blazing away, Hess returned to the tent to pack up his belongings. By that point everyone in camp was bustling around in preparation for the day: packing or eating breakfast by one of the three fires or stretching or having their raw, blistered hands bandaged by Dick Stillwagon. Their muscles were getting stronger day by day, but the toughness of their skin was lagging behind. Hess had layers of blisters across his hands and each day of paddling meant tearing them open again. Today they were traveling from Cornwall, Ontario, to Massena, New York, on the opposite side of the river, thirteen miles against the current.
The Last Voyageurs Page 6
