The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

  Kulick was impressed by the houseboat and its history. Only a year ago it had been submerged in river water up to the top of its first deck. McNally bought it for $1.00 and got the fire department to help him resurrect it. Once it was safely docked near his house, it was restored to all its former turn-of-the-century splendor. The woodwork was unbelievable, and details like the original brass fireplace had been refurbished as well. McNally even stocked the cabinets with coffee mugs from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair; he was now using those mugs to serve coffee and Coca-Cola to the voyageurs. Talk about classy: coffee and donuts on a gorgeous antique houseboat. Even Cox was happy to get some Coke.

  The tour of La Duchesse was enjoyable but short, as the voyageurs still had fourteen miles to go before they reached Gananoque on the Canadian side of the river. Only a couple of weeks earlier that distance might’ve seemed impossible. Paddling continued to be hard, exhausting work. And taller members of the crew, like Lieberman, were dealing with terrible backaches from having to bend over so much in the little boat. There was a reason most voyageurs had been short and squat. Their physique was matched more closely by Cox, who’d once been a competitive gymnast. But they were all getting stronger, and the miles melted away faster. Everyone’s arms and torso were burnt red or had turned golden tan—Gorse looked like a regular Adonis with his wavy blond hair. They were also pocked with mosquito bites. But it was invigorating and liberating to live outdoors. No roof over your head but the sky, which changed every day, no home to call your own but the canoe you turned into a shelter at night. The scenery was beautiful, especially now that they had entered the Thousand Islands region. They’d passed Corn Island, Ontario; Grenadier Island, New York; and Chimney Island, Ontario, the past few days. Today they were paddling along a narrow channel between Wellesley Island and the southern shore. The land was adorned with thatches of cedar and pine trees. Patches of artichoke-green moss covered the rocks along the riverbank. Traveling by water gave the crew a whole new perspective on the world, and sleeping outdoors made them feel like they were part of the beautiful, wild landscape. It seemed like the way man was supposed to live.

  The camp at Gananoque turned out to be a perfect spot along the river. Though the men always knew approximately where they were ending the day, oftentimes the suitability of the campsite would be a mystery until they arrived: it could be a smelly morass of mud and weeds, or rocky, or in the middle of a town. If they were spending the night near or in a town, the liaison team coordinated with city officials to pick a spot for the voyageurs, then flagged the men in with a big white banner. Being in a town meant the crew got to interact more with other people, but it also made their campsite vulnerable to theft. They’d had to set guards a few nights because of the possibility of vandalism. If the men were spending a night away from crowds, they chose their own campsite based on which stretch of shoreline looked most inviting. Camp here was just off the water under the shade of trees, and Gananoque community members further warmed the hearts of the voyageurs by providing them with a huge dinner of hamburgers, corn, and potato salad. Kulick ate five burgers on his own to make up for the paltry cheese sandwiches they’d gotten at lunch.

  The town had arranged for several other activities in between the voyageurs’ presentation in a gazebo near their campsite, including a trip to the showers at the local hockey rink. To top it off, the girls who had served them dinner brought candy bars for everyone. The chocolate and the girls were the perfect treat to end the night. Gorse and Gross were by far the most popular among fawning teenage girls, but the more tanned and muscular everyone got, the more likely they were to elicit looks of admiration and compliments from members of the fairer sex. The expedition had set rules about not going off alone with a girl, but the men couldn’t help looking. It was a rush to be the most popular attraction in town.

  Back in the camp that evening, Cox, Lewis, and a few others sat up around the fires talking and relaxing while everyone else crawled into their sleeping bags. The burning logs hissed and popped. Cicadas scratched out a shrill symphony from their perches in surrounding trees. The men had a full day coming up in the morning, their last day on the St. Lawrence River before entering the first of the Great Lakes: Lake Ontario.

  Around midnight the sleeping crew members were jarred awake by the sound of shrieking and the beating of drums outside their shelters. Kulick tried to shake off some of his sleepy befuddlement. From a gap in the shelter canvas he could just make out the sight of legs running through their campsite. Shit. It was probably some rowdy townies wrecking the place. He pulled on his pants to go help, inadvertently planting a hand in the middle of DiFulvio’s chest and shoving him to the ground just as the latter tried to sit up.

  When he got outside there was no wreckage or destruction and the voices had quieted. More confused than ever, Kulick made his way down to the last of the three fires they’d built earlier in the night and found several dozen teenagers in Native American costumes and war paint sitting around the fire and passing around a peace pipe with Lewis. He recognized some of the girls from before, members of the Gananoque summer recreation staff and the girls’ softball team. Splashes of white light erupted sporadically around the campfire. Kulick blinked and realized it was the flashbulb of a photographer from the local paper. As he watched the bizarre scene, more voyageurs stumbled out of their shelters, having been awoken by the sound.

  The surreal peace-pipe smoking lasted a short while, then the “natives” made to leave. Just as everyone crawled back into their beds, the “raiders” came howling through camp again, beating their drums and screeching. It was a ridiculous racket, but Kulick had never been happier to be part of the expedition. Gananoque was, by far, the greatest town they’d been in yet.

  Chapter Four

  THE BONDS

  OF BROTHERHOOD

  Lake Ontario

  September 1681

  What kind of person set off into the wilderness for months or years without knowing if he’d ever be home again? What thoughts crossed the mind of the voyageur when he left behind all that was familiar to enter alien terrain? We know only the broad strokes of La Salle the man, a member of the nobility and the man who led the voyageurs, and what we do know is colored by the accounts of his contemporaries. As one historian wrote of La Salle, “He was hated more than he was liked, reviled more than he was praised, denounced and condemned more than he was commended and defended.”1 Even if this historic interpretation of his personality is incorrect, La Salle did seem to excite the ire of his men. On one of his exploratory trips down the Ohio River (all of which took place years before he was granted permission to explore the Mississippi), one of La Salle’s servants went so far as to try to poison him by mixing hemlock into his salad. Though the attempt wasn’t fatal, it made La Salle ill for more than a month.2

  But we don’t know what La Salle himself would have said in response to accusations about his character flaws. However despised he may have been, he also earned the loyalty of men like Henri de Tonty and Governor Frontenac.

  If so many difficulties exist in trying to understand a landed, literate man like La Salle, about whom much is written, discerning the motivations of the illiterate drudges who served as voyageurs is akin to navigating an unfamiliar coastline in the fog. What can be said of the voyageurs as a group is that their reputation preceded them. At certain points in the history of New France up to 12 percent of the male population was working in the fur trade as voyageurs or coureurs de bois, men who set off into the wilderness illegally, without permission from the government. They quickly grew into mythic figures similar to those people who populate American tall tales.3 A voyageur was a man whose central principle in life was fulfilling expectations of masculinity. He passed much of his life in a liminal zone between “savage” and “civilized” (as it was then understood), giving him the opportunity to create new social norms. An individual could earn higher wages for working harder and doing odd jobs such as hunting or learning indigenous langu
ages. These were the types of things that impressed their bosses, the bourgeois leaders. Among comrades the voyageurs built a reputation by gambling, winning boxing matches, and running rapids. Having a good sense of humor and working without complaint were also highly valued personality traits.

  Learning the code of the voyageurs and earning the respect of fellow paddlers was no easy task for a novice. As a way of initiating a greenhorn into the brotherhood of paddlers, experienced voyageurs often staged a mock baptism. The earliest known spot for such religious rites was along the Ottawa River at a place called Pointe-aux-Baptemes, Quebec, the first location past Montreal where the landscape suddenly transformed into craggy bedrock.4 Not only was the scenery starkly different from what the new men had seen before, but going beyond this point meant it would be hard to return to Montreal alone if they chose to desert. The baptism ritual—which could be a bit of splashing or a total soaking, depending on the mood of the initiators—was a symbolic rebirth, a shedding of one’s old identity. Welcome to the New World. There’s no turning back now. You better learn to blend in if you want to survive.

  La Salle’s men would likely not have had to worry about initiation rituals on their departure from Montreal. They didn’t even paddle past Pointe-aux-Baptemes, since they were traveling along Lake Ontario, two hundred miles south of the Ottawa River. Their mission was different from that of the typical voyageurs. Instead of shipping furs, they were providing manpower for an explorer, an altogether more dangerous task. And with a leader like La Salle, who had a history of inspiring defections, it seemed likely that the thirty men who started the voyage would not all make it to the end before deciding to turn back.

  Kingston, Ontario

  August 24, 1976

  Ken Lewis lay on his back in the scratchy, sun-browned grass of Lake Ontario Park, feet crossed at the ankles, head pillowed by an angular log that would later be used for firewood. His left arm was draped across his chest, palm and one finger wrapped with white tape that had turned a dirty gray over the course of the day. His right arm was bent at a ninety-degree angle at the elbow, balancing a log on its rough end to cast a shadow over his face and keep the sun from his eyes. Tomorrow marked two weeks on the expedition. Two weeks since he’d said good-bye to his wife, Judy. Two weeks since he’d drunk a drop of alcohol. Two weeks since he’d tasted the ashy smoke of a cigarette. Cigarettes were banned on the expedition, but most everyone else smoked tobacco from their wooden pipes. He’d decided to quit both vices at the same time, because the expedition seemed like the perfect break from his old life. He forced himself to abstain from smoking a pipe and resorted to chasing after puffs of secondary smoke that drifted across the water when other people took a break from paddling and lit their pipes. The little whiffs of smoke he managed to catch did nothing to relieve his cravings or reduce his irritability. But at least he could escape in his mind. Eyes closed, he’d fantasize about the Cornstalk Fence in New Orleans. He’d rent a room there at the end of the trip, buy a box of Cuban cigars and a bottle of bourbon, and fill a bathtub with steaming hot water and enough bubbles to form a snowy mountain over the edge. He’d soak, drink, and smoke himself into blissful oblivion. Only seven-and-a-half months and three thousand miles to go.

  Until then, he’d have to suffer in silence.

  Not that he was all that silent. Some might even call him cantankerous and prone to picking arguments. Not necessarily the kind of person you wanted to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with. At least he had outlets for his edginess, a couple of ways to drain the bile of a bad mood. On the water he poured his energy into paddling. Situated in the middle of the canoe behind George LeSieutre and Sam Hess and ahead of Mark Fredenburg, all Ken had to focus on was raw power. He worked hard to wear himself out. Today they’d gone twenty-three miles from Gananoque to Kingston, and they’d still managed to arrive two hours early.

  “La Salle never had to work his ass off in the morning so he could sit outside a town and wait,” Bill Watts had grumbled during their two-hour lunch break. But being a little early was a hell of a lot better than being late. The towns were expecting a grand entrance complete with synchronized paddle salute and the smoke and boom of blanks fired from their replica 17th-century flintlock muskets. Even setting up camp was something of a performance, with kids and adults crowding around to ask about the mallets the voyageurs used to pound stakes into the ground, about the knives they wore around their waists, about sleeping under canoes every night.

  But the real show was on a stage instead of in their camp. It was in these almost-daily presentations that Ken could once more lose himself. The scripted stage performance came complete with songs, gags, and a smattering of educational information. Ken wrote it and organized the score with the help of one of his friends, Howard Platt. The two met in an acting class and instantly hit it off, bonding over a shared obsession with Mark Twain and paddling down the Mississippi. Platt was off in Hollywood now, making a weekly appearance as the clownish Officer Hoppy in the NBC show Sanford and Son, and Ken had transitioned to writing plays and copy for big firms. Given all his experience, it made sense for Ken to take up his pen once more in service of a historical reenactment. He had a turn for the dramatic and was able to slip into new characters with ease. He even had the appearance of a scruffy voyageur: long brown hair pulled into a ponytail, a wiry brown beard, a beak-like nose, and a rugged leanness that suggested missed meals and long hours paddling. But he didn’t want to steal the limelight. Plenty of other people had main roles and lines to memorize for their performances.

  “You know, it occurs to me that with all the talking we’ve been doing up here about the voyageur, there might just be a couple of you out there that don’t know what a voyageur was,” Cox said later that day to the audience spread out before them in the park. For Kingston being home to La Salle’s first fort, Fort Frontenac, the crowd was disappointingly small.

  “Is that possible? I don’t believe it!” Ken interjected with a heavy French accent.

  As Cox explained the duties and personalities of the voyageurs, John DiFulvio, who went by the French name La Violette, lumbered onto the stage in nothing but pink long underwear. He was gruff and brawny with a dense, dark beard and brown hair down to his shoulders. His entrance was always sure to elicit laughter. The “dress the voyageur” sketch was so popular, a Chicago-area newspaper had turned DiFulvio into a cutout paper doll, complete with three outfits and a choice of accessories that included his paddle and musket.

  “The voyageur’s roomy French peasant britches were reinforced in the knees and seat to withstand months of sitting and kneeling in canoes, and they were constructed of very heavy sail canvas,” Hobart said as he passed a pair of pants to DiFulvio.

  “Heavy leggings, called mitasses, were borrowed from the Indians. Mitasses were sometimes made of leather, or, as you can see here, canvas,” continued Fredenburg. “They protected the voyageur’s legs from brambles on long portages and kept the bottoms of his wide pants from getting in his way.”

  One by one, crew members brought forward articles of clothing and described their function until DiFulvio had grown even larger and been bundled in every layer he had. From there, they launched into a paddling song called “C’est L’aviron” with Hobart strumming a guitar as they sang. Not everyone had been blessed with a good voice or the ability to hold a note, but after months of training, Hobart had turned them into a respectable group of singers. They hardly ever sounded flat. Although sometimes that meant telling Hess and Gorse to just mouth along.

  At the conclusion of the show, the voyageurs were ushered off to a formal dinner. Kingston had been the site of plenty of extraordinary spectacles over the past few years; La Salle: Expedition II was hardly the first group of sportsmen to attempt an unusual feat on Lake Ontario. American athlete Diana Nyad became the first person to successfully swim thirty-two miles across the lake two years earlier. A month earlier, Kingston had hosted the sailing portion of the 1976 Summer Olympics. That h
ad been a memorable event, as much for the stellar abilities of skippers and crews battling for gold as for the antics of one of the losers. The British two-man boat named Gift ’Orse, manned by Alan Warren and David Hunt, stole the show. They’d won the silver medal in the boat four years earlier. After finishing fifteenth overall in Kingston, the pair of Brits decided to put the limping stallion out of its misery. On the last day of the races, they brought several gallons of gasoline on board and set the boat aflame while still on the water, sending up clouds of black smoke and drawing the attention of helicopters and harbor police boats.5 Although the two claimed the fire was caused by spontaneous combustion, Warren later said, “She went lame on us, so we decided the poor old ’orse should be cremated.”

  By comparison, twenty-three men dressed in 17th-century garb eating a steak dinner with linen napkins and crystal wineglasses didn’t seem quite so odd.

  In addition to being a popular venue for water sports and a historic city, Kingston also marked the end of the St. Lawrence River and the beginning of the Great Lakes. Paddling on the lakes would be an entirely different experience than traveling along the river. The current and the occasional rapids had been challenging on the St. Lawrence, and they’d all had to adjust to the voyageur routine, but the Great Lakes held their own dangers. It wouldn’t be hard to get caught up in a storm and swept away from shore or to capsize in large waves. The six canoes didn’t have any kind of entourage following them, so if they got into trouble, they had only one another to rely on. It didn’t matter how many times they practiced capsizing on rivers near Elgin before departing; the experience couldn’t compare to an unexpected roll.