Reid could be amiable, charming, and inspiring. But he could also be short-tempered and overly demanding. These qualities are not uncommon to leaders, and everyone on the crew exhibited some of them from time to time. In Reid’s case, the problem was that half the time he wasn’t around. He couldn’t always stay to help unload his canoe and cut wood or pitch the shelter because he had to meet with the press and the town officials, or his wife and the other members of the liaison team. Everyone understood that those duties fell to him as creator and public representative number one of the expedition. But it was still irksome that his share of work fell to others. And then at night, when everyone else sat around the fires singing or talking or reading, Reid was often gone, writing applications for grants to continue financing the expedition. They were surviving on loans so far, but Lewis worried they wouldn’t have enough to finish the voyage.
But this wasn’t a concern he shared with most of the other crew members. For many of them, respect was earned by pulling your weight, doing your chores, being reliable. And since they were, for the most part, oblivious to the financial state of the expedition, Reid didn’t seem to be doing anything but ordering other people around and spending time with the liaison team. His absence and his style of leadership—an unclear blend of democracy and dictatorship where he asked for opinions but ultimately made his own decisions—left a void in the chain of command. Power loves a vacuum, and the younger crew members looked to different adults to take a more prominent leadership role. As the group’s navigator, Ron Hobart seemed like the most likely candidate, and he was supported by Cox. Both regularly found themselves at odds with Reid.
Ken did what he could to support Reid’s decision-making, even when he didn’t agree with his brother. The last thing Reid needed was another voice of dissent. Despite help from his brother and some members of the crew, a few days earlier at Newcastle, Ontario, Reid had finally made the decision to abandon his grant applications and extra fund-raising efforts. He feared for the future of the expedition if he wasn’t around more, and given the choice between finishing with more debt and not finishing at all, he chose the former. They’d have to rely on the fund-raising apparatus still in place back in Chicago, where Reid’s parents continued with the bookkeeping and sent regular updates to their donors. They had enough money for food, and there were plenty of communities along their route who had offered to provide them with a free meal. The main concern would be getting salaries to all the adults and scholarships for the students by the end of the expedition, not to mention paying off the personal loans Lewis had taken out.
Still, even without the added burden of writing letters and fund-raising, Reid struggled to balance all the different roles he had to fill. One of the most trying issues was the liaison team, headed by his wife. They had repeatedly borne the brunt of the crew’s ire. Crew members complained that the liaison team was unorganized, lazy, and irresponsible. They lost articles of clothing in the laundry, failed to generate enough publicity for the expedition, and didn’t do the necessary advance work with communities the voyageurs planned to visit. Was it so hard to make a phone call a week in advance to confirm arrangements with each town where the voyageurs planned to camp? Reid tried to defend the liaison team’s work—there were only four of them attempting to do the work of a much larger team and none of the women were experienced in event planning or public relations. Ken offered his own explanation for the issue. It was a problem he was familiar with in the theater: the stagehand effect.
“The stage crew is totally supporting the actor. If the actor reaches for a prop and it’s not there, he feels his vulnerability and trust has been betrayed. A lot of beginning actors, until they learn better, take it out on the stage hands,” Ken said. It didn’t help that the liaison team got none of the glory the crew members received. No one cheered for them after they drove all day to prepare a landing site for the expedition, and no one wanted to interview them or hear about the kind of work they did to ensure the expedition’s success. It was an exhausting, thankless job, and any mistakes were magnified in the eyes of the crew by the fact that they paddled all day in all sorts of weather.
None of these challenges was visible to the crowds that gathered around the crew members. They saw all the details that had been painstakingly crafted to look as authentic as possible—the moose-hide moccasins and matchless fires—and none of the interpersonal drama. The voyageurs lived under two layers of fiction: first, that they were from the 17th century, and second, that their lives were every bit as idyllic and adventurous as they appeared from the outside. This was certainly the impression they gave as they performed on a mobile stage for the suburb of Scarborough. The audience cheered and clapped after the last song, and the mayor returned to present the crew with maple leaf pins and Scarborough medallions.
By this point in the evening, Ken was desperate to use a restroom. Making matters more difficult was the design of the park. It had been built to fit in with the natural environment as much as possible, and he had trouble locating the dun-colored facilities. They blended right into the bluffs, with their peaked roofs imitating the jagged shape of the cliffs. When he finally found them, he ran into a stall and sat down. Just then a child’s voice asked, “Are you one of those La Salle guys?”
“Yes, I am,” he said, bemused.
A little hand appeared beneath the stall door holding a pen.
“Could you give me your autograph?”
“Of course.” Looking for something to write on and finding nothing but toilet paper, Ken took the pen and signed his name across it in cramped, uneven handwriting that slanted to the left. It never ceased to be a strange experience to have children ask for an autograph. In some ways, being a reenactor was like being a rock star, at least in the eyes of the children who’d never seen anything like them before. However unreal it felt, Ken never hesitated over which name to use when he signed an autograph. To the world, he was a voyageur who felt neither fear nor fatigue nor cravings for alcohol and nicotine. He was Antoine Brossard.
Chapter Five
STUCK BETWEEN
TWO WORLDS
Toronto Portage
September 1681
Canoes were an anomaly to the first Europeans visiting North America. They were sleek and narrow and utterly foreign. John McPhee writes of the sailors who had just crossed the Atlantic in enormous brigs: “Longboats were lowered, to be rowed by crews of four and upward. The sailors hauled at their oars. The Indians, two to a canoe, indolently whisked their narrow paddles and easily drew away. In their wake they left a stunning impression. Not only were they going faster. They could see where they were going.”1
This invaluable native technology was quickly adopted by European explorers. Canoes were the only method of transportation across the country if you didn’t want to travel entirely by foot. La Salle tried to introduce barques to the Great Lakes, but failed miserably when his forty-foot ship, the Griffin, disappeared on its maiden voyage. There wouldn’t be another ship built on the Great Lakes until 1734. Even a century after La Salle’s disastrous attempt to navigate the lakes, only sixteen ships plied their waters.2
Canoes became a key part of the voyageurs’ identity. The boats La Salle’s men used were twenty feet long and three feet wide and could carry up to twelve hundred pounds. They were made of strips of birch bark sewn together with spruce roots and stretched over a wooden frame, with long poles called grands-perches laid along the bottom to help distribute the weight.3 The canoes had to be sporadically repaired through a process called “gumming,” which required smearing melted spruce sap along cracks and holes in the bark.4 According to Nicholas de la Salle, a member of La Salle’s crew and no relation to him, one or two men could carry the weight of one canoe when they had to make portages across land.5 This detail was especially crucial since the men would be portaging to Lake Huron rather than traveling the easier route through Lake Erie.
La Salle knew the southern shore of Lake Erie was populated by
Iroquois and worried that running into them might lead to attacks.6 But as many canoeists will attest, paddling an extra fifty miles is always preferable to a ten-mile portage. The difficult Toronto Portage, established by earlier voyageurs, stretched over thirty miles between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe and required the men to carry all the canoes and gear. The portage was named not for the city that would eventually come to sit at the beginning of the trail but for a specific location called Tkaronto by Mohawk speakers to describe “where there are trees standing in the water.”7 The trail started at the Humber River and passed over the Oak Ridges Moraine. The voyageurs made the backbreaking trek up and down steep hills and through dense forests. Each man was expected to help carry a canoe or several ninety-pound bags, balanced with a tumpline across his forehead. It’s little wonder that voyageurs often suffered from hernias.8
La Salle and his men got back in their boats on Lake Huron in October. But they would have to hurry through the Great Lakes if they hoped to make it to the Mississippi before the upcoming winter froze all the rivers solid.
Toronto, Ontario
September 8, 1976
Sid Bardwell scanned the shoreline as his canoe glided past the white geodesic dome and tall stadium lights of the Ontario Center. Only ten or so people were there to greet them. Why was it that big cities seemed to have fewer people interested in the expedition? Maybe because in small towns the voyageurs were the only source of entertainment, like a band of traveling troubadours. In Toronto, the 2 million city dwellers had dozens of other things vying for their attention: the Toronto Argonauts football team played at Exhibition Stadium, concerts drew famous musicians such as Patti Smith and The Who, streets were filled with a plethora of bars and restaurants, and the Toronto International Film Festival was happening in the coming weeks. The sheer size of the city prevented the expedition from having much of an impact. The day was clear and calm and they’d seen the smoggy skyline and needle-like CN Tower from a distance in the morning, but it didn’t seem that anyone on shore had been watching their arrival, except maybe the liaison team. Then again, even the ladies might’ve had too much going on to find a spot on shore and watch their approach. They were always busy and disorganized, which meant it took twice as long to finish anything. They didn’t have a lot of free time to sit on the shore and stare out onto the lake in anticipation of the voyageurs’ arrival.
If anyone understood the dynamics of the liaison team, it was Bardwell. Until a week earlier, he’d been traveling with them. Technically, he was still part of that team and was just subbing into the crew since Father Loran had hurt his back. Bardwell, a tall, lanky teen who was rarely without his green-and-yellow-striped hat, had been recruited for the expedition at the very last minute. He hadn’t been a student at either of the Elgin schools and was younger than most of the others, having finished high school in three years. Reid Lewis heard about Bardwell from the teen’s father, who was the superintendent in Elk Grove, not far from Elgin. Lewis was intrigued when he heard about Bardwell’s trip down the Mississippi River a year earlier in a makeshift pontoon boat. He was still searching for an alternate by April 1976, just three months before the expedition’s start date. When he offered Bardwell the spot, the teenager got to work sewing clothes and building his endurance. It was a little awkward at first, being the outsider in a group of young men who had spent the better part of two years training together. But the crew was friendly and he was soon accepted into their ranks.
From the outset, the expedition had been the perfect alternative to a fourth year of high school. Bardwell had planned in advance to finish high school in three years instead of four. It required a combination of summer classes and a higher course load, but he wanted that last year to be dedicated to traveling or some kind of adventure before heading off to college. Bardwell loved camping and boating and was fascinated by the physical challenges past explorers had faced. His own great-grandmother had been a homesteader in Iowa in 1874. She remembered Thanksgiving dinners in a barn, when her family welcomed impoverished Native Americans who lived in the area to eat with them. “You can’t imagine how much the telephone changed the world,” she told her great-grandchildren decades later.
Bardwell could imagine it now; he had the unique perspective of witnessing communication between the crew and the liaison team from both sides. Neither group seemed particularly adept at communicating with the other, but it was especially frustrating when he was on the water with the crew and they had no idea where to land. Sometimes Cathy Palmer appeared at the edge of the water waving a big white flag to signal the canoes’ landing spot. Other times the canoes landed without being able to find the liaison team, uncertain if they would have the proper facilities or even permission to spend the night where they’d stopped. These incidents and others had led to some hard feelings on both sides.
Something that particularly irked the crew was the apparent lack of advance publicity. Here they were about to land in Toronto, the biggest city in Canada, and all they had was a minuscule welcome committee waiting for them on shore. But the lackluster welcome the men received was quickly forgotten once the men learned about their itinerary for the rest of the afternoon. Toronto city officials may not have spread word very far that their city was being invaded by a group of scruffy voyageurs, but they had planned a number of promising activities for the men. First they were taken for a tour of the warship HMCS Haida, the last Tribal-class destroyer in the world. It had the reputation as being “the fightingest ship in the Royal Canadian Navy.” Onboard the ship, the crew got the chance to take showers and learn about the destroyer’s history. A few crew members made the observation that everywhere they went, in Canada or the United States, people seemed particularly proud of their military history. No wonder the French were so often forgotten. Their military involvement in both countries was either short-lived or unsuccessful. The men tried to remedy this bit of historical amnesia by performing a musket salute for their hosts, guns aimed toward shore.
Bardwell didn’t have a musket of his own; only seven of the crew members had built them, and he’d gotten involved too late to be part of any of the construction projects. The musket men were proud of their guns, but they required a lot of care and upkeep. If they got wet, they would rust and jam up when you loaded the powder and pulled the trigger. Every time the men did a salute, there was always the risk that none of the muskets would work. Most of the time at least a couple went off, and those whose guns didn’t were saved from embarrassment by the bang and smoke of the neighboring guns.
With showers and an official welcome out of the way, the crew headed down to Fort York. The military fortifications were built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and had housed British soldiers during the War of 1812. Today the buildings were among the oldest in Toronto, and the crew had been invited to stay in the barracks. The wooden bunks were only six by four-and-a-half feet and had been shared by two men originally. Luckily no one had to share a bunk now, although some of the men’s feet hung over the edge. For Bardwell and Lieberman, two of the tallest men on the crew, it meant sleeping with considerably more than just their feet dangling off the end. It would’ve been more comfortable to sleep outside beneath the canoes as they were accustomed to, but they appreciated the fort’s hospitality. In addition to offering them a place to sleep with a roof over their heads, the men at the fort brought the voyageurs twelve loaves of fresh-baked bread and several cases of Molson Golden, which had become everyone’s favorite beer. Nobody felt any qualms about drinking while they were on Canadian soil, since they were all of legal drinking age there, and several towns along the way had offered them bottles of wine as souvenirs.
That evening the crew sat around a fire with the men from the fort, drinking beer and swapping songs, with the Canadians’ songs getting progressively raunchier. The Canadians ended the night with a series of ghost stories about Fork York, perhaps hoping to send the young voyageurs to bed with a chill. But ghosts were hardly the kind of thing t
hey needed to be worried about. The task facing them for the next two weeks—their portage through downtown Toronto—was far more intimidating than imaginary apparitions.
Bardwell woke the next morning to the sound of crew members dragging Clif Wilson out of his bunk and singing happy birthday. “Okay, but where am I going?” he asked as they carried him out into the barracks yard in nothing but his red underwear.
“We’re putting you in the stocks!” someone answered.
Outside the barracks, they strapped Wilson’s feet into the stocks, locked him in, and posed proudly for photos. Luckily there hadn’t been any stockades around during Bardwell’s eighteenth birthday a month ago. Instead, he was the first of the crew to experience the Quebecois tradition of being thrown into the air once for every year of birth. Being tossed into the air eighteen times sounded like a recipe for injury, but with so many people pitching in to carry his weight, Bardwell had flown up and down as if on a trampoline. The practice had been continued with other birthdays since then, though he wasn’t sure how they’d manage Father Loran, who was in his fifties.
When the morning’s entertainment concluded, the crew spent the next few hours working on clothes and moccasins in preparation for the wear and tear that would occur during the portage. It was another beautiful day, clear and warm. The men sat bare-chested in the sun with their backs against the gray stone wall surrounding the fort or in the shadow of the barracks. Bardwell had a shirt in his lap and was sewing on the deer antler buttons. By this point in the expedition, everyone had perfected his skills with a needle and thread and could put together a pair of leather moccasins or repair a torn seam practically with his eyes closed. Some people wore through their moccasins faster than others and had to make new pairs more often, which seemed like it would be the main problem as they hiked along the concrete streets and sidewalks. Grass and sand were gentlest on the leather moccasins, followed by dirt, then gravel, stone, and concrete. Most of the men had developed the habit of going about barefoot during the day and the soles of their feet had grown thick and insensitive with the practice. Some planned to walk most of the portage barefoot to protect their moccasins.
The Last Voyageurs Page 10
