As for the modern reenactors, personality was everything. It was what divided them and brought them together again, what kept them moving forward when others would have stopped. Would they be remembered for all they’d done? Would states and cities and schools and streets be named for their accomplishments? No. As the years went by, fewer and fewer people would remember the journey of the last voyageurs. But the men themselves would have the voyage permanently etched in their skin and bones. One can’t embark on an odyssey and return unchanged.
It took another four hours of paddling for the men to reach Pilottown again. The current pushed hard against them as they made their way north, just as the pilots had warned. But it wasn’t strong enough to stop them, especially after their grand success. When they pulled into the little stilted city, they were met with incredulous looks from the pilots and a bottle of whisky in the bar. The man who’d made the bet was too embarrassed to show his face.
Pilottown to Venice, Louisiana
April 10, 1977
The morning after the end was surreal. It was a Sunday, so Father Loran held mass as he usually did. It was the first time in years the people of Pilottown had mass performed in their village, and they were grateful for it. The pilots shared a breakfast with the voyageurs, complete with eggs, grits, sausage, and French toast. Then it was time for a last day of paddling, retracing their path for the second day in a row. They had no choice but to follow their earlier route once more and head back up the river to reach Venice. It was the closest town accessible by road, and they needed cars to carry their gear and themselves back to their homes in Illinois and trailers to cart the canoes back with them.
Even against the current, it was a short paddle. Only two and a half hours on the river. No audience waiting for them or their shows, no potlucks to attend or schools to visit. Only their 20th-century lives to get back to. It was chaos trying to unload the canoes for good and organize the five thousand pounds of gear in the trunks of cars. Everyone was rushing, most of them eager to leave. Ken Lewis was thinking about his celebratory visit to New Orleans and the bottle of bourbon and box of Cuban cigars he had planned to buy. He’d decided to forgo those vices. It hadn’t been an easy eight months going clean, but why break his streak now? He could treat himself with a greasy, sugary beignet from Café du Monde instead, and maybe a cream puff from another patisserie, and a lavish dinner at a nice restaurant. He could still take the hot bath, and it would still feel superb. Then, when he got back home, he’d join Alcoholics Anonymous and keep himself away from beer and liquor forever.
Gary Braun seemed to be one of the few who felt disappointed by the abrupt ending. It felt so . . . unceremonious. They’d done a final paddle salute on the Mississippi River, planted the cross yet again, and Lewis had thanked all the crew members for their hard work, then that was it. Braun didn’t know what he wanted in place of the disorganized jubilation. Something that would provide more closure. Something that would say, “This is the very last day of your life as a voyageur. You’re about to reenter the real world.” Instead everyone just changed out of their voyageur clothing and into their civvies. Lots of guys had trouble fitting into their old clothing. Some had lost weight, others had gained it, and all of them had increased their muscle mass. Their thighs were larger and their shoulders wider. Normal clothes felt strange. Packing the five thousand pounds of gear they’d carried across the country in canoes and on their backs felt strange. Getting into cars and vans and boarding planes felt even stranger. They were walking out of the past into the present, a world that had existed all along right before their eyes and to which they now unquestionably belonged again. It was an uncomfortably abrupt transition. Braun knew they’d all be meeting up as a group in a month’s time to assemble their notes and put on a few final performances. But by then everything would be different—they’d be 20th-century men again who just happened to know quite a lot about the lives of those who lived three hundred years earlier. Right now there seemed to be no acknowledgment of all that they’d been through. Everyone just wanted to get home. They wanted to say their good-byes and forget about the 17th century for a while.
Sid Bardwell hopped into one of the liaison team vans once more to transport a couple of men to the airport before driving the van back up to Illinois on his own. He appreciated the quietness of the drive after so many months of being surrounded by other people. After only a day away from the crew, the whole expedition felt like a vibrant, fantastic dream. It had lasted seemingly forever and now it was suddenly done. His alter ego Nika, La Salle’s Indian guide, died a fast death on that car ride home, left behind somewhere in the Louisiana bayous. But the person who exited the van in Illinois wasn’t the same person who’d first driven it to Montreal last summer. Like all the others, Bardwell had changed.
“I think the question usually asked is how was it, which is impossible to answer,” he wrote in his journal when he got home. “Hell it was good and it was bad, it was hot, it was cold, it was one hell of a lot of fun and it was a real bitch, but I am glad I lived it. Then if the person who asked the question in the first place is still there, they ask, What next? or, Would you do it again? Yes, if I had never done it before, but having done it, it’s been done.”
EPILOGUE
Lake Kegonsa, Wisconsin
August 16, 2014
For only the second time in three and a half decades, the crew of La Salle: Expedition II had gathered together for a reunion. Those who’d grown to be close friends over the course of the journey had kept in touch throughout the years, but it wasn’t until 2012 that they’d all made a concerted effort to reunite with everyone. That first gathering was held in New Orleans, and there were four generations present for the celebration: parents of the voyageurs, the now middle-aged crew members, their children, and even a few grandchildren.
It had been a minor shock for those who hadn’t seen one another in more than thirty years. Gone were the wild beards, the long hair, and the well-defined muscles of their canoeing days. Now most had gray hair or none at all. Some had beer bellies and wore glasses, while others had suffered illnesses or gone under the knife for injuries old and new. The men who had been teenagers when they were last together had jobs, wives, and children. They were lawyers, accountants, construction workers, park rangers, business owners, managers, and teachers. But underneath the new skins they’d acquired with age and experience, they retained much of what made them voyageurs.
The second reunion in Wisconsin required much less reacquainting. They’d seen one another only two years ago and already had plans for another reunion, this one to be held in Toronto in 2016 for the expedition’s 40th anniversary. There were discussions of family life and careers, the problems and conveniences of the 21st century. But as always, the conversations held around a crackling bonfire eventually turned to their one shared experience and the ways it continued to shape them.
“I’m afraid there’s a lot I don’t remember,” George LeSieutre said of the voyage. He sat next to his wife, Annie, both of them with graying hair, George’s thick and in disarray. He was still thin and fit despite the passage of years: he liked to run marathons and the occasional ultra-marathon.
“Join the club. It’s the forgetful club. The forty-year club,” Randy Foster said.
“You hear the story and it’s like, do I know that? Or have I just heard the story so many times?” Chuck Campbell said. He still wore a beard and had the same soft voice he’d had on the trip.
“Should I know that? Was I there?” LeSieutre concluded. Why was it so difficult to reconstruct something they’d all lived?
Part of the problem in creating a coherent narrative was that they were twenty-three individuals, all with different perspectives, different memories, different responses to what they’d undergone. The expedition had never been one story. It was the accumulated experiences of twenty-three young men living through something extreme and unique that tested their fortitude and their ability to see past one another’s
flaws. Little wonder that it was so hard to remember everything or understand what precisely had happened after nearly forty years had passed.
There, too, was the lack of organization of the surviving physical mementos. At the end of the expedition, everyone had taken home their canoe paddles, voyageur clothing, personal journals, and a collection of photos. Normal life resumed, with most going to college, others to work. Some of the crew members had scrapbooks created by family members that were filled with yellowing newspaper clips about the expedition. A few copies of the vinyl LPs the men had made during a short recording session at a studio in Chicago at the end of the expedition were still floating around eBay and used record shops, and were occasionally purchased by those who wanted to hear the songs of the voyageurs.
Reid Lewis himself had old promotional materials and documents from his La Salle: Expedition II presentation, which he created at the conclusion of the expedition as a way of paying off the debts he still owed. But the professional film footage of the men in canoes was gone. The boxes of notes from their nineteen interdisciplinary projects had vanished. No lesson plans were created. No studies were undertaken. The notes and recordings were lost in the chaos of trying to pay off debts in the aftermath of the expedition, and Lewis himself had been busy crafting the presentation he gave to hundreds of schools and businesses across the country and around the world in his new role as a motivational speaker. Years later, the letters from students and executives who saw his presentation were what mattered most. Their stories of using Lewis’s advice to overcome personal hardships were the tangible result of the successful reenactment voyage. They were proof that the same spirit of adventure that had motivated him to organize the expedition could still be shared with and utilized by people of all ages.
But apart from those people who saw the post-trip presentations, La Salle: Expedition II became a mostly forgotten reenactment that happened during a brief, feverish period when America was obsessed with examining its historical roots. Whatever significance the voyage was supposed to have in the larger national narrative had long since been buried by a new discourse—terrorism and technology and social media and climate calamities. What then, was the point? Did any of it matter?
Perhaps the expedition’s real value was unmeasurable, existing in the memories and abilities of all those who were touched by it. It was the hundreds of fires the men cooked and ate from for eight months and the stories they told one another each night. It was the children and adults who saw the lengths the men would go to in order to reach their destination. It was the courage and determination they showed in the face of so many hardships, major and minor, along the way. It was the self-confidence each of the participants earned by completing such a strenuous journey, the generosity they were shown by strangers, the friendships they formed. Each of the crew members carried all of these things inside them throughout their lives, thanks to the improbable vision of one man: Reid Lewis.
Whatever their relationship with him may have been on the expedition, all the crew members agreed that Lewis was the driving force behind the expedition’s completion. Lewis, on the other hand, insisted that the expedition didn’t belong to him, even though he was its creator. “It was our expedition,” he said decades later. “Everyone played an important role, including all the thousands of people along the way.” He credited his wife and the other members of the liaison team and everyone on the crew and all their supporters with the expedition’s success. No matter how much or little a person had done to support the voyage, all of it mattered. They all provided the manpower for his original idea.
Though Lewis and his men had set out to create a replica of a much earlier journey, the end result was something else, unique and wholly new. It was a wild jump into the natural world, a Thoreauvian rejection of modernity and its easy comforts. La Salle embraced the world he lived in; the members of La Salle: Expedition II rejected it. But instead of making the men unfit for a life with electricity and indoor plumbing and the communication and information capacities of the Internet, living like voyageurs gave them the courage to overcome obstacles that have haunted humans since the dawning of self-awareness—uncertainty and doubt. More valuable than the increased muscle mass or the knowledge of obscure 17th-century names and events was the confidence the crew members gained in completing their odyssey. As Lewis likes to say, “You don’t cross a canyon in two jumps. You either go for it or you don’t.” At numerous points along their route the modern voyageurs encountered gaping chasms, valleys so wide and obviously uncrossable that most sane people would have turned back. But they never did. They always chose to jump.
ENDNOTES
CHAPTER ONE: MAKE NO LITTLE PLANS
1 Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker and Company, 1997).
2 Claiborne Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
3 Donald Johnson, La Salle: A Perilous Odyssey from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, 1st ed. (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002).
4 Chilton Williamson, Jr., “They Almost Stole the Bicentennial,” National Review, 8/20/1976.
5 Ibid.
6 “The U.S. Begins Its Birthday Bash,” Time, 4/21/1975.
7 “Bicentennial Times,” American Revolution Bicentennial Administration, April 1975.
8 “The Birthday Spirit,” Time, July 5, 1976.
CHAPTER TWO: RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST
1 Anka Muhlstein, La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier, trans. from French by Willard Wood (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994).
2 Claiborne Skinner, The Upper Country: French Enterprise in the Colonial Great Lakes (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
3 “Letters Patent Granted by the King of France to the Sieur de La Salle on the 12th of May, 1678,” Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. 1., ed. H. W. Beckwith (Springfield: H. W. Rokker Co., 1903).
4 William Henry Atherton, Under the French Regime, 1535–1760 (Chicago: S. J. Clarke, 1914).
5 “Letters Patent Granted by the King of France to the Sieur de La Salle on the 12th of May, 1678,” Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. 1., ed. H. W. Beckwith (Springfield: H. W. Rokker Co., 1903).
6 National Center for Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_075.asp
7 Jon Van, “Teens to Put Safety First in Reliving Canoe Trek,” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1976. This quote and the following quotes are taken from this article.
8 Karen Blecha, “Reliving the Past,” The Daily Herald (Chicago), July 17, 1976.
9 “Hooray for That Old RWB,” Time, July 5, 1976.
CHAPTER THREE: THE LIFE OF A VOYAGEUR
1 Anka Muhlstein, La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013).
2 Using http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~unclefred/MONETARY.htm and http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm to calculate inflation
3 Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
4 Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle, Relation of the Discoveries and Voyages of Cavelier de la Salle from 1679 to 1681, trans. Melville B. Anderson (Chicago: The Caxton Club, 1901).
5 Henri de Tonty, Relation of Henri de Tonty Concerning the Explorations of La Salle from 1678 to 1683, trans. Melville Anderson (Chicago: The Caxton Club, 1898).
6 Claire Puccia Parham, The St. Lawrence Seaway and Power Project: An Oral History of the Greatest Construction Show on Earth (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2009).
7 David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
CHAPTER FOUR: THE BONDS OF BROTHERHOOD
1 John Upton Terrell, La Salle: The Life and Times of an Explorer (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1968).
> 2 James E. Bruseth and Toni S. Turner, From a Watery Grave: The Discovery and Expedition of La Salle’s Shipwreck, La Belle (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005).
3 Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
4 Ibid.
5 Martin Cleary, “Flaming to Finish,” The Saturday Citizen, July 26, 1976.
CHAPTER FIVE: STUCK BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
1 John McPhee, The Survival of the Bark Canoe (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982).
2 Charles Patrick Labadie, Minnesota’s Lake Superior Shipwrecks (A.D. 1650–1945) (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 1990).
3 Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
4 Ibid.
5 William C. Foster, ed.,The La Salle Expedition on the Mississippi River: A Lost Manuscript of Nicholas de la Salle, 1682. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2003).
6 Anka Muhlstein, La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2013).
7 Dr. Ron Williamson, director of archaeological master plan of Toronto. http://heritagetoronto.org/its-not-the-trail-its-the-land-it-crosses/
8 Grace Lee Nute, The Voyageur (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987).
CHAPTER SIX: NO TRAILS BUT THE WATERWAYS THEMSELVES
1 “Henri de Tonty’s Memoir of 1693,” Collections of the Illinois State Historical Library, vol. 1., ed. H. W. Beckwith, (Springfield, Ill.: H. W. Rokker Co., 1903).
2 Ray, C. Claiborne, “Mighty Acorns,” New York Times, Oct. 19, 2009.
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