Origin Story, Part the Fourth: Les Français arrivent avec les Ojibwés
In the 1500s eight thousand years of Dakota way of life and territorial integrity in Minnesota was challenged by European colonial powers. Following Christopher Columbus’ voyage across the Atlantic to the New World in 1492, on May 4, 1493 Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull, Inter Caetera-Among Other (Works) that established the “Doctrine of Discovery”. The Bull stated that any land not inhabited by Christians was available to be claimed and exploited by European ruling families.
In 1608 Samuel de Champlain founded Québec, New France. In the 1600s French explorers, traders and missionaries came to the Midwest via Canada and the Great Lakes. They established trading posts to control the fur trade. French youth lived with local natives and quickly assimilated with the tribes, adopted their customs and language and became translators and intermediaries for trade out of Québec.
French fur trade followed this model through a series of native agreements amid conflicts with the Dutch and English. The coureurs de bois-forest runners encouraged Natives to trap and trade in exchange for European technology. Trade was unregulated until 1681 when the Compagnie des Cent Associés-Company of the Hundred Associates was granted a monopoly in the fur trade in areas controlled by France—including Minnesota. A system of licenses gave rise to the voyageurs-travelers who displaced the coureurs.
Forts and trading posts were built and treaties negotiated with Native groups throughout the Midwest. Goods and furs weighing tons, ingoing and outgoing, depended on the network of lakes and rivers via canoe and portages. Trading trips lasted months, over thousands of miles, with outgoing goods (cloth, ammunition and firearms, metal goods, liquor) bartered for pelts. In the summer trading season, voyageurs paddled canoes 36 by 6 feet on the Great Lakes. These could accommodate four tons (!) of fur bundles and trade goods that weighed 90-100 pounds each. During portages, voyageurs were expected to carry two bundles.
In 1659 French traders and missionaries first encountered the Dakota when they moved south with their Ojibwe allies into Minnesota via the Great Lakes. The French were interested in expanding the fur trade; the Ojibwe in Dakota hunting grounds; the Dakota in access to French trading goods. However the Dakota lost one of their sacred sites at Mde Waḳaŋ—Spirit Lake/Mille Lacs.
In 1671 Nicolas Perrot (c.1644–1717), a French explorer, interpreter and fur trader, claimed lands around Lac Supérieur-Lake Superior and the Upper Mississippi River for France, and finalized an agreement at Sault Ste Marie with 14 native tribes including the Dakota. In 1686 he constructed Ft. Saint Antoine on Lake Pepin. In 1679 the Ojibwe and the Dakota formed an alliance at Fond Du Lac at Lake Superior. Peace, trade and intermarriage lasted 57 years.
French employees were burgeois (administration), engagés (logistics) and voyageurs. The last were hired specifically for their expertise in navigating waterways and handling canoes. Hivernants-winterers were voyageurs that wintered on the frontier. They courted and married Native women by Dakota customs, or a la facon du pays. They took advantage of the Dakota’s embrace of kinship based on strangers’ willingness to become Dakota, become kin, and provide for the Native family.
By the early 1700s, Native women were critical to the survival of the French. They were often from prominent families and provided tribal access as intermediaries in the fur trade. Their domestic skills included cooking, sewing, harvesting; processing furs and preparing meat; building shelters and repairing canoes. Their offspring, the métis-mixed blood, played an important intermediary role in the economy and settlement of Minnesota, and emerged to become a distinctive community, particularly in Canada. Native networks helped to create kinship between tribes which benefitted the traders, and their offspring, the métis, came to dominate trade, with French as the language of commerce and early Minnesota.
The rendezvous was a great annual gathering of Natives, traders, trappers, voyagers, and administrators, particularly at Grand Portage on the north shore of Lake Superior. It connected Montreal to 120 furring posts west of Lake Superior. Aside from trade, the rendezvous was a great social gathering fueled by alcohol, feasts, dancing, gaming/gambling and merriment. Three camps included company agents and clerks, the voyageurs often métis, and Natives. The event provided trappers a social event as a break from their isolation on the frontier, and an occasion to exchange tales of adventure, and possibly find work with the trading companies.
As the dependency on the fur trade increased, so also pressures on native customs and resources. Between 1702 and 1763 the French and English fought a series of wars in Europe and in North America. Each was dependent on shifting loyalties of Native allies, Dakota and Ojibwe, Cree in the north and Fox south. France gave up its North American territories to the British in 1763 and its legacy of 200 years of interaction with Native tribes, and the métis.
With colonization, Natives, who had held real power in the fur-trade era, were marginalized, no longer crucial to the survival or profit of Europeans and Americans who entered the area. The métis would continue to impact Minnesota for years to come.
You can find a copy of “The Origin Story of Fort Road/West Seventh Street, the Township/City of Saint Paul, the Territory/State of Minnesota: Glacial Age Forward” at your local library. Learn more about the book and find Joe’s upcoming conversations about the history of West 7th at josfland.com.
