Voyageurs National Park - Journey's End

Two large trading posts -- one at Grand Portage on the shore of Lake Superior, and the other on Rainy Lake -- were the principal sites where east met west. Here voyageurs renewed old friendships and enmities, as they bragged and boasted of their prowess and adventures. Clerks frantically tallied the bales and bundles that daily poured in from brigade after brigade of canoes, then repacked and redirected the goods.

Each July at Grand Portage a great ball was held. It was the closest thing to a formal affair for hundreds of miles around. Voyageurs appeared in clean colored shirts with their holiday-best sashes, moccasins, and caps. Clerks wore freshly ironed white shirts and trousers. Indian women, their cheeks and the parts in their hair dabbed with vermilion, came in their softest doeskins and fanciest beadwork. Braves sported showy buckskins and face paint. The great hall blazed with the light of dozens upon dozens of candles; tables were laden with venison, trout, moose, buffalo, whitefish, sturgeon roe, fresh bread, butter, and maple syrup; fiddles, flutes, and bagpipes played chansons, Virginia reels, square dances, and Highland flings. A marvelous and exhausting time was had by all.

Then, the annual gala over, canoes were re-laden with new freight. The large work canoes were filled with furs for Montreal; the north canoes with trade goods and supplies for points westward. And once again the tough, adventurous voyageurs set off to complete their roundtrip journey before winter.

Do any tokens remain of these gallant travelers? Very few. Their boats have long since disintegrated, their muskets and ax heads rusted and mixed with earth. Their graves, marked with stones or simple wooden crosses, cannot be found.

Their memory endures in the many old French place-names in Canada and the northern United States, in the traditional water routes now in use by modern-day canoeists, in the lilting echoes of voyageur songs, in the whisper of sweet-scented waterlilies brushing against a skimming craft, in the liquid evening chant of a white-throated sparrow, in the sight of mist drifting across dawn water, in the sound of blue waves crashing on low cliffs -- and in Voyageurs National Park.