TRADERS

Since most of the explorers and early traders were single and virile men, they entered into sexual relationships with the Indian women, sometimes casually (prostitution) and sometimes in more permanent form (concubinage, marriage). Most of the native peoples of North America did not share the Euro-Christian morality about chastity and fornication, and sexual contacts between White and Indian were sometimes actually encouraged in the belief that the special virtues and powers of the invader would be transmitted to the host people. In any case, the more enduring the liaison, the greater the likelihood of mutual influence. Mixedblood families were often bilingual and often acted as channels of information and exchange between the Whites and the Indians (thus, the Dakota term for Mixedblood is also used to denote an "interpreter").

Traders

The independent behaviour of many traders was a continuing subject for comment. Jean Talon wrote that they were men "without Christianity, without sacraments, without religion, without priests, without magistrates, sole masters of their own actions and of the application of their wills" ( Diamond 1961: 10). Other observers noted the extent to which they adopted Indian ways when among the Hurons and other Indian groups around the Great Lakes. Some violated Indian conventions in their eagerness to cast off their own. And numbers found within the framework of Indian society a more ample freedom than that offered within the confines of their own colony--a phenomenon that was not uncommon among whites in early North America ( Hallowell 1963; Axtell 1975). The youthfulness of these men may have exacerbated the tension; as of 1663, the average age of all males in the colony was 22.2 ( Trudel 1973: 260).

Of much concern to the colonial authorities was the sexual freedom shown by the early traders when in the Indian country and by the Indians themselves. The Hurons, the most important trading partners of Champlain and his followers in the first half of the seventeenth century, considered premarital sexual relations and multiple companionships normal, and girls as well as men could initiate such relationships. Stable marriages were not considered to begin until children were produced ( Trigger 1969: 66). The French missionaries' efforts to change these patterns were hindered by the behaviour of their trading compatriots. The morality of Huron women would be improved, wrote the missionary Gabriel Sagard, if the French who went up with us did not, out of frenzied malice, tell them the opposite (of what we did), defaming and taxing wickedly the honor and modesty of the women and girls . . . so that they could continue their infamous and evil life with more liberty. Hence those who should have aided and served us in the education and conversion of these peoples by their good examples were the very ones who hindered us and destroyed the good which we went to establish ( Saunders 1939: 26).

When the priests tried to urge upon the Indians the virtues of chastity, the Indians were unimpressed and "pointedly asked why, if chastity were such a fine thing, all the French Christians did not practice it" ( Eccles 1969: 52).

Such problems, and the fear that more settlers would be attracted from agricultural pursuits to a disorderly fur trade life, led the colonial authorities to promulgate laws and decrees to restrict fur trade activities ( ibid., 104-5 ). A rule that all adult men enter into a Christian marriage relationship or suffer penalties was one solution offered against turbulence and immorality. In 1668, Colbert proposed to Intendant Talon that all "who may seem to have absolutely renounced marriage would be made to have additional burdens and be excluded from all honors; it would be well even to add some mark of infamy." Talon responded by forbidding bachelors "to hunt, fish, trade with the Indians, and even to enter the woods" ( Diamond 1961: 10). Both officials also hoped to speed population growth by promoting marriage; and to this end, the French government later undertook to import large numbers of white women to New France. For a while too, Christian intermarriage with Indians was encouraged. In the mid 1600s, the Jesuits favoured intermarriage as an aid to converting the Indians and doubtless also as a means of coping with the six to one ratio of marriageable male to female colonists that still existed in 1663 ( Trudel 1973: 261). While formerly Indian mates had been taken by Frenchmen eager to "become barbarians, and to render themselves exactly like them," such degrading unions would, they hoped, be replaced by "stable and perpetual" ones that would spread knowledge of God and his commandments ( Saunders 1939: 29). Talon was amenable to Indian marriages, and although he was concerned that the fertility of Indian women was reduced by their custom of nursing their children longer than necessary, he felt that "this obstacle to the speedy building up of the colony can be overcome by a police regulation" ( Diamond 1961: 9). By the early 1700s, however, through migration and internal growth, the colony had become better supplied with white women; and civil and religious authorities began to discourage Indianwhite marriages ( Eccles 1969: 91).

Efforts to promote marriage as a means of reducing disorder, spreading Christianity, and increasing the population may have had some of their desired effects within the boundaries of New France. But they scarcely slowed the stream of men to the fur trade country each year or modified their behaviour in that distant area. Indeed, even as the authorities tried to contain the traders by social legislation, their own economic measures encouraged more settlers to enter the fur trade. Beginning in 1675, beaver prices were fixed by ministerial decree, a measure that benefited mainly the traders; "the law of supply and demand was held in abeyance; and at the established prices profits were guaranteed, regardless of how much beaver was brought to the bureau of the company. Nothing could have been better contrived to bring about expansion in the fur trade, or of the numbers engaged in it." By 1680, over eight hundred coureurs de bois were off in the Indian country (although many of these would have gone on a seasonal basis only), and the intendant Duchesneau was complaining, "I have been unable to ascertain the exact number because everyone associated with them covers up for them" ( Eccles 1969: 105, 110). The social mobility that fur trade wealth could confer offered another incentive. A man with financial resources could apply for a seigneury and for the privilege of attaching a de to his name, as did Médard Chouart, Sieur Des Groseilliers, as a consequence of his fur trade gains.

Fur traders might on occasion become seigneurs, but seigneurial families also became involved in the fur trade themselves. Young men of gentlemanly background, "not accustomed to hold the plow, the pick, or the ax . . . spend their lives in the woods, where there are no priests to restrain them nor fathers, nor governors to control them," wrote the Marquis de Denonville, governor general in the late 1680s. Some intendants themselves also profited from the fur trade, against orders, while illegal trading continued ( Diamond 1961: 25, 31).

In 1681, governmental authorities attempted to place more direct controls on the trade. A licensing system was established, whereby up to twenty-five trading permits a year were to be granted, each entitling its holder to send one canoe with three men to trade with the Indians. No one would receive a permit two years in succession; while applicants waited their turns, they would be usefully employed in the colony ( Eccles 1969: 113). Enforcement was continually a problem, however. At the end of the century, a glut on the European beaver markets caused the authorities to impose new regulations and attempt stronger measures against contraband traders; but as one officer sent to the post of Michilimackinac to implement the new rules soon learned, the traders on the Great Lakes and beyond were little inclined to co-operate. Writing to his superior in 1702, he complained, "It is very fine and Honourable for me, Monsieur, to be charged with your orders but it is also very vexatious to have only ink and paper as means to enforce them" ( ibid., 128 ). Variously revised licensing systems persisted, however, as the major, if imperfect, means of controlling the fur traders.

The trade, after all, could not be eliminated; it remained of critical economic importance. In the first half of the eighteenth century, it was also becoming clear that the presence of French traders in the Northwest had a broader political significance--they maintained Indian-French alliances and a French presence in lands that might otherwise be taken over by British Hudson's Bay Company traders to the north and Anglo-American traders to the south. The French had lost any claim to Hudson Bay with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713; but they still could, and did, make their influence felt in the areas around and beyond the Great Lakes.

STRANGERS IN BLOOD