Pages 63-66

In another detailed narrative packed with period quotes and illustrations, my favorite magazine paints a well-textured—if gray—picture of life in a voyaguer settlement. The voyaguers were Canadian frontiersmen who traveled largely by canoe across the network of lakes and rivers that spans the continent from divide to divide in the northern latitudes.

The Settlers of Assiniboia covers the region just west and north of Lake Superior, from 1811 – 1846. There was an effort to resettle displaced Irish, Scottish and Swiss poor, which resulted in a mixed-race society of rough European refugee men and native women and their half-breed children. Scottish Lord Selkirk led this effort, which resulted in a feud over bison meet exports with the North West Company, named the Pemmican Wars, which ended in the merger of the North West and Hudson Bay Companies in 1821.

Although Lord Selkirk had envisioned his Scotch-Irish settlers farming, their crops failed and they took to living like Indians, hunting for sustenance. The Swiss immigrants fared poorly, and became artisans, some of whom left us their visual impressions of the Red River Colonies. Quotes from period social critics make clear the native and half-breed aversion to European style slave farming, noting how a hunter can never be made into a farmer by his masters.

Thomas Swan gives us a glimpse of the Canadian effort that would fuel U.S. exploration and exploitation just to the south, and would provide a market for the furs taken by the early and peak Mountain Men that preceded the man who came lately to the last American frontier and went down in folk history as a kind of boogieman. Interestingly, according to one account I have read, the Liver-Eater made his last Indian kill in Canada, to the West of this region, where he made the rare claim of a kill [for he rarely related details of Indian encounters to other men in his trade] of an Assiniboine warrior.