Reading the title of this post, you might think that the day at the park was filled with bottles of some kind of French wine. Instead, they are the names of the characters that we portrayed during Oakwood's recent Voyageur Experience day.
The Oakwoods crew spent the morning explaining the lives and adventures of of a colorful group of French Canadian men known as the voyageurs, who in the 18th and 19th centuries, were hired by the fur trading companies to travel thousands of miles to trade for furs. We learned of their duties in the canoe, their voyage (nearly six months to paddle from Montreal to Grand Portage, Minnesota), the food they ate (they placed pork fat in their hat to let the heat from their head warm it?), the clothes they wore, etc. We then got to head out for a short trip in the Voyageur canoe, then to the trading post where we learned more about the fur trade and our individual character's fates.
The girls, the milieu, were the laborers of the fur trade. They were responsible for paddling the canoe (at a rate of 1 paddle stroke per second) for up to 12 hours a day! They were also responsible for carrying the canoe, furs, and gear anytime they canoe had to portage. They typically had two pairs of clothes and at night they slept under the overturned canoe.
As bourgeois, my life was much easier. I didn't have the laborious duties of a millieu, I was educated, slept in a tent, and had a better selection of food to dine on. I was the "clerk" of the trip responsible for documenting the fur inventory and negotiating trades for furs.
The fates of our characters:
Louis St. Jean (Kennedy) -- drowned in Churchhill river (1821) after the canoe tipped over in a heavy current. (Poor Kennedy...she had a history of dying in programs at Oakwoods.)
Alexandre-Antonin Tache (Mark) -- became the 1st Archbishop in the West and defender of French-Canadian rights.
Etienne Provost (Riley) -- group was attacked by a tribe of Snake Indians in October 1824. Survived the attack and is credited with being the first European to see the Great Salt Lake.
This was our first participation in the annual Voyageur program at Oakwoods. We had a lot of fun, and definitely will make it again next year.
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