Without question, Making the Voyageur World is prodigiously researched. To capture the nuances of fur trade life as experienced by some of its most crucial, most celebrated, yet perhaps least understood participants, Carolyn Podruchny consulted so many sources that her bibliography fills nearly twenty-six pages. Students of the fur trade will likely find this, along with the book’s index and its sixty pages of endnotes, useful research tools. Whether those same researchers will wish to wade through the 308-page text on the French Canadians who manned the lower echelons of the Montreal-based fur companies and, later, the Hudson’s Bay Company, is another question.
Now an assistant professor of history at Toronto’s York University, Podruchny writes that her interest in voyageurs “began with a desire to contribute to the history of plebeian peoples who did not leave a documentary record yet who had a significant impact on the social and cultural landscape of early North America.” She pursued this interest through a doctoral dissertation at the University of Toronto, which has now been published in book form.
Her original intention was to paint a picture of the voyageurs, also known as engagés or servants, with information gathered through their own writings. However, since they were almost without exception illiterate, this proved an impossible task. Podruchny notes that she was able to locate only sixteen letters written from friends and family to voyageurs, and just one actually written by (or perhaps ghostwritten for) a voyageur, to his wife. She was therefore forced to rely upon secondary sources, just like others who have written about these workhorses of the fur trade.
As anyone familiar with this crucial part of North American history can confirm, and as Podruchny herself admits, portraits of voyageurs are not in short supply. Starting with their immediate superiors in the various fur companies, and continuing with writers and painters from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, many have attempted to portray the lives and work of voyageurs. The result, writes Podruchny, is that they “have a highly visible reputation, building the Canadian nation with their Herculean strength, while singing, laughing, leaping over waterfalls, and paddling faster than speeding arrows.” Yet, she contends, these portraits have both “idolized and simplified” the reality. “Despite their highly visible profile in popular culture and history, voyageurs have received little scholarly attention.”
Podruchny set out to rectify this omission. Beginning with their social background in French Canada, she looked at many aspects of life for fur trade engagés — from their rites of passage and dealings with their superiors, to life at inland posts and their friendships and relationships. Unfortunately, the result is disappointing — largely due to a lack of internal organization and a dearth of editing, but also due to the author’s pedantic writing style. Her fondness for the passive voice and her abrupt cadence might have suited a doctoral dissertation, but these rhetorical devices greatly detract from the book’s readability.
Rather than introducing a particular aspect of a subject and dealing with it comprehensively in a given chapter, Podruchny repeatedly raises ideas, begins to address them, and then moves on, only to return to them pages (or chapters) later. Even her abundance of footnotes — on some pages more than three-quarters of the sentences are footnoted — results in confusion for the reader.
In short, since much of Podruchny’s information is not new, and her focus on the voyageurs is necessarily arm’s-length, Making the Voyageur World could have been half as long and twice as interesting, given more attention by editors.
— Barbara Huck (Read bio)
Barbara Huck is an award-winning author and editor. Among her many books is the national bestseller Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America.