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Showing posts with label Grand Portage National Monument. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Grand Portage National Monument. Show all posts

Monday, April 4, 2016

Grand Portage National Monument at Grand Portage, Minnesota

The Far North 

The Grand Portage was the Grand Central Station of the Native Far North. Long before French colonial coureurs des bois (runners of the woods) entered the region, the Algonquin hauled their canoes and goods over the 8 mile trail around the falls on the Pigeon River. At this site on the northwest lip of Lake Superior, people in canoes traveled to the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans with portages past unnavigable rivers lasting at most a day.

The Ojibwe, an Algonquin speaking tribe, made this land home. Before contact with the French, they trapped, fished, hunted, farmed, and gathered food and resources, moving seasonally to reap nature’s harvest. The Ojibwe used birch bark canoes for fishing, harvesting wild rice, and perhaps most importantly, transporting copper from Isle Royale and furs from their forests for trade with tribes far and wide. 
Birch Bark Canoe in front of the trading post at Grand Portage (Photo by Gary Alan Nelson)
Writing about these canoes, the French missionary Rene de Brehant de Galinese observed in 1669: “The convenience of these canoes is great in these waters, full of cataracts or waterfalls, and rapids through which it is impossible to take any boat. When you reach them, you load canoe and baggage upon your shoulders and go overland until the navigation is good….”[1]
Canoe Manned by Voyageurs Passing a Waterfall by Frances Anne Hopkins (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
At such a busy center for travel and trade, Grand Portage served as a gateway for migration, contact, and commerce. Native Americans used it in their extensive trading networks, and during colonial times, the French accessed the interiors of North America through this portage.

 The French Enter North America

The French brought a unique European culture into the hemisphere. They founded over a dozen colonies on Caribbean Islands and also settled Quebec, Montreal, Detroit, Green Bay, and farther south St. Louis, Mobile, Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans. In 1608, Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement in North America at Quebec, the capital of New France. During the early colonial period, the French explored and laid claim to much of the northern and middle parts of North America.

The coureurs interacted with the native peoples differently. French men often married into native communities, raised families, and served as cultural brokers as Europeans spread into tribal ancestral lands. Additionally, while predominantly Catholic, the French did not evangelize with the same zeal as the Spanish nor the English.

Perhaps the first Europeans to arrive at the Grand Portage were Pierre Esprit and his brother-in-law, Medard Chouart, who traveled the area around 1660. A Jesuit missionary, Father Claude Allouez, canoed Lake Superior in 1667 and on his 1670 map of his explorations marked the mouth of the Pigeon River. Then in 1682, René-Robert Cavelier sailed down the Mississippi River and claimed the middle part of the continent for the French, from the upper Rocky Mountains to the Appalachian Mountains. At the edges of these contested empires, disputes flared that sometimes erupted into conflict.

The American Fur Trade

The height of the French fur trade that flowed through Grand Portage occurred between 1740 and 1745. By the late 1760s, English fur traders encroached on the French territories. In 1767, the English traded goods with Native Americans valued at 5,000 pounds sterling and returned the next summer with 100 canoes crammed with pelts. Captain Jonathan Carver witnessed the bounty that summer as packages of pelts came down the trail to the depot and put on larger canoes for transport to Montreal and then to hat makers in Europe. Among the Europeans at the post, Carver also saw Ojibwe, Cree, and Assiniboine tribal members.

The French traded for the pelts of beaver, minx, fox, otter, buffalo, and other animals.  These pelts made hats that were strong, waterproof, and held their shapes. In a damp cool climate of northern Europe with scant heating, beaver hats provided warmth. In the 17th and 18th centuries, beaver pelts made the highest quality hats. For almost two centuries, the Americas provided the raw material for high fashion in Europe. Over the first 2/3rds of the 18th century, English factories alone made approximately 21,000,000 high quality beaver and felt hats from American furs.

The Grand Portage around the Upper Falls on the Pigeon River

Map of the portage around the falls of the Pigeon River (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
To get the furs to Europe from middle America, canoes piled to the gunwales sliced through the waters. At unnavigable sections of rivers, coureurs carried their goods and canoes around the obstacles. For the Grand Portage around the falls of the Pigeon River, each porter’s load weighed between 160 and 200 pounds. By stooping over and distributing this heavy load onto the lower and upper back, porters lugged their goods and canoes over the eight miles of the Grand Portage.\
At Grand Portage, an annual rendezvous occurred each July when trappers came from all over to trade their year’s haul, buy supplies for the next year, and party. Some years, 500 men from the fur companies joined the numerous native peoples encamped at Grand Portage to trade and celebrate.

By the end of the 1600s, 16,000 settlers lived in New France bunched along the Saint Lawrence River and in parts of Nova Scotia. At the same time, English colonists equaled around 160,000. The French continued to explore and expand their trade networks into the hinterlands and competition with the English grew.

The English Compete with the French

The English Hudson’s Bay Company earned a charter in 1670 to trap and trade the northlands. The Company governed vast areas of North America, including all the land that drained into Hudson Bay, totaling 1.5 million acres, or about 15% of North America’s land mass. Headquartered at the York Factory on Hudson Bay, it grew rich on the fur trade that came out of the forests.
Trading at Hudson Bay Company (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)
The men working for the fur companies led hard lives. Living in a harsh climate, isolated from their home country, many married into native communities. Such marriages often strengthened the bonds between the French and the Indians. The resultant mixed heritage children called Métis served many roles in the colonial era. They were cultural brokers between the Europeans and Native Americans, they worked as porters and paddlers for the various companies, and they supplied food for the traders and trappers.

Native Americans often traded on credit so that in the spring, the French returned to pick up the furs as payment for the goods left the previous fall.  A cycle of perpetual debt sometimes burdened Native Americans as their winter hunt did not retire the debt owed for the advanced goods. Fostering unreasonable debt and using alcohol as payment for the furs undermined the traditional cultures of the Native Americans. John Tanner in the 1790’s told of North West Company traders who enticed his mother with alcohol to store her furs at their post at Grand Portage, never to see them again.

From 1689 to 1763, France and England fought four wars of empire, culminating in the Seven Year’s War (aka French and Indian War) where France lost its colony in North America.  In 1673, Britain acquired the vast French territories in the far north.

In 1779, nine mainly Scottish businessmen formed the North West Company to continue the flow of fur to England. Barrels of rum, bags of corn, rifles, knives, kettles, blankets, needles, tobacco, and cloth flooded the Northland to entice Indians to trade their catches from the winter. Joseph Frobisher from the North West Company reported that of its 500 employees, about half transported goods back and forth from Montreal to Grand Portage while the rest traveled outward from their base at Grand Portage to acquire furs. The North West Company successfully competed with the Hudson Bay Company for the fur business in central and western Canada until 1821, when the two companies merged.

The Trading Post on Lake Superior


This description of the Grand Portage trading depot in July 1793 comes from the diary of John MacDonell, a North West Company clerk: "All the buildings within the fort are sixteen in number made with cedar and white spruce fir split with whip saws after being squared, the roofs are covered with shingles of cedar and pine, most of their posts, doors and windows are painted with Spanish brown. Six of these buildings are store houses for the company's merchandise and furs. The rest are dwelling houses, shops, compting [counting] house, and mess house - they have also a warf [wharf] or kay for their vessel to unload and load at. "[2] Today, the National Monument of the “Great Carrying Place” has a partially reconstructed late 18th century trading post, the Grand Portage trail, and Fort Charlotte on the Pigeon River.
Reconstructed trading post at Grand Portage (Courtesy NPS)
The French were intrepid explorers, skilled entrepreneurs, and innovative cultural brokers. Throughout the north and middle part of the continent, French coureurs de bois were often the first Europeans into this vast country. The sparsely populated French settlements in North America, about 40,000 in the 17th and 18th centuries, were predominantly male. Thus the French adopted a more cooperative and embracing attitude about Native Americans. The French voyageurs discovered ways to trade with and live among different tribes. From Detroit to New Orleans, from St. Louis to Des Moines, the French contributed a different culture and fostered different relationships with the land and with the native peoples.

The NPS designated Grand Portage a National Historic Site in 1951 and a National Monument in 1958.
Pigeon River Upper Falls by Kenneth Clinton
Grand Portage National Monument
Heritage Center & Headquarters
P.O. Box 426, 170 Mile Creek Road
Grand Portage, Minnesota 55605
218-475-0123              http://www.nps.gov/grpo/index.htm

The Spring 2016 History Graduate Research Seminar at New Mexico State University work-shopped this chapter. Thanks to Victor Apodaca, Taj Backus, Peter Mattox, Kyle Mery, Casey Panarese, Laura Salas, and Camille Ville for making this a better history.




[1] Woolworth, ”Historic Study of Grand Portage.”
[2] “The Grand Portage Story” www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/story/chap1.htm