Water and waterways define the region today known as Minnesota. Minnesota is and has always been a Native place as well. There are currently eleven sovereign Tribal Nations in Minnesota. In the past, these Indigenous peoples, including the Dakota, the Ojibwe, and their ancestors, created a vast network of water (canoe) trails, linked by carrying places or portages. When the French arrived beginning in the 17th century, learning, quite literally, to navigate the natural and cultural nuances of this vast waterscape was key to the establishment of a permanent French presence in the region (Birk 1994; Gilman 1982). The beginning of a French heritage in Minnesota was established on the Lake Superior/Grand Portage/the Border Route, along the Upper Mississippi River, in the Minnesota River Valley and braided through the Red River Oxcart Trail system.

The history of the French presence in Minnesota has been divided into two temporal phases (Birk 1991). During the Initial or French Contact phase (ca. 1640-1702), French explorers and coureurs des bois made their initial forays into Minnesota. Rouge fur traders Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart, Sieur des Groseilliers are the first recorded Frenchmen to enter the place we now know as Minnesota sometime around 1659-1660. Other French personages of note during this Initial Phase include: Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, who explored the western area of Lake Superior in 1679/1680 and for whom the modern city of Duluth is named; Father Louis Hennepin, who along with two other Frenchmen, was captured by the Dakota in 1680, during an expedition led by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle and taken to Dakota settlements near present day Lake Mille Lacs; and Pierre Le Sueur, a French Canadian who spent several years on the Upper Mississippi River trading with the Dakota and Ojibwe between 1683 and 1701. Between 1702 and 1713 the French were largely absent from Minnesota (Birk 1991).

The Late or French Expansion phase (ca. 1713-63) saw the French return to Minnesota to resume the fur trade and their relationships with the Ojibwe and Dakota peoples. During this period, the French established a series of more permanent trading posts and forts, primarily on the Mississippi River, the Lake Superior/Grand Portage/the Border Route, and the Minnesota River. For example, between 1731 and 1743 Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendry, a French Canadian military officer and fur trader, along with his sons and led by Indigenous guides, charted and established a number of trading forts along what would become the primary fur trade route from Lake Superior into the interior waterways of North America. La Vérendry and company would be the first Europeans to record their journey over the Grand Portage, an 8.5 mile overland trail system linking Lake Superior and the interior lakes and rivers (Wingerd 2010). In Minnesota this route, known as the Border Route (because it runs along the US/Canadian border) or the Voyageur’s Highway, is today encompassed by the Superior National Forest, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Grand Portage National Monument, and Voyageurs National Park. It was during this period that many French men and Indigenous women forged the kinship ties through marriages (à la façon du pays or “according to the custom of the country) that would lead to the development of a large métis population who would “become the central cultural brokers in shaping Indian-white relationships” in Minnesota for the next 150 years and beyond (Wingerd 2010:7; Peterson 2001; Vaughan 2021).

Although 1763 marks the end of the French regime in Minnesota, it does not mark the end of a French and métis presence in Minnesota. Along the Border Route, French Canadian and métis engagés–contracted or indentured servants–continued to provide much of the labor for the fur trade brigades passing through Grand Portage. The British hired large numbers of French Canadian and métis engagés as boatmen to transport via canoe supplies, provisions, and trade goods to bring the furs collected back to Montreal (Podruchny 2006). The men of this special class of engagés were called voyageurs. Over time the voyageurs developed a unique lifestyle and occupational identity, with particular skills, knowledge, aptitudes, and material social practices that set them apart from other groups (Podruchny 2006). So, for example, the voyageurs wore a distinctive style of dress, engaged in distinctive secular and religious rites and rituals, preferred a particular diet, engaged in manly “rough culture” behaviors such as drinking, and gambling, developed a system of oral traditions dominated by folk tales and folk songs, and created a multitude of quotidian practices associated with their labor regimen, including unique smoking customs (Mann 2017; Podruchny 2006).

In 1779 the Northwest Company (NWC) was founded and it would control much of the fur trade in Minnesota over the next forty years or so. In 1784 the NWC constructed its main depot at Grand Portage, a complex of 16 buildings surrounded by a wooden palisade. It was the largest fur trade depot in the interior of North America at the time. By the late 1780s the NWC employed over 1,000 voyageurs and operated a number of smaller wintering posts throughout Minnesota (Gilman 1954; Wingerd 2010). As the NWC preferred to hire French Canadians as their voyageurs, French-speaking men and their métis offspring were soon living and working across much of Minnesota. After the American Revolution and the departure of the NWC (which merged with the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821), many of these French Canadian and métis became independent fur traders or joined up with the American Fur Company, which formed in 1808 and by 1821 held “a virtual monopoly in Minnesota and throughout the American Midwest and Great Lakes” (Lurie 2022). Some of these fur traders, such as Jean Baptiste Faribault and Hypolite Dupuis, played important roles during the early American period in Minnesota, helping to found towns and cities across the state. Many Minnesotans alive today can trace their ancestry back to the French Canadian and métis fur trade families of this period (Lurie 2022).

Finally, a unique aspect of the French heritage of Minnesota is the important economic role played by the Red River Trails, which meandered through the state. The Red River Trail system, a crucial route for both commerce and immigration in during the first half of the nineteenth century in Minnesota. The overland trail system linked the Red River Colony (near present-day Winnipeg, Manitoba) in British Canada to St. Paul, Minnesota and the Mississippi River valley. Buffalo robes and hides worth millions of dollars annually were collected by Métis hunters on the Plains and transported down the trail in the famous Red River oxcarts to markets in St. Paul (Even 2022; Gilman et al. 1979; Vaughn 2021).
–Rob Mann, St. Cloud State University

References

Birk, Douglas A.
1991     French Presence in Minnesota: the View from Site MO20 near Little Falls. In French Colonial Archaeology: The Illinois Country and the Western Great Lakes, edited by John A. Walthall, pp. 237–266. University of Illinois Press, Champaign.

1994     When Rivers were Roads: Deciphering the Role of Canoe Portages in the Western Lake Superior Fur Trade. In The Fur Trade Revisited: Selected Papers of the Sixth North American Fur Trade Conference, Mackinac Island, Michigan, 1991, edited by Jennifer S.H. Brown, W.J. Eccles and Donald P. Heldman, 359-375.  Michigan State University Press, Mackinac Island, East Lansing/Mackinac Island.

Even, Megan Lynn
2022     Red River Carts. MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. https://www.mnopedia.org/thing/red-river-carts

Gilman, Carolyn.
1982     Where Two Worlds Meet: The Great Lakes Fur Trade. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul.

Gilman, Carolyn (with research by Alan R. Woolworth)
1992     The Grand Portage Story. Minnesota Historical Society Press, St. Paul.

Gilman, Rhoda, Carolyn Gilman, and Deborah M. Stultz
1979     Red River Trails: Oxcart Routes between St. Paul and the Selkirk Settlement, 1820–1870. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press.

Lurie, Jon
2022     Fur Trade in Minnesota. MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. https://www.mnopedia.org/fur-trade-minnesota

Peterson, Jacqueline.
2001     “Many Roads to Red River: Métis Genesis in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1815.” In The New Peoples: Being and Becoming Métis in North America, edited by Jacqueline Peterson and Jennifer S. Brown, 37–71. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society.

Vaughan, Margaret
2021     Métis in Minnesota. MNopedia, Minnesota Historical Society. http://www.mnopedia.org/group/m-tis-minnesota.

Podruchny, Carolyn.
2006     Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur Trade. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.

Wingerd, Mary Lethert.
2010     North Country: The Making of Minnesota. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.