Through their explorations, 17th-century fur traders, coureurs de bois (woods runners),
voyageurs (canoe men), explorers for the Crown, Jesuit missionaries, and the colonial
militaiy expanded the territory of New France, centered in Quebec City and Montreal
(founded by Samuel de Champlain in 1608 and by Maisonneuve in 1643, respectively) to
what is now a large part of the continental United States. They explored the Great Lakes
and the Mississippi and its tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, and established fur
trading posts, military forts, and missions at strategic points along these waterways. They
paved the way for French Canadian settlements, which grew up around these sites in the
18th century. These settlements were relatively small—the total population of New
France has been estimated at only 60,000 habitants (settlers) by 1760. Yet, a case can be
made for French folk cultural influence extending into the 20th century, despite France’s
loss of its colonial empire and the subsequent loss of the French language among habitant
descendants.
France ceded to the British by treaty in 1763 the Upper Midwest, that area north and
west of the Ohio River that would become the Northwest Territory by ordinance of the
U.S. Congress in 1784. It ceded to the Spanish the vast Louisiana Territory which the
Americans later obtained in 1803. Detroit, which was founded in 1701, New Orleans in 1718 and St. Louis in 1764 are just a few examples of the 3,000 places in the United
States whose names still mark the outlines of what was once New France.
The voyageurs have a special place in American folklife study. Although their image
is part of the romanticization of the frontier, an earlier generation of scholars—notably,
French Canadian folklorist Marius Barbeau and American historians Theodore Christian
Blegen and Grace L.Nute—traced these boatmen’s distinctive folk patterns, especially
their chansons (songs). The chansons, like other worksongs, apparently helped the
voyageurs paddle in unison and build morale and identity through two centuries: first, for
the French fur-trading monopolies; then for the North West Company; and, finally, for
the American Fur Company. Typically, novice boatmen, called mangers de lard (pork
eaters), brought manufactured goods from Montreal to a point on the north shore of Lake
Superior, now Grand Portage, Minnesota, to exchange for furs. The experienced
boatmen, called hivernants (winterers), traveled there from far-flung posts in the interior
with pelts for the manufactured goods in return. The hivernants shared their repertoires,
polished by long winter nights of singing and fiddling, with the less experienced men
before returning to their posts to begin the cycle anew.
Yet, their songs also connected the voyageurs to habitant culture because they usually
selected and adapted 17th-century traditional tunes and lyrics also sung in settlements
throughout New France. Barbeau writes that folksongs were “as familiar as barley-water
to the home-keeping villagers of Quebec, Acadia, Detroit and Louisiana.” Marcel
Bénéteau, a researcher at Laval University, has found, for example, that this folksong
tradition was extant in the Detroit River region settlements the 1940s (Bénéteau 1991).
French families, whom he has interviewed on both sides of the border since the 1980s,
have given him “scribblers,” or handwritten books, with song texts. They have also
remembered songs sung at viéllees (traditional evening gatherings), as well as at
weddings and other celebrations whose versions date back to this early period. Both
voyageurs and habitants once sang “A La Claire Fontaine” (At the Clear Fountain), now
called the unofficial anthem of French Canada, and the familiar “Alouette” (The Lark),
for instance.
Other habitant folklore and folklife has been recorded in states created from the old
Northwest Territory—Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin—and
from those states once part of the Louisiana Territory—Louisiana and Missouri, in
particular. These works suggest that distinctive verbal arts, social folk customs, and
material culture, once based in the French colonial agricultural and mercantile economy
and Catholic religious structure, are, for some, cultural memories and, for others, ongoing
or revived traditions in these localities.
M.C.W.Hamlin, writing Legends of le Détroit in 1884, noted les peurs (horror stories)
about la chasse galerie (the phantom canoe), le feu follet (fairy lights), and le loup garou
(the werewolf) as well-remembered narratives among French families “on the strait”
between Lakes Michigan and Erie. WPA (Works Progress Administration) folklife
researchers recorded these same stories as memory culture in 1930s Vincennes, Indiana.
Folklorist Ron Baker edited their findings in his French Folklife in Old Vincennes (1979).
Baker discusses Vincennes’ strategic position in New France from the 1730s; as a fort,
then a village, it was located at the confluence of the Wabash and Ohio Rivers and so
allowed water access from Detroit to New Orleans. French Canadian folklorist Joseph
Médard Carrière also recorded contes (classic wonder tales) about the hero ‘Tit Jean (Little John) in the 1930s from residents in Old Mines, Missouri, a village dating from
the 1760s that was orginally made up of French colonials who had come from France or
from the Illinois Territory, which had gone to the British. In the mid-1990s, folklorist
C.Ray Brassieur is continuing folklife study among Missouri Creoles.
In his article “The Lingering Shadow of New France,” Dennis Au notes that the
French custom of charivari (shivaree) is still practiced in Monroe County, Michigan, in
what was once the River Raisin settlement of the 1780s, augmented by French families
leaving Detroit once British rule was established there (Au 1987). Mary Agnes Starr
found the same tradition in some Wisconsin French communities in her Pea Soup and
Johnny Cake (1981), noting that the custom of making noise outside newlyweds’ home
was once a sign of community disapproval of an inappropriate marriage (for example,
one spouse was much older, too recently bereaved or not a Catholic), but was now just
one more prank played by friends on the new couple. Traditional Christmas suppers after
Midnight Mass and New Year’s gift giving and blessings are other customs not only
surviving but also evolving within families on the eve of the 21st century.
Baker and Au outline habitant material culture, including settlement and agricultural
patterns. The “ribbon farm,” in which houses cluster at river’s edge and fields stretch out
in long, thin plots behind, occurs often, and there is other typical log-cabin construction
and tool use. They also note foodways legacies, including use of outdoor bakeovens,
construction of traps and trapping techniques, and a variety of dishes for everyday and
festival use. Au traces muskrat eating, for example, still current in some parts of
Michigan and Ohio, to the voyageurs, who learned the techniques for trapping the animal
and preparing it from the Native American groups originally in the area. These muskrateating French call themselves and their patois “Mushrat French” to distinguish
themselves from the Quebecois and continental French.