The French were absent from what is today Minnesota during the period starting in around 1702 and lasting until about 1713. At this time, France’s energy and finances were dominated by the War of Spanish Succession, which was fought on European soil by major powers including France, Spain, Britain, and others. Following this period, however, the French returned to Minnesota to resume the fur trade and their relationship with the Ojibwe and Dakota peoples. They were also still in search of a shorter route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean.
In 1727, a group of French military officers and traders backed by Montreal merchants built Fort Beauharnois on the western bank of Lake Pepin, just south of present-day Minneapolis. They were accompanied by two French Jesuit missionaries, who established the Mission of St. Michael the Archangel, the first Christian mission established in Minnesota. Though the French remained at Fort Beauharnois for over a decade, tensions with the local Meskwaki (Fox) and Dakota peoples finally forced the French to abandon the location.
Lake of the Woods
This frustration led the French to seek another path to the interior of North America, again guided by Native people who were experts in the region. Pierre Gautier de Varennes, sieur de la Vérendrye, learned from Native allies of a route, long used by Native people, that led to the west and north from the western edge of Lake Superior via a trail that avoided the falls on the Pigeon River just upstream from the lake. It thus led, via braided portage trails overland for about 8.5 miles, toward the Lake of the Woods area and access to the lakes and rivers of present-day Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
On Lake of the Woods la Vérendrye and his men built Fort St. Charles in 1732, and, along with his sons, constructed other forts farther in the interior waterways. The site at the mouth of the Pigeon River would become the Grand Portage fur trade post, the starting point for voyageur fur trade trips to the northwest—les Postes du Nord—until the beginning of the 19th century. Today the reconstructed North West Company fur trade depot at Grand Portage National Monument interprets and depicts life of the Indigenous, métis, and European (especially the French Canadian voyageurs) men and women during the fur trade era in Minnesota.
Although the French did participate in the fur trade between 1713 and the time when France gave up its claim to North American territory to the British in 1763, they did not build large forts in what is now Minnesota. Rather, their presence in the region was marked by relatively short-term outposts, sited on waterways and at centers of Native population.
Grand Portage
After 1763, territory east of the Mississippi River was claimed by the British, while territory to the west of the river had been ceded to Spain by France. That meant that, in what is now the state of Minnesota, some territory in the southwest was Spanish while the area west of Lake Superior was British, with an undefined border somewhere in between. Nevertheless, the fur trade continued, and the Grand Portage, called Gichi Onagamiing (“Great Carrying Place”) by the Ojibwe, remained an important outlet to the fur-rich territory of the Postes du Nord.
In 1779, several Scottish-Canadians banded together to create the North West Company, a fur trade partnership that aimed to compete with the British Hudson’s Bay Company, using the routes through the Great Lakes that the French had been using for over a century (and which they had learned about from their Native partners). The North West Company built a main trade depot at Grand Portage, with sixteen buildings surrounded by a wooden palisade. They hired large numbers of French-Canadian and métis (part Native, part French) employees, called voyageurs.
At Grand Portage, hundreds of voyageurs passed through each year, on their way from Montreal to the north country, or on their way back. The North West Company also established small wintering posts throughout Minnesota, often manned by French-speakers. The route starting at Grand Portage, known as the Border Route (because it runs along the U.S./Canada border) or the Voyageurs’ Highway, is today encompassed by the Superior National Forest, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Grand Portage National Monument, and Voyageurs National Park.
Voyageurs
The lore of the French-Canadian voyageurs is rich and colorful: the large canoes, the largest of which were 36 feet long; the portages at which the men carried packs weighing up to 80 pounds each; their distinctive style of dress, with leggings, woven sashes, and knitted red caps or tuques; the use of music to give rhythm to their work paddling; their diet, including dried peas, lyed corn, bacon or pork fat, and dried biscuit; their unique smoking customs; their riotous behavior at the annual rendezvous at posts like Grand Portage. Though these characteristics have become legendary, in fact the voyageurs did develop a unique lifestyle and occupational identity that set them apart from other groups.
In Minnesota as in much of the Pays d’en haut and the Illinois country farther south along the Mississippi, there was considerable intermarriage among French or French-Canadian traders and Native women. These relationships, sometimes formalized in the Church and sometimes “à la façon du pays,” which means following the Native marriage custom, brought advantages to both parties, integrating traders into existing Native kin relationships. Children of these marriages were known in French as métis, and they were frequently important intermediaries between the two cultures. Often, they became leaders as Minnesota moved toward statehood in 1858 and afterward. (This use of the word métis, to indicate people of mixed Indigenous and Euro-American ancestry, is distinct from the Métis Nation of Canada, which considers their members to be a distinct Indigenous people.)
Minnesota Pages