Frontenac played a double game on the fur trade

Coureurs de bois were accorded more latitude than France wanted

It was early spring 1678, and Louis de Buade de Frontenac, the governor of New France, was in a pickle.

He wanted to encourage the fur trade, a mainstay of the colony’s fragile economy, and indeed he benefited from it personally. But only a limited number of men with congés, or licences, were allowed to trade.

Furthermore, a 1676 edict by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, King Louis XIV’s powerful minister of finances, prohibited traders from venturing farther afield, into the rich fur country west of the Great Lakes.

The reason for Colbert’s edict was simple. Too many young men in the colony, disenchanted with farming and other settled occupations, were drawn to the excitement — and the potential riches — of trading with distant indigenous nations.

They were the coureurs de bois, and Colbert believed that by abandoning the heart of the colony, in the St. Lawrence valley, they were undermining its growth and leaving it more vulnerable to attacks by warrior nations nearby as well as by the English.

Frontenac seemed willing enough to look the other way, so long as the coureurs de bois didn’t defy Colbert’s edict too blatantly. But then, early in 1678, the governor learned that a prominent, Montreal-based colonial official named Daniel Greysolon Dulhut was planning a trading expedition to the Ottawa country. Not only was Dulhut not licensed, but he was also not sufficiently discreet.

Frontenac directed the judge of the bailiff’s court in Montreal, Jean-Baptiste Migeon de Branssat, to investigate, with a view to reining in not just Dulhut, but the other coureurs de bois, too. So far, so bureaucratically correct. But in fact, Frontenac was playing a double game.

On March 30, Judge Migeon took a deposition from a man named Jean Dupuy, who testified he had seen Dulhut assembling his trade goods and organizing a travelling party of seven or eight Frenchmen and three Indian slaves. But before Dupuy could finish, there was a loud knock on the door. It was Jacques Bizard, Montreal’s town major.

“Listen carefully to what I have to tell you on behalf of the king and (the governor),” Bizard told Migeon. “I arrest you and constitute you prisoner, and order you to go … to your house, which will be your prison.”

Clearly, Migeon had been poised to get too close for Frontenac’s comfort to the reality of the fur trade. Frontenac wanted to be able to report to Colbert that he had ordered an investigation into the coureurs de bois, but without seeing messy details emerge, like his own role in the trade.

Migeon was undaunted. Two days later, though under house arrest, he managed to hear another witness, one Paul Dazé. Like Dupuy, Dazé had seen Dulhut’s preparations. He added that a man named LaRue had said no one needed to worry about being licensed.

“LaRue had been trading for seven years without ever having been bothered,” Dazé testified, adding “that he’d heard several people say they would also go on account of the impunity of the others, and that the change of the governor (Frontenac had taken office six years before) would pardon everything.”

It was not the sort of testimony that Frontenac would want to see make its way back to Versailles.

However, it appears Dazé was the last witness whom Migeon managed to examine. The judge was kept sequestered for two months, he was fined 200 livres, and his inquiry quietly faded away.

On Sept. 1, Dulhut and his party duly set off for the country west of Lake Superior; they didn’t return until March 1681. Three months later, Colbert proclaimed an amnesty for the coureurs de bois — just when Frontenac’s rackety administration had resulted in his recall to France.

Such was his influence at court, however, that he was able to return for a second term as governor in 1689.