Trade and Mobility in the Late Eighteenth-Century River World of the Western Great Lakes: the Case of Réaume’s Leaf River Post
Author(s): Amelie Allard
Year: 2018
Summary
This paper examines the lived experiences of French Canadian fur traders in the late eighteenth-century western Great Lakes region. Even as they labored under – sometimes actively resisted - the Anglo-Scot masters of the trade, a life of travel away from colonial centers provided an arena for voyageurs to enact and reproduce distinct sets of fur trade practices through the transmission of knowledge on the spot, as well as create a place for themselves at the intersection of British colonial expectations and Indigenous alliances. Drawing from archaeological data from Réaume’s Leaf River Post, a fur trade post in central Minnesota, as well as contemporaneous documentary sources, I argue that the traders’ mobility, as a politically-significant form of movement, allowed traders to create a sense of place in unfamiliar landscapes, while also creating tensions between colonial ideals of sedentary life and the need and desire for mobility. Architectural practices at Réaume’s reflect this ambivalence.
Cite this Record
Trade and Mobility in the Late Eighteenth-Century River World of the Western Great Lakes: the Case of Réaume’s Leaf River Post. Amelie Allard. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, New Orleans, Louisiana. 2018 ( tDAR id: 441836)
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Keywords
Temporal Keywords
Late 18th Century
Spatial Coverage
min long: -141.003; min lat: 41.684 ; max long: -52.617; max lat: 83.113 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 195