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Crusaders of New France - A Chronicle of the Fleur-de-Lis in the Wilderness - Chronicles of America, Volume 4 by William Bennett Munro
page 107 of 164 (65%)
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The most active and at the same time the most picturesque figure
in the fur-trading system of New France was the _coureur-de-bois_.
Without him the trade could neither have been begun nor continued
successfully. Usually a man of good birth, of some military training,
and of more or less education, he was a rover of the forest by choice
and not as an outcast from civilization. Young men came from France
to serve as officers with the colonial garrison, to hold minor civil
posts, to become seigneurial landholders, or merely to seek adventure.
Very few came out with the fixed intention of engaging in the forest
trade; but hundreds fell victims to its magnetism after they had
arrived in New France. The young officer who grew tired of garrison
duty, the young seigneur who found yeomanry tedious, the young
habitant who disliked the daily toil of the farm--young men of all
social ranks, in fact, succumbed to this lure of the wilderness. "I
cannot tell you," wrote one governor, "how attractive this life is to
all our youth. It consists in doing nothing, caring nothing, following
every inclination, and getting out of the way of all restraint." In
any case the ranks of the voyageurs included those who had the best
and most virile blood in the colony.

Just how many Frenchmen, young and old, were engaged in the lawless
and fascinating life of the forest trader when the fur traffic was at
its height cannot be stated with exactness. But the number must have
been large. The intendant Duchesneau, in 1680, estimated that more
than eight hundred men, out of a colonial population numbering less
than ten thousand, were off in the woods. "There is not a family of
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