The Story of the Voyageurs

As Michael Peake has written in his article "Meet the Voyageurs," "The history of Canadian wilderness canoeing has a cast of thousands. To many, Bill Mason rightfully stands as the embodiment of everything about canoeing. But before Bill was on the scene there was a group of gentlemen paddlers who were dubbed by the press 'The Voyageurs' after the early fur traders. They began their canoeing exploits without much fanfare but by the time they were done they had influenced, directly or indirectly, a whole generation of paddlers. "

Sigurd Olson was the leader of the group, and so, using a term that one-and-a-half centuries earlier had designated the bosses of fur-trading voyageurs, the modern Voyageurs fondly called him "Bourgeois."

The following story of how the Voyageurs came to be, what they did, and what they meant to Sigurd is excerpted from my book A Wilderness Within: The Life of Sigurd F. Olson. The story begins in 1950, as Sigurd is working on drafts of a U.S.-Canada treaty that would create an immense, precedent-setting land management program for the Rainy Lake watershed. The proposal encompassed some 14,000 square miles of territory on both sides of the border, including Quetico Provincial Park and what is now called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. But most of the vocal support for the proposal came from the United States. Sigurd Olson was heckled by chamber of commerce members in northwestern Ontario when he spoke of the treaty, and it was not surprising: 9,000 of the 14,000 square miles to be regulated were in Ontario, and to many residents the proposal seemed to be little more than an American proposal to make tourist dollars at the expense of Canada. The following excerpt begins with Sigurd's realization that a long-term program of postive, Canadian-driven publicity was essential to wilderness preservation, treaty or no treaty.

To that end, Olson arranged a July 1950 Quetico Park canoe trip with three members of the Toronto Anglers' and Hunters' Association, including the group's secretary, John Mitchele. Olson hoped to get them excited enough about wilderness preservation in general, and Quetico Park and the international treaty in particular, that they would start building grassroots support through their organization.

Mitchele took Olson's idea one step further: he invited an Ontario journalist named Fred Bodsworth. At the time, Bodsworth (shown at right), who eventually became one of Canada's best known nature writers, was just beginning to break into the magazine market, and he hoped to write about the trip for Maclean's, which was then Canada's equivalent of the Saturday Evening Post. Bodsworth recalled years later, "Maclean's approved the idea, gave me some expense money, and I went along and spent two weeks paddling bow in a canoe and talking with Sig in the stern."

The experience, he said, changed his life. Bodsworth, who had grown up along the shore of Lake Erie in a small Canadian fishing port, had never taken a wilderness trip before. Nor had he met someone like Sigurd Olson:

He had the scientific underpinnings, he could talk about lichens and forest succession and the mineralogy of rocks, but he also had another entirely different functional level of bush lore expertise. He could look at a lake and know right where to go to get a couple of fast lake trout for supper while the rest of us pitched tents. He could find his way across an invisible portage that had not been used for a couple of years, find the salt or tea in a food pack amid a muddle of a hundred other little packets, and knew exactly how much wood it would take to bake a bannock. In that two weeks Sig Olson assumed for me a kind of mythic godlike caliber that mellowed a little as my experience broadened but never entirely left me.

The resulting article gave Quetico Park exactly the kind of Canadian publicity Olson hoped for. "The Fight to Keep the Wilderness Wild," published in Maclean's on May 15, 1951, told of the pressures that threatened the park, from road developments to the "covetous glances" of resort planners. Bodsworth also spoke of the battles waged over the years by conservationists on both sides of the border, and of the proposed treaty. He didn't say anything that hadn't been said by American conservationists in American publications, but he wrote from a Canadian perspective and for a Canadian audience. He mentioned Olson just once in the article, and identified him not specifically as an American, but as an Izaak Walton League ecologist, in order to minimize the gut-level hostility many Canadians felt whenever Americans tried to influence Canadian policies. He also let Olson edit a draft of the article, but told Sigurd to make comments on separate paper so Bodsworth could send the manuscript on to Maclean's: "I wouldn't let them see it with another man's handwriting on it, for then they would suspect that other parties were interested in it for publicity reasons and maybe take a dim view of the whole business."

Sigurd, of course, was interested in the article for publicity reasons, but he saw the canoe trip with Bodsworth as just the beginning. On July 29, 1950, just after the trip was over and long before Bodsworth's article was completed and published, Olson wrote to Kelly [Charles Kelly, chairman of the President's Quetico-Superior Committee] his vision of what could be called "canoe public relations," although Sigurd himself would not have thought of using such explicit terminology. "I feel that this first all-Canadian trip will be the forerunner of many others which will bring to the attention of Canadians the real values of the Quetico," Olson wrote.

The first indication that Olson was right came soon after Bodsworth's article appeared. Eric Morse (shown at left), national director of the Association of Canadian Clubs, contacted Bodsworth and asked how to get in touch with Sigurd Olson. Morse had recently taken a small group of prominent Canadians and foreign diplomats on a week-long canoe trip along the Gatineau River near Ottawa. The diplomats had never canoed before, but had been coaxed into the trip after being teased during a dinner party about trying to understand the real Canada from the cocktail circuit. The canoe trip ended up such a success that the men vowed to try it again in 1952. Morse, in charge of planning, read about the Quetico in Bodsworth's article and decided that was where his group would go.

Late in 1951 and early in 1952, Olson and Morse were in contact by mail, planning a two-week trip for August around a central portion of Quetico Park known as Hunter's Island. For Olson, it was an opportunity to introduce some influential VIP's to the wonders of the canoe country and to the hopes conservationists held for its preservation. Olson didn't canoe with the group, but met the men on August 18 at Horse Portage, a mile-long hike into Basswood Lake, their final destination. He was to take them by motor launch to the Basswood home of F.B. Hubachek [a member of the Quetico-Superior Council, law partner of Charles Kelly, and a leading advocate of canoe country wilderness preservation]. Forty years later, Omond Solandt (shown below) recalled the experience:

Our first meeting with Sig was very auspicious. We arrived at the portage landing after a tough day paddling in rain against a headwind and were not looking forward to walking a mile uphill with canoes and packs. Sig and Joe Kerntz, a very experienced local guide who was Brookes' [Hubachek's] manager awaited us. After a warm but brief welcome they shouldered our two canoes and set off at a brisk pace.

When we got to the end of the portage we found Hub's Tub, a commodious work boat, waiting to whisk us down Basswood Lake to Brookes' establishment while we drank cold beer. When we arrived we had showers and then a huge dinner of steak and apple pie followed by a sauna and bed. No wonder we thought well of Sig, Brookes, Joe and all their friends!

[Note: All of Omond Solandt's quotes in this excerpt come from his 1993 article "Sig Olson: The Bourgeois and his Voyageurs," which Micheal Peake, editor of Che-Mun, has made available on line.]

A year later, Olson joined the group for the first time on another two-week trip through Quetico Park. Sigurd thought their average daily distance of twenty-one miles was too much for full enjoyment, but the dawn-to-dusk regime of paddling and portaging also forged lasting friendships. They worked well together, establishing routines that took advantage of each person's talents, and they gave each other the space and freedom to fully enjoy their time away from high-pressure jobs. They joked together and sang songs, took pre-dawn plunges in misty bays before drinking their morning coffee, and fell asleep at night listening to the loons. There was a wild, windy day when they virtually sailed down white-capped Sturgeon Lake, using their paddles not to go forward but to keep from tipping, and a repeat the next day when they had to use their bodies as shields to keep the canoes from smashing on the rocks as they approached their campsite. And, of course, they got lost. Omond Solandt recalled:

Sig was in country that he vowed was familiar to him so he took over the task of guiding us to a wonderful campsite he knew. After far too much paddling we realized that we were lost. Sig stoutly denied this charge and assured us that he was just searching for his grandmother's grave which he yearned to revisit! Such slips were rare and only served to further endear him to us.

Before the men returned home they planned a trip for 1954: they would follow the 266-mile section of the historic voyageurs' trail that formed the international boundary from Grand Portage to Fort Frances. The expedition ended up receiving extensive media coverage in Canada, and from then on Olson and his companions were known as "the Voyageurs."

The makeup of the group guaranteed media interest in their annual expeditions. In addition to Olson and Eric Morse, the Voyageurs included Omond Solandt, a doctor who planned Canada's national defense research; Major-General Elliot Rodger, Vice Chief of General Staff of the Canadian Army; Denis Coolican, president of the Canadian Bank Note Co.; Blair Fraser, an editor and writer with Maclean's magazine and a broadcaster with a large Canadian following; Antonius "Tony" Lovink, the Netherlands Ambassador to Canada; John Endemann, a South African diplomat; and Tyler Thompson, U.S. minister to Canada. Age, in addition to prominence, sparked the interest of reporters. These were not young men fresh out of college; none of them was under forty when they first joined the Voyageurs, and several of them were in their fifties when they started taking rugged canoe trips through the Canadian bush.

Olson made seven expeditions with the Voyageurs, beginning with the Quetico Park trip in 1953 and ending with a grueling four hundred-mile journey down the Hayes River to Hudson Bay in 1964, when he was sixty-five years old. In between were two voyages along the Churchill River, a trip across the top of Saskatchewan from Reindeer Lake to Lake Athabasca, and a subarctic journey along the Camsell River and Great Bear Lake to the Mackenzie River, the Mississippi of the North. The group's make-up changed a little from trip to trip; typically, six of the Voyageurs went along. Olson, Morse, Solandt, Rodger, Coolican, Lovink and Fraser made the most trips and formed the group's core. Olson, the oldest and most experienced, was the unanimous choice of the others to be the leader, with the final say whenever the travelers faced a difficult decision. Using a title from the fur trade, the Voyageurs called him "the Bourgeois." Years later, Omond Solandt described Olson as a strong leader who knew how to delegate:

In looking back on our trips together I realize that part of the magic of his leadership was a gift for encouraging each Voyageur to do his thing and to defer to him in his chosen area. For example, Sig did not monopolize the role of naturalist. Eric knew more than Sig about flowers and history and Elliot was an expert on birds, especially waterfowl, and was also greatly interested in animal tracks. He had a habit of wandering off after the work was done to scout the neighborhood and often came back with antlers or other trophies of the chase. He was also unmatched as an assistant to the cook.

I established a modest reputation of keeping track of where we were. Once, after the cocktail hour, Sig decided that he would honor me by appointing me cartographer to the expedition. He had trouble finding the right word and finally decided that the closest he could come was pornographer. So from then on map reading became pornography!

Beginning with the 1954 trip that gave the group its name, all of the Voyageurs' expeditions were along historic routes of fur traders and explorers. As they paddled, the group often sang the traditional chansons of the original voyageurs: En roulant ma boule, La Belle Lizette, La Claire Fontaine. In the evenings, Eric Morse would read selections from the diaries of such men as David Thompson, Peter Pond, and Alexander Mackenzie, who had traveled the same waterways and stayed at the same campsites a hundred-fifty or more years before. The times were quite different, of course--on the Churchill River they encountered Cree Indians who couldn't fathom why anyone would want to travel the river without an outboard motor--but many sites remained unchanged.

The historical connections enriched the journeys for all of the white-collar Voyageurs, and played a major role in Canadian media publicity, for in the 1950s the country was embracing its geographically rooted cultural history. When the Voyageurs completed their first Churchill River journey in August 1955, and stepped out of their canoes at The Pas, Manitoba, far from the urban centers of Canada, they were greeted by television crews and newspaper reporters. They could count on regular coverage of their journeys by major newspapers in Winnipeg and Toronto and Ottawa, and also--not surprisingly, given Blair Fraser's connection--were featured in Maclean's. In Ottawa, where several of the Voyageurs lived, the Ottawa Evening Journal not only routinely printed Denis Coolican's diaries of the trips, but also published them in pamphlet form.

Sigurd Olson didn't foresee all of this in 1952 and 1953, when he first met and traveled with the Voyageurs and became their Bourgeois. Nor did he realize what the Voyageurs might mean to wilderness preservation across Canada. Their importance--including his own role--would begin to be clear by the 1960s. But in 1953, after his first two-week canoe trip with the group, just two thoughts were uppermost in his mind. First, he sensed he was beginning what would become the most satisfying friendships of his life. Second, he knew he had gotten the Voyageurs interested in helping to preserve the Quetico-Superior wilderness. As he wrote to the Izaak Walton League's Ken Reid on November 15, 1953, "That little nucleus in Ottawa will be our main anchor to windward when the treaty comes up."