The romance of the forest

Washington Irving published his first book before the age of twenty. By thirty he’d earned a reputation as the cleverest and most engaging author in early 19th-century New York. He wrote essays, short stories, poems, satires and travelogues. His characters Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane became fixtures in American culture.

Irving might have been the most famous man in New York. He wasn’t the richest. That distinction went to John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant who built a mercantile empire on furs before shifting to New York real estate. In time the Waldorf Astoria Hotel would memorialize both the man and his native town.

Irving encountered Astor after completing research in the American West for a book on that frontier region. Astor suggested Irving’s next subject: the American fur trade. He promised cooperation in the research.

Irving didn’t have to be persuaded. He would center his story on Astor and his fur company. Then as later, celebrity biographies sold well.

Yet Irving wasn’t far into his research when he discovered another protagonist, even more compelling than Astor. Irving recounted the development of the fur trade in French Canada in the 18th century. Novel techniques and business models were required to turn a profit in the trade. No less novel were the personnel.

“A new and anomalous class of men gradually grew out of this trade,” Irving wrote. “These were called coureurs des bois, rangers of the woods; originally men who had accompanied the Indians in their hunting expeditions, and made themselves acquainted with remote tracts and tribes; and who now became, as it were, peddlers of the wilderness. These men would set out from Montreal with canoes well stocked with goods, with arms and ammunition, and would make their way up the mazy and wandering rivers that interlace the vast forests of the Canadas, coasting the most remote lakes, and creating new wants and habitudes among the natives. Sometimes they sojourned for months among them, assimilating to their tastes and habits with the happy facility of Frenchmen, adopting in some degree the Indian dress, and not unfrequently taking to themselves Indian wives.

“Twelve, fifteen, eighteen months would often elapse without any tidings of them, when they would come sweeping their way down the Ottawa in full glee, their canoes laden with packs of beaver skins. Now came their turn for revelry and extravagance. ‘You would be amazed,’ says an old writer, ‘if you saw how lewd these peddlers are when they return; how they feast and game, and how prodigal they are, not only in their clothes, but upon their sweethearts. Such of them as are married have the wisdom to retire to their own houses; but the bachelors act just as an East Indiaman and pirates are wont to do; for they lavish, eat, drink, and play all away as long as the goods hold out; and when these are gone, they even sell their embroidery, their lace, and their clothes. This done, they are forced upon a new voyage for subsistence.’”

Lest his readers be scandalized, Irving had to frown at the excesses of the wood rangers. “Many of these coureurs des bois became so accustomed to the Indian mode of living, and the perfect freedom of the wilderness, that they lost relish for civilization, and identified themselves with the savages among whom they dwelt, or could only be distinguished from them by superior licentiousness. Their conduct and example gradually corrupted the natives, and impeded the works of the Catholic missionaries, who were at this time prosecuting their pious labors in the wilds of Canada.”

But Irving didn’t seem disappointed that the missionaries failed to impose piety on the stepchildren of the forest. The coureurs were more fun than the blackrobes. Irving’s readers agreed, to judge by his book sales.