For four centuries, before the conquest of the West, trappers crisscrossed North America. Marginal, most often living with the Indians, their figure evokes a lost world, which continues to haunt America.
This work by Gilles Havard is in line with his previous opus, the remarkable History of the coureurs de boispublished in 2016, which explored the world of fur trade in North America before the conquest of the West. Largely renewing a historiography that tended to present the coureurs de bois as adventurers driven by the sole taste of freedom when it was not the quest for profit, Gilles Havard had developed a fascinating social and cultural analysis of this atypical environment, while questioning in an original way the question of power in an imperial context, through the capacity of the authorities to direct the behavior of the most unstable fringes of the European population. The dense and very successful nature of this impressive work did not therefore suggest that its author would return to plough a field that seemed to have already yielded its finest fruits.
Traces of life
Gilles Havard’s new book presents itself as a collection of ten “individual journeys”, those of male characters, French or French-speaking, and who share the quality of adventurers, in the sense that they have made the choice, often at their own risk, to spend part of their existence in Amerindian territory. Here we find, gathered in the form of a biographical narrative, figures already present in theHistory of the coureurs de boissuch as Radisson, Nicolas Perrot, Truteau, Charbonneau, Provost or Beauchamp. While most of the travellers considered here have a link with the fur trade, they may also have distinguished themselves for other reasons, such as their mastery of indigenous languages (the Gambie or Brûlé intermediaries) or their “discovery” expeditions (like the La Vérendrye brothers, the first Europeans to reach the Rocky Mountains).
This original approach allows G. Havard to offer the reader an easily accessible, lively, pleasant and anecdote-filled story, without however sacrificing any of the interpretative quality that we already knew him for. Each of these biographies is, in fact, at the heart of a stimulating play of scales that allows both access to details inaccessible to macroscopic analysis (such as the meticulous attempt to identify La Vérendrye’s two mysterious companions) and to situate these singular itineraries in relation to the norm of the societies in which they evolve (European, colonial, Amerindian). We are ultimately not so far from the “connected micro-history” as it was experienced by Romain Bertrand in other contexts. The approach also pays homage, in its own way, to the pioneering work of Carlo Ginzburg or other Italian theorists of microstorywhen they studied the social world by collecting traces or “clues” left along some apparently uneventful paths of life.
The question of sources then naturally arises. If some of these men gained a little notoriety, it is first of all because they knew how to write (Radisson, Perrot, Truteau, La Vérendrye) and they knew how to put themselves in the picture in the account of their travels. Others, illiterate, are known only through the testimony of those who knew them: the approximate idea that one can have of the character of Etienne Brûlé comes essentially from the remarks, generally malicious, of Champlain or the missionary Gabriel Sagard. As for the colorful figure of Toussaint Charbonneau, he owes his place in the collective American memory to his role in the famous expedition of Clark and Lewis, which crossed the continent from east to west (1804-1806). A modest place, moreover, since the young Shoshone wife of the French-Canadian, Sakakawea (or Sacagawea), steals the show because of her intimate knowledge of the environments and cultures crossed. If Charbonneau has caught the attention of American historians, it is above all for his supposed immorality, cowardice and brutality which allowed, a contrario, to enhance the virtues of the Anglo-Saxon explorers and pioneers…
Between these fragments of existence that the documentation brings to light, the gaps must be filled. The life of Etienne Brûlé (including his death), among the Hurons, is full of these gray areas that G. Havard manages to illuminate, in the manner of an Alain Corbin reconstructing the environment of the Norman clog maker Pinagot, by describing what he could have done or lived, taking into account what is known elsewhere about Huron customs. But other posthumous destinies appear to be even more precarious: it is this Pierre Gambie, one of the rare French go-betweens of the XVIe century whose identity is known, assassinated in Florida in 1565, in unclear circumstances, by Timucua Indians; or Pierre Beauchamp, a trapper from North Dakota whose life and privileged relations with the Amerindians have come down to us thanks to the account given by a Breton colonel in the American army, Régis Trobriand, who crossed his path in 1867…
The ghosts of the “between world”
One could certainly question the need to rehabilitate, in a somewhat repetitive manner, this Franco-America “in memorial disgrace”, at the risk of reawakening some nostalgic passions linked to a French colonization too often caricatured as more “peaceful” and “respectful” than others (a reading that Gilles Havard, let us emphasize, never encouraged). It is, in any case, difficult not to agree with the author when he pleads for a “new genealogy of American history” (p. 503), which would be addressed in particular to readers across the Atlantic for whom, we hope, this work will soon be translated. In terms of the feeling of “already read”, we can still regret that the original flavor of G. Havard’s analyses – when he deals for example with questions of gender (the virile ideal of travelers, the perception of Amerindian women, their modesty or their sexuality, etc.) – fades as soon as we have already tasted them in his previous works. But other questions make their way. We must remember, for example, stimulating reflections on “social boundaries” (p. 492) and what is commonly called marginality.
Marginal, these men are so from the point of view of the dominant social experience of the French colonist in America, the “normal” (and most valued) destiny being that of the farmer. However, as G. Havard notes, they would not have enjoyed such “historical depth” (p. 494) if they had not evolved in these peripheral spaces. It is precisely because they were cultural transmitters, straddling two worlds and two identities, because they had exclusive know-how, that they sometimes became key players in the imperial enterprise. Contrary to an often derogatory image, the sociological paradox of the coureur de bois, demonstrated by this succession of case studies, is that by seeking the freedom and invisibility of Amerindian spaces, the traveler could also obtain a certain form of social recognition from his compatriots. In the mirror, a reflection is outlined on the place of these bicultural French people in Amerindian classifications, also a source of tensions to the extent that integration, so precious to a kinship network, is accompanied by restrictive social obligations (in particular prodigality) which must be respected, at the risk of losing protection and consideration.
Ghost America is therefore formed from the complex combination of these social atoms that represent not only some of the ten protagonists of G. Havard’s story, but also and above all the multitude of characters, sometimes anonymous, that they frequent or meet by chance during their wanderings. Some sometimes emerge from nowhere, unexpectedly, like the two members of the La Vérendrye expedition whose names are revealed to posterity, engraved on a lead plate that was dug out of the ground by a happy coincidence, in February 1913, at Fort Pierre (South Dakota).
But the real ghosts are perhaps even more all the Amerindians, friends, partners, informants, enemies, wives and concubines of these white prairie runners, without even mentioning their mixed and Indianized descendants. If the ethnonyms, the collective names of the Amerindian nations, have come down to us and still populate a significant part of our imagination today, the individual names of the natives most often remain unknown, and the lives that go with them stubbornly escape any biographical ambition. The Amerindians, at the time of G. Havard’s characters, were not yet ghostly: they were made of flesh and blood and reigned supreme over the prairie. They evolved in this still undecided period (from the 1560s to the 1840s), when the history of the continent had perhaps not yet completely changed: within this expanded “between-world”, indigenous cultures and those of Europeans coexisted and, G. Havard tells us, taking up a phrase of Claude Lévi-Strauss, “the fate of the former was not definitively sealed” (p. 12). Their ghosts haunt us today more than ever, at a time when we are becoming aware of what all of humanity has lost in the great ethnocidal and ecocidal cataclysm that followed, swallowing up for good indigenous societies and their ways of being in the world.