The cultural traders of New France

And the fascinating story of Guillaume Couture

https://sglevis.ca/guillaume-couture-et-sa-descendance

While researching the early American encounters recently, I was reminded of the pivotal and courageous role some settlers played in navigating back and forth between different worlds, cultures, and languages.

Below is a condensed story of one of these “cultural” traders.

In 1637, working in his hometown of Rouen in France, a young Guillaume Couture in his early twenties could not envision the political and diplomatic role he would eventually play in the New World when he accepted the offer to accompany missionary Jesuits in New France. Even as a literate master carpenter—a rarity in early 17^th century France—his socio-economic prospects remained grim, in a country strife with wide disparities of wealth and miserable living conditions.¹ In such a context, and aware of alternatives outside his native land, the young Couture was open to new opportunities in the New World. After a month-long perilous trip across the Atlantic, Couture initially arrived in the first French fortified settlement on the St-Lawrence, Québec. He quickly learned the customs of the colony, practiced the languages of the First Nations, and prepared himself for his mission into the Great Lakes region where the Jesuits wished to establish a permanent village to evangelize the Hurons.

Located 1,200 kilometers from Québec, the new Saint-Mary village near Georgian Bay posed a significant logistical challenge for the necessary journeys between the two sites for supply exchanges, communication, and transporting new recruits. During a returning voyage in 1642, Couture and his crew of French and Hurons travellers got ambushed by the Iroquois while canoeing back up the river. Equipped with Dutch supplied weapons, the Iroquois killed many during the skirmish, but young Guillaume was abducted and taken as a hostage deep into Iroquois territory near present-day Albany, New York. In the initial stages of his capture by the Mohawks Iroquois, Couture suffered a level of torture which was related in the Jesuits Relations² with incredible precision and detail, to “emphasize the cruelty of the Iroquois enemy.”³

The Natives travelled with Couture from village to village, made him suffer for weeks, cutting one of his index fingers with the edge of a seashell, and burning part of his skin in rituals that Couture witnessed in previous years while with the Hurons in Saint-Mary. As the time passed, he survived the physical abuse and eventually integrated the tribe, as it was the custom at the time with the Natives who often welcomed captured soldiers, white or Indian, to replace fellow soldiers who got killed in never ending wars against their foe. Guillaume Couture, with his linguistic capacities, courage, working skills, and an impressive knack for diplomacy, eventually ascended the political hierarchy amongst the Iroquois. In a book review of the life of Couture, Vergereau-Dewey summarizes the events by stating that he was “adopted by the Iroquois, who admired his bravery.”⁴

He was so respected by his new peers that, by 1645, he persuaded enough Iroquois to seek a peace treaty with Governor Montmagny and the French, ending the perpetual war around the Great Lakes basin. About this improbable turn of events, anthropologist Serge Bouchard wrote:

“This unlikely treaty is not owed to the aristocrats of Quebec and France, who repeatedly make political blunders toward sovereign Indigenous nations, but to Guillaume Couture, a man of good faith who simply wishes for the war to end and for trade to flourish between peoples.”

Serge Bouchard (translated from original version in French)⁵

Couture, an otherwise unknown carpenter, explorer, and settler in the early days of New France, exemplifies the courageous and tenacious lives of these truchements⁶ or “Go-Betweens.” Studying this Guillaume Couture character of the early days of New France also represents a perfect window in understanding the work of historian Richard White, who coined the concept of The Middle Ground in his book of the same name. This atypical culture creation that took place in the Great Lakes area, particularly between the early French explorers and the Native Nations that held dominion in this part of North America, was characterized by mutual misunderstandings and pragmatic forms of adaptation, all in a context of relative balance of power.⁷ Much to the fact that, compared to the British settlements of the Atlantic coast, New France had a small population in the mid-17^th century.

For White, the inability of any group to dominate its neighbor through force or sheer numbers is a key factor explaining the political and diplomatic relations that developed in this region. This short story merely scratches the surface of the complex cultural and political dynamics of early colonial times. It should, however, broaden people's perspectives when they encounter or read about oversimplified historical concepts, such as unceded territories.

Keep on reading and researching !

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1. Serge Bouchard et Marie-Christine Lévesque, Ils ont Couru l’Amérique: De Remarquables Oubliés Tome 2 (Montréal: Lux éditeur, 2014), 62-63.

2. L.-É Bois, Relations des Jésuites - Contenant ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable dans les missions des pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle-France, Québec, Augustin Coté, éditeur-imprimeur, 1858, 3 vol. ; 26 cm., Collections de BAnQ.

3. Amélie Hamel, “Translating as a Way of Writing History: Father Du Creux’s ‘Historiæ Canadensis’ and the ‘Relations Jésuites’ of New France,” Renaissance Studies 29, no. 1 (2015): 146.

4. S. Pascale Vergereau-Dewey, The French Review 80, no. 4 (2007): 929.

5. Serge Bouchard et Marie-Christine Lévesque, Ils ont Couru l’Amérique: De Remarquables Oubliés Tome 2 (Montréal: Lux éditeur, 2014), 79

6. Word utilized by the French to describe the explorers and translators that acted as intermediaries with the First nations in New France.

7. Richard White, The Middle Ground : Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).