The Last Voyageurs

by Lorraine Boissoneault

Overview

Reid Lewis never wanted to be an ordinary French teacher. With the approach of the American Bicentennial, he decided to put his knowledge of French language and history to use in recreating the voyage of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the first European to travel from Montreal to the end of the Mississippi River. Lewis’ crew of modern voyageurs was comprised of 16 high school students and 6 teachers who learned to sew their own 17th-century clothing, paddle handmade canoes, and construct black powder rifles. Together they set off on an eight-month, 3,300-mile expedition across the major waterways of North America. They fought strong currents on the St. Lawrence, paddled through storms on the Great Lakes, and walked over 500 miles across the frozen Midwest during one of the coldest winters of the 20th century, all while putting on performances about the history of French explorers for communities along their route. Weaving the true history of La Salle's initial voyage throughout the narrative, The Last Voyageurs tells the story of a truly unique American odyssey, where a group of young men discovered themselves by pretending to be French explorers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781605989761
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	04/11/2016
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Lorraine Boissoneault is a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where she studied narrative nonfiction. She is an editor at the Weather Channel and lives in Chicago.

Table of Contents

Prologue ix

Chapter 1 Make No Little Plans 1

Chapter 2 Reconstructing the Past 22

Chapter 3 The Life of a Voyageur 48

Chapter 4 The Bonds of Brotherhood 74

Chapter 5 Stuck Between Two Worlds 95

Chapter 6 No Trails But the Waterways Themselves 118

Chapter 7 Trapped at Death's Door 146

Chapter 8 "The Beginning of Our Hardships" 175

Chapter 9 The Most Dangerous Product the Intellect Has Concocted 201

Chapter 10 Parallel Voyages 222

Chapter 11 The Green Buoy 245

Epilogue 265

Endnotes 271

Acknowledgments 275

Editorial Reviews

02/15/2016
In this action-packed dual narrative, Boissoneault, an editor at the Weather Channel, shares a charming slice of U.S. Bicentennial history. In 1973, Reid Lewis, a high school French teacher, outdoorsman, and historical reenactor, was in his mid-30s and at a career crossroads. Dedicated to education but dismayed by the restrictions of the classroom, he came up with an idea for a high-profile adventure that would honor the Bicentennial while illustrating the benefits of hands-on learning. Lewis chose to reenact an important early American exploration: the 1681 Mississippi River voyage of René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. Lewis recruited five other teachers, a priest, and 16 teenage boys to represent the original expedition’s personnel, and he assembled a support team to help with logistics and publicity for the eight-month trip. There was fund-raising, too; the project cost around $595,000 (about $2.5 million today). All the elements of an exciting adventure story are here. Boissoneault describes interesting, complicated people facing life-threatening perils, and in alternating Lewis’s story with that of La Salle’s journey, she makes fascinating historical comparisons. Illus. Agent: Jennifer Carlson, Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner Literary Agency. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

An almost forgotten chapter of our history is brought to light in this chronicle that should be widely read and remembered.

Christopher Webber

In The Last Voyageurs, Lorraine Boissoneault brings both 17th and 20th century history alive in her telling of a daring group of high school students, led by educators, who in 1976 retraced in period gear the 3,300-mile journey of the French explorer La Salle. She puts the reader in the canoes of the youths who traveled from Lake Ontario to New Orleans via the Mississippi River.

Dale Maharidge

I was fascinated by Lorraine Boissoneault's story of latter-day American explorers who set out to conquer time and space in moccasins and canoes. It's an adventure tale, but it's also a meditation on the chasm that separates the present from the past, and how hard it is to leap it.

James Tobin

Lorraine Boissoneault has written a contemporary classic in the literature of the vision quest – part arduous odyssey, part coming-of-age saga. And this book has the added advantage of being indelibly true, lived out by a charismatic teacher and the high school students who volunteer as his crew on a 3,000-mile canoe journey from the St. Lawrence River to the Gulf of Mexico. Here is risk, injury, pain, contention – and camaraderie, common purpose, rapture, and a life-changing achievement.

Sam Freedman

2016-01-19
A parallel narrative of French explorer René-Robert Cavelier La Salle's 1680s trek to the mouth of the Mississippi River and an intrepid 1976 journey by a group of Midwestern youth. Swept up in the bicentennial fever, Illinois French teacher Reid Lewis envisioned a dynamic re-enactment project that would focus not on the Revolutionary events in the Northeast but on the role of the 17th-century French explorer in displaying the early American spirit of adventure and determination. In her nicely woven, bifurcated narrative, Chicago-based author Boissoneault, an editor at the Weather Channel, pursues the complicated personalities and logistics that comprised this extraordinarily arduous expedition of 3,300 miles in handmade canoes across two countries, three lakes, and five major rivers. The journey began in Montreal on Aug. 11, 1976, and concluded with a ceremony at the Gulf of Mexico on April 9, 1977. Well ahead of launch, Lewis and a team of teachers and helpers selected their crew of hardy male teenagers—as part of the need for authenticity, the team had to mirror the initial all-male crew, with each participant assuming the name and persona of an actual original—and a supporting liaison staff of girlfriends and wives to help them with food and lodging along the way. They also had to raise the huge anticipated cost of $595,000 to fund the project, requiring six specially fabricated canoes, moccasins, beaver skins, and other authentic clothing and equipment, salaries for the teachers, and media attention. From her research into individual stories by the participants, Boissoneault offers a fresh sense of the challenges to the second expedition—e.g., avoiding anachronisms (mostly for the press), surviving winter weather, and navigating aggressive personalities. The fluid narrative moves with authority and a sense, like La Salle's original fraught expedition, that anything could disrupt the flow. An engaging travelogue that provides a good example of how one person tirelessly pursued his dream to fruition.

Kirkus Reviews

The ‘La Salle Expedition II’ is awesome, agonizing, and astonishing.

The Providence Journal