The Last Voyageurs Read online

  At the end of the interview session, Lewis asked Campbell to leave the classroom, then come back as if he were a voyageur just arriving after a day on the water, with an audience on shore eager to hear about the trip. Campbell was to conclude the impromptu skit with a verse of the French drinking song, “Chevalier de la Table Ronde.”

  Campbell left the classroom and closed the door behind him. When he came back, any nerves he’d felt during the interview seemed to have disappeared. His voice was confident as he described life on the river. Then, without hesitation, he broke into song. The adults cheered and clapped. Full marks for dramatization.

  In addition to interviews meant to illuminate their character and show their level of comfort in front of the media, students had to prove their dedication to the expedition in other ways: learning the history of French explorers in North America, memorizing pages upon pages of relevant French vocabulary (la cordelle for tow rope; l’hache for ax; la pagaie for paddle), and contributing to the interdisciplinary projects. They did all this work in addition to their regular schoolwork, extracurricular commitments, and jobs, without knowing if they’d make the cut. There was a small scholarship promised for those who made it through the selection process and completed the voyage, but the overwhelming incentive for most of those going through the application process was the expedition itself. Many called it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The chance to participate in something so vast in scope was worth all the extra work. Fortunately, the adults didn’t take long to make their final decision. By early 1975 they’d winnowed away the remaining applicants to a crew of sixteen, a number that included Campbell. He was thrilled and his parents were somewhat relieved; their son had originally planned on spending the months following graduation doing a solo hike of the Appalachian Trail. At least now he wouldn’t be alone.

  Meanwhile, other pieces of the expedition were falling into place. Lewis enlisted the help of experts from Chicagoland and beyond to act as advisers, including famed Chicago weather forecaster Harry Volkman, Indiana Mental Health Department psychologist Will Kennedy, and Peter van Handel, a sports physiologist from the Ball State University Human Performance Lab. Lewis also found a priest who was the perfect replica of the priest who had accompanied La Salle: Father Loran Fuchs was a member of the Recollect Order (a French branch of the Franciscans) who had spent years canoeing in the Boundary Waters near Canada and was fit enough to make the journey. The priest agreed to join the expedition and play the role of Pere Zenobe Membre.

  As it came together, the expedition, like dozens of other projects celebrating the country’s bicentennial, was starting to get more press attention—so much so that people began approaching Lewis with ideas for the reenactment. One such man was Joel Knecht, who had expertise in Native American history and 17th-century clothing. The blond-haired, blue-eyed teacher from Connecticut was knowledgeable and enthusiastic. He had plans to help the expedition develop authentic attire, which was a subject Lewis and the other teachers knew little about. After debating the merits of adding another person, Lewis welcomed Knecht to the crew.

  Lewis also found the perfect person to head the liaison team: his wife, Jan. The newlyweds had been dating while Reid was on the Jolliet-Marquette expedition, so Jan knew the lengths her husband was willing to go to accomplish a historic reenactment. Reid liked to joke that when they got engaged, he and La Salle came in the same package. He believed in this second expedition so much that she couldn’t help but believe in it, too. She wanted to make his dream come true. If that meant figuring out the logistics and doing publicity work while receiving none of the fame and acclaim showered on the crew, so be it. Though it did sometimes feel like she was drowning under a mountain of paperwork.

  Thankfully, she had her best friend, Marlena Scavuzzo, to help with all the secretarial work. Marlena joined when Jan asked her because she thought the trip sounded exciting, like something out of an adventurous romance novel. The two friends had met when they were both studying to be high school English teachers at Western Illinois University and stayed close even after going to work in different schools. If there was anyone Jan could rely on to be a brick and accept her bossiness, it was Marlena. She was relieved she’d have her best friend with her on the expedition, because accomplishing everything on her own would’ve been impossible.

  At the beginning of 1976 two more women joined the liaison team as well. Cathy Palmer, a senior graduating that summer from Elgin High School, had originally wanted to be part of the crew. When she learned that only male applicants were allowed (a strict rule meant to reflect the original voyage’s demographics), she and a friend fumed but let the matter drop. A year later during study hall she saw George LeSieutre, one of the crew members, sewing leather moccasins. She was intrigued. She asked what he was doing, and he reminded her of the expedition she’d heard about a year ago. This time she decided she wanted to be part of it, even if she wasn’t going to be paddling in the canoes with the men. She applied to join the liaison team and was accepted.

  Sharon Baumgartner had already graduated and started taking classes at Elgin Community College when most of the other crew members were finishing their senior year of high school. But she heard about the voyage all the same because she was dating Marc Lieberman, one of the members of the expedition. She slowly got pulled into the liaison team, though no one really outlined what she and Palmer would need to do in advance. For all the training the crew members underwent, the leaders of the liaison team didn’t share much with their younger counterparts about how they should prepare. The older women never discussed their letter-writing campaign with the new recruits, perhaps because they felt it wasn’t the girls’ responsibility. All Palmer and Baumgartner knew was that there would be some publicity work and they’d drive around the country following the crew. They’d pick up mail from prearranged drop sites, do laundry for the men, carry the bags of dried peas and beans that wouldn’t fit in the boats, and set up the sound equipment for performances. It would be an adventure of sorts, even if it meant doing lots of work.

  Despite how well everything was progressing, Lewis continued to have too many things to do and not enough time to do them. He’d already quit his job as a teacher at the end of the 1974 school year. Now he started sleeping less and dedicating all his time, including weekends, to the expedition. No matter how much he planned and how comprehensively he explained his detailed strategy for the voyage, there were always complications arising and detractors pointing out various impossibilities.

  Of the ongoing issues, fund-raising remained the most challenging. From the start, Lewis had known the expedition would be a costly undertaking. All the teachers he brought onto the expedition would need salaries, and the average yearly income for a teacher at the time was $12,000.6 He also planned on paying the two heads of the liaison team, the photojournalist who would travel with the crew and publish stories and photos of them in newspapers along their route, and potentially a film crew that would make a video of the expedition. The crew members would need food, health insurance, and materials to make their clothing and tools (leather, wool, wood, and metal). He wanted two vans for the liaison team and enough money to cover the cost of their accommodations over the course of the journey. All in all, Lewis anticipated the trip costing $595,000 (close to $2.5 million in today’s currency), an amount that seemed impossibly large, despite the number of in-kind donations offered to him by various public and private groups.

  Lewis wasn’t going to raise those kinds of funds through bake sales and car washes—he needed a professional to assist him. He worked with two separate fund-raising groups for several months, but neither raised much money. Their explanation for the lack of results was that the expedition didn’t have a natural constituency, unlike a cause such as a hospital or new school. So Lewis turned to grant writing and donations from states, Canadian provinces, and individuals. He took out around $30,000 in personal loans, sold his car, and poured his savings into the project. He recruited the othe
r adult crew members to undertake fund-raising efforts of their own in different parts of the Midwest, though they struggled with how to approach the problem. Some of the parents of the teenage crew members did their own work to raise money. Ken Lewis learned fund accounting so that they could trace the individual dollar from the donor to what it was spent on. He knew it would be a scandal if they misused the donations and grants, so he spent innumerable long days recording each of the incoming donations by hand in ledger books.

  Despite the many hurdles the expedition had to overcome, the teenage crew members never seemed too concerned by the possibility of failure. As long as they stayed committed to the vision, Lewis felt confident the crew would pull through, regardless of their critics and the monetary difficulties. The young men who had any doubts about the success of the expedition had already removed themselves from the running. The ones who remained were firm in their commitment to the expedition. They were enthralled by the scope of the challenge. It sounded like an adventure on a Homeric scale, a last chance to live in the wild before fully submitting to the strictures of adulthood. No one could call them frivolous, either, because they planned to educate their countrymen on a little-known but essential piece of North American history. As Lewis liked to say, “We’re not doing this to indulge ourselves.” Really, it was almost a patriotic duty.

  On the corner of Irving Park Road and Narragansett Avenue in Chicago, a half dozen people worked in a large square building that had once housed a blacksmith’s forge. Instead of the melodic pinging of metal being hammered into new shapes, the smithy now emitted the rasp of knives shaving curls of wood and the occasional thunk of an ax splitting logs. Inside the shop the air was thick with dust and the sickly perfume of drying fiberglass. Teenage boys came in and out of the workshop on different days, eager to help construct the canoes that would soon be carrying them down the St. Lawrence. Leading them in their efforts were metals teacher John Fialko and Ralph Frese, owner of Chicagoland Canoe Base, where the work was completed.

  Frese had developed the design for the replica birch-bark canoes and built two on his own several years earlier. Those first two were used in the Jolliet-Marquette expedition. He based his boats on historical models and used traditional tools and techniques: no power tools, no glue, no nails. The sleek crafts were perfect imitations of Algonquian birch-bark canoes, but for one crucial detail: the birch-bark hull. Birch bark is a strong but high-maintenance building material that can be torn on sharp rocks and requires regular patching. Given the expedition’s tight schedule and the long distance to be covered, it seemed like too much of a gamble to see if the canoes could survive such a journey. Plus, no one knew how birch bark would react to the pollution-infused waterways near Chicago. Instead, Frese developed a fiberglass hull, screen-printed to look just like birch bark. The layers of fiberglass cloth had an accumulated thickness of one eighth of an inch. Frese called his creation “Chicago bark.”

  To give the hull its shape, inner and outer gunwales (the upper edges of the boat) were attached at the top of each side of the hull and lashed together. Then, one-hundred rib planks cut from logs bought off a farm in southern Wisconsin had to be steamed into a U shape. The process of cutting a rib piece down to the proper size with a drawknife took about twenty-five minutes, and there were six hundred ribs to make for all the canoes. Each of the ribs had to be slid into its spot, and then the thwarts were placed above them, crosswise between the gunwales. Finally, the bow and stern pieces were gently inserted and the boat was turned upside down so that all the seams could be smeared with spruce resin gum. The entire process took somewhere between eight hundred and one thousand man-hours, but the finished product was a stunning vessel that looked almost ghostly in its effortless movement through the water. The first boat, christened the Montreal, was completed on February 2, 1976. The last one wouldn’t be finished until barely a week before the group was set to depart from Illinois in July. Together, the fleet of six boats cost $25,000—Frese had been generous enough to give them one of the canoes for free.

  Frese was an invaluable ally in the construction of the canoes, and in some ways, he was also the person who had pushed Lewis onto the path on which he found himself. Frese, a fourth-generation blacksmith, was fiercely proud of the history of the Midwest and had done all he could to educate people about it. He was especially interested in the 17th and early 18th centuries, the era of French exploration in the region. Before Lewis ever had the inkling of an idea to take students on canoe reenactments, Frese was organizing anniversary celebrations of famous events at places like Starved Rock State Park. When Frese had the idea for the three hundredth anniversary Jolliet-Marquette expedition and recruited Lewis to play a leading role, he had unwittingly infected the younger man with the reenactment bug.

  All around the country, living history was in vogue. Places that purported to offer authentic glimpses into the past, like Pioneer Village in Salem, Massachusetts; Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; and the Pleasant Hill Shaker community in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, were rising in prevalence and popularity. The American Revolution Bicentennial only fanned the flames of immersive nostalgia, sending hordes of people to museums, filling gas stations with commemorative mugs, and network television running “Bicentennial minutes” segments in which politicians and celebrities described a snippet of American history. The history fever even spread to pop culture, with shows like All in the Family and The Carol Burnett Show lampooning the Bicentennial minutes. It had never been cooler to show interest in—and even dress up as—a bunch of dead white guys.

  “It was only by luck that La Salle’s men finished the trip at all. They could’ve all been killed instead,” Naval instructor Tom Kirkpatrick told the group of young men assembled before him at the Glenview Naval Air Station.7 The statement was equal parts introduction and admonishment. Kirkpatrick was there to teach the men about surviving outdoors in the winter, but he also seemed doubtful about the expedition’s ability to travel safely, regardless of how well they were trained. They could learn all about the dangers of hypothermia, how to stay warm with a severe windchill, and the body’s physiological response to being plunged into cold water, but none of that mattered if they were wearing leather moccasins and nothing but a few layers of wool shirts. That was Kirkpatrick’s real concern: the expedition’s strict adherence to authenticity.

  “Couldn’t you make those things bigger?” Kirkpatrick asked as he inspected the group’s moccasins. “That way you could slip them on over snowmobiling boots. Then you’d keep your feet warm and dry.”

  “If we went around wearing gunboats like that, people would laugh at us,” Father Loran Fuchs answered.

  Father Loran’s response was representative of the other crew members’ feelings on the matter. Authenticity was held up as the pinnacle to which everyone should strive. But the concept was a vague, slippery one. How do you re-create a perfect imitation of the 17th century when you live in the 20th? Lewis built a few loopholes into the expedition’s parameters to account for the time discrepancy. They would be permitted to brush their teeth every day and wear contact lenses if vision correction was necessary, though the anachronistic bottles of contact cleaning solution would need to be hidden. Anyone who wanted to read could pack books, despite the fact that most voyageurs were illiterate. And since La Salle and his men survived on food given by generous Native American hosts along the route, Lewis would let the crew eat any kind of food hospitable communities along the way gave and receive care packages from home, most of which would contain comestibles that wouldn’t have existed or been available to the voyageurs. The men would also carry water in their boats instead of drinking out of the rivers and lakes.

  Everything else would be re-created as accurately as knowledge allowed: clothes would be hand-sewn and colored with natural dyes; crew members would use French vocabulary and their French names in front of audiences; and food cooked in camp would be limited to oatmeal, cornmeal, peas, beans, and whatever fruits and vegetables
communities donated to them. If Lewis had learned anything about reenactments during the Jolliet-Marquette expedition, it was that audiences noticed the details. On several occasions, people had looked askance at the men when they ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Lewis wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. It didn’t matter that perfect authenticity was impossible. If they didn’t at least try, how could La Salle: Expedition II say they’d achieved something only one other group of people had ever achieved in known human history? How could they bring the past to life without the proper accoutrements? How could they hope to understand the voyageurs’ mentality if they didn’t wear the same scratchy wool clothes and eat the same tasteless food?

  All these questions may sound ludicrous, and they don’t have any real answers. Wearing wool clothing and eating bean soup for dinner was no more likely to give them insight into the worldview of a 17th-century man than taking tea in the White House would illuminate the mysteries of the American presidency. Bridging the gap between three hundred years of elapsed time wasn’t possible, especially in an era of accelerated technological and social change. The voyageurs who traveled into the continent’s interior would sometimes go for months without seeing another European or meeting someone who spoke their language. They had never been vaccinated against any kind of disease, they had no reliable maps to consult, and for every tribe they met their chance of being warmly welcomed was matched by the likelihood of being attacked.