Just how many Frenchmen, young and old, were engaged in the lawless and fascinating life of the forest trader when the fur traffic was at its height cannot be stated with exactness.  But the number must have been large.  The intendant Duchesneau, in 1680, estimated that more than eight hundred men, out of a colonial population numbering less than ten thousand, were off in the woods.  “There is not a family of any account,” he wrote to the King, “but has sons, brothers, uncles, and nephews among these coureurs-de-bois.”  This may be an exaggeration, but from references contained in the dispatches of various royal officials one may fairly conclude that Duchesneau’s estimate of the number of traders was not far wide of the mark.  And there is other evidence as to the size of this exodus to the woods.  Nicholas Perrot, when he left Montreal for Green Bay in 1688, took with him one hundred and forty-three voyageurs.[1] La Hontan found “thirty or forty coureurs-de-bois at every post in the Illinois country."[2]

[Footnote 1:  Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York, ix., 470.]

[Footnote 2:  Voyages (ed.  Thwaites), ii., 175.]

Among the leaders of the coureurs-de-bois several names stand out prominently.  Francois Dauphine de la Foret, Nicholas Perrot, and Henri de Tonty, the lieutenants of La Salle, Alphonse de Tonty, Antoine de La Mothe-Cadillac, Greysolon Du Lhut and his brother Greysolon de la Tourette, Pierre Esprit Radisson and Medard Chouart de Groseilliers, Olivier Morel de la Durantaye, Jean-Paul Le Gardeur de Repentigny, Louis de la Porte de Louvigny, Louis and Juchereau Joliet, Pierre LeSueur, Boucher de la Perriere, Jean Pere, Pierre Jobin, Denis Masse, Nicholas d’Ailleboust de Mantet, Francois Perthuis, Etienne Brule, Charles Juchereau de St. Denis, Pierre Moreau dit La Toupine, Jean Nicolet—­these are only the few who connected themselves with some striking event which has transmitted their names to posterity.  Many of them have left their imprint upon the geographical nomenclature of the Middle West.  Hundreds of others, the rank and file of this picturesque array, gained no place upon the written records, since they took part in no striking achievement worthy of mention in the dispatches and memoirs of their day.  The coureur-de-bois was rarely a chronicler.  If the Jesuits did not deign to pillory him in their Relations, or if the royal officials did not single him out for praise in the memorials which they sent home to France each year, the coureur-de-bois might spend his whole active life in the forest without transmitting his name or fame to a future generation.  And that is what most of them did.  A few of the voyageurs found that one trip to the wilds was enough and never took to the trade permanently.  But the great majority, once the virus of the free life had entered their veins, could not forsake the wild woods to the end of their days.  The dangers of the life were great, and the mortality among the traders was high. Coureurs de risques they ought to have been called, as La Hontan remarks.  But taken as a whole they were a vigorous, adventurous, strong-limbed set of men.  It was a genuine compliment that they paid to the wilderness when they chose to spend year after year in its embrace.