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CANADIAN CURRENCY Talk about funny money! Canadian currency hasn’t always been loonies, toonies, and twenty-dollar bills. Beads, beaver pelts, and playing cards, too, were the coin of the realm before the realm had coin. DEAR
SIEUR DE LA SALLE For Europeans, seventeenth-century North America was a dangerous, untamed land--a vast wilderness that attracted men with a thirst for adventure and discovery. Such a man was the enigmatic Robert Cavelier de La Salle. After charting the Great Lakes and paddling down the Mississippi River, La Salle embarked on his most ambitious quest--to claim for France the lands at the mouth of the Mississippi. But his journey into the Gulf of Mexico would prove to be his downfall, fatally exposing his stubborn pride and his capacity for delusion. A
LETTER TO ANTOINE What can only be described as a love letter, it reaches across the centuries to touch the heart of the ancestor of Adrienne Leduc's husband, Antoine Leduc, bringing to life the personal nature of the author's long-lasting relationship with the past. ANTOINE:
COUREUR DE BOIS (English version) This novel provides a compelling portrait of the class system that dominated social relations during the 17th century in France and New France. The events against which the hero's life unfolds were very real, and the major feudal characters lived and behaved as described. The story is concerned with the politics of maps, and the motivations of those who had a vested interest in it. Antoine’s life and death is set against a fabric of harsh Parisian royal decrees and bureaucratic venality, harsher Indian brutality and Jesuit aggressiveness. As a Norman émigré, Antoine apprentices in the fur trade with friendly Indians. He learns mapmaking from the Jesuits and builds a career in exploration that takes him far afield, including today's U.S. southwest. He loses his Indian wife to wilderness savagery and weds a Fille du Roi. But in the end Antoine is the restless coureur de bois, who discovers the corruption of those involved with his maps. Seventeenth-century North America was a dangerous, untamed land, a vast wilderness where settlers, fur traders, and missionaries all struggled to eke out an existence. But the New World was also a place that attracted a special breed of men—men with a thirst for adventure and discovery—coureurs de bois. HOW TO TRACE YOUR
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