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Tour participants paddle a canoe along the waterfront in Lachine. (NATASHA FILLION/The GAZETTE)
Tracing fur traders' steps
Lachine museum offers hands-on experience
Christopher Maughan
The Gazette
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Tour participants paddle a canoe along the waterfront in Lachine. (NATASHA FILLION/The GAZETTE)
For the next month, Quebec’s history buffs will be able to live the experiences of fur traders first-hand, as part of a tour that organizers say is about as historically accurate as you can get.
That is, without asking people to lug around huge bags of fur pelts.
“Each bag weighs 90 pounds, so I don’t think people would make it,” said Daniel Benjamin, a Parks Canada agent working at Lachine National Historic Site.
August is archaeology month in Quebec and as part of the festivities, the fur trade museum is organizing the Archeo-trek, where visitors can retrace the steps of some of Montreal’s first European settlers.
After a short presentation on archaeology and a practice dig, Benjamin and others hop into a colonial-era canoe with the participants and paddle from the fur trade museum to the Lachine Museum.
“You get to experience what it was like to become an explorer, a voyageur of the fur trade,” Benjamin said.
Over the month of August, Quebecers will be able to get hands-on archaeology and history lessons at 75 events on 56 sites across the province as part of archaeology month, which is organized by Archéo-Québec, a province-wide, non-profit association of archaeologists. The ministry of culture provides $50,000 a year in funding.
Gisèle Piédalue, a contract archaeologist working with Archéo-Québec, said the goal of archaeology month is to help Quebecers realize they’re standing on rich archaeological territory.
“For example, few people know that there’s an important site near Lac Mégantic that was discovered a couple of years back that proves that 12,000 years ago there were people walking in southern Quebec.”
The big challenge, as is always the case with educational pursuits, will be getting kids interested. But Archéo-Québec has a plan.
Piédalue said many of the centres and museums participating in archaeology month will have spots set aside where kids can dig, unearth pre-planted artifacts and hopefully learn a thing or two in the process.