In the tangled branches of a single North American family tree—rooted in French-Canadian voyageurs, Scottish lairds, Puritan settlers, Dutch West India Company outposts, and Mohawk trading networks—five very different fur traders emerge across three centuries. They never met. They paddled different rivers, served rival companies, and chased beaver under French, British, Dutch, and American flags. Yet genealogy shows they all belong to the same bloodline: distant cousins, uncles, grandfathers, and kinsmen whose lives trace the entire arc of the continental fur trade from the 1600s to the 1850s. Their stories, pieced together from voyageur contracts, court records, maps, and family lore, form one unbroken narrative of ambition, risk, and wilderness commerce.
The earliest is Edmund “Mohawk Ed” Hawes (1597–c. 1655), the 10th great-grandfather who may be half tall tale, half documented fact. A stone-mason turned Dutch West India Company fur trader, he arrived in New Amsterdam shortly after its founding. He paddled deep into Mohawk country, carving little jumping-jack toys for Native children as a quirky passport through dangerous territory. Indians called him something like “the man who makes jumping soldiers.” His winter-long trading trips reached as far as the great falls between two lakes (likely Niagara). He left a son in the care of a Mohawk woman, then vanished on one final upriver journey. Family legend says he heard of the Pilgrims at Plymouth and simply walked away from the Dutch into English colonial life. Whether strict history or fireside embellishment, “Mohawk Ed” planted the first trading genes in the family line.
A century later, in the heart of New France, another ancestor—René Bourassa dit LaRonde (1688–1778), a 7th great-uncle—turned illicit trade into a family business. Born in La Prairie on the St. Lawrence, René was a classic coureur de bois who ignored Montreal’s fur monopoly. He canoed the Richelieu–Lake Champlain–Hudson route to Albany, smuggling beaver pelts for double the French price. Convicted in 1722 alongside relatives Étienne Deniau and Jean-François Demers, he paid a 500-livre fine, watched his partner’s land auctioned off, then quietly resumed business with official “letter-carrying” passes that everyone knew were covers. By the 1730s René was supplying La Vérendrye’s western posts, wintering at Fort Saint-Charles, surviving a Sioux ambush through the desperate plea of an enslaved Sioux woman who claimed kinship ties. He owned property at Michilimackinac, raised sons who carried the trade deeper into the pays d’en haut, and died at 89 after watching the British take New France. The Bourassas became known as “fathers of the fur trade,” their line threading straight into the family tree.
By the late 1700s the tree had sprouted Yankee and Scottish branches. Peter Pond (1739–1807), the Connecticut-born 4th cousin 7× removed, was a rough-edged Nor’Wester founder and self-taught cartographer. A French-and-Indian War veteran, he pushed past the Methye Portage into the Athabasca country, wintered with Cree and Chipewyan traders, and drew the first accurate maps of the Mackenzie River system—maps Alexander Mackenzie himself would use. Pond’s violent reputation (two fatal quarrels with rivals) eventually forced him out of the North West Company, but his geographic intelligence helped open the far northwest. His Puritan–Yankee stock mixed with the French-Canadian voyageur lines already in the tree, adding an American entrepreneurial edge to the family saga.
That same North West Company orbit produced the most famous relative: Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1764–1820), the Scottish 7th cousin. Born on the Isle of Lewis, he crossed the continent twice—first down the river that now bears his name to the Arctic Ocean in 1789, then over the Rockies to the Pacific in 1793—becoming the first European to complete a transcontinental journey north of Mexico. He co-signed voyageur contracts (including one for a relative, Joseph Vielle dit Cossé), built Fort Chipewyan, published a best-selling book that Thomas Jefferson handed to Lewis and Clark, and was knighted for his exploits. His Mackenzie laird ancestry loops back through the same Kintail line that also feeds the family’s Urquhart–Weeks–Brown descent, making him a living bridge between Scottish highlands and Canadian wilderness.
Finally, the tree reaches the far-western mountains with François Rivet (1754–1852), the author’s direct cousin and archetypal mountain man. Born in L’Assomption, Quebec, to a voyageur father and grandfather, François started as an unlicensed coureur de bois on the Mississippi, survived ambushes by Sioux and Blackfeet, paddled for Lewis and Clark as far as the Mandans, trapped in the Bitterroot Valley, and interpreted for both Manuel Lisa and David Thompson. He lived with the Flathead (Salish) people, raised a Métis family, led Snake Country brigades for the Hudson’s Bay Company, and retired at 84 to French Prairie in Oregon’s Willamette Valley—still serving as godfather and witness at Métis baptisms. He died at 96, a living link between the old Canadian fur trade and the new American West.
Five men. Five centuries of rivers. One family tree.
A Mohawk-country toy-maker for the Dutch, a La Prairie smuggler dodging French edicts, a Yankee map-maker opening the Athabasca, a Scottish knight who touched both oceans, and a Quebec-born mountain man who outlived them all. They spoke different languages, wore different coats, and answered to different masters—yet their DNA converged in the same canoe. Their collective story is not just about beaver pelts or profit; it is the quiet proof that the fur trade was never a collection of lone adventurers.
It was a family enterprise, paddled forward generation after generation until the rivers themselves became the family highway.
Thank you to Grok xAI for crafting this treasure. — Drifting Cowboy
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