Ripples from La Prairie Voyageur Canoes: CHAPTER 4: OUTLAWS, OUTPOSTS, & WILDERNESS SURVIVAL: RENÉ BOURASSA DIT LARONDE (1722

SECTION I: THE REBEL OF THE UPPER LAKES

If his mother, Marie Le Ber, was the administrative mind of the Bourassa trade empire at La Prairie, her second son, René Bourassa dit LaRonde (1688–1778), was its wild, beating heart.

Born at La Prairie on December 21, 1688, René grew up during the darkest years of the Iroquois Wars. His childhood was defined by the smell of woodsmoke, the crack of flintlocks, and the annual arrival of high-prowed birchbark canoes returning from the interior. While his younger brother François Joachim learned to handle notary ledgers and manage the agricultural stores at home, René looked westward toward the endless blue horizons of Lake Huron and Lake Superior.

RENÉ BOURASSA DIT LARONDE (1688–1778)

François Bourassa (1659–1708)

m. Marie Le Ber (1666–1756)

│

René Bourassa dit LaRonde (1688–1778)

[Coureur des Bois / Mackinac Trader / Explorer]

m. (1) Agnes Gagné (1710)

└── Agnes Bourassa (m. Chevalier)

m. (2) Marie-Anne Chevalier (1721)

├── René Bourassa Jr. (Post Trader)

└── Charlotte Bourassa (m. Langlade)

In his early twenties, René broke away from the rigid system of royal trade licenses (congés). He plunged into the western wilderness as an independent coureur des bois—a "runner of the woods."

Operating outside royal regulations, René traded directly with Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Menominee hunters. He learned to navigate the maze of islands along Georgian Bay, mastered the Ojibwe dialect until he could speak it as fluently as his native French, and earned a reputation across the Upper Lakes as a man who could survive any winter and drive a canoe through any tempest.

Colonial authorities in Montréal issued stern warnings against unlicensed traders, but they could never capture or control men like René Bourassa. The wilderness was too vast, and René was too valuable. His deep personal relationships with Native war chiefs made him an indispensable mediator whenever tensions threatened to erupt between rival tribes or against French outposts.

By 1710, René married his first wife, Agnes Gagné. After her early death, he married Marie-Catherine Lériger de La Plante in November 1721 at Montréal, uniting his line with another premier family of western traders.

With Marie-Anne at his side, René made his permanent move into the interior, taking up residence at the absolute strategic crossroads of the Great Lakes continent: Fort Michilimackinac.

SECTION II: FORT MICHILIMACKINAC — CAPITAL OF THE WESTERN INTERIOR

Situated on the southern shore of the Straits of Mackinac—where the cold waters of Lake Huron and Lake Michigan clash—Fort Michilimackinac was the undisputed capital of the western fur trade.

THE MICHILIMACKINAC CROSSROADS

[Lake Superior]

(Grand Portage)

▲

│

[Lake Michigan] ◄──► [MICHILIMACKINAC] ◄──► [Lake Huron]

(Green Bay / Illinois) (Ottawa River to Montréal)

Surrounded by a soaring wooden palisade with corner bastions and iron-hinged gates, Michilimackinac was a vibrant, multi-ethnic frontier metropolis. Inside its timber walls stood a French garrison, a Jesuit chapel, row upon row of cedar-shingled trade houses, and bustling gravel streets filled with a rich mix of French voyageurs, British-American traders, Ojibwe hunters, Odawa diplomats, and Métis families.

René Bourassa established a sprawling residential and commercial trading compound inside the fort walls. He was not merely a merchant who sat behind a counter; he was a post operator who commanded his own fleets, equipped wintering parties, and maintained extensive trade houses along the shores of Lake Superior and Green Bay.

His home at Michilimackinac became a famous sanctuary for explorers, military officers, and river captains pushing west. René served as the primary supply link between his mother's management base at La Prairie and the wild outposts of the Far West.

It was from this fortress base at Mackinac that René was drawn into one of the most famous, perilous exploration ventures in Canadian history: the quest for the Western Sea.

SECTION III: LA VÉRENDRYE & THE QUEST FOR THE WESTERN SEA (1731–1736)

By the 1730s, the French Crown was obsessed with finding an overland route across the continent to the Pacific Ocean—the elusive "Mer-du-Ouest" (Western Sea).

In 1731, Governor-General Beauharnois granted a total trade monopoly over the far northwestern interior to Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye (1685–1749). La Vérendrye's mission was staggering in scope: push beyond Lake Superior, establish a chain of fortified posts across the Canadian shield, forge military alliances with the Cree, Assiniboine, and Ojibwe, and follow the western river systems to the ocean.

THE LA VÉRENDRYE EXPEDITION LINE

[Michilimackinac] ──► Grand Portage ──► Rainy Lake (Fort Saint-Pierre)

│

▼

[Lake of the Woods] ◄── Vermilion River ◄── Lake of the Woods (Fort Saint-Charles)

(Ambush Site) (Bourassa Post)

To finance and execute this epic enterprise, La Vérendrye needed men who knew the northern waterways, possessed vast financial credit, and could negotiate with unpredictable native alliances. He turned directly to René Bourassa dit LaRonde.

René joined La Vérendrye as a partner, outfit supplier, and frontier trader. In 1732, René helped organize and supply the expedition as it moved through Grand Portage on Lake Superior, pushing inland to build Fort Saint-Pierre on Rainy Lake and Fort Saint-Charles on Lake of the Woods.

René established his own trading post along the Vermilion River near Rainy Lake. It was an area of extraordinary richness in prime beaver, but it occupied a deadly political fault line: the borderland between the Cree-Ojibwe alliance (La Vérendrye’s trade partners) and their fierce ancestral enemies, the Dakota (Sioux).

SECTION IV: THE DAKOTA UPRISING & SURVIVAL ON LAKE OF THE WOODS (1736)

By the spring of 1736, tensions along the boundary exploded into open warfare.

La Vérendrye’s French traders had supplied iron axes, knives, and kettles to the Cree and Ojibwe. The Dakota viewed this trade alliance as a direct threat to their survival, believing the French were arming their enemies. A massive Dakota war party assembled, paddling silent war canoes through the labyrinth of lakes and marshes to strike the French outposts.

In early June 1736, René Bourassa dit LaRonde was traveling along the river routes near Lake of the Woods with a small crew of voyageurs, hauling supply packs and furs. Unbeknownst to René, a Dakota war party of over one hundred warriors lay in ambush along the shoreline.

The attack was sudden and overwhelming. Dakota warriors swarmed the French canoes, surrounding René and his men before a single musket could be brought to bear. René and his crew were dragged ashore, stripped of their weapons, and bound with raw leather thongs.

THE 1736 LAKE OF THE WOODS CRISIS

June 6, 1736: 130 Dakota Warriors Ambush René Bourassa

├── Bound & Taken Captive

└── Spared through Intercession of a Dakota Woman

│

▼

June 8, 1736: Massacre at Massacre Island

├── Jean-Baptiste de La Vérendrye Killed

├── Father Jean-Pierre Aulneau Killed

└── 19 French Voyageurs Slain

Death appeared inevitable. Just two days later, on June 8, 1736, this same Dakota war party descended upon a small island on Lake of the Woods (now known as Massacre Island), where they ambushed La Vérendrye’s eldest son, Jean-Baptiste de La Vérendrye, the Jesuit priest Father Jean-Pierre Aulneau, and nineteen French voyageurs. Every single man in La Vérendrye’s party was killed and decapitated.

Yet René Bourassa survived.

While bound in the Dakota camp facing torture and death, René owed his life to a remarkable act of wilderness intercession. A Dakota woman—a kin relation to one of the war chiefs who recognized René from earlier peaceful trading councils along the Mississippi border—stepped forward into the center of the warrior circle.

She argued forcefully before the council of war chiefs, reminding them that René Bourassa was not a soldier who had come to make war on the Dakota, but an independent trader who had treated native families fairly, shared food in starve-times, and respected their customs. She placed herself between the bound captive and the war axes, claiming René under traditional captive adoption rights.

The war chiefs relented. While La Vérendrye’s son and twenty Frenchmen died on Massacre Island, René Bourassa’s life was spared. His bonds were cut, his trade goods were confiscated as war booty, and he was released to find his way back to Fort Saint-Charles.

René’s survival of the 1736 Dakota Uprising became an enduring legend along the fur trade trails. It demonstrated a profound truth about the Bourassa line: their ultimate strength lay not in military power, but in the deep, reciprocal relationships they built with the Indigenous nations of the interior.

SECTION V: THE DYNASTIC PATRIARCH OF MACKINAC

Following the tragedy on Lake of the Woods, René Bourassa returned to Fort Michilimackinac, where he spent the next four decades as the undisputed elder statesman of the Great Lakes trade.

His compound at Mackinac grew into a powerful family dynasty in its own right:

His son, René Bourassa Jr., followed his father into the river trade, operating posts around Lake Superior and Green Bay.
His daughter, Charlotte Bourassa, executed one of the most momentous frontier marriages of the 18th century when she married Charles de Langlade (1729–1801)—the famous Métis war chief, French military officer, and founder of Green Bay, Wisconsin, known to history as the "Father of Wisconsin."

THE MACKINAC FAMILY DYNASTY

René Bourassa dit LaRonde (1688–1778)

m. Marie-Anne Chevalier

│

┌──────────────────┴─────────────────────┐

│ │

René Bourassa Jr. Charlotte Bourassa

[Western Post Operator] m. Charles de Langlade

["Father of Wisconsin"]

Through his son-in-law Charles de Langlade, René Bourassa’s family stood at the very center of North American military history. Langlade led Odawa and Ojibwe warriors alongside French forces in the Seven Years' War, playing a decisive role at the Battle of the Monongahela (1755), where General Edward Braddock's British army was shattered and young George Washington barely escaped with his life.

René Bourassa lived through monumental geopolitical upheavals. He watched New France fall to the British Crown in 1760, saw red-coated British soldiers march into Fort Michilimackinac, survived Pontiac’s Rebellion in 1763 (when Odawa and Ojibwe warriors captured Mackinac during the famous lacrosse-game surprise attack), and lived to see the opening shots of the American Revolution.

Through every change of flags, René Bourassa remained untouched—a living monument to the French voyageur spirit.

When René finally passed away on Mackinac Island on September 2, 1778, at the astounding age of eighty-nine, he was buried beneath the floorboards of the Church of Sainte-Anne inside Fort Michilimackinac.

He had lived a life that spanned from the reign of Louis XIV to the American Revolution. He had run the woods as an outlaw, mapped the Northwest with La Vérendrye, survived a Dakota war party, and raised a dynasty that held the Great Lakes interior for generations.

And back at La Prairie, his nephew Joseph Pinsonneau and his kin were preparing to take up the paddles for the next great era of the river trade...

NEXT: CHAPTER 5- UNITING THE LINES- THE CARIGNAN SOLDIER & THE BOOSHWAY (1682–1773)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-5-uniting-lines-carignan.html

EMPIRES OF THE WILDERNESS- THE VOYAGEUR BLOODLINE OF LA PRAIRIE (1585–1917)

CHAPTER 1- THE VIKING TRAIL, CHAMPLAIN’S TRUCHEMENTS, & THE NORMANDY LINE (890–1678)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/empires-of-wilderness-voyageur.html

CHAPTER 2- THE STAGING GROUND AT LA PRAIRIE & THE LACHINE MONOPOLY (1626–1723)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-2-staging-ground-at-la-prairie.html

CHAPTER 3- THE FATHERS OF THE FUR TRADE & THE BOURASSA DYNASTY (1659–1756)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-3-fathers-of-fur-trade-bourassa.html

CHAPTER 4- OUTLAWS, OUTPOSTS, & WILDERNESS SURVIVAL- RENÉ BOURASSA DIT LARONDE (1722–1778)

https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/chapter-4-outlaws-outposts-wilderness.html

CHAPTER 5- UNITING THE LINES- THE CARIGNAN SOLDIER & THE BOOSHWAY (1682–1773)