The Calling: Ancestral Synchronicity
The phenomenon is often called synchronicity—those uncanny, meaningful coincidences that feel too precise to be chance. Carl Jung gave it the name. In the quiet work of genealogy it becomes something more intimate: ancestral synchronicity, or transgenerational resonance. It is the moment when a lifelong passion, a skill practiced in ignorance, or a place that has always felt like home suddenly reveals itself as inheritance.
My life has been a long conversation with that resonance.
Long before I knew a single name on the family tree, I was already living the daily reality of my French-Canadian ancestors—the coureurs de bois and voyageurs who spent more than two centuries paddling birchbark canoes, trapping, and ranging the northern forests and rivers of the continent. What I once thought were personal eccentricities now read like memory written in the blood.
Here is how the pattern reveals itself.
1. Canoeing and the Open Water
The voyageurs were professional canoeists. They moved thousands of miles of trade goods and furs across the Great Lakes and inland waterways in fragile, heavily loaded birchbark craft. For sixty years I have done the same—solo and in company—on many of the same watersheds. The muscle memory of reading water, the feel of a paddle biting current, the long days of portage and camp: these were never hobbies. They were rehearsal.
2. Trapping and the Language of the Land
The coureurs de bois learned Native methods of trapping, hunting, and hide-dressing because survival demanded it. As a boy I built a box trap and caught a fox. I spent years learning the quiet habits of animals and the lay of wild country. The knowledge felt innate, as though the land itself were reminding me of something I had once known.
3. Reenactment as Remembering
When I discovered mountain-man rendezvous in the 1980s, the pull was immediate and addictive. Reenactors sometimes speak of “toughing it out like the ancestors did.” For me it was more than costume and campfire. It was the hands remembering what the mind had not yet learned from books—how to live with little, how to move through timber, how to sit quietly in the old ways.
4. The Two-Century Thread
French-Canadian involvement in the fur trade was not a brief episode. From the early 1600s onward, men from the same small cluster of parishes—especially La Prairie—signed contracts, disappeared into the pays d’en haut, and returned (or did not) with the rhythm of the seasons. When I finally uncovered that history after six decades of living its outward forms, the “pull” stopped looking like coincidence. It looked like continuity.
The fur trade was never only commerce. It was a complete way of being in the world—one that shaped bodies, skills, temperament, and bloodlines. My own path simply continued the pattern in modern dress.
My Life’s Ancestral Synchronicity Timeline
1950s
Learned to ride on the Montana family homestead. Drawn to solo canoeing. Built a box trap and caught a fox. Spent boyhood riding horses through wilderness.
1960s
Sought adventure as a soldier and paratrooper. Worked as a carpenter—hard physical labor that mirrored the strength the old trade demanded.
1970s
First learned I carried French-Canadian blood and wondered about the fur trade. Bought my first canoe and floated fifty miles of the Owens River.
1980s
Discovered fur-trade rendezvous reenactments. Canoed the Boundary Waters (eight days), Algonquin, Yoho, Maligne Lake, and the waters of Glacier, Yellowstone, and Grand Teton. Toured old Quebec and Montreal; bought an Assumption sash and a crooked knife. Returned to remote horseback travel. Began collecting the writers and artists who had chronicled the same world: Schultz, Linderman, Grinnell, Laut, Nute, Russell, Remington, and the rest.
1990s
Solo-paddled 150 miles of the Upper Missouri from Fort Benton to James Kipp. Continued canoeing the Snake River country. Bought, sold, and traded Old West antiques. Designed and built artistic furniture carved with forest, Native, and frontier motifs.
2000s
Breakthrough: the Pinsonneau and Lagacé lines opened all the way back to the earliest years of New France.
2010s
Continued canoeing the Snake and Tetons. Genealogical study led to Louis Lavallée’s La Prairie en Nouvelle-France, 1647–1760. On pages 144–159 I found my own people named among the parish’s founding families:
Barette, Bourassa, Boyer, Caron, Cusson, Deneau, Desrochers, Diel, Dupuis, Duquet, Gagné, Leber, Lemaistre, Lemieux, Marier, Moreau, Perras, Pinsonneau, Poupart, Robidou, Roy… That list launched years of deeper research into La Prairie and its unbroken connection to the North American fur trade.
2020s
Wrote more than 250 posts on the fur trade. Published The River’s Blood: The La Prairie Voyageur Legacy (394 pages, 30 January 2026).The synchronicity was never subtle. For sixty years the life arrived first; the names and documents followed. What I had been doing all along was not imitation. It was continuation.
This is the door that opens onto the larger story—the multi-generational saga of the voyageur bloodline that began on the shores of the St. Lawrence and eventually reached the stump ranches of Montana…
Empires of the Wilderness: The Voyageur Bloodline of La Prairie (1585–1917) https://laprairie-voyageur-canoes.blogspot.com/2026/10/empires-of-wilderness-voyageur.html
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