Working the Short-Haul Fur Trade: Voyageurs and the Family Economy at St-Benoît, 1796–1821
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based primarily on an analysis of three cross-linked datasets (voyageur contracts, demographic data, and notarial records), this case study of fur trade employment and the family economy at St-Benoît, Lower Canada, between 1796 and 1821 reveals that while families engaged with the fur trade in different ways, short-haul contracts became an important source of employment in the parish during a period of intensive colonization. These occasional voyageurs, men who dipped in and out of the trade during the early years of the family life cycle, have received less attention from Anglophone historians than their professional counterparts who overwintered in the interior. Yet short-haul contracts were significant because they took men away from their families for less time than previously imagined, allowing them to balance the competing demands of agriculture, family formation, and mobile labour, with wages acting as a multiplier early in the life cycle. In this analysis, the fur trade and colonization became mutually supportive forces. Abstract: Pour les familles qui s'engageaient à divers titres dans le commerce de la fourrure dans la paroisse de Saint-Benoît, au Bas-Canada, entre 1796 et 1821, les contrats de courte durée constituaient une source importante d'emploi durant cette période de colonisation intensive. C'est ce que montre la présente étude de cas sur l'emploi dans le commerce de la fourrure et l'économie familiale, qui repose principalement sur l'analyse de trois ensembles de données interreliés (contrats de voyageurs, données démographiques et documents notariés). Ces voyageurs—des hommes qui s'adonnaient occasionnellement au commerce pendant les premières années de leur mariage —, n'ont guère attiré l'attention des historiens anglophones, comparativement à leurs congénères qui hivernaient au loin. Les contrats de courte durée avaient pourtant leur importance, car ils éloignaient les hommes de leur famille moins longtemps qu'on ne le croyait auparavant, ce qui leur permettait d'établir un équilibre entre l'agriculture, les exigences familiales et la mobilité professionnelle, le salaire constituant un appoint appréciable pour une jeune famille. Selon cette analyse, le commerce de la fourrure et la colonisation s'appuyaient mutuellement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".