Weekly Word Search: Mar 24 - Mar 28, 2025
- Ontario Métis Facts
- Mar 29
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 23
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John Charles Sayer: Métis Freeman
After the merger of the North West Company (NWC) and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) in 1821, many Métis employees across the Homeland were faced with the decision to stay with the Company in its amalgamated form or become independent ‘freemen.’
John Charles Sayer, brother of Henry and Pierre Guillaume Sayer, was one such Métis HBC employee. John Charles had been working with the Company since about 1811. By the time of the merger, he was working as a clerk in the Lac La Pluie (Rainy Lake) District.
After refusing to take a significant salary reduction in the newly amalgamated Company, John Charles terminated his employment. However, he remained a fixture of the Rainy Lake District fur trade for many years as a “freeman” hunter and trapper.
In the 1825-26 post journal, John Dugald Cameron, the HBC’s Chief Factor at Rainy Lake, wrote a colourful description of the Métis freeman Sayer, undoubtedly tainted by Sayer’s decision to leave the Company’s direct employ:
“. . .Sayer the Free Man got afraid of the high water and has abandoned his usual Haunt. He arrived here last Night. He says [he] intends going to the Plains. I have advised him to go to red River and become a Settler. He is however a Lazy drunken Scamp and prefers leading a Vagabond Life from one turn to an other than to settle when in a Place when he would be obliged to work.”
Despite Cameron's recommendation to head west, as his brothers Pierre Guillaume and Henry had, John Charles Sayer returned to his family’s original home in the Upper Great Lakes. By the mid-1830s, Sayer was residing at Grand Portage with his wife and children and trading at Fort William.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
The High Cost of Métis “Jobbers”
After the North West Company (NWC) and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) merged in 1821, many longtime Métis employees chose to branch out on their own, working independently as “freemen.”
As astute businesspeople, these Métis freemen recognized the continued demand for their labour as hired “jobbers” and could demand competitive wages for their work.
This was certainly the case in the Upper Great Lakes region, where demand for Métis freemen jobbers, like Henry Sayer and Michel Labatte, for transport and other vital tasks outstripped supply, causing labour costs to increase to the point that post manager William Nourse devoted most of his 1835 report on the St. Mary’s District to the subject, saying in part:
“With regard to the expenses incurred for occasional day labourers I am persuaded a saving might be easily effected granting that the Freemen would be dispensed with for the transport.”
As the ‘halfbreed freemen’ gained greater autonomy, government authorities took increasingly drastic measures to control and suppress their community, ultimately resulting in the exclusion of Métis from the Robinson-Huron Treaty and subsequent displacement from their Métis River Lots on the St. Mary’s River.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
Madeline Lafromboise: Métis Entrepreneur
Michilimackinac, or Mackinac Island, was “an eighteenth century nexus for the Great Lakes fur trade” where many Métis families like the Langlades, Cadottes, and Nolins emerged as leading families within the emerging Métis political consciousness in the Upper Great Lakes.
Within that often male-dominated business world, Métis matriarch Madeline Laframboise was renowned for her entrepreneurial prowess and success. Laframboise was “a tall and commanding figure, and most dignified deportment”, fuelled by her “vast deal of energy and enterprise."
Madeline emerged as the successful owner of a string of trading posts around Mackinac Island, for which she was later described as being “no ordinary woman—probably for succeeding in an exclusively male trade.”
Madeline’s enduring entrepreneurial spirit and drive to succeed in a male-dominated field was likely inspired by the death of her French fur-trading father, after which she and her sisters married traders, and eventually became successful in their own right.
Madeline was an important matriarch in the Upper Great Lakes Métis world, standing as godparent to many Métis children, and recorded as a distinguished guest at a Métis wedding in 1819.
Madeline’s position both as a matriarch and a businesswoman also made her a key figure within broader Métis kinship networks throughout the Homeland. Madeline’s nephew, Joseph Laframboise, for example, later moved to Red River, where his daughters and granddaughters became matriarchs of the Fisher and Dumont families—both well-known names within Métis communities on the Prairies.
Madeline Laframboise’s entrepreneurial spirit and tireless drive to succeed have left a lasting legacy, and serve as an inspiration for Métis women from the Upper Great Lakes-westward to this day.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
“worked for myself since I was fourteen”
In addition to being a key figure in Upper Great Lakes Métis political advocacy during the mid-1800s, signing Métis petitions in both Penetanguishene (1840) and Sault Ste. Marie (1850), Michel (Michael) Labatte was also a successful lifelong Métis entrepreneur.
Later in his life, Michel Labatte would speak about his entrepreneurial beginnings to journalist A.C. Osborne: “My father was married twice. I was the eldest of the first family, and worked for myself since I was fourteen years old.”
Labatte’s career of independent business was long and diverse.
In addition to being a volunteer in the local militia, Michel Labatte was a successful Upper Great Lakes guide who collaborated with other Métis guides like Lewis Solomon, a contractor who “was sent by the Government to clear the land where Waubaushene now stands” where he also “planted potatoes and sowed grain”, and a “fireman for three summers on the steamer Gore, commanded by Captain Fraser, who married a daughter of Hippolyte Brissette,” and his Métis wife, Archange L'Hirondelle who came to Penetanguishene from the prairies in the 1840s.
Michel Labatte is perhaps best remembered, though, for his work as a Métis mail carrier, traversing the vital three-hundred-mile communication route between Penetanguishene and Sault Ste. Marie, often with “a sleigh and two dogs in fifteen days – snow three feet deep.”
Even as an elderly man, Michel Labatte’s lively spirit endured. A.C. Osborne captured this spirit in his preface to Michel’s narrative, where he couldn’t help but note that, “For a man of his years (over 85), Michael is vigorous and alert, and his memory is apparently intact.”
Click here to view the original story and sources.
Independent Métis Ferry Operators
Generations of Métis have built diverse and prosperous careers around the lakes and rivers of their traditional territories.
In addition to piloting or captaining vessels for others, like Lewis Solomon famously did in the Upper Great Lakes, many Métis throughout the Homeland built thriving businesses as independent Métis ferry operators, helping to transport people and goods across the water before the construction of roads and bridges.
In her memoirs of growing up on St. Joseph Island, in the Upper Great Lakes, settler Christy Ann Simons recalled numerous stories of the independent Métis ferry operators her family encountered, including one that helped them move to their new home:
“Later in the fall Mother went across to Bruce Mines and came home excited. We were going to move… She packed, hired a half-breed to move us in his sailboat and went by water…”
Simons also described many positive interactions they had with Métis ferry operators, who her family soon came to see as friendly and generous neighbours:
“Mother was fortunate in getting across free with some half-breed in his boat… Mother was nice to the half-breeds the same as she had always been to the Indians on the reservation near our old home, and they seemed to appreciate it. They asked her to go across in their boat when they were going and would not take pay.”
This important form of Métis entrepreneurship extended across the Métis Homeland, including, perhaps most famously, by Métis leader and ferry operator Gabriel Dumont, whose Métis grandfather, Joseph Laframboise, was born around Mackinaw Island, to the west of St. Joseph’s Island.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
Métis Youth Entrepreneurship
Métis youth have a long history of entrepreneurship, often leading to long and successful careers as independent businesspeople and Métis community leaders.
One such young Métis entrepreneur was the Georgian Bay Métis Community’s Lewis (Louie) Solomon. While “it was the fond hope of the family that Louie would succeed his father in the Government service as Indian interpreter,” Lewis would later recall that it was his early experiences joining his father on work assignments that gave him his first taste of what would become a lifetime of entrepreneurship:
“I remember… several gentlemen, starting for a trip to Manitoulin and the ‘Sault’ accompanied by my father as interpreter, myself … I was attendant on Lord Morpeth and Lord Lennox. I was obliged to look after their tents, keep things in order and attend to their calls. Each had a separate tent. My first salute in the morning would be, ‘Louie, are you there? Bring me my cocktail’… When Lord Morpeth asked me what he should pay me for my attendance I said, ‘Whatever you like, I leave that to yourself.’... He gave me the handsome sum of two hundred dollars, besides a present of ten dollars in change on the way down, which I was keeping in trust for him.”
Lewis would go on to build a “jack-of-all-trades” career, in professions as diverse as interpreting, captaining ships, and guiding visitors across the waters of Georgian Bay of which he was deeply familiar—and through which he served as one of his Métis community’s first ambassadors—believing in the value of earning what was “mine by merit”.
Fellow Georgian Bay Métis Community member—and occasional guiding colleague—Michel (Michael) Labatte similarly started his entrepreneurial journey as a Métis youth, later recalling: “My father was married twice. I was the eldest of the first family, and worked for myself since I was fourteen years old.”
In addition to being a volunteer in the local militia, Michel Labatte built a career as a successful Upper Great Lakes guide, an independent contractor, a “fireman for three summers on the steamer Gore”, and a Métis mail carrier who traversed the vital three-hundred-mile communication route between Penetanguishene and Sault Ste. Marie.
It was through his deep connections throughout the Upper Great Lakes that Michel Labatte became a prominent Métis political advocate, eventually signing Métis petitions in both Penetanguishene (1840) and Sault Ste. Marie (1850).
Lewis Solomon and Michel Labatte’s legacy of Métis youth entrepreneurship continues to this day.
Click here to view the original story and sources.
Independent Métis Fisheries
Across the Homeland, fishing has been central to the Métis way of life and economy for generations. While some Métis worked directly for major employers like the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and North West Company (NWC), many others developed and operated independent Métis fisheries that became an important part of their distinct Métis economy and way of life.
As early as 1824, for example, the HBC post manager at Sault Ste. Marie recognized a distinct independent Métis fishing economy, recording that, “The halfbreeds begin to come now of their own accord with fish.”
Sault Ste. Marie’s thriving independent Métis fisheries were also noted a generation later in the 1859 Report of the Fishery Overseer for the Division of Lakes Huron and Superior: “The half-breeds depend upon fish, from September till sugar-making… the half-breeds and Indians with nets and spears take large quantities for the American boats.”
Prosperous independent Métis fisheries also existed in other locations throughout the Upper Great Lakes, including Georgian Bay. In an 1862 report by the Superintendent for Fisheries in Lake Huron and Lake Superior, for example, the waters of Georgian Bay between Shawanaga (near present-day Parry Sound) and Matchadash Bay (near present-day Waubaushene) were said to be fished by “All Penetanguishene Halfbreeds.”
A generation later, an 1882 Michigan Tribune article remarked, “On the Georgian Bay inlets Indian and half-breeds are the fishermen—not white men.”
Today, Métis fishermen like Bernie LePage carry on the proud tradition of independent Métis fisheries and, in doing so, play a vital role in maintaining their Métis communities’ distinct Métis economies and way of life.
