DCHP-1 Online

coureur de bois -s de bois [< Cdn F "woods ranger"]

• 1 n. Hist. an unlicensed trader who ranged the forest in search of furs.

  See also: bush-ranger (def. 2)  bush-runner  French pedlar  wood-ranger (def. 2)  wood rover  woods-runner (def. 1)  

  • Although long used in English in Canada, this term is often treated as a French word still.

  • 1703  (1905)  Coureurs de Bois, i.e. Forest Rangers, [are] so called from employing their whole life in the rough exercise of transporting merchandise goods to the lakes of Canada . . . to trade with the savages. . . .
  • 1898  After the British conquest enterprising Scotch traders began to organize the considerable trade that the coureurs de bois had created.
  • 1963  The licenses had been multiplied by Frontenac, and the need for them ignored by the outfitting merchants and the coureurs de bois alike.

• 2 n. an independent fur trader allied with the Montreal fur companies.

  • 1801  Hence they derived the title of Coureurs des Bois, became a kind of pedlars, and were extremely useful to the merchants engaged in the fur trade. . . .
  • 1907  . . . after the French regime several Scotch Merchants of Montreal prosecuted [the fur trade] with more vigor than heretofore. This they did under the name of "The Northwest Company." Their agents and "Coureur des Bois" [sic] were ever pushing westward and had posts strung from Ottawa to the Rocky Mountains.
  • 1938  Overnight there sprang up a demand for these cast-off and dispossessed voyageurs and coureurs de bois as guides, and once again their lilting chansons awakened the echoes of the Ottawa valley.