Wiktionary
WordNet
Usage examples of "coureur".
Anywhere else it would have been preposterous as a decorative presentment, but here, in this little nook where the coureurs de bois, the halfbreeds, the traders and the missionaries had founded a centre of assembly, it was the best possible expression in the life so formed at hap-hazard, and so controlled by the coarsest and narrowest influences.
Not all paths have evolved into railroads, but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths-- paths of the coureurs de bois, instinctively searching for mountain passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades.
Her coureurs de bois opened its paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the shod feet of Europe.
The old French forts have grown into new-world cities, the portage paths have been multiplied into streets, the trails of the coureurs de bois have become railroads, and all are the noisy, flaming, smoky places and means of such an industry and exploitation as doubtless are not to be found so extensive and so intensive in any other valley of the earth.
It is an interesting tribute to these spiritual pioneers, however, that the particular rough coureur de bois who first looked into that far valley of solitude, inhabited only by Indians and buffaloes and other untamed beasts, would doubtless never have left his Indian habits and returned to civilization if he could have lived without the sacraments of the church.
The coureurs de bois may have anticipated the priests in some solitary places, but they seldom made records.
There are thousands of "Aramonis" where the railroads have gone, drawing all the physical conveniences and social conventions after them, where once coureurs de bois followed the buffaloes.
I spent the day at another great State university and at dusk set off by the actual trails of the French coureurs de bois (only by wheels instead of on foot), first through the woods and along rivers, above Green Bay to the "Soo," then above Lake Huron and the Nipissing and down the Ottawa River, where I saw the second day break, and then on past La Salle's seigniory of St.
Perhaps this ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the temptations of the open country to a man without a slave.
When he started down the Ohio into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his household goods, and a considerable quantity of whiskey, he was going to treat, not as the coureurs de bois, with the Indians, the savage men of the forests.
Let me without fatiguing statistics give intimation of what I mean in one or two illustrations of the successors of the coureurs de bois, the runners before, the later prophets of the valley.
A band of coureurs du bois, bound for Quebec, had come upon old Le Moyne and himself in the woods.
These were a strange mixture: French peasants, halfbreeds, Canadian-born Frenchmen, gentlemen of birth with lives and fortunes gone askew, and many of the native Canadian noblesse, who, like the nobles of France, forbidden to become merchants, became adventurers with the coureurs du bois, who were ever with them in spirit more than with the merchant.
Indians, half-breeds, coureurs du bois, native Canadians, seigneurs, and noblesse, were joining in the function.
Many of these coureurs des bois became so accustomed to the Indian mode of living, and the perfect freedom of the wilderness, that they lost relish for civilization, and identified themselves with the savages among whom they dwelt, or could only be distinguished from them by superior licentiousness.