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.

See Our Sources

• In the Beginning, Christy Ann Simons, 1951

• Upper Great Lakes Historic Métis Community Submission to the MNC Expert Panel

• Gabriel’s Crossing

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