Learning Why "We Remember" and Learning More About the Fur Trade

In the last week of my Magellan in Montreal, I waited to go to Montreal's flagship museum of archaeology and history with a fellow W&J student who was completing her own Magellan focusing on the history of the city. The museum opened with a fifteen minute or so long video that detailed the vast experiences of the French colonial city that became usurped by the British, invaded by the American revolutionaries, and nonetheless prospered with its unique identity intact. Keeping their own identity is a mainstay of the mindset French Quebec as a whole. Even their words on their license plates "Je Souviens" means "We Remember" our identity, our French heritage. 

Other than the decently large number of language options available in the headset, the most striking thing about the presentation was how the video's narrator spoke as if she was the city herself, and that led to a slightly more emotional telling that allowed you to see the growth of the town through the city's personified eyes.

 After the video, you weave through hundreds of years of history starting in the lower floors and making your way up to modern times, and eventually to their current selection of temporary exhibits. Through dioramas of the town that the museum had built into the floor, one could see the quick growth of the "foolhardy venture" that Montreal undertook to become the wealthy and influential city it is today. Quebecois were unhappy and powerless as the upstart Montreal survived and prospered despite its proximity to initially hostile Iroquois tribes to become the premier Canadian city operating in the fur trade.  

A Surprise Closing and a Surprise Show

Unfortunately this has been sitting as a draft for about a month due to some laptop troubles with the laptop I took with me to Montreal. This day, I had a singular purpose. It was to visit a well-known and highly recommended fur store called Dubarry Furriers. The shop has a great story of being a passion shared by father and son and being a family-owned furrier for two generations. While that is relatively short span for a city celebrating its 300 year anniversary this year, two generations of performing a highly specialized and slowly dying business that competes against dozens of other boutique stores thousands of mass produced fake furs is still an accomplishment. Even better, their prices are superb according to everyone who has every recorded a customer review on the internet, and their quality is supposedly equally unmatched. With the great reputation, prices, and after checking their hours twice, I set out for Viex Montreal to visit their store. 

Along the way, I passed the Notre-Dame Basilica and stood in awe of its grandeur...and also had to constantly stop as dozens of horse-drawn carriages clogged the road shuttling tourists. I took advantage to take a few photos of the basilica's facade and the courtyard while I was there, and made my way to the shop. Only, when I got there, it was closed with no signs of life in the building. I had checked the hours twice! My first thought was "how unprofessional, a store in the US actually keeps their posted hours!" After my couple moments of anger-laced disappointment, I decided to try again another day, and after I talked to my host, I learned the trick is to always call the store to make sure since Montreal stores' posted hours are not as sacrosanct as they are here. 

A Magical Exhibit and A Magical Moment at McGill University

On this action packed day I went to the Redpath and McCord Museum due to their close proximity to each other in downtown Montreal. The Redpath Museum (which is not the Redpath Hall pictured in the next couple photos as I originally thought) is owned by and is part of the campus of McGill University. Unfortunately but interestingly, I accidentally chose to visit the university during its graduation ceremony for its students. I felt that I was intruding on a proud but private moment, but it was amusing to see the bagpipe player lead a procession of new graduates through the streets of Montreal. I actually got trapped for about twenty minutes on the steps of the Redpath Museum since I thought it would be incredibly rude if I were to try to break through a graduation procession. I treated it like a funeral procession and I refused to get in the way, and so I simply watched them pass by and snapped a few photographs and a video. 

After I escaped McGill, I felt bad and bought a hat from a student merchandise tent they had set up, and then it was on to the McCord Museum. Slightly less eclectic than the collection of the Redpath that included taxidermy animals, fossils, minerals, mummies, and even some Etruscan urns, the McCord had three exhibits at the time. Native Peoples and their culture through their clothing, a collection of magic advertisement posters from the Golden Age of Magic, and a collection honoring the forty-year career of a political cartoonist named Terry Mosher (more about him when you get closer to his exhibit's photographs).