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.
I also enjoyed (perhaps too much) the privateer section of the museum that was primarily for children, but still showed the importance of the St. Lawrence River to Montreal and the city's international trade that was often coveted by rivals. Finally, the museum's visit ended with a temporary exhibit on the Amazonian peoples that filled a half dozen rooms with maps, weapons, handicrafts, clothing, and other relics from the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin.
The day was not over, however, as I still had a mission to visit the furrier whose unkept hours had thwarted my last attempt. Luckily, this time, I was met by success. After talking to the furrier for about a half hour, learning his trade, about his family's connection to its craft, and admiring a photo Mr. Dubarry had of his father in front of the shop he took over, I decided I could not leave Montreal without buying a fur. Obviously as a college student, I could not hope to afford a real coat or anything remotely similar to a fur coat. What I could afford though was a hat, specifically a beaver fur hat. What better way to end a Magellan trip studying the fur trade of Montreal that was led by demand for beaver pelts than to buy a beaver fur hat from a renowned Montreal furrier? I had looked at the furs in Marche Bonsecours, the boutique shops, and thought the best I would be able to afford is the equivalent of a beaver fur handkerchief (which to my knowledge do not exist), but to my pleasant surprise, I could actually afford a sheared beaver fur hat in this place! Not only could I get a hat for a third of the price (it definitely helped that I deliberately picked one on sale in the dead of the summer heat), but I could surprise my mother with a small beaver fur scarf as well!
So long as I can keep hippies from throwing blood at me for wearing fur, the couple souvenirs I picked up from Dubarry Furriers are going to be my fondest of the trip. Every time I look at my beaver fur hat, I don't see a luxury item I probably should not have bought. Instead I see a physical, modern manifestation of a good that created a city, a good that caused battles over its riches to be had in its trade, and a reminder of how lucky I am to have a college willing to fund my trips to visit and learn peculiar things in different places.
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