NEW YORK FOLKLORE QUARTERLY
Vol. II, No. 3, August, 1946

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FRENCH LOUIE
Harvey L. Dunham

AS YOU speed over the more or less smooth highways through the Adirondack forest, you pass many small clearings, some near the road, some inhabited, some just a patch of lighter green on a distant slope. Each has its story. Follow up the West Canada Creek — “creek” by name, but larger than many rivers — which flows into the Mohawk River at Herkimer. You go first by car, through farm lands and into the beginning ot the woods; then by tote road and trail, northward along a rocky stream, past wild, black, still waters, and, when the trails peter out, through tangled alders and leg-breaking windfalls.

If you go tar enough up the old “West Crick” to its headwaters, you will come to the West Canada Lakes. On North Lake of these West Canadas is a clearing which has been a stopping place for hunters, trappers, and woodsmen for more than a hundred years. There, in the 1850s, were signs of rotting logs of an old cabin. So said the trappers Marinus Lawrence and Burr Sturges of Newton Corners, now Speculator. Soon after that date, they built a slab shanty against a large rock on the south side of the clearing.

In the 1870s, Louis Seymour, a French Canadian, better known as “French Louie,” took over the slab shanty as his own and about ten years later built a new cabin that could accommodate his “guests,” who were many. He lived at this clearing until he died in 1915.

Louis Seymour was born in Canada about 1830. As a boy, he ran away from home and came across to the United States where he worked with circuses and drove mules on the long Erie Canal towpath. It was not until the fall of 1868 that he climbed down from the big-wheeled buckboard stage from North Creek at the small Adirondack town of Indian Lake. He was stockily built, not tall but deep-chested, with broad shoulders, very long arms, and strong hands. He had a large head with light brown curly hair, and sparkling, blue-black eyes, narrow and smiling.
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