Joachim and Anne, how honored a couple! All creation is obliged to you. For at your hands the Creator was offered a blessing exceeding expectations all different endowments: a pure mother, who alone was deserving of him. Joachim and Anne, how honored and spotless a couple! You will be known by the organic product you have borne, as the Lord says: "By their natural products you will know them." The behavior of your life satisfied God and was deserving of your little girl. For by the virtuous and sacred life you drove together, you have designed a gem of virginity: she who remained a virgin some time recently, amid, and subsequent to conceiving an offspring. Only she for record-breaking would keep up her virginity as a top priority and soul and in addition in body. Joachim and Anne, how pure a couple! While driving an ardent and sacred life in your human instinct, you brought forth a girl nobler than the heavenly attendants, whose ruler she now is. – from a sermon by Bishop Saint John Damascene.
Numerous early Canadian hide dealers were Catholic; the French-Canadian voyageurs, as well as their generally Scottish bosses too; it's not shocking that they ought to have had a benefactor holy person. In the journals of Alexander Henry (the Elder), written in 1804, he composed of his first wander into the Canadian hide exchange 1761:
"Holy person Anne is the patroness of the Canadians, in all their goes by water."
Henry was an accomplice in the North West Company, the hide exchanging organization which utilized the biggest number of voyageurs for a very long time. From the Narrative of Peter Pond, an establishing accomplice of the North West Company, composed c.1800, and describing his encounters in 1773: (My transliteration, from his exceptionally particular spelling framework!).
… This congregation is devoted to Saint Anne who ensures all voyageurs. Here is a little box with a gap in the top for the gathering of a minimal expenditure for the sacred father to say a little mass for the individuals who put a little aggregate in the crate. Rare a voyageur yet stops here and puts in his parasite and by that implies they assume that they are ensured while truant. The congregation is not bolted but rather the cash box is very much secured from cheats. After the function of intersection themselves and rehashing a little petition we crossed the lake…
From the 1793 diary of John Macdonnell, agent of the North West Company:
At the congregation of Saint Anns the groups of the kayaks gathered an intentional gift amongst themselves to which I contributed my bug, keeping in mind the end goal to have supplications said for the flourishing of the voyage and a sheltered come back to those occupied with it, to their loved ones… . The following day, we achieved Saint Ann's, thirty miles from Montreal. Here we passed the day in repairing the Canoes. I ran with others to see the Church and was influenced to 'guarantee a Mass' to 'entreat Gods favoring'. I did, and put a shilling in the case of the Roman Church in Montreal, when I returned in 1816 for I had no cash then.
This congregation was at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, on the west end of Montreal Island, and was the last one that the voyageurs went before coming back from their work in the hide exchange, months or years after the fact. The voyageurs had an extremely unsafe calling; numerous voyageurs suffocated running tricky rapids in delicate birchbark kayaks (in some cases whole kayak teams died). Different times, voyageurs survived the rapids just to starve to death amid the winter. My range of study and research closes at 1821, so I don't know much about Saint Anne's part in the hide exchange after that. Be that as it may, Fort Michilimackinac exhumed a Saint Anne's decoration which was dated to c.1840-1860. – Angela Gottfred Editor, Northwest Journal
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