Louis “French Louie” Seymour, at the back door of his West Canada Lake Camp in 1910. Louie was about 78 years old. PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCIS HARPER-COURTESY MAITLAND DESORMO

“The man who was most responsible for the promotion of French Louie was. . . Lloyd Blankman of Clinton. He did quite a number of lecture programs featuring French Louie.” -Maitland DeSormo, in his address titled “Hermits, Guides and Other Adirondack Characters.” Author and owner of Adirondack Yesteryears. At the Sixth Annual St. Lawrence University Conference on the Adirondack Park, June 11, 1976.

Lloyd Blankman

The combined excerpts from two of Lloyd Blankman’s articles, “French Louie” and “French Louie, As I Knew Him,” form a nice introduction to the French Louie profiles that follow. Both articles appeared in The Courier, Clinton, N.Y.

It is almost impossible to believe that such a man as French Louie ever existed, but there he was, right in the middle of the scene, in Newton Corners two or three times a year for a spree that lasted two or three weeks. The old fellow couldn’t even read or write his own name but what a man he was in the woods! Stories of Louie will be handed down for years to come.

Louie was a small, Vulcan-like man, a foot through from breast to back, stoop-shouldered a bit, but knit together with a powerful build. He moved about in his moccasins with the stillness of a cat, full of ambition in camp or on the trapline.

Elgie Spears wrote the following about French Louie in 1952. “Louie believed in freedom. He went alone deep into a wild country with forest and lake far and wide around him. There he could do as he pleased, a man in the wilderness. For the most part he wrested his living from woodlands, sparse clearings and waters, using but little of this and that from civilization. He rolled logs up into camps and used split planks and shakes for floors and roofs. He made his furniture. He made sleds for winter hauling, sap-buckets from birch bark, troughs from saplings and storage tubs from logs.”

Mud Lake

It was just a twenty-minute walk by trail from Louie’s place on Big West to Mud Lake. Mud Lake is a wild place any time of the year. Here the herons, helldivers, and loons cry at sunset; the deer splash in the lily pads. Sometimes at dusk fifteen or more deer are here at one time.

Brook Trout Lake

From Louie’s place it is just a mile and a quarter across Big West and then just a twenty-minute walk to Brook Trout Lake. This lake is a wild place and it is rightly named. In Louie’s day the place was so full of trout, when you caught one, it tasted fishy. Half way to Brook Trout you step over a small stream and your guide tells you, “this is the North Indian River.”

Somebody Special

There was something about Louie that everybody had to like. He always had a twinkle in his eye. He was as hard as Laurentian Granite, as tough as Adirondack spruce. Out and around almost anybody is more or less like everybody else, but this fellow was different and worth writing a book about. Here is the story, therefore, of Louis Seymour of West Canada Lakes, better known as “French Louie.”