THE SETTLEMENT OF CANADA AND THE FIVE NATION INDIANS
[Sidenote: _Colonization by the medium of Chartered Companies
characteristic of the nations of Northern Europe._]
To trade and to colonize through the medium of Chartered Companies
has been characteristic of the nations of Northern Europe. Chartered
Companies have not been peculiar to England. The Dutch worked
entirely through two great companies; the Danes adopted the same
system; and various companies played their part in the early history
of French colonization. Herein lay the main difference, in the field
of colonial enterprise, between the northern peoples and the
southerners who had preceded them. In the case of Spain and Portugal
all was done under the immediate control of the Crown. These two
nations were concerned with conquest rather than with settlement;
and, if the Portuguese were traders, their commerce was not the
result of private venture, but was created and supported by the
Government. The Spaniards and Portuguese were first in the field.
East and West lay before them, and they divided the world in secure
monopoly. The northerners came in--they came in tentatively; policy
kept the Governments in the background for fear of incurring war, and
freedom of individual action was more ingrained in these races than
in the Latin peoples of the south. So freebooters sailed here and
there, at one time honoured, at another in disgrace; merchants took
shares in this or that venture, and Chartered Companies came into
being.
[Sidenote: _French Chartered Companies._]
In the case of Holland, the Netherlands East India Company and the
Netherlands West India Company practically {80} included the whole
nation: the state and the companies were co-extensive. In England,
the companies were really private concerns, licensed by the
Government, often thwarted by the Government, but, in the main,
working out their own salvation or their own ruin, as the case might
be. In France there was a mixture of the northern and the southern
systems, as of the northern and the southern blood. There, as in
England, the companies were private associations, but Court favour
was to them the breath of life. Kings and ministers constantly
interfered, created and undid, conferred licences and revoked them,
until in no long time the Chartered Company system lost all that
makes it valuable, and Frenchmen learnt to look to the Crown alone.
[Sidenote: _The company of the One Hundred Associates._]
Trade jealousies hampered the beginnings of Canadian settlement;
there was neither free trade in Canada nor unquestioned monopoly. To
cure this evil Richelieu, in 1627, brought into being the company of
the One Hundred Associates, nominally a private association, really
the offspring of the Government. Its sphere extended from Florida to
the North Sea, and from east to west as far as discovery should
extend along the rivers of Canada. It controlled all trade except the
fisheries, and it enjoyed sovereign rights in so far that it was
entitled to confer titles and tenures, subject to the approval of the
Crown. The chief officers were to be nominated by the King, but under
the Sovereign the company was feudal lord of New France; of its soil
and its inland waters, with all that they produced. A statesman
projected the company, and, with keen insight into the wants of New
France, Richelieu laid down as one of the terms of its charter that
settlers were to be introduced in specified numbers, especially and
immediately settlers of the artisan class; but these provisions were
made to a large extent barren by excluding the Huguenots. At the
outset the new French company, with all its backing, was foiled in
its efforts by the English Merchant Adventurers. The first transports
{81} sent out, bearing settlers and supplies, were captured by Kirke.
Quebec fell and New France was lost. The Convention of Susa and the
Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye were signed and executed, and the One
Hundred Associates resumed their charge of Canada. Under them
Champlain held the government of New France till he died, being
succeeded by a soldier, M. de Montmagny, who reached Quebec in June,
1636.
[Sidenote: _Three Rivers. Montreal. Sorel._]
In 1634, while Champlain was still alive, a fort was begun at Three
Rivers. The first permanent settlement at Montreal dates from the
spring of 1642, and in the same year Fort Richelieu was founded on
the site of the present town of Sorel,[1] where the Richelieu--the
river of the Iroquois--joins the St. Lawrence. For many years Quebec,
Three Rivers, and Montreal practically comprised New France. Outside
them were fur-traders and Jesuit missionaries, carrying their lives
in their hands. A few farms were taken up along the river above and
below Quebec, but colonization was almost non-existent, and small
groups of priests and soldiers at two or three points on the St.
Lawrence feebly upheld the power of France in North America.
[Footnote 1: 'So called from M. de Saurel, who reconstructed the fort
in 1665' (Kingsford's _History of Canada_, vol. i, p. 185).]
[Sidenote: _Slow progress of Canada up to 1663._]
The company of the One Hundred Associates lasted till 1663, and
little they did for the land or for themselves. At the end of their
tenure, the whole French population of Canada hardly reached 2,500
souls. It had been an integral part of the company's programme to
people Canada with French men and French women, but, inasmuch as
Huguenots were rigidly excluded, the motive for emigration was
wanting. The Catholic citizens of France were comfortable at home.
They might wish to trade with Canada, but they did not wish to spend
their lives there. The soldiers of France went out only under orders;
they looked for brighter battlefields than the North American
backwoods. Priests and nuns {82} alone felt a call to cross the
Atlantic, to face the most rigorous winters and the most savage foes.
The French religion was firmly planted in North America during these
early years, but the French people were left behind.
De Montmagny was Governor for twelve years, till 1648. His successors
under the company's regime were D'Ailleboust, De Lauzon, the Vicomte
d'Argenson, and Baron d'Avaugour. Under the Governors there were
commandants of the garrisons at Three Rivers and Montreal; and from
1636 onwards there was some kind of Council for framing ordinances
and regulating the administration of justice, the Governor and the
leading ecclesiastics being always members, and representatives of
the settlers being from time to time admitted. In 1645, moreover, the
company was reorganized, and the fur trade, which had been vested in
the Associates, was handed over to the colonists. Notwithstanding,
there was little increase of strength and little growth of population
till the year 1663, and up to that date the history of Canada is no
more than a record of savage warfare and missionary enterprise.
[Sidenote: _The foundation of Montreal._]
Religious enthusiasts founded Montreal, and the foundation of
Montreal was a challenge to the Iroquois. Always the enemies of the
French, the Five Nations saw in the settlement a new menace to their
power. Above the Richelieu river, they looked on the St. Lawrence as
more especially within their own domain; and when Frenchmen took up
ground on the island of Montreal, the Indians resented the intrusion
with savage bitterness and with more than savage foresight. On the
part of the French, state policy had nothing to say to the new
undertaking, nor was it a commercial venture. It was simply and
solely the outcome of religious zeal untempered by discretion.
[Sidenote: _The Jesuits in Canada._]
[Sidenote: _They did not promote colonization._]
The Jesuits had abundantly advertised in France the spiritual needs
of Canada. They had much to tell, and they told it well, skilful in
narrative as they were bold in action. {83} They attracted money to
the missionary cause, they enlisted brave men, and, still more, brave
and beautiful women. Convents were founded in America, and hospitals;
priests and nuns led and lost heroic lives, to widen the influence of
the Roman Catholic Church, and to convert the heathen. The deeds
done, and the sufferings endured, commanded, and still command
admiration, yet withal there was an element of barrenness in the
work; it was magnificent, but it was not colonization. It was unsound
in two main essentials. First and foremost, liberty was wanting. The
white men and the red were to be dominated alike: North America and
its peoples were to be in perpetual leading strings, prepared for
freedom in the world to come by unquestioning obedience on this side
the grave. The Protestant, however narrow and prejudiced in his
dealings and mode of life, in theory held and preached a religion
which set free, a gospel of glorious liberty. The Roman Catholic
missionary preached and acted self-sacrifice so complete, that all
freedom of action was eliminated. There was a second and a very
practical defect in the system. What Canada wanted was a white
population, married settlers, men with wives and children. What the
Jesuits asked for, and what they secured, was a following of
celibates, men and women sworn to childlessness. The Protestant
pastor in New England lived among his flock as one of themselves; he
made a human home, and gave hostages to fortune; a line of children
perpetuated his name, and family ties gave the land where he settled
another aspect than that of a mission field. The Roman Catholic
priest was tied to his church, but to nothing else. At her call he
was here to-day, and, it might be, gone to-morrow. He more than
shared the sufferings and the sorrows of those to whom he ministered,
but his life was apart from theirs, and he left no children behind
him. Martyrs and virgins the Roman Catholic Church sent out to
Canada, but it did not send out men and women. In comparing {84}
English and French colonization in America, two points of contrast
stand out above all others--the much larger numbers of English
settlers, and the much greater activity of French missionaries. Both
facts were in great measure due to the influence of the Roman
Catholic religion, and notably to the celibacy of its ministers.
[Sidenote: _Religious enthusiasts in Canada._]
Histories of Canada give full space to the names, the characters, and
the careers of the bishops, priests, and nuns who moulded the
childhood of New France, and to the struggle for supremacy between
the Jesuits and rival sects. We have portraits of the Jesuit heroes
Breboeuf, Lalemant, Garnier, Isaac Jogues, and many others; of the
ladies whose wealth or whose personal efforts founded the Hotel Dieu
at Quebec and at Montreal; of Madame de la Peltrie, Marie Guyard the
Mere de l'Incarnation, Jeanne Mance, and Marguerite Bourgeoys; of
Laval the first of Canadian bishops; but the record of their devoted
lives has only an indirect bearing on the history of colonization. It
will be enough to notice very shortly the founding of Montreal, and
the episode of the Huron missions, as being landmarks in Canadian
story.
[Sidenote: _Montreal settled by a company connected with St.
Sulpice._]
Montreal, it will be remembered, had been in Cartier's time the site
of an Indian town, which afterwards disappeared. Champlain had marked
it out as a place for a future settlement, and the keen eyes of the
Jesuits looked to the island as a mission centre. It had become the
property of De Lauzon, one of the One Hundred Associates and
afterwards Governor of Canada, and he transferred his grant to a
company, the Company of Montreal, formed exclusively for the service
of religion, and especially connected with the priests of St.
Sulpice. The first settlers numbered about sixty in all, in charge of
a chivalrous soldier, De Maisonneuve, and including one of the
religious heroines of the time, Mdlle. Jeanne Mance, who was
entrusted with funds by a rich French lady to found a hospital. They
arrived in Canada in 1641, {85} and in spite of the warnings of the
Governor, who urged that they should settle within reach of Quebec on
the Island of Orleans, they chose their site at Montreal in the same
autumn, and in the following spring began to build a settlement.
Ville Marie was the name given to it at the time, the enterprise
being dedicated to the Virgin. At the first ceremony, on landing, a
Jesuit priest bade the little band of worshippers be of good courage,
for they were as the grain of mustard seed; and now the distant,
dangerous outpost of France in North America, which a few
whole-hearted zealots founded, has become the great city of Montreal.
[Sidenote: _The influence of religion on colonization._]
Religion has been a potent force in colonial history. On the one hand
it has promoted emigration. It carried the Huguenots from France to
other lands. It peopled New England with Puritans. On the other hand,
it has sent forerunners of the coming white men among the coloured
races, bearers of a message of peace, but too often bringing in their
train the sword. As explorers and as pioneers, missionaries have done
much for colonization; but from another point of view they have
endangered the cause by going too fast and too far. In South Africa,
a hundred years ago, the work, the speeches, and the writings of
Protestant missionaries led indirectly to the dispersion of
colonists, to race feuds, and to political complications which, but
for this agency, would certainly have been postponed, and might
possibly never have arisen. Similarly in Canada, Jesuit activity and
forwardness added to the difficulties and dangers with which the
French settlers and their rulers had to contend.
[Sidenote: _Montreal and the Five Nations._]
The Governor, who vainly attempted to dissuade the founders of
Montreal from going so far afield, was right in his warnings. Very
few were the French in North America, their struggle for existence
was hard, their enemies were watchful and unrelenting. Safety lay in
concentration, in making Quebec a strong and comparatively populous
centre, in keeping aloof from the Iroquois, instead of straying
within {86} their range. To form a weak settlement 160 miles higher
up the river than Quebec, within striking distance of the Five
Nations, was to provoke the Indians and to offer them a prey. This
was the immediate result of the foundation of Montreal. Year after
year went by, and there was the same tale to tell: a tale of a hand
to mouth existence, of settlers cooped up within their palisades,
ploughing the fields at the risk of their lives, cut off by twos and
threes, murdered or carried into captivity. Moreover, between
Montreal in its weakness and the older and stronger settlement at
Quebec, there was an element of jealousy. What with rival commandants
and rival ecclesiastics, controversy within and ravening Iroquois
without, the early days of the French in Canada were days of sorrow.
[Sidenote: _The Huron missions._]
Far away from civilization in the seventeenth century was Montreal,
but further still was the Huron country. The first white man to visit
the Hurons was the Recollet friar, Le Caron, in the year 1615, and
from that date onward, till Kirke took Quebec, a very few Franciscan
and Jesuit priests preached their faith by the shores of Georgian
Bay. Suspended for a short time, while the English held Canada, the
missions were resumed by the Jesuits in 1634, foremost among the
missionaries being Father de Breboeuf, who had already worked among
the Hurons, and came back to work and die.
Few stories are so dramatic, few have been so well told[2] as the
tale of the Huron missions. No element of tragedy is wanting. The
background of the scene gives a sense of distance and immensity. The
action is comprised in very few years, years of bright promise,
speedily followed by absolute desolation. The contrast between the
actors on either side is as great as can be found in the range of
human life, between savages almost superhuman in savagery, and
Christian preachers almost superhuman in endurance and {87}
self-sacrifice; and all through there runs the pity of it, the pathos
of a religion of love bearing as its first-fruits barren martyrdom
and wholesale extermination.
[Footnote 2: By Francis Parkman in _The Jesuits in North America_.]
Between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay the Hurons dwelt, accessible to
the Frenchmen only by the Ottawa river and Lake Nipissing, for the
Iroquois barred the alternative route up the St. Lawrence and by Lake
Ontario. Montreal was left far behind, and many miles of a toilsome,
dangerous route were traversed, until by the shores of the great
freshwater sea were found the homes of a savage but a settled people.
To men inspired by religion and by Imperial views of religion, who
looked to be the ministers of a world-wide power, including and
dominating all the kingdoms of the earth, the greatness of the
distances, the remoteness of the land, the unbounded area of unknown
waters stretching far off to the west, were but calls to the
imagination and incentives to redoubled effort.
But, ambitious as they were, the Jesuits were not mere enthusiasts:
they were practical and politic men, diplomatists in the American
backwoods as at the Court of France. Not wandering outcasts, like the
Algonquins of the lower St. Lawrence; not, like the Iroquois, wholly
given to perpetual murder; with some peaceful impulses, traders to a
small extent, and tillers of the ground, and above all, since
Champlain first came among them, sworn allies of the French--the
Hurons seemed such a people as might be moulded to a new faith, and
become a beacon attracting other North American natives to the light
of Christianity. So the Jesuit fathers went among them in 1634, and
in 1640 built and fortified a central mission station--St. Marie--a
mile from where a little river--the Wye--flows into an inlet of Lake
Huron.
To convert a race of suspicious savages is no easy task. The priests
carried their lives in their hands. They were pitted against native
sorcerers, they were called upon to give {88} rain, they were held
responsible for small-pox. Yet year by year, by genuine goodness and
by pious fraud, they made headway, until some eleven mission posts
were in existence among the Hurons and the neighbouring tribes, the
most remote station being at the outlet of Lake Superior. The promise
was good. Money was forthcoming from France. There were eighteen
priests at work, there were lay assistants, there was a handful of
French soldiers. Earthly as well as spiritual wants were supplied at
St. Marie, and far off in safety at Quebec was a seminary for Huron
children. It seemed as though on the far western horizon of discovery
and colonization, the Roman Catholic Church was achieving a signal
triumph, its agents being Frenchmen, and its political work being
credited to France. Yet after fifteen years all was over, and the
land was left desolate without inhabitants. The heathen learnt from
their Christian teachers to obey and to suffer, but in learning they
lost the spirit of resistance and of savage manhood. As in Paraguay,
a more submissive race, under Jesuit influence, dwindled in numbers,
so even the Hurons, after the French priests came among them, seem to
have become an easier prey than before to their hereditary foes.
[Sidenote: _Destruction of the missions by the Iroquois._]
[Sidenote: _Dispersion of the Hurons._]
In July, 1648, the mission station of St. Joseph, fifteen miles from
St. Marie, was utterly destroyed, the priest in charge was shot dead,
and 700 prisoners were carried off. In the following year 1,200
warriors of the Five Nations swept like a torrent through the Huron
cantons, fifteen native towns were attacked, ravaged, and burnt, and
the brave priest, De Breboeuf, was tortured and slain. Other devoted
missionaries shared his fate; the shepherds were slaughtered, and the
survivors of the flock were scattered abroad. For the Hurons made
little or no attempt to defend themselves; fear came upon them and
trouble; they fell down, and there was none to help them. The fort at
St. Marie stood, for even the Iroquois hesitated to attack armed
walls; but its purpose {89} was gone with the slaughter and
dispersion of the Huron clans. The priests who still lived abandoned
it, and spent a miserable winter with a crowd of Indian fugitives on
a neighbouring island in Lake Huron. There too they built a fort; but
famine and the Iroquois followed them, and in 1650 they left the
country, taking with them to Quebec some 300 Huron converts. The
refugees were settled on the Isle of Orleans; yet even there, five or
six years later, they were attacked by the Iroquois, and at length
they found a secure abiding-place at Lorette, near the banks of the
river St. Charles. The rest of their kinsfolk were scattered abroad.
Some were incorporated in the Five Nations. Others, driven from point
to point, were found in after years at the northern end of Lake
Michigan or at Detroit, and, under the new name of Wyandots, played
some part in later Canadian history; but the Huron nation was blotted
out, the Huron country became a desert, and the light which had shone
brightly for a few years in the far-off land was put out for ever.
[Sidenote: _Weakness of the French in Canada._]
Most readers of the story of the Huron missions will study it mainly
as an episode in religious enterprise. They will note the heroism of
the Jesuit priests--their faithfulness unto death, their constancy
under torture and suffering not surpassed by the stoicism of the
North American Indians themselves. They will mourn the failure of
their efforts, the butchery, the martyrdom, but will record that all
was not absolutely thrown away; for even in the lodges of the Five
Nations we read that some of the nameless Hurons held to the faith
which their French teachers loved and served so well. But this is not
the true moral of the story. The significance of the events lay in
proving the French to be weak and the Iroquois to be strong, in
demonstrating with horrible thoroughness that the white men in Canada
were powerless to protect their friends, in thus making more
difficult what was difficult enough already, in retarding the
progress of {90} European colonization in Canada. The want of
concentration, the attempt to do too much, the somewhat paralysing
influence of the particular form of the Christian religion which the
French brought with them--all these elements of weakness came out in
connexion with the Huron missions; and meanwhile precious years were
lost to France which could not be afterwards made good; for in these
same years the English, not producing martyrs and heroes, so much as
fathers of families, were taking firm root in North American soil,
plodding slowly but surely along the road to colonization.
[Sidenote: _The strength and ferocity of the Iroquois._]
The Iroquois were like man-eating tigers. The taste of human blood
whetted their appetite for more. Fresh from the slaughter of the
Hurons, in 1650-1 they fell upon the Neutral Nation, whose home was
on the northern shore of Lake Erie, stretching to the east across the
Niagara river. The Neutrals had held aloof from Iroquois and Huron
alike, whence their name; but their neutrality did not protect them
from utter extermination at the hands of the Five Nations. Over
against them on the southern side of the lake were the Eries, second
to none as ferocious savages, and known to the French as the 'Nation
of the Cats.' Their turn came next, in 1654-5. They fought hard,
behind palisades and with poisoned arrows; but they too were blotted
out, and only on the south were left native warriors to cope with the
conquering Iroquois. These were the Andastes, on the line of the
Susquehanna river, who year after year gave blow for blow, until they
too succumbed to superior numbers.
Nothing withstood the Five Nations; yet their fighting men were few,
and their losses great. For the time they nearly ruined the French
cause in Canada, but in the end their work of destruction rendered
the triumph of the white man more inevitable and more complete. They
broke up and killed out tribes, whose forces, if united to their own,
might have overwhelmed the Europeans; and in doing so {91} they
sapped their own strength. They kept up their numbers only by the
incorporation of natives who had learned to look to Europeans for
guidance and support; and in course of time, fallen from their high
estate, they found salvation not as leaders of red men but as allies
of white.
[Sidenote: _Mission of Le Moyne to the Five Nations._]
It seems marvellous that the confederation held together, and there
were, it is true, occasional outbursts of inter-tribal jealousy and
suspicion. Difference of geographical position tended to difference
of policy. The most determined foes of the French were the
Mohawks--the easternmost nation, supplied with firearms by the
Dutchmen at Albany, and having easy access to the St. Lawrence. At
the other end of the line the Senecas had their hands full in the
Erie war, and were little disposed, while it lasted, to molest the
Europeans. In the centre, the Onondagas, always few in numbers and
already recruited by captive Hurons, were minded to attract to their
ranks the Huron refugees at Quebec. So about the autumn of 1653,
overtures of peace were made to the French, even the Mohawks for the
moment dissembling their enmity; and in the following year a Jesuit
priest, Le Moyne, was sent as an envoy to the Iroquois country.
The mission was notable in more ways than one. Le Moyne was the first
white man to follow up the St. Lawrence from Montreal to Lake
Ontario, and his journey marked the beginning of diplomatic relations
between the French and the Iroquois. Thenceforward there was always
the nucleus of a French party among the Five Nations, the elements of
a divided policy in lieu of solid hostility to the French. Here was
an illustration too of the value of the Jesuit priests to the French
cause, as well as of the danger of employing them. None equalled
these priests in the statecraft necessary for dealing with savages,
but none were at the time in question so ready in season or out of
season to promote a forward policy, involving future complications
and dispersion of strength.
{92} [Sidenote: _Attempt at a French settlement among the Five
Nations._]
Le Moyne's mission was to the Onondagas, and its result was an
application from that tribe that a French settlement should be
established among them. The invitation was accepted; and in the
summer of 1656 between forty and fifty Frenchmen established
themselves on Lake Onondaga, in the very heart of the Iroquois
country. It was a desperate enterprise. The men could ill be spared
from Quebec, and they were but hostages among the Five Nations. The
Indians pretended peace, but even while the Onondagas were escorting
the Frenchmen up the river, the Mohawks attacked the expedition, and
subsequently under the very guns of Quebec carried off Huron captives
from the Isle of Orleans. For a little less than two years, the small
band of French colonists remained amid the Onondagas, in hourly peril
of their lives; and finally, towards the end of 1658, at dead of
night, while the Indians were overcome by gluttony and debauch, they
launched their boats and canoes on the Oswego river, reached Lake
Ontario and the St. Lawrence, and found themselves once more at
Montreal.
It was a fit ending to the first stage of Canadian history--a
hopeless venture, a confession of weakness, a hairsbreadth escape. So
far there had been no colonization of Canada. There had been one
wise, far-seeing man--Champlain. Brave soldiers had come from France,
and still braver priests. There had been going in and out among the
natives, toil and hardship, adventure and loss of life. But the
French had as yet no real hold on Canada. Between Quebec and the
Three Rivers--between the Three Rivers and Montreal, not they but the
Iroquois were masters of the St. Lawrence. A trading company claimed
to rule: its rule was nothingness. Within Quebec bishops and
Governors quarrelled for precedence: under its walls the Mohawks
yelled defiance. Montreal, the story goes, was only saved by a band
of Frenchmen, who, in a log hut on the Ottawa, sold their lives as
dearly as the heroes of Greek or Roman legend; and to crown it all,
{93} at the beginning of 1663, the shock of a mighty earthquake was
felt throughout the land, making the forts and convents tremble,
sending, as it were, a shiver through the feeble frame of New France.
[Sidenote: _The One Hundred Associates surrender their charter._]
It was the prelude of a better time. In March, 1663, the One Hundred
Associates surrendered their charter to the Crown. A century later,
by the Peace of Paris in 1763, France lost Canada. In those hundred
years a fair trial was given to French colonization. How much was
done to leave the impress of a great nation on Canada, the province
of Quebec to-day will testify. Wherein the work was found wanting is
told in history.
[Sidenote: _The Company of the West._]
In 1663, we read, Canada became a Royal Province. It passed out of
the keeping of a company and came under the direct control of the
French King and his ministers. The statement requires some
modification, for in 1664 Colbert created a new Chartered Company,
the Company of the West, whose sphere, like that of the Netherlands
West India Company, included the whole of the western half of the
world, so far as it was or might be French--America North and South,
the West Indies, and West Africa. Canada was within the terms of its
charter, which included a monopoly of trade for forty years and, on
paper, sovereign rights within the wide limits to which the charter
extended. Thus the members of the company claimed to be feudal
Seigniors of the soil of New France and to nominate the Council of
Government, with the exception of the Governor and Intendant; while
from the dues which they levied the cost of government was to be
defrayed.
Such was the outline and the intention of the scheme: the actual
result was that the carrying trade was monopolized by the company,
together with one-fourth of the beaver skins of all Canada, and the
whole of the traffic of the lower St. Lawrence, which centred at
Tadoussac. Out of their monopoly they paid all or part of the
expenses of government, {94} but the administration practically
remained in the hands of the Crown. Like its predecessor, this
company was a miserable failure. It lasted for ten years only, and
during those years it was an incubus on Canada.
[Sidenote: _Chartered Companies ill suited to France._]
The truth was that Chartered Companies were alien to the genius of
France, or at any rate of Roman Catholic France--the France of the
Bourbons. Her greatest ministers, Richelieu and Colbert, were, it is
true, loth to discard the system. They wished to give French
merchants a direct interest in building up a colonial empire. They
saw the English working by means of companies. They saw the Dutch
giving to the state the outward semblance of private enterprise.
Companies, they argued, would promote French trade and colonization,
as they had promoted the trade and colonization of rival nations. But
Richelieu and Colbert were despotic ministers of arbitrary Kings; the
companies which they created were as lifeless and as helpless as
their titles were high-sounding and pretentious. They lasted as long,
and only as long, as they were backed by the Crown. They were swept
away as easily as they were formed; and they left no lasting impress
on French colonial history.
[Sidenote: _Canada under the Crown._]
We may take it then that, in 1663, Canada in effect passed to the
French King and became what would now be styled a Crown Colony.
Strong hands ministered to it, and it grew in strength. New France
was fostered, was ruled and organized, was supplied, though sometimes
sparingly, with means of defence and offence. It was developed on
rigidly prescribed lines. It was given a social and political system.
Capable and enterprising men were concerned in making its history,
and its history was made on a distinct type imported from the Old
World, and little modified by the New. What this system was, and how
far under it the colonists were able to cope with their coloured
foes, will be told in the remaining pages of this chapter.
[Sidenote: _The Government of Canada._]
[Sidenote: _The Supreme Council._]
The Government of Canada was a despotism. Under the {95} King of
France, whose word was law, the whole power was centred in the
Governor, the Intendant, and the Council, known at first as the
Supreme Council, afterwards as the Superior or the Sovereign Council.
This Council was created by royal edict in April, 1663. It was at
once a legislative body, and a High Court of Justice. It consisted of
the Governor, the Intendant, the bishop, and five other councillors,
afterwards increased to seven, and again to twelve. The councillors
were appointed by the King, and held office usually for life. They
deliberated, they legislated, they judged, they wrangled among
themselves; they followed the lead of Governor, Intendant, or bishop,
according as one or the other was strongest for the time being, and
the strongest for the time being was the man who had the ear of the
King and his minister.
[Sidenote: _The law of Canada._]
[Sidenote: _The courts of justice._]
The law of the land was the Customary Law of Paris, supplemented by
three kinds of ordinances. There were the royal edicts sent out from
France and registered by the Council in Canada; there were the
decrees made by the Council; and in the third place, there were the
ordinances of the Intendant, who was invested with legislative
authority by the King. The Council, as has been stated, was a
judicial as well as a legislative body. It was the court of appeal
for the colony, and in early days it was also a court of first
instance. There were minor courts of justice, too, established by the
Council, and three judges of the three districts of Quebec, Three
Rivers, and Montreal respectively, appointed by the King. In
addition, the feudal Seigniors[3] of Canada exercised a petty, and
usually little more than nominal, jurisdiction among their vassals,
while the Intendant enjoyed {96} extensive judicial powers, emanating
from and subordinate to the King alone.
[Footnote 3: The judicial powers of the Seignior varied. In a very
few cases the Seignior could administer _haute justice_, i.e. try
crimes on the Seigniory which were punishable with death. For all
important cases there was right of appeal. See Kingsford's _History
of Canada_, vol. i, p. 365, and Parkman's _Old Regime in Canada_
(14th ed.), pp. 252, 269.]
[Sidenote: _The Governor._]
The highest executive officer was the Governor. He had control of the
armed forces, and was responsible for the peace and safety of New
France. He called out the militia when he thought fit; foreign policy
and native policy were in his charge. In old and troubled times
distance gave to the Governors of colonies and provinces actual power
far exceeding the terms or the intent of their commission. They were
the men on the spot. They held the sword; and, when a serious crisis
arose, their word was obeyed. Especially was this the case in Canada,
cut off for half the year from communication with France, and girt
with foreign and with savage foes. Few years passed without wars or
rumours of wars. Each Canadian settlement was a garrison; and
strength, if not full authority, tended to centre in the hands of the
commander of the forces, the trained soldier who held for the time
the Governorship of Canada.
[Sidenote: _The Intendant._]
Yet, unless he had, like Count Frontenac, great force of character,
or was in favour at the Court of Versailles, and when war was not
imminent, his influence was hardly more, it was often less, than that
of the Intendant. The Governor was the representative of the Crown.
The Intendant was the King's agent, the steward of his province, his
own man. He was a civilian, usually a lawyer, and therefore, in most
cases, of greater business capacity, and more skilled in penmanship,
than the Governor with his military training. His intimate relations
with King and minister, coupled with experience of legal advocacy,
tended to give more weight to his representations than to those of
the Governor at the Court of France. The Intendant, not the Governor,
presided at the Council; and as legislator or judge, he was
responsible to the King alone. In time of peace, and in matters of
internal administration, he had perhaps more real power than the
Governor, and even when fighting times called the {97} soldier to the
front, the Intendant, dealing with supplies and accounts, controlled
in great measure the sinews of war.
[Sidenote: _The bishop._]
By the side of the Governor and the Intendant at the council sat the
bishop, spiritually supreme, and with power by no means confined to
spiritual matters. How strong, politically, was the Church in France
before the Revolution, the cardinal prime ministers bear witness, and
the priest-ridden wives and mistresses of the Bourbon Kings. It was
stronger still in Canada. Priests formed no small part of the scanty
population of New France; they made a large part of its history. The
schools and hospitals were built by the Church, and the Church owned
much of the land. Well organized and disciplined, with clear and
definite aims, the ministers of the Church made their power felt in
council chamber and in palace; too often they ruled the rulers; and
the first and greatest bishop of Canada, Bishop Laval, made or unmade
the Governors of New France.
[Sidenote: _Defects in the political system of New France.
Centralization of power._]
Such was the political system of Canada, while Canada was a province
of France. Power was centralized, and the ordinary safeguards of
freedom were wholly wanting. Executive, legislative, and judicial
functions were placed in the same hands. There was not a shred of
popular representation, there was not even a vestige of municipal
rights.[4] Canada was good for priests and, to some extent, for
soldiers; there was room in it and a living for an agricultural
peasantry, and for the trapper and backwoodsman, who was a law to
himself. Where the St. Lawrence flowed by the island of Montreal, or
under the rock of Quebec, there were the beginnings of cities with
dwellers in them, but there were no citizens in Canada.
[Footnote 4: Count Frontenac on first arriving in Canada attempted to
give the Canadians some voice in the government by calling together
the three estates, and by allowing the citizens of Quebec to elect
three aldermen. He incurred the royal displeasure by his proceedings,
and his measures came to nothing. See Parkman's _Count Frontenac and
New France_ (14th ed.), pp. 16, &c., and see below, p. 107.]
{98} [Sidenote: _Friction between the officials._]
Though power was centralized, it was not entrusted locally to one man
alone. The maxim of despotism is _Divide et impera_; and on this
principle the Kings of France ruled Canada. The Governor and the
Intendant each corresponded directly with the King and his minister.
Each was wholly independent of the other, and yet their respective
functions were not clearly enough defined to prevent friction and
deadlock. The other members of the Council were subordinate neither
to the Governor nor to the Intendant, in so far that they were
appointed, and could be removed, by the King alone. For this division
of authority there was some excuse. On the assumption that both the
Governor and the Intendant might be thieves, it was prudent to set a
thief to catch a thief. The system minimized the possibility of
tyranny in a distant dependency, where the colonists had no voice in
making the laws, and no control over the administration. One
all-powerful officer might have become a tyrant; but two or more, if
evilly disposed, might be trusted to expose each other's misdoings
with a view to securing favour at home. Chartered Companies took the
same line in this respect as the French Kings. The British East India
Company held their Governor-General in check through his Council; the
Dutch East India Company created in their dependencies the office of
Independent Fiscal, which corresponded in great measure to that of
Intendant.[5] But the plan devised by Louis XIV and Colbert for the
government of Canada had grave defects. Division of authority meant
weakness, where strength was urgently needed; it led to personal
jealousy, to party feeling, to corruption, and to intrigue; it
lessened the sense of responsibility, for each officer could throw
the blame on another; and it left the fortunes of Canada in the hands
of the man who, for the time being, had, irrespective of any office
he held, the {99} strongest character, or the least scruple, or the
largest share of Court favour.
[Footnote 5: See vol. iv of this series, pt. 1, p. 75 and notes.]
[Sidenote: _Emigration from France to Canada._]
[Sidenote: _The settlers and_]
The King of France created the government of Canada. He created also
the people. In less than ten years from the date when he took the
colony in hand the population was more than doubled. Shiploads of
male emigrants were sent out from France, and cargoes of future wives
and mothers. Wedlock was prescribed, celibacy was proscribed,
bounties were, in Roman fashion, given to early marriages and to
large families. The privilege of remaining single was reserved for
priests and nuns; the lay members of the community were bidden to be
fruitful and multiply, and they obeyed the King's commands with much
success. They were honest folk, the Canadian settlers, not convicted
felons sent out from French prisons. No doubt there were among the
emigrants men and women who were glad to leave France, and of whom
France was glad to be rid; but there was no convict strain in the
population, and the _coureurs de bois_, unlicensed though they were,
were not mere outlaws, like the Australian bushrangers.
[Sidenote: _the Feudal System._]
[Sidenote: _Canadian feudalism was purely artificial._]
When an emigrant came to Canada, he could not return to France
without a passport, but he might possibly drift into the backwoods or
to the Dutch or English colonies. Efforts were therefore made to
attach him to the soil. For this purpose a kind of Feudal System was
introduced, somewhat diluted to suit the place and the time. The
essence of feudalism in bygone days had been military tenure and
oligarchy. Time had been in France when the nobles were stronger than
the King, but in the reign of Louis XIV they were little more than
courtiers. They had become ornamental rather than useful; yet even
under a Bourbon despotism, tradition, long descent, ownership of wide
and well-cultivated lands, and rights over a considerable number of
serfs or peasants, gave the French noblesse considerable social
influence. In Canada feudalism had no military {100} aspect. There
was, it is true, a Canadian militia, but it had no connexion with the
feudal tenure of land. Very few of the Canadian Seigniors were of
noble birth, all were poor, their honours were brand new, their
domains were backwoods with occasional clearings, their vassals were
nearly as good men as themselves. The Feudal System in Canada was not
born of the soil, it was simply a device of a benevolent despot for
allotting and settling land, for artificially grading and classifying
an artificially-formed people, and for giving to a new country some
element of old-world respectability.
[Sidenote: _The Seigniors._]
[Sidenote: _The Habitans and their tenure._]
The Seignior held his land, in most cases, directly from the Crown.
He held it as a free gift from the King by title of faith and homage.
He held it on condition of bringing it into cultivation; and, if he
sold his Seigniory, one-fifth of the price as a rule was paid to the
Crown. There was no immemorial title to the land. The title was given
by an arbitrary overlord, and by the same could be revoked. The
condition of cultivation was annexed in order to promote settlement,
and inasmuch as most Seigniors, owing to poverty and the size of the
holdings, could not themselves fulfil the condition, they granted
lands in turn to other settlers, who held of them as they held of the
King. These other settlers were the _Habitans_, the cultivators of
the soil, and their tenancy was the tenure of _cens et rente_, whence
they were known in legal phrase as _Censitaires_. In other words,
they paid a small rent in money, or in kind, or in both. If they sold
their holdings, the Seignior received one-twelfth of the
purchase-money. They were required to grind their corn at the
Seignior's mill, to pay for the privilege of fishing one fish in
every eleven caught, and to comply with sundry other small demands,
in addition to having justice meted out occasionally at the
Seignior's hands.
These conditions may have been found in some instances petty and
annoying, but to Frenchmen of the seventeenth {101} and eighteenth
century they can hardly have been onerous. They were limited and
safeguarded, as they had been created, by the royal will; and it was
not till the year 1854, after Canada had known British rule for
nearly a hundred years, that they were swept away. That a purely
artificial system should have lasted so long and caused apparently so
little friction and discontent, argues no little skill in those who
invented it, and proves that it was not ill suited to the wants, and
harmonized with the traditions, of the colonists of Canada. It is
impossible to imagine the Puritan settler in New England submitting
to such minute regulations, taking his corn to a Seignior's mill,
baking his bread at a Seignior's oven, paying homage to another
settler set over him by a distant King. But Frenchmen could be
drilled and organized. They understood being planted out in rows,
like so many trees. Their religion and their training tended to
unquestioning obedience, and they throve in quiet sort under
restrictions which the grim and stubborn New Englander would have
trodden under foot.
[Sidenote: _Military colonization in Canada._]
[Sidenote: _The Carignan Regiment._]
Though feudalism on the St. Lawrence had no military basis, military
colonization played a great part in the early settlement of Canada.
The Intendant, Talon, Colbert's right-hand man in his Canadian
schemes, took in this matter the Romans for his model. As the Romans
planted military colonies along the frontiers of their provinces,
including Gaul itself, so Colbert and Talon determined to ensure the
security of Canada by placing a barrier of soldier-colonists on the
border. There was a famous French regiment known as the
Carignan-Salieres Regiment. It had been raised in Savoy by a Prince
of Carignan. It had lately fought with distinction side by side with
the Austrians against the Turks, and in 1665, under Colonel de
Salieres, was sent out to Canada, the first regiment of the line
which had ever landed in New France. The main outlet for Iroquois
incursions was the line of the Richelieu river. On that river forts
were {102} built and garrisoned, and along its banks and also along
the St. Lawrence, between the mouth of the Richelieu and the island
of Montreal, time-expired soldiers were planted out as settlers.
Officers and men alike were given grants of land and bounties in
money, and the soldiers were kept for a year by the King, while
building their houses and clearing their land. The theory was that
the officers should be Seigniors, and that the soldiers who had
served under them should become tenants of their old commanders.
Where the lands were most exposed, the houses were grouped together
within palisades. Elsewhere they were detached from one another,
forming a line of dwellings along the river-side, whence the
settlements were known as _cotes_.
[Sidenote: _Size of the Seigniories._]
The usual size of a Seigniory, whether granted to a soldier or to a
civilian, was four arpents in front by forty in depth. In other
words, an arpent[6] being rather less than an acre, the frontage of a
Seigniory was about 260 yards long, while the depth was about 2,600,
or a mile and a half. This long hinterland contained the corn land,
the timber, and the hunting-grounds, but the most valuable and
distinctive feature in the Seigniories was the river frontage. In a
word, Canadian colonization consisted of a series of river-side
settlements, forming a long, narrow, military frontier, with a
wilderness behind.
[Footnote 6: The _arpent de Paris_ was .845 of an acre or 36801.7
English square feet; therefore one side of the arpent was about 64
yards.]
[Sidenote: _Strong contrasts in Canadian history._]
Such was the colony, its land, and its people. There is no exact
parallel to be found in the story of other European colonies. None of
them, perhaps, started with such very strong contrasts. Canada was
not a seaboard colony, it was a purely inland colony; yet its
settlements were so many little ports, and its active life was mainly
by, and on, the water. It was pre-eminently not a colony of towns or
of townsfolk, yet Quebec was as much the heart of Canada as Paris was
of France, and the conquest of Canada consisted {103} in the taking
of Quebec and Montreal. It was not a plantation colony, it was not a
mining colony, it was not a pastoral colony; it was a colony of
agriculturists and hunters, and its trade, such as it was, came not
so much from agriculture as from the chase. No colonists were ever
more carefully drilled and organized than the Canadian
agriculturists; none ever lived a life of more unbounded freedom than
the Canadian _coureurs de bois_. The drilling and organization of the
one element, and the roving enterprise of the other, combined to
produce a good fighting population; but the extremes in either case
were too great to result in forming a community, which should be at
once stable and progressive. What was natural in Canada was not
colonization. What was colonization, that is to say permanent
European settlement in the land, was purely artificial. The system of
settlement was cleverly conceived, and skilfully as well as humanely
carried into effect; but it depended not on law so much as on the
personal will of an absolute master. It was wanting in safeguards, it
was wanting in elasticity, it stunted individual effort, and it
contained no element of growth. A full-blown colony was called into
being under regulations which implied childhood, and the result was
to leave the Canadians contented so long as they knew no other rules
of life, but to leave them standing still, while their English
rivals, neither too lawless nor too conservative, grew out of infancy
into clumsy manhood, and proved their strength when the fullness of
the time was come.
[Sidenote: _Arrival of De Tracy, De Courcelles, and Talon._]
On June 30, 1665, the Marquis de Tracy arrived at Quebec. He had been
appointed by the King of France Lieutenant-General for the time being
of all his American possessions, including the West Indies; and,
before coming to Canada, he had visited Cayenne and the French West
India Islands. His mission was temporary, to put the colony in a
proper state of defence, and to inaugurate the system of
administration devised by the King. The new Governor {104} of Canada,
De Courcelles, and the Intendant, Talon, landed in September of the
same year. They were good men for their respective posts--the one a
keen soldier, the other, Talon, a born administrator, whose power of
organization and creative genius left a lasting mark on New France.
[Sidenote: _Operations against the Iroquois._]
The most pressing need of the colony was security against Iroquois
raids. Before the year 1665 ended, three forts had been built on the
Richelieu; one, Sorel, at its mouth, a second below the rapids at
Chambly, a third at some little distance above the rapids. The line
of communication was strengthened by the construction of sixteen or
seventeen miles of road from Chambly to the bank of the St. Lawrence
opposite Montreal, and in the following year a fourth fort was built
near the northern end of Lake Champlain.
[Sidenote: _Expedition of Courcelles;_]
The Frenchmen determined to strike soon and hard at the Five Nations.
In January, 1666, in dead of winter, Courcelles led an expedition
against them up the Richelieu, by Lakes Champlain and George, on to
the head waters of the Hudson river. The route, well known in after
years, was unfamiliar then, and instead of turning to the west into
the country of the Mohawks, the Frenchmen found themselves in the
middle of February near the small Dutch settlement of Schenectady,
where they were challenged as invaders of an English province, for in
1664 the Duke of York had become proprietor of New Netherland. It was
news to the French commander that the valley of the Hudson had passed
into British hands--unwelcome news, and would have been more
unwelcome, had he foreseen the results of the change on after
history. Of all events which strengthened the English cause in
America against the French, the most important perhaps was the
substitution of English for Dutch ownership of the present State of
New York. At the time, no rupture took place between French and
English, and, after an interchange of courtesies, Courcelles led his
troops back to Canada, losing men through cold and privation, and
{105} by the hands of the Mohawks, who dogged his retreat. He had
achieved nothing, yet the daring of his venture seems to have
impressed the Indians, and he had gained knowledge which was soon to
tell.
[Sidenote: _and of Tracy._]
In September of the same year he set out again with 1,300 men, the
whole commanded by Tracy in person. This time no mistake was made as
to the route. The hearts of the Mohawks failed them. They fled before
the invaders, leaving their strongholds empty and undefended. Each
village in turn was burnt to the ground, the stores were destroyed or
carried off, and, homeless and starving, the Indians were glad to
make peace with the French, leaving Canada unmolested for some years
to come. During those years the colony grew stronger, the
administration was recast, the settlements were organized, and,
beyond the line of colonization, explorers carried French influence
further to the west.
In 1667, Tracy returned to France. In 1671, Courcelles and Talon
followed him. In 1672, Count Frontenac came out as Governor to
Canada.
[Sidenote: _Prominence of individual leaders in the early history of
Canada._]
It has been noted above how great are the contrasts in the story of
Canada, and, so far as it was colonized, how much in the system was
artificial, how little was the result of natural growth. The record
of Canada, as compared with that of the English colonies in America,
is much more a series of biographies, much less a chronicle of a
community. Of the great men, whose lives and doings make up Canadian
history in French times, it may be said that some created Canada,
while others were Canada's own creations. In other words, some were
in but not of Canada; they came out from France to make, to rule, to
save, or to try to save, the French colony on the St. Lawrence; while
others, though many of them also came out from home, and all of them
were in their way builders of New France, yet were the outcome of
Canada itself, the result of the unbounded freedom of its backwoods,
{106} their deeds being done and their lives spent mainly beyond the
limits of the Canadian settlements. To the first class belong, among
others, Champlain (though Champlain's name might in truth appear in
either list), Talon, Frontenac, and Montcalm. The second class
comprises the names of explorers such as La Salle, of Du Luth, the
noted _coureur de bois_, and of Iberville, the bold guerilla chief,
who raided the English in Newfoundland and on Hudson Bay, who carried
out La Salle's unfinished work in Louisiana, and of whom, when dead,
Charlevoix wrote: 'The late M. d'Iberville, who had all the good
qualities of his country without any of its defects, would have led
them (his countrymen) to the end of the world.'[7]
[Footnote 7: Charlevoix's _Letters to the Duchess of Lesdiguieres_,
Eng. tr., 1763, p. 104.]
Of these last there will be more to tell. Of the former class it may
be said that, while not children of Canada, their influence on the
history of the colony and their distinction in Canadian annals was in
proportion to the extent to which New France was the land of their
adoption. If we except discoverers, the three greatest names in
Canadian history are Champlain, Frontenac, and Montcalm, all three of
whom died at Quebec.
[Sidenote: _Count Frontenac._]
The strongly marked contrasts characteristic of Canada and its story
are illustrated in the case of Count Frontenac. Like other Governors,
before and after him, he came out from the very centre of
civilization, the Court of France: from serving in the finest army in
the world, he came to rule a barbarous borderland, and to command
troops, the majority of whom were backwoodsmen or native Indians, or
at best a half-disciplined militia. He did not come young to the
work. He was fifty-two on his arrival. When he was appointed Governor
for the second time, in 1689, he was in his seventieth year. He had
great merits and great defects. He was pretentious, arrogant, violent
and overbearing, {107} insubordinate to his employers, somewhat
unscrupulous in his policy, and not cleanhanded in repairing his
broken fortunes. On the other hand, he was resourceful, fearless, and
determined; he stood by his friends, he was not unkindly, he had in
many respects broad views, and above all he believed in Canada, its
fortunes, and its peoples. He had in a high degree the admirable
French quality of adapting himself to places and to men. He was
trusted and revered by the Indians beyond any other French or English
Governor, for, while he refused to treat them as equals, he humoured
their customs and to some extent walked in their ways. His force of
character impressed native and colonist alike. He took Canada in hand
at a time of danger and disorganization. When he died, he left her on
the lines of prosperity and possible greatness.
[Sidenote: _His first government._]
The term of his first government lasted for ten years, from 1672 to
1682. They were years of constant wrangling and worry. He was at
daggers drawn with the Jesuits, and his quarrels with his colleagues
on the Council, notably the Intendant, Duchesnau, were similar to the
disputes between Warren Hastings and Francis at another time and
place. The end of it was that both Frontenac and Duchesnau were
recalled; but Frontenac had left his mark, and after seven years'
interval, during which two governors failed, he was sent back at a
critical time to Canada.
[Sidenote: _His attempt to introduce political representation._]
[Sidenote: _Jealousy between Quebec and Montreal._]
Two incidents in his first administration may be picked out as
illustrating the boldness of his character, and implying foresight
and breadth of view unusual in a French Governor under Louis XIV. The
first was his crude attempt, already noticed,[8] to form a kind of
Canadian parliament on the old French model, with the three estates
of clergy, nobles, and people. It was a rash step to take immediately
after his arrival, when he could not have known the conditions of the
colony, and must have known well the wishes of the King. {108} It
brought upon him a severe reprimand from home, and his scheme came to
nothing. But the step, if ill timed, was in the right direction. Some
semblance of popular assembly would have done much for Canada, if
only as tending to create a national sentiment and to allay local
jealousies. For among the many elements of weakness in the colony in
its early days was the semi-independence of Montreal. Montreal was
the commercial depot for the upper St. Lawrence, the Ottawa, and the
great lakes. It was the meeting-place of French and native
fur-traders. In it centred the natural wealth of Canada, and to it
resorted the most enterprising and the least settled part of the
population. It was jealous of the older settlement of Quebec, which
was the seat of government, the centre of law and order, and which,
being nearer the sea, commanded the import and export trade with
Europe. Under its feudal Seigniors, the Sulpician monks, Montreal
claimed to have some voice in the appointment of the local Governor;
and Perrot its Governor, in the early days of Frontenac's first
administration, defied within the limits of his district the
authority of the Governor-General, and imprisoned his officers.
[Footnote 8: See above, p. 97, note.]
[Sidenote: _Founding of Fort Frontenac._]
The second event to be specially noted was the building of a fort on
the northern bank of the St. Lawrence, at the point where it flows
out of Lake Ontario. The place was known to the Indians as Cataraqui.
It is now the site of the town of Kingston. The new fort, built in
1673, the year after Frontenac came to Canada, was named after him,
Fort Frontenac. Its building marked the onward movement of the
French. Hitherto their main concern had been to secure mastery of the
central St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal, together with the
command of the Richelieu river. Among the Iroquois, they had fought
chiefly with the Mohawks, the easternmost and nearest of the Five
Nations. But before Frontenac came, and long before the central St.
Lawrence was wholly safe, traders and missionaries had {109} gained
knowledge of the western lakes, and Fort Frontenac was built to be at
once a new outpost of the colony, guarding the upper reaches of the
St. Lawrence, and a starting-point for further exploiting the trade
routes of the west. By building it, the Frenchmen made good their
claim to the river of Canada for its whole length from the lakes to
the sea, and planted themselves at the entrance of a new and vast
system of waterways.
As the St. Lawrence on its upward course broadens into Lake Ontario,
so, as the French went further west, the story of Canada widens out.
From the tale of two or three river settlements it slowly grows into
the history of a continent. The struggle becomes more and more a
struggle not so much for bare existence as for supremacy. The
Iroquois were a deadly danger still, but the danger largely consisted
in the fact that behind them was a strong and, as a rule to them, a
friendly European colony--the English State of New York. Every year
intensified the rivalry between French and English. Every year showed
that both sought to control the trade of the west. The main practical
issue, for the time being, was whether the furs from the lake region
should come down the St. Lawrence to Montreal and Quebec, or be
diverted to Albany through the country of the Five Nations. The
Iroquois held the key of the position, and they knew it. Unless they
could be taught either to fear or to love the French, there was
little hope for Canada.
[Sidenote: _The French come into contact with the Senecas._]
As the French moved up the St. Lawrence, and along Lake Ontario, they
passed along the line of the Five Nations, and came directly into
conflict with the furthermost and the strongest of the five, the
Senecas. After Tracy's successful expedition against the Mohawks in
1666, the Iroquois gave comparatively little trouble for some years.
They knew well the difference between a strong and a weak _Onontio_,
as they styled the Governor of Canada, and for Courcelles, and his
successor Frontenac, they had a wholesome respect. {110} When
Frontenac was recalled, in 1682, there was a different tale to tell.
[Sidenote: _Frontenac recalled and succeeded by La Barre._]
His successor in that year was La Barre, an old soldier of some
distinction, who had been Governor of Cayenne, which he recaptured
from the English. In Canada he proved to be an irresolute commander
and an incapable administrator, notable even among Canadian officials
for greed of gain. The Iroquois became more and more menacing. The
Senecas especially, at the western end of the line, who had never yet
felt in any measure the weight of the French arm, raided the Indians
of the Illinois, who were nominally under French protection,
threatened the tribes of the lakes, and were in a fair way to master
the trade on which Canada depended. There had been some prospect of a
rupture between the Five Nations and the English, owing to border
forays on Virginia and Maryland; but in 1684, at a great council held
at Albany, the old alliance was solemnly renewed. There was no hope
from this quarter for the French.
[Sidenote: _His expedition against the Iroquois._]
[Sidenote: _Its failure._]
[Sidenote: _He is succeeded by De Denonville._]
La Barre, whatever may have been his faults, was in a most difficult
position, but made up his mind to take the offensive, hoping by a
demonstration of force to bring the Iroquois to terms. Having
collected troops and native allies, he moved up the St. Lawrence in
the summer of 1684, from Montreal to Fort Frontenac. There he waited
while his force sickened with malarial fever. After delay he moved
his men across to the southern side of Lake Ontario, and encamped at
a place called La Famine, where more men went down with fever. There,
at length, deputies of the Iroquois came to meet him. He talked
swelling words, but the state of his camp gave them the lie. He made
a kind of truce, in which the Indians practically dictated the terms,
and he retreated down the river again, having encouraged his enemies,
disgusted his allies, brought embarrassment on the colony, and
procured his own recall. He was succeeded in the following year by
the Marquis de Denonville.
{111} [Sidenote: _His expedition against the Senecas._]
[Sidenote: _Posts placed at Niagara and Detroit._]
Denonville was at once more capable and more honest than La Barre,
but he had still greater difficulties to contend with. The Iroquois
were now quite out of hand, and Dongan, the able Governor of New
York, was taking a stronger line than was the wont of most Governors
in the English colonies, making a bold bid for the control of the
lake region. However, ample reinforcements were sent from France with
orders to attack the Five Nations, and in the summer of 1687 the
French Governor set out with an overwhelming force against the
Senecas. His troops, nearly 3,000 in all, mustered at Irondequoit
Bay, halfway along the southern shore of Lake Ontario. From thence a
route led southwards to the chief town of the Senecas. Many of the
Seneca warriors were out of the country at the time, and the French,
advancing in strength, dispersed the savages who remained, reached
the town, already burnt and deserted, and after destroying corn and
devastating the neighbouring land, returned to the lake. A fort was
then built at the further end of the lake, below Niagara,[9] to
command the junction of Lakes Erie and Ontario, as in the previous
year a stockade had been constructed on the strait of Detroit, to
control the passage from Lake Huron to Lake Erie; after which the
Governor returned to Montreal.
[Footnote 9: In March of this same year Dongan was urging on the
Lords of Trade the building of an English fort at Niagara, or as he
called it, Oneigra, 'near the great lake on the way whereby our
people go hunting and trading. It is very necessary for our trade and
correspondence with the Indians, and for securing our right to the
country' (_Calendar of State Papers_, Colonial, 1685-8, p. 328).]
[Sidenote: _Fruitlessness of the expedition._]
[Sidenote: _The massacre of Lachine._]
The French, to quote Colden's words,[10] had 'got nothing but dry
blows by this expedition.' Denonville had not done enough. He had
enraged the confederate Indians without crippling them. A few months
before, with odious treachery, he had ordered some friendly Iroquois
to be kidnapped and sent to France to serve in the galleys. The
tribesmen of the prisoners neither forgave nor forgot, and in less
than two {112} years' time they paid the debt. On the island of
Montreal, some eight miles above the town to the south-west, at the
head of rapids now cut by a canal, and at the lower end of the broad
reach of the St. Lawrence--which bears the name of Lake St.
Louis--was the settlement of Lachine. At the beginning of August,
1689, at dead of night and under cover of a storm, many hundred
Iroquois warriors broke in upon the settlers. Two hundred of the
French were butchered there and then. One hundred and twenty were
carried off, some to be tortured and burnt almost within sight of
their countrymen, others to be gradually done to death in the lodges
of the Five Nations. A detachment of eighty French soldiers was also
cut to pieces, and outside forts and palisades the country was a
scene of death and desolation.
[Footnote 10: _History of the Five Nations_ (3rd ed.), vol. i, chap.
v, p. 82.]
[Sidenote: _Abandonment of Fort Frontenac. Recall of Denonville and
return of Frontenac._]
The horrors of Lachine stand out in Canadian history as a kind of
Sicilian Vespers or Massacre of St. Bartholomew. The upper part of
the colony, Montreal and its neighbourhood, was paralysed with
terror, and once more, for a moment, the Iroquois seemed to threaten
the very existence of New France. It was not so in fact. Below Three
Rivers Canada was safe, and the savages did not, as in old days,
parade their triumph beneath the cliffs of Quebec. Meanwhile
Denonville had already been recalled, his last act being to order in
his panic the evacuation and destruction of Fort Frontenac; and the
old Frenchman, after whom that fort had been named, came back in his
seventieth year to save and to rule Canada.
[Sidenote: _Callieres._]
Another competent man returned with Frontenac, after a short visit to
France--Callieres, the Governor of Montreal. He was a strong second
in command, and, when Frontenac died, was appointed to succeed him,
and carried on his work. The two commanders arrived in the autumn of
1689, to find all in confusion and distress; but Frontenac was not
forgotten. His presence gave confidence, and even among the {113}
Iroquois his name secured respect. It was his habit to see with his
own eyes, to take his own line, to act with promptitude and decision.
These qualities, when coupled with ten years' previous experience of
the colony, were invaluable at a crisis. He might quarrel with
Intendants, browbeat Councillors, and denounce Jesuit priests; but to
the settlers he gave security, to the adventurous backwoodsmen of the
West he was a congenial leader, and to the Indians he was the great
_Onontio_, whose actions matched his words.
[Sidenote: _Confidence restored by Frontenac._]
[Sidenote: _His dealings with the Indians._]
For the time he was not in a position to carry war into the Iroquois
country, and the Iroquois would not listen to friendly overtures. He
contented himself, therefore, with strengthening the forts and
defences of the colony and with issuing proclamations to the wavering
tribes of the lakes. It was one thing when La Barre or Denonville
spoke, it was another when the words were those of Frontenac. His
next step was to intimidate the English allies of the Five Nations,
and to send three raiding parties into New England and New York. This
was the kind of irregular warfare for which the Canadians were best
suited. All three expeditions were successful; and their success,
coupled with two defeats of parties of Iroquois on the Ottawa, by Du
Luth in 1689 and Nicolas Perrot in 1690, both noted leaders of
_coureurs de bois_, gave new heart to Canada. Before the summer of
1690 ended, the Indians of the upper lakes came down in force to
trade at Montreal, and the grey-headed Governor-General of New France
led the war dance, hatchet in hand, appealing to savages in savage
fashion, as only a versatile Frenchman could.
It was a typical proceeding. French priests turned heathens into
Christians, but left them on their savage lines. French hunters lived
among Indians, adopting Indian garb and Indian methods; and the great
Governor of Canada, who of all others was a ruler of men, led a
yelling crowd in their native prelude for war, as sure in {114}
self-esteem, as sure in the esteem of his company, as if he were
treading a minuet in stately fashion at the Court of Versailles. The
English had no such address; but not having it they ran less risk for
the future of their kind. They kept the heathen, for the most part,
outside their pale. They did little to convert them. They did little
to befriend or protect them. But the English race remained stronger
and purer in its dour isolation than the assimilated and assimilating
Frenchmen of what was then Upper Canada.
[Sidenote: _Insecurity of the French settlers above Three Rivers._]
Raids and counter raids went on. Of the part which the English took
in the fighting, something will be said presently. So far as the
struggle was between the French and the Five Nations, the scene of
action was either the Ottawa river, or the angle between the
Richelieu and the St. Lawrence. Always important, as being the direct
trade route from Lake Huron, the Ottawa was more important now,
seeing that there was a larger population in Canada than in bygone
days dependent on the fur trade, and that since Denonville's abortive
expedition against the Senecas, the massacre of Lachine, and the
evacuation of Fort Frontenac, the French had lost command of the
upper St. Lawrence.
The corner of land lying between Chambly on the Richelieu and
Montreal was the old battlefield of French and Iroquois. By this
line, before Tracy's expedition of 1666, the Mohawks had raided
Canada; by this line, once more, their war-parties came. Below the
Three Rivers, at Quebec and in its neighbourhood, there was no fear
of the Indians, though there was both apprehension and reality of
English invasion, and distress from English blockade of Canadian
trade. But in the upper half of the colony, of which Montreal was the
centre, there was no security for life or property outside
fortifications and stockades.
[Sidenote: _Madeleine de Vercheres._]
Some twenty miles below Montreal, on the southern bank of the St.
Lawrence, in the troubled belt of land between that river and the
Richelieu, was the Seigniory of Vercheres. {115} There was on it a
fort and a blockhouse, which, in the last week of October, 1692, was
the scene of one of the most picturesque episodes in all the annals
of border warfare. The Seignior, a military man, was absent, the fort
was nearly empty, for the able-bodied men were working in the fields,
when the Iroquois came down on the place. The Seignior's daughter,
Madeleine de Vercheres, a girl of fourteen, took charge of the fort,
having for a garrison, over and above women and children, two
terrified soldiers, one hired man-servant, one refugee settler, an
old man of eighty, and two small boys, her brothers. She gave the
command, she placed each at his post, she misled the savages by a
show of imaginary force, and watching day and night she held them at
bay, until, at the end of a week, a party of soldiers came to her
relief from Montreal. Years afterwards the tale of the siege was
taken down from her own lips; and her name lives, and deserves to
live, in the history of Canada. The girl's heroism is the chief, but
not the only, point of the story. That the Mohawks should have
prowled round the fort for a week without seriously attempting to
take it, and without finding out that it was nearly defenceless,
shows how helpless and stupid these noted warriors were when face to
face with a fortification. On the other hand, that a post, only
twenty miles distant from Montreal, was left for a week without
relief, proves how paralysed, or at least how weakened, were the
French by a long series of Indian incursions. This was in Frontenac's
time; but Frontenac had the English on his hands, and was short of
men. Had it been otherwise, there would have been no beleaguering of
girls in forts, and Canada would have lost a pretty story.
[Sidenote: _Revival of the French cause._]
As it was, the scale soon turned in favour of the French. In dead of
winter, at the beginning of 1693, a mixed body of Canadians and
Indians broke in upon the Mohawk towns, and, in spite of a somewhat
disastrous retreat, inflicted considerable loss on their persistent
enemies; while later {116} in the year, at the bidding of the sturdy
old Governor, a strong party of _coureurs de bois_ came down the
Ottawa, convoying a long pent-up and most welcome cargo of furs. This
'gave as universal joy to Canada as the arrival of the galleons give
in Spain';[11] and Frontenac was hailed as the father of the people.
[Footnote 11: Colden's _History of the Five Nations_ (3rd ed.), vol.
i, chap. ix, p. 159.]
[Sidenote: _The Iroquois complain of English inaction._]
More soldiers came out from France, and the Iroquois began to lose
heart. Many of their warriors had fallen, and not a few, converted by
the Jesuits, had settled in Canada, being known to their heathen
countrymen as the 'praying Indians.'[12] From the English colonies
little or no help had come, beyond supplies of arms and ammunition.
The councils at Albany produced on the English side pretentious
speeches, criticism, encouragement, and promises which were never
fulfilled; but the words of the Indians were more to the point, 'the
whole burden of the war lies on us alone ... we alone cannot continue
the war against the French by reason of the recruits they daily
receive from the other side the Great Lake.'[13] They had been
faithful to the English alliance, more faithful than the English
deserved, and more faithful than any civilized nation would have been
under like circumstances; but they tired of fighting singlehanded,
and the chain of the covenant began to rust.
[Footnote 12: The converted Iroquois were settled at Caughnawaga,
which was on the south bank of the St. Lawrence, at the Sault St.
Louis, and directly opposite Lachine. They were often called
Caughnawagas.]
[Footnote 13: Colden, vol. i, chap. x, p. 176.]
[Sidenote: _Their policy towards the French._]
[Sidenote: _Barbarity of Frontenac._]
In default of active aid from the English, there were two policies
open to them--to make terms with the French, and to detach from the
French cause the Indian tribes of the lakes. They pursued both
policies at once: they invited Frontenac to meet them and the English
at Albany; he refused. He refused also to come to a meeting at
Onondaga. {117} They then sent a deputation to Quebec in 1694; and
Frontenac offered a peace which should include the Indian allies of
the French and exclude the English. Two nations of the confederacy
were ready to accept these terms; the other three rejected them, and
there was no peace. In the meantime the Iroquois intrigued with the
Lake Indians, and, attracted by the prospect of English goods, the
latter came near exchanging the French alliance for combination with
the Five Nations and the English. To prevent this result, Frontenac
and his officers had resort to infamous methods. Not only at the
forest post of Michillimackinac, but at Montreal itself, the French
compelled the wavering Indians to burn Iroquois prisoners to death,
in order to make peace impossible, and joined themselves in the
torture and butchery. Few worse instances of barbarous policy are
recorded in history.
[Sidenote: _Fort Frontenac reoccupied._]
Such means alone would not attain the desired end. Nothing, the
Governor knew, would avail except acknowledged mastery over the Five
Nations. The most obvious confession of weakness on the French side
in Denonville's disastrous time had been the evacuation of Fort
Frontenac; and never had Denonville's successor slackened his
determination to reoccupy the post, which, if he had arrived in
Canada a day or two earlier, would not have been abandoned. The time
came in the summer of 1695. A force, secretly and quickly gathered,
was sent up from Montreal; the walls of the fort still standing were
repaired; and the Iroquois were startled by the news that the post,
which they most dreaded, and which most menaced their confederacy,
was again manned by a French garrison. Frontenac was just in time.
The day after the expedition started, orders came from France that
the fort should not be reoccupied; but he refused to recall his
troops, and set himself to justify, by further measures, his
disobedience to the home Government.
[Sidenote: _Frontenac's expedition against the Five Nations._]
In July, 1696, he set out from Montreal at the head of {118} over
2,000 men. The military strength of Canada was well represented;
there were French soldiers of the line, Canadian militia, and
friendly Indians. With the old Governor went his best
officers--Callieres leading the van of the march, Vaudreuil bringing
up the rear. The force reached Fort Frontenac, crossed Lake Ontario,
and, landing at the mouth of the Oswego river, worked their way up,
by stream and lake and portage, towards the goal of the
expedition--Onondaga, the central town and meeting-place of the Five
Nations. What had happened before happened again. The Indians
retreated into the forest before superior numbers, leaving the French
a barren conquest over the smouldering ashes of the native town and
the standing corn. The Oneidas' village and maize fields were also
laid waste, and then the invaders retraced their steps.
[Sidenote: _Death of Frontenac._]
Though the expedition was recorded by the French as a success,
Frontenac had done no more than Denonville in his march against the
Senecas, and a writer on the English side contemptuously refers to it
as 'a kind of heroic dotage'.[14] The show of force, however, seems
to have had the effect of inclining the Iroquois to peace, of proving
once more that the French were more active than the English, and that
the arm of _Onontio_ was longer than that of the Governor of New
York. Early in 1698 came news of the Peace of Ryswick. The Five
Nations were subjects neither of England nor of France, but both
Canada and New York claimed them. Sturdily to the last, Frontenac
repelled English pretensions and half-hearted Indian advances; but
the hand of death was upon him, and on November 28, 1698, he died at
Quebec, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.
[Footnote 14: Colden, vol. i, chap. xii, p. 202.]
[Sidenote: _His services to Canada._]
He had rid Canada in a great measure from the scourge of murdering
savages. He had humbled the Iroquois to some extent; he had certainly
won their respect. How he withstood the English in open warfare, and
how he {119} encouraged Frenchmen of his own bold type to explore and
to claim the far West, remains to be told. He was a great man for the
time and place, great in fearlessness, in self-reliance, in
foresight, and in unflinching tenacity of purpose. The element of
bombast and arrogance in his character helped him, as it helped other
Frenchmen, whose names have lived, in handling native races. As a
ruler of wild men, whether coloured or white, he was unsurpassed. The
ruthlessness of his policy has left a stain upon his memory; but he
gave life and confidence to Canada in time of trouble, and but for
him there would have been no future for New France.
[Sidenote: _The Iroquois make peace with the French._]
His deeds and his character bore fruit immediately after his death.
At the invitation of his successor, Callieres, a general meeting of
all the Indian tribes was held at Montreal, in 1701, to which the
Iroquois condescended to send representatives. Peace was made; and
the French, whom the Five Nations had brought to the brink of ruin,
emerged from the contest as acknowledged arbitrators between the
native races of North America.
[Sidenote: _Causes which inclined the Iroquois to peace. Loss of
numbers._]
Thus, with the close of the seventeenth century, came in effect the
close of the life-and-death struggle between the Five Nation Indians
and the Canadian settlers. What were the causes which brought the
Iroquois to terms? The first and most potent was loss of numbers.
Continual bloodshed had reduced the male population of the
confederates by half;[15] and mixture by adoption, it may well be
supposed, had brought some alloy into the old fighting breed. When
white men meet coloured men in war, there is always the same tale to
tell. The white men suffer reverses, as long as they are a handful,
and until the native race has lost a certain proportion of its
warriors. Then strength, and knowledge, and discipline prevail; and
the issue is no longer in doubt. But no other coloured race in the
history of colonization fought with Europeans, man for man, like the
Iroquois, and never {120} submitting, treated sullenly as equals only
when the white race were absolutely superior in numbers. Big
battalions in the end usually determine the course of history. They
certainly decided the fate of North America. Numerical strength
turned the scale in favour of the French, as against the Iroquois. It
subsequently turned the scale in favour of the English, as against
the French.
[Footnote 15: See Parkman's _Count Frontenac_, last page, note.]
[Sidenote: _Personality of Frontenac._]
The second cause which influenced the Iroquois was Frontenac's
personality. In dealing with him the Indians dealt, and knew that
they dealt, with a man who in the greatest straits would never give
way an inch. There was no compromise in his policy. He meant to be
master; the savages knew it, and respected him accordingly. He did
not live to complete his work, and it was not thoroughly completed;
but he lived long enough to cripple the Five Nations, and after his
time their strength declined.
[Sidenote: _Shortcomings of the English._]
A third cause was the failure of the English. They missed their
opportunities. The path of English colonization has been strewn with
lost opportunities. The end has been achieved in most cases, and in
most parts of the world; but it has been achieved only after long
years of toil, expense, and loss of life, which a little foresight
might well have avoided. There was no Frontenac on the English side,
no man who went in advance of his Government, who framed and forced a
strong policy. One Governor of New York, the Irishman Dongan, was
active and determined, but those who came after did little. The
element of compromise in the English character, and in the policy of
the English Government, made itself felt. Colony was jealous of
colony, petty legislatures wrangled, and farmers resented being
called to fight instead of sowing or harvesting their crops. Over and
above all, whether as friends or as foes, the Frenchmen stretched out
their right hands to the native races of North America; the English
lived their lives apart, and for the time they paid the penalty.
{121} [Sidenote: _Founding of Detroit._]
[Sidenote: _La Mothe Cadillac._]
Thus the Five Nations made peace with the French at Montreal. At the
very same time, at Albany,[16] they gave the English a title to the
lake regions. In the year 1686, by Denonville's orders, Du Luth, with
a party of _coureurs de bois_, established a French outpost on the
strait (Detroit) between Lakes Huron and Erie,[17] his object being
to prevent the fur trade of the upper lakes passing down that way to
the Iroquois country, and thence to the English market at Albany. The
post was not maintained; but some years afterwards a more permanent
occupation took place. Frontenac had died; but he left behind him men
trained in his school, keen on a forward policy, on holding in the
interests of France and in their own the passes of the West. Such a
man was La Mothe Cadillac, who in 1694 had been sent to take command
at Michillimackinac. He urged upon the French Government the
importance of controlling the outlet from Lake Huron to Lake Erie,
and, having obtained their consent, was the founder of the city of
Detroit. He began the work in July, 1701, but before his expedition
actually reached the place, the Five Nations took alarm, recognizing
that Detroit, like Fort Frontenac, would limit their range and
endanger their power.
[Footnote 16: The great meeting at Montreal was held on Aug. 4, 1701.
The deed of cession referred to in the text was dated July 19, 1701.]
[Footnote 17: See above, p. 111.]
[Sidenote: _The Iroquois cede their hunting-grounds to the King of
England._]
They sent representatives of all their nations to Albany, and there,
on July 19, 1701, ceded to the King of England their 'beaver
hunting-ground,' retaining for themselves the right of free hunting.
The deed was of the most formal character, attested by the totem
marks of all the Five Nations.[18] It is an interesting document,
setting forth that the Iroquois had already subjected themselves and
their lands 'on this side of Cataraqui (Ontario) lake wholly to the
Crown of {122} England,' and conveying to the King a wide area to the
north of the lake, which the Five Nations claimed as their
hunting-ground in right of conquest. The tract was estimated at 800
miles in length by 400 in breadth, extending on the north to Lake
Superior, on the west to Chicago, and it specifically included
Detroit,[19] the French designs on which were stated as the reason
for making the cession. A white man's hand must have drawn the deed.
It gave away the Iroquois entirely. Hitherto they had stubbornly
rejected any English claim to sovereignty. Brother the Governor of
New York had been, but not father, and no allegiance had been offered
to the King of England; but in the conveyance William III figured as
'the great lord and master' of the Five Nations, and on paper the
acknowledgement of British sovereignty was complete.
[Footnote 18: A certified copy in manuscript sent home at the time
may be seen at the Record Office, and a printed copy is included in
the New York documents.]
[Footnote 19: Spoken of in the deed in one place as 'Tiengsachrondio
alias Fort de Tret.']
It was a piece of parchment only, and as such and no more the
Iroquois probably regarded it; but it embodied a small element of
fact. These hardheaded, hardhanded Indians were gradually being worn
down by the white men on either side, owing such measure of
independence as they still retained not so much to their own fighting
strength as to the constant enmity between Great Britain and France.
When war broke out again, after Queen Anne's accession, they remained
for the most part neutral; what they had claimed and conveyed as
their hunting-ground passed more and more under French control,
while, as the result of Marlborough's victories on the other side of
the Atlantic, their own land and its cantons was awarded to Great
Britain in 1713 by the Treaty of Utrecht.[20]
[Footnote 20: Clause xv of the Treaty of Utrecht ran as follows: 'The
subjects of France inhabiting Canada, and others, shall hereafter
give no hinderance or molestation to the Five Nations or Cantons of
Indians subject to the dominion of Great Britain nor to the other
natives of America who are friends to the same.']
[Illustration: Map of New England, New York & Central Canada, showing
the Waterways]
{123}