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Title: Canada
Series: The Children's Study
Author: McIlwraith, Jean Newton (1859-1938)
Date of first publication: 1899
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Toronto: W. Briggs, 1899 (first edition)
Date first posted: 18 January 2009
Date last updated: 18 January 2009
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #239

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THE CHILDREN'S

STUDY


CANADA




_THE CHILDREN'S STUDY_


SCOTLAND. By Mrs. Oliphant.

IRELAND. Edited by R. Barry O'Brien.

ENGLAND. By Frances E. Cooke.

GERMANY. By Kate Freiligrath Kroeker.

OLD TALES FROM GREECE. By Alice Zimmern.

FRANCE. By Mary C. Rowsell.

ROME. By Mary Ford.

SPAIN. By Leonard Williams.

CANADA. By J. N. McIlwraith.


[Illustration: Monument to Champlain.

Unveiled at Quebec, September, 1898.]




The Children's Study


[Illustration: Native Canadian warrior]


CANADA


BY


J. N. McILWRAITH


TORONTO

WILLIAM BRIGGS

1899




[Illustration: QUEBEC coat of arms]

[_All rights reserved_]

[Illustration: ONTARIO coat of arms]




CONTENTS




PART FIRST

_TO THE END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_


CHAPTER I
                                             PAGE
THE FIRST PEOPLE OF CANADA                      1


CHAPTER II

THE EARLIEST VISITORS                          13


CHAPTER III

THE VOYAGES OF JACQUES CARTIER AND OTHERS      24




PART SECOND

_TO THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_


CHAPTER IV

THE ROMANCE OF ACADIA                          35


CHAPTER V

THE FATHER OF NEW FRANCE                       49


CHAPTER VI

THE MISSIONARIES                               62


CHAPTER VII

A ROYAL PROVINCE                               74


CHAPTER VIII

FRONTENAC AND LA SALLE                         88




PART THIRD

_TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_


CHAPTER IX

NEW FRANCE SPREADS HER WINGS                  102


CHAPTER X

THE FIGHT FOR NOVA SCOTIA                     115


CHAPTER XI

CANADA HOLDS HER OWN                          127


CHAPTER XII

LOUISBOURG TO QUEBEC                          140


CHAPTER XIII

THE FIRST FEW YEARS OF BRITISH RULE           154


CHAPTER XIV

THE UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS                   166




PART FOURTH

_TO THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY_


CHAPTER XV

THE WAR OF 1812-14                            179


CHAPTER XVI

MISGUIDED PATRIOTS                            192


CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW DOMINION                              204


CHAPTER XVIII

THE NORTH-WEST                                215


CHAPTER XIX

BRITISH COLUMBIA                              228


CHAPTER XX

'DAUGHTER AM I IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE,
BUT MISTRESS IN MY OWN'                       239


[Illustration: Dominion of Canada coat of arms]


PART FIRST

_TO THE END OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY_




CHAPTER I

THE FIRST PEOPLE OF CANADA


The oldest Canadians are the Indians. For many hundreds of years
before white men had set foot upon the western continent red men had
found homes there, both in North and South America.

Where did they come from at the first? Their high cheek-bones, Roman
noses, small, deep-set eyes, and straight hair make them very unlike
the darker, woolly-haired negroes from Africa, and very different also
from the white-skinned races of Europe. It is among the Tartars and
other wild tribes of Eastern Asia that are seen faces which might pass
for North American Indians, and that is one reason why some of the men
who have made a study of the subject think that the first people of
America came from Asia.

The two continents are so close together up at the north-west, it is
not hard to cross from one to the other on the ice at Behring Strait.
Probably the Eskimos came that way. These natives are the same,
whether on the Siberian or the Alaskan side of the Strait, and they
occupy also the Arctic regions of North America, coming as far south
as the shores of Hudson's Bay, and eastward to the coasts of Greenland
and Labrador.

The name Eskimo is an Indian word, meaning "Eaters of raw flesh," and
these people consume much fat and oil too, but very few vegetables. An
Eskimo might pass for a white man if his face were washed, but he
thinks that many layers of grease keep out the cold; and he does not
believe in house-cleaning either. He is generally under five feet in
height, has a flat, broad face, and a stay-at-home disposition. He
would rather live in his snow hut up in the frozen north and hunt the
whale and the walrus for his food and clothing than come southward to
sunnier climes to quarrel with the Indian for his hunting grounds. It
may have been the Indian who drove him up there in the first place,
but most students think that the Eskimo was the last comer.

No one knows, but there are reasons for imagining, that if the people
of Asia did cross to America they did not all come at once. There
would be a family, perhaps, of one tribe driven from island to island
of the Pacific Ocean which landed at last on some part of North or
South America. This may have happened many ages ago, before the seas
and the continents had settled into their present form, when there may
have been less open water to cross. The currents of the Pacific Ocean
run towards America, and most of the winds blow in that direction.

Whether landed by accident or driven out of their early homes by war
or by want of food, it is probable that these emigrants settled some
of the islands of the Pacific and came even so far as South America
before the less fertile parts of Asia were filled up. The first people
of America have been there a very long time. The earliest arrivals
were not so wild and savage as the later lot. When the Spaniards
landed on the coast of South America they were astonished at the
wealth and cleverness of the natives, many relics of which are still
to be seen. In North America it is the Mound-builders who have left
traces of their work, even so far north as Lake Superior, where they
worked the copper mines. The mounds of earth they threw up, and which
one sees in different parts of the United States, may have been
churches or burial-places, though they were more probably defences
against their enemies. These enemies would likely be the first of the
Indians, who would drive the Mound-builders farther and farther south,
and at last put an end to them altogether.

These are some of the guesses white men have made on how the red men
came to America, but nothing can be told with certainty about it,
because the Indians of old could not write and did not keep any
stories of their race in a form that can be understood by the people
of to-day. We study the Indian skull, his religion, his language, his
features, his habits, and some of us think he came from Asia, while
some think he did not. All that is known for certain is that he was
there when the first Europeans landed. Those bold sailors were looking
for a passage to the East Indies, and when they found land where no
land was known to be, they thought it must be some part of India, and
so they called the natives Indians.

There were a great many different tribes, speaking a great many
different tongues, but those that lived in the country now called
Canada were mostly of the Algonquin family, who bore the name of
Micmacs in Nova Scotia, Abenakis in New Brunswick, Ottawas and
Montagnais in the province of Quebec, Ojibwas in Ontario, Blackfeet
and Crees in the North-west. Tribes of the same family, settled
farther south, used to till the soil, but the Canadian Algonquins
lived by hunting, and when they had killed with their bows and arrows
all the game birds, the deer, and the bears within a certain district
they would roll up their tents, which were merely skins stretched on
poles, and move elsewhere. Sometimes they moved for another cause--the
Iroquois.

This was the family of Indians who lived to the south of Lake Ontario
in what is now the northern part of the State of New York, between the
Hudson and the Genesee rivers. There were five divisions of them, and
therefore they were called the Five Nation Indians--Mohawks, Oneidas,
Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. Though not nearly so large a family
as the Algonquin, the Iroquois gained strength by their union, and
they were the most fierce and cruel, as well as the bravest and
wisest, of all the Indians. If they had joined hands with the
Algonquins, instead of fighting them to the death, they might have
kept the white men from settling this country for a century or two.
But to go to war was the most important part of an Indian's life; he
cared for nothing else; and the aim of the Iroquois was to kill off
every other nation but his own five.

Family fights are always more bitter than those between strangers, and
so the wars between the Iroquois and Hurons were the most savage on
record because both belonged to the same stock. The Hurons, who lived
between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay, made friends with the Algonquins
to gain their help against the Iroquois, but the Neutral Nation would
not join them. That family was also related to the Iroquois, and lived
between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. They were called neutral by the
French because they did not side with either the Hurons or the
Iroquois in their wars. It might have been safer for themselves to
have joined the stronger party, because in the end the Iroquois killed
or adopted the whole of them.

Captives from other nations kept up the number of the Iroquois, whose
losses by war were, of course, very great. If a brave who went out to
fight did not come back, his parents or his wife, his brother or his
sister would usually adopt in his place one of the prisoners brought
in by the war party, and this man would be bound to make his own the
family which had thus saved him from a horrible death by torture, even
though he should have to fight against his own friends ever
afterwards. White men were sometimes adopted by the Indians in this
way, and often they did not want to leave them, even when they had the
chance.

The Hurons and Iroquois lived a more settled life than the Algonquins.
They grew Indian corn around their villages and laid some of it up for
winter use. Their houses were made so long that seven or eight
families, and even so many as twenty could live under one roof. The
sides of these lodges were made of long poles, slim enough to be bent
together at the top, and to be placed also along the sides, crossways,
to make a frame for the big pieces of bark that were tied on to keep
out the rain and snow. The inside was a long, wide passage, with an
open skylight the full length of the roof to let out the smoke, for
down the middle were the fires, one between every two families, to
warm them in winter and to cook their food all the year round. On
either side, next the wall, was the long, low platform on which the
Indians slept in the same clothes, made of the skins of animals, that
they wore by day.

There was always a head man in each tribe, and he took counsel of
others noted for being either great fighters or wise thinkers, but he
never did more than advise or persuade the warriors. Each one could go
on the warpath when he saw fit, alone or with two or three of his
fellows, and the smaller the party the more glory was gained by the
scalps they brought home. The custom of taking off the skin and top
hair of an enemy arose, so say the Indians, at the time that a famous
chief promised to give his beautiful daughter to the man who would
bring him the dead body of the chief of another tribe, whom he hated.
The young man who killed the enemy was hotly pursued by the friends of
the dead chieftain when he was bringing him home to the living one to
claim the reward, and as the body seemed to become heavier and heavier
he cut it down lighter, bit by bit, till he arrived before his
employer with only the scalp-lock in his hand. That was enough to show
that he had done the deed.

Another custom of long standing among the Indians was the use of
_wampum_, which was first made from bits of shells, but afterwards
from beads got from white men. Necklaces of wampum were highly prized
by warriors and squaws alike, and every clause of a treaty or
agreement of any sort had to be sealed with a belt of wampum or it did
not hold good. It was used as money too.

If a man killed one of his own tribe he was not killed himself, but
was obliged to make presents of wampum and other things to the family
of the man he had murdered. So when he wanted a wife he bought her
from her father, and she became his drudge and slave for the rest of
her life. It was the squaws who planted the corn when any was planted;
they who made those marvels of lightness and toughness, the birch-bark
canoes, as well as the bows and arrows for their lords, and carried
the heaviest burdens at the _portages_. That name was given by the
French to the places where canoes and all they contained had to be
lifted out of the water and carried through the woods, to avoid rapids
and waterfalls, or to reach the next one of the lakes and streams
which were the only roads.

Indian babies were tied up between two stout strips of bark and
carried about on their mothers' backs. Lame or sickly children died
young--often helped out of the way. So were the old people, who
sometimes begged their sons and daughters to make an end to them when
they were no longer strong enough to endure the long, hard marches in
search of food. In spite of these customs, the Indians were fond of
their parents, their brothers and sisters, and indeed of the whole
clan to which they belonged. This was shown in the strong, though
useless, means they used to cure a sick person, the savage way they
would fight to revenge one who was killed, and the care they took of
the bodies of friends, after death.

Every ten or twelve years there was a great Feast of the Dead, when
all the different clans of a tribe would bring the bones of their
relations to one spot, where speeches would be made, relating how
brave and how useful these people had been when alive. All the bones,
as well as the bodies of more recent dead, would then be buried
together in a deep pit lined with furs, and beside them would be
placed bows and arrows, kettles, food, wampum, trinkets--anything that
the spirits might be likely to need on their journey to the land of
the hereafter. No Indian believed that a man died like a dog; he was
more likely to believe that his dog lived for ever, like a man.

The natives on the Pacific coast of the continent are a lower type
than the Eastern tribes. They flatten the heads of their children by
tying boards on the front of their skulls while still soft, and when
they grow up they seem to have no foreheads. The men are not tall and
sinewy, like the tribes of the plains to the east of the Rocky
Mountains, but are short and thick-set, with very strong arms, gained
by generations of paddling, for they live chiefly by fishing. The boat
is not the birch-bark canoe but the dug-out, made from a single log of
one of the big trees of the country, and sometimes it is ornamented at
the bow or stern by a rude carving of bird or beast. With a mild
climate and plenty of fish and game near by, the "Siwash," as the
British Columbia Indian is called, has never been such a rover nor
such a fierce fighter as his brother to the eastward used to be.

Against all the scalping and burning and torturing that white men have
suffered from Indians must be placed the evil done to the red men by
strong liquor and by the small pox, both unknown before Europeans
came. It must be remembered, too, how much the early settlers learned
from them. The First Families never despaired of doing a thing for
want of proper tools; they made tools out of what was at hand, and
that was the beginning of American cleverness at invention. The
Indians taught them how to trap and to shoot fur-bearing animals, and
to fish through holes in the ice; how to follow a trail through the
forest which ordinary eyes could not see, and how to find their way
out if lost in the woods, by examining the bark of the trees to see on
which side it grew thickest, for that was the north; how to smoke
tobacco and to grow potatoes; how to raise Indian corn under the
standing forest trees to keep themselves from starving until such time
as the fields needed for the smaller grains could be ploughed and
planted, and how, in many ways to adapt themselves to the climate and
circumstances of a new country.




[Illustration: QUEBEC coat of arms]

CHAPTER II

THE EARLIEST VISITORS


Whoever first landed upon the western shores of the American
continents, whether they came from China, Japan, Siberia, or from the
islands of the Pacific Ocean, they did not go home and write, or have
written for them, accounts of their voyages and the strange new lands
they had seen. Of the earliest visitors to the eastern shores, on the
other hand, there are records in plenty, some of them quite clear,
others a little misty. Some describe wild men and animals, plants,
mountains, rivers, and rocks, as they are now known to have really
been; while in others are fairy stories about palaces of gold and
crystal, about one-legged men, griffins, hobgoblins, and demons that
we know never existed.

The historical tales, and also the myths of the Northmen--a name given
to the natives of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--are called sagas, and
from these old stories we learn that five hundred years before America
was discovered by Columbus it had been visited by the Norsemen, or
Northmen. These Vikings (Sons of the Fiord) were more at home on the
sea than on land, and their "dragon" ships, with high, carved bows and
sterns, propelled either by oars or sails, were both stronger and
faster than the caravels of Columbus. About the year 875 they had
settled upon Iceland, and to sail onwards to Greenland was a shorter
journey than back to their homes in Scandinavia.

=986.= The saga of Eric the Red tells how he killed a man in Norway
and fled to Iceland, got into trouble there and fled still further,
sailing away to Greenland, where, with some comrades as hardy as
himself, he spent three years in exploring the coasts. At last they
fixed upon a good place for a settlement, near where Juliane-shaab now
stands, in a grassy valley at the head of Igaliko fiord. It was, and
still is, one of the few spots that deserved the name _Greenland_ Eric
gave to it, which spread afterwards to the whole peninsula. He thought
rightly that there was a great deal in a name, when one wanted to coax
emigrants to a place. The first settlers from Iceland built their
houses in the spot Eric had chosen, and called it Brattahlid. Other
tiny villages sprang up near by in course of time, and a settlement
was also planted on the west coast, so far north as Godthaab.

Eric the Red had several sons. Leif, the most famous of them, was a
Christian, and brought the first priest to Greenland. The remains of a
stone church built by the Norsemen can be seen at the present day, and
they are said to have had several monasteries, a cathedral, and about
a dozen churches for a population of five or six thousand.

Leif Ericson was much impressed by the story of one Bjarni Herjulfsson
who told of losing his way in a mist while sailing between Iceland and
Greenland, and of seeing land when the fog lifted, which was neither
the one country nor the other, but lay further to the south and west.
According to a writer of his own country, "Leif was a large man and
strong, of noble aspect, prudent and moderate in all things," but he
had his share of the daring spirit of his time, and though he had no
mariner's compass, he made up his mind to search for this unknown
country which Bjarni had seen.

=1000.= Thirty-five vikings sailed with Leif from Brattahlid, and
truly they did find land before long, either Labrador or Newfoundland.
Very desolate it looked, not like the fine wooded coast described by
Bjarni, so they kept on farther to the south and came to a shore where
the trees grew so thickly they named it Markland (Woodland). This was
probably the coast of Cape Breton or Nova Scotia, so that Leif Ericson
and his men were the first European visitors to Canada, so far as we
know.

Sailing still southward, they landed at a place where many wild vines
were growing, and they called it Vinland. There they spent the whole
winter, which seemed mild to them after the climate of Greenland, but
it was probably no further south than Massachusetts. From that time
onward there were a number of expeditions from Greenland to Vinland,
chiefly to bring home timber which was scarce both in Greenland and
Iceland; and some of the wood-cutters spent two or three winters in
the new country, hewing down the tall trees that were to make masts
for their ships.

Another saga relates how a rich nobleman, called Thorfinn Karlsefni,
tried to found a colony in Vinland. He took cattle there, along with
his settlers, and the natives were much alarmed at the bellowing of a
bull, for they knew no domestic animal except the dog. Nor did they
understand the value of the costly furs they sold to the Norsemen for
little strips of red cloth, just as they gave them away to later
explorers for beads and trinkets. Though friendly at first, it was not
long before quarrels arose between the white men and the red, and the
idea of planting a colony in Vinland had to be given up, for the
Norsemen had not the firearms of a later day which gave Spanish,
French, and English pioneers so great an advantage over hordes of
savages armed only with bows and arrows.

Early in the fifteenth century the Greenland settlements were entirely
forsaken, after an existence of four hundred years. It was most likely
the Eskimo who destroyed them, though the decline of the shipping
trade with Norway and Denmark, and a plague called the Black Death may
have helped.

Nowhere else on the western continent are there any traces of the
Norsemen remaining, though the walls of an old stone mill near Newport
used to be thought their work. Longfellow's poem, "The Skeleton in
Armor," was written with that idea, and it gives a good picture of one
of those old vikings, but neither skeleton nor tower had in truth
anything to do with the Norsemen.

Greenland in their day was considered but a remote part of Europe, and
therefore they had no notion of the importance of their discovery.
Believing, as they did, that the earth was flat, it might extend
westward without end, for aught they knew, or cared. America had been
discovered again for two hundred years before those who knew of the
Norse sagas began to say, "This must be the country the Northmen
called Vinland."

=1394.= An Italian, named Zeno, wrote an account of a visit he paid to
the dying Norse settlements in Greenland, but with that exception
there were no visitors to America from Europe (who left cards) for
about one hundred years. The nations of the older continent had too
many troubles at home to spend their strength in venturing abroad; but
peace brought plenty, and plenty brought the desire for luxuries that
could be had only in the East. Trade revived, and India was the
country every adventurer wanted to reach. Whoever should first succeed
in sailing there, to bring home a ship-load of silks and diamonds, of
gold and silver, sapphires and pearls, would be the most famous man in
all Europe.

The Portuguese, who ranked next to the old Norsemen as mariners, tried
it by sailing down the coast of Africa, even so far as the cape they
named "Good Hope," because they were sure they had found the right way
to reach India; and they had discovered most of the islands of the
Atlantic Ocean before the Pacific was known to exist. Christopher
Columbus went with the Portuguese on some of their voyages, but it was
learning the wonderful lesson that the earth is round which decided
him to sail directly westward in order to reach that eastern "land
where the spices grow."

=1492.= The story of his going from court to court in Europe to find a
sovereign with faith enough in his enterprise to fit out vessels for
him is well known. So, too, is the glory he added to the reign of
Ferdinand and Isabella by planting the Spanish flag upon San Salvador,
one of the Bahama islands. Columbus thought it was an island off the
coast of Japan which he had reached, and to the end of his life he
believed that the different islands he discovered were not far from
the clime he had come to seek. Therefore he called them the West
Indies, and their natives, Indians.

Columbus made four voyages to the New World, but the year before he
found the southern continent an English expedition had landed upon the
mainland of North America. This was commanded by John Cabot, a
Venetian by birth, but living with his family in Bristol, at that time
the busiest seaport town of England.

Hearing the story of Columbus, and plenty of sailors' yarns besides,
Master Cabot made up his mind to outdo them all. Nothing could be done
without leave, in those days, so he had to get permission from Henry
the Seventh before he could set out in search of new lands. He went at
his own expense, and promised that one-fifth of the riches he might
gain should be given to the English king.

=1497.= Generally two or three ships went together on these voyages
into the unknown, but John Cabot sailed away to the westward with one
small vessel and a crew of eighteen men, including probably his second
son, Sebastian, a young man of twenty-four. They started in the
beginning of May, and it was the 24th of June when they caught sight
of the northern headland of Cape Breton, though they thought it was
China. Cabot went ashore, and, according to the custom of discoverers,
he set up the flag of the king who had sent him and took possession of
the country in his name. No natives were seen, though some rude tools
were found that must have been made by man.

It is not unlikely that the explorers sailed round the Gulf of St.
Lawrence and out by the Straits of Belleisle, the best exit in the
summer season. When they reached home, in the month of August, so
great a stir did John Cabot make with the news he brought, that we are
told he "dressed in silk and was called, or called himself 'the Great
Admiral.'"

He and his son set out on a second trip in April of the next year, and
they visited different points along the coast of North America,
probably as far south as Cape Cod, but no one knows exactly, nor has
any one told what became of John Cabot. His son, Sebastian, made other
voyages alone, and is said to have entered the great inland sea,
Hudson's Bay.

=1500.= The same shores touched upon by the Cabots were visited by
Gaspar Cortereal in the interests of the King of Portugal. He brought
back savages and white bears to Europe with him, but from his last
voyage he never returned.

=1504-1518.= While the Spaniards were keeping up their search for gold
in the south, fishermen from Normandy and Brittany were finding out
the wealth more surely to be drawn in the shape of codfish from the
Banks of Newfoundland. These are not land-banks but flat-topped
mountains in the Atlantic Ocean whose heads come to within five
hundred feet of the surface. Cape Breton was christened by Breton
fishermen; but it was the Baron de Lry who first tried to plant a
colony in that region. He made a bad choice in Sable Island, off the
coast of Nova Scotia, a bleak and barren spot noted ever since for its
wrecks. His settlers all died, though their cattle lived on and
multiplied.

Meanwhile the King of France woke up to what his neighbours of Europe
were doing in the new West, and he cried--

"Shall the kings of Spain and Portugal divide all America between them
without giving me a share? I should like to see the clause in Father
Adam's will that makes them his sole heirs!"

=1524.= Francis the First therefore sent out a sailor of Florence,
called Verrazano, to take what he could, and the parts taken seem to
have been those already claimed by Cortereal and the Cabots; but it is
not easy to say for certain, because each man made his own map and
gave to the lands he saw what names he pleased. Very curious are these
old charts, showing as they do that the early visitors never dreamt
what a solid bulk of continent was between them and Asia. For long
years they thought they were discovering islands through which, sooner
or later, the desired passage to the Indies would be found, but after
all Vasco da Gama got there first by sailing round the Cape of Good
Hope (1497).

The coast-line of North America was not discovered as a whole, but
just a scrap here and a scrap there. We see from maps made even in the
middle of the sixteenth century that South America had been sailed
about, and its size and shape pretty well known while North America
was still thought to consist of islands.

First Brazil, then the whole of South America, and lastly North
America were named from the famous pilot and astronomer, Americus
Vespucius, a friend of Columbus, who made several voyages to both
continents in the early years of the sixteenth century. He did what no
one before him had done--wrote about the Western Hemisphere when he
came back from it--and he was also the first to speak of a New World,
as distinct from the Old World which Columbus and all the others
thought they had found.




[Illustration: MANITOBA coat of arms]

CHAPTER III

THE VOYAGES OF JACQUES CARTIER AND OTHERS


St. Malo on the northern coast of France is famed for its sailors, and
there was born on December 31, 1494, one called Jacques Cartier. He
went to sea when only a boy, but he was a man of forty ere he set out
upon the voyage which has handed down his name. Before that he had
been a "corsair," roaming the high seas in search of weaker vessels to
capture, generally, though not always, those of the nation with which
his own chanced to be at war. Cartier's ideas of right and wrong were
never very clear, but he was a brave sailor. Picture one going to sea
in a vessel smaller than most modern yachts, and sailing in it not
over a well-known route where thousands of ships have been before him,
but over a pathless waste of waters, at a time of the world's history
when men peopled the unknown with all sorts of terrible creatures.

=1534.= Francis the First, the same king who had sent out Verrazano,
ten years before, gave Cartier leave to go, and he took with him one
hundred and sixty-two men on his two little vessels, sailing from St.
Malo on the 20th of April. Three weeks later he sighted Newfoundland
about Bonavista Bay, and put into a harbour close by to have his ships
repaired. Then he sailed northward near to an island completely
covered with birds, or so it seemed, and swimming towards it, to feast
upon them, was a huge bear "as white as any swan."

Cartier and his company went onwards to the coast of Labrador, which
looked so dreary, even in the month of June, they were sure it must be
the land, told of in the Bible, that was set apart for Cain; and the
natives were unfriendly enough to have been his descendants. Through
the Straits of Belleisle went the two little ships, sailing
southwards, across the Gulf of St. Lawrence, till the end of Prince
Edward Island came into view; thence into the Miramichi Bay, where so
many savages paddled out in their canoes to see the wonderful
strangers in boats moving with wings, that Cartier had to fire his
cannon to scare them away; but the next day he went on shore and made
friends with the chief of the Indians by giving him a red hat.

The next bay they entered was much larger, and as it was now the 8th
of July and very warm, Cartier called it the Bay of Chaleur (heat).
Landing on the Gasp peninsula, he carried off a couple of Indians,
then crossed to Anticosti, where he was actually at the entrance of
the opening he sought to the westward, had he only known it. But the
summer was passing, and there was not enough food to supply his
company much longer, so he sailed once more through the Straits of
Belleisle, and was back at St. Malo by the 1st of September.

He set out again the next year with three ships and a mixed company,
consisting of gentlemen rovers who wanted to go, criminals from the
jails who did not want to go, and the two Indians kidnapped at Gasp.
Once more they reached the wonderful Bird Island, at the north of
Newfoundland, and sailed through the Straits of Belleisle onwards to
the passage between the island of Anticosti and the mainland. There
they saw a lot of whales, and on the 10th of August--the festival of
St. Lawrence--they entered a small bay to which was given the name
that afterwards extended both to gulf and river.

The two captive Indians told Cartier that he was at the mouth of a
mighty stream that flowed from _Kanata_, a Huron-Iroquois word,
meaning village, but he would not believe them, though he kept on to
the westward, in the hope that this time he had really found the sea
passage through to the Indies. But the water began to get fresh and
presently land on either side of the river could be seen. Near the
mouth of the Saguenay were some natives in canoes who paddled off in
terror at sight of the strangers, till the two Indians on board
shouted to them to come back, which they did, and greeted the
Frenchmen very gladly. Further on, past the island of Hazel-nuts,
still called _Ile-aux-Coudres_, they met more savages, and among them
the great chief Donnacona, who lived at Stadacona, an Indian town
where Quebec now stands. Cartier's ships came to anchor at last beside
a beautiful island which was covered with the vines of wild grapes;
and therefore he called it the Isle of Bacchus, but now it is named
Orleans. On September 14th a better anchorage was found at the mouth
of the little river running into the St. Lawrence below the heights of
Stadacona, and now called the St. Charles.

Cartier left some of his company there, but he was bound to sail
further on up the great river with the rest, though the travelled
Indians who had gone back to their friends were shy of coming near the
ships again to act as guides. Donnacona, likewise, was none too sure
of what these strangers meant to do in his country, and would rather
have seen them turning back down the river than going farther on; but
Cartier only laughed at the childish way the chief tried to frighten
him out of his purpose--dressing Indians up as demons, and so on.

=1535.= It took the Frenchmen about two weeks to make the journey
between what are now Quebec and Montreal, and it was the first week of
October before they reached the site of the latter, where then stood
the Indian town of Hochelaga. It consisted of about fifty wooden
lodges, surrounded by a fence, or palisade, for defence, which had
only one gate. Just above this entrance was a platform, or gallery, to
which the warriors could climb up and throw down stones or shoot their
arrows at an enemy trying to get in. The people were probably of the
Huron-Iroquois family, for they were not simply hunters but grew a
little corn about their village, and they gave Cartier and his men
some bread made out of it. Fish was also set before the strangers, who
presented beads, knives, and hatchets in exchange.

The whole village went wild with delight over the bearded visitors
clad in armour, and, looking upon their leader as a divine person,
they brought him their sick to heal with his touch. At his request
they led him by a steep path to the very top of the high wooded hill
at the back of the town, and he called it Mount Royal. Jacques Cartier
was the first of Europeans to look out upon that wide prospect of
river, forest, and mountain, and the only one to see the Indian town
of Hochelaga. Sixty-eight years afterwards, when the next visitors
from France came to Mount Royal, village and people had both
disappeared. The Iroquois could probably have told what had become of
them.

Cartier and his companions stayed on the island for three days, and
being quite convinced that no outlet through the continent was to be
found in that direction, they returned to Stadacona, where Cartier
resolved to spend the winter. He might have chosen a warmer place.
Those travellers from the sunny land of France were not prepared to
find, in a latitude lower than that of Paris, ice-bound rivers, keen,
biting winds, and snowdrifts as high as their heads. They built a rude
fort, at the mouth of the Lairet, a tiny stream running into the St.
Charles. Soon the scurvy appeared, a loathsome disease caused by
"exposure to a moist, cold, foul atmosphere, with long use of one kind
of food and of stagnant water." All but ten of the men took it, and
twenty-five had died before a friendly Indian told them how to make a
drink from the spruce-tree that cured the remainder.

When the month of May came round, and the ice broke up in the great
river, the survivors sighed to go home, so Cartier set up a cross with
the arms of France upon it, as a sign that he had taken possession of
the country for his king, and departed. So many of his men had died,
he needed only two ships for the return trip, and he therefore
destroyed the smallest, leaving it behind. Its remains were discovered
in the river St. Charles, three hundred and seven years afterwards.

That Jacques Cartier was a bit of a pirate is seen from the fact that
he coaxed the Indian chief, Donnacona, and nine of his principal men
on board one of his vessels when he was ready to sail and would not
let them go again, though the Indian people begged him to do so. They
followed him in their canoes as far as the island of Hazel-nuts
(Coudres), and were not satisfied till Donnacona himself came on deck
and told them that he was all right and would be back again the next
year. He never did come back, for he died in France, and so did all
the rest of the kidnapped party, except one little girl.

=1541.= No wonder, then, that when Jacques Cartier returned to the
river St. Lawrence upon his third voyage he did not find the savages
so friendly as before. Indians do not forget. Cartier told them
Donnacona was dead, and that news was pleasing to the chief who ruled
in his stead, but of the other nine he said they were all married to
Frenchwomen, and so happy and rich they had refused to return to their
own country. The two Indians who had been to France were not likely to
believe that story, and they stirred up their friends against the
kidnappers, so that they thought it safer to go a little farther from
Stadacona than the St. Charles, and they built another fort at Cap
Rouge.

Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence once more, and tried in vain to get
farther west than Hochelaga. The rapids barred the way. Upon this
voyage he was supposed to be acting under the orders of a nobleman
called Roberval, whom King Francis was sending out with colonists to
plant a settlement of which he would be governor. Jacques Cartier was
not the kind of man who cared to take orders from another, and whether
he did it purposely or not, certain it is that he had spent his second
winter in Canada and had left for home again before Roberval and his
settlers arrived.

The fort at Cap Rouge was there, however, and in a large house they
built close by, the new-comers spent a wretched winter. Scurvy was not
the only foe they had to fight. Most of the colonists were jail-birds,
sent out against their will, who, instead of doing their best to begin
a new life in a new country, quarrelled among themselves and were so
bad in every way that Roberval had to punish them by lashing,
imprisonment, and even by hanging. He, too, tried to explore the great
river, but lost eight of his men in the attempt, and the news he sent
back to France was so hopeless that Cartier was told to go and bring
both colonists and governor home.

Nothing daunted that brave mariner. He came out in the autumn and
spent a third winter in Canada, sailing home with Roberval and company
in the spring. France was much taken up with her wars of religion with
Spain, but when another breathing spell came she made another attempt
to colonise Canada. Roberval and his brother were sent out with
settlers, but the ship went down and all on board were lost.

=1549.= The voyages of Cartier had made it plain that a short cut to
India was not to be found through the middle of America, but the brave
sailors of that time still had hope of finding it to the northward.
Martin Frobisher, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, made three voyages
with that object in view, and after him John Davis made three more,
but no result followed except the naming of Frobisher's Bay and Davis
Strait. Both men left it on record that a north-west passage to the
Indies was possible, and thus they inspired the later band of gallant
Arctic explorers. "I think it might be done, and England should do
it," was the line Millais, the artist, wrote below his picture of an
old sea captain, even in the nineteenth century.

=1578.= Sir Francis Drake, who sailed all round the world in
Elizabeth's time, was one of the first visitors to the Pacific Coast
of what is now called Canada. He went northward as far as Alaska, some
say, but it was near San Francisco that he stayed on shore for five
weeks and took possession of the whole coast for England.

=1583.= Sir Humphrey Gilbert did more. His was the first English
attempt at founding a colony, and the place he chose was the island of
Newfoundland. Ill-fortune met him from the first. So many men took
sick in one of the ships that she had to turn back. Another was lost
in an exploring trip from the island, and fearing famine for his
colonists, Sir Humphrey decided to take them home to England. He
himself was on board the _Squirrel_, a tiny craft of only ten tons
burden, when it was lost in a storm. Some of his last words have come
down to us--"Courage, my lads! Heaven is as near by sea as by land."

=1592.= A Greek pilot, called Juan de Fuca, was sent by the Spanish
viceroy of Mexico to sail northward along the Pacific coast and see if
he could not find a passage through to the Atlantic Ocean. He thought
he had found it at the south of Vancouver Island, when he sailed into
the wide channel which is now named after him; but his discovery was
scoffed at by the sailors of his own and a later day, who declared
that the Straits of Juan de Fuca did not exist.




[Illustration: NEW BRUNSWICK coat of arms]

PART SECOND

_TO THE END OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY_




CHAPTER IV

THE ROMANCE OF ACADIA


While France was busy at home, in the war with Spain, fighting her own
subjects also about their religion, she had no time to attend to
Canada, and left it alone for half a century. So soon as there was
peace within the borders of Old France, the Marquis de la Roche was
made viceroy of New France, with power to control its trade, grant
land to settlers, and, in short, to have all things his own way; but
these wide powers proved to be of small use to him.

=1598.= As colonists he had to take prisoners from the jails, and his
sailors too were mostly pressed into the service against their will.
Being afraid that his settlers would desert if he landed on, or near,
the mainland of America, the Marquis put them ashore on Sable Island,
more than a hundred miles from the coast of Nova Scotia, to stay there
until he found a place for them; but his little ship was caught up in
a gale from the west and driven straight back to France. There he
found his enemies in power, and they had him put in prison, so that it
was five years before he could get the ear of the king to tell him
about the convicts he had left to their fate.

As if cold and hunger were not enough to fight, those wretched men had
fallen to fighting one another, and when at last a ship was sent to
rescue them from Sable Island, only twelve out of the forty were found
alive. They had built a frail house for themselves out of an old
wreck, and had lived by fishing and by hunting the descendants of the
cattle Baron de Lry had left on the island. Henry the Fourth
expressed a wish to see these long-bearded, fierce-looking men,
dressed in the skins of wild animals, and when he heard their story he
gave them fifty crowns apiece and a pardon for all their past sins;
but the Marquis de la Roche was so much disappointed at the failure of
his grand schemes for a colony that he pined away and died.

The next attempt to found a settlement in Canada was made at Tadousac,
where the Saguenay River enters the St. Lawrence. Out of sixteen men
who were left there to get valuable furs from the Indians in exchange
for a few beads, knives, and hatchets, four died, and the rest would
have shared their fate had not the natives taken pity on them, and
when winter came, warmed and fed them in their wigwams.

Pontgrav was the name of the merchant who had thus tried to add to
his riches by the fur trade, but upon his next voyage to the St.
Lawrence for the same purpose, four years later, he had with him a man
of a higher stamp. This was Captain Samuel de Champlain, of the Royal
Navy, who had served as a soldier too, yet was like a priest in his
piety, and zeal for converting the heathen.

=1603.= Pontgrav and Champlain crossed the ocean in two vessels so
small that a man would be considered mad who would venture out upon
the inland lakes in one of them, if the water were rough.
Nevertheless, they arrived safely in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and
sailed up the broad river of the same name, past the present sites of
Quebec and Montreal, where the Indian villages that Cartier had found
there were no longer to be seen. But the rapids of St. Louis, near the
island of Mount Royal, ran swiftly as ever, and as before they had
prevented Cartier from going further up the river, they now prevented
Champlain. He returned to France and did not go into the St. Lawrence
upon his second voyage the next year. This was taken in company with a
Huguenot nobleman, M. de Monts, who had got leave from the king to
colonise Acadia, a tract of country in which were included the present
Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and part of the State of Maine.

De Monts was made viceroy of all that region; and besides Champlain,
there sailed with him the Baron de Poutrincourt, while Pontgrav
followed later with supplies. They explored the Bay of Fundy and
discovered the beautiful Annapolis Basin, with which Poutrincourt was
so much delighted that De Monts made him a present of land upon its
shores. After seeing that suitable site for a colony, why they should
have fixed upon St. Croix, a barren little island at the mouth of the
river of the same name, cannot be told. But there the settlers were
landed--a mixture of nobles and convicts, Protestants and Catholics,
soldiers and working men--eighty in all. A rude fort was built, as
well as a chapel, a house for the viceroy, barracks and storehouses.

Poutrincourt went home to bring out another band of colonists for the
settlement he intended to found at his new domain on Annapolis Basin
which he called Port Royal. Pontgrav went off on a trading trip up
the St. Lawrence, and thence back to France, but De Monts and
Champlain spent the winter at St. Croix. A bitter cold one it turned
out to be. The men fell ill of the scurvy, and nearly half of them
died before Pontgrav came to their relief with supplies in the
spring. Champlain alone had kept up his courage, and whenever the
weather permitted he had sailed on exploring trips, visited different
points along the coast, as far south as Cape Cod, and gone also some
distance inland, which none before him had done. Being geographer to
the king, he took notes of the natives and their customs, as well as
of the plants and animals he saw; and he wrote them down in his diary
with good literary style.

=1605.= Nowhere had either he or the viceroy seen a better place for a
settlement than Poutrincourt's grant at Port Royal, so rather than
spend another winter at St. Croix, the colony was moved over there in
August. The buildings taken down on one side of the Bay of Fundy were
set up on the other. Then De Monts and Poutrincourt went home to
France on business while Pontgrav and Champlain were left in charge
at Port Royal. The second winter was not nearly so hard as the first
had been, and Champlain, as before, did his best to keep up the
spirits of the colonists, but it was not easy to do that when the food
began to run short.

Pontgrav feared that DeMonts had forgotten his settlers, and he had
actually embarked with all but two to seek help from some of the
French fishing-boats likely to be found near the banks of
Newfoundland, when M. de Poutrincourt sailed into the basin. Pontgrav
and his shipload were not far off, and were soon recalled to make a
fresh start at Port Royal.

The third winter was mild for Acadia, and the settlers had learned
through their hard times how and what to hunt for food. They had made
friends with the Micmac Indians of the neighbourhood, especially with
an old chief, called Membertou, who brought a number of his people to
set up their wigwams near Port Royal. They taught the French to trap
the hare and the beaver, to follow the big moose on snowshoes far into
the trackless woods, and in return they were made welcome to the fort
and to the fare within, whatever it might be.

There were fish and game in plenty, and Champlain started a spirit of
friendly rivalry among fifteen of his comrades to see which would
provide the best fare for the table of Poutrincourt. These skilful
sportsmen called themselves "The Order of the Good Time," and good
times indeed seemed in store for the whole colony when it suddenly got
a "Notice to Quit." The power granted to De Monts had been taken from
him as carelessly as it had been given, and therefore the colony he
had tried so hard to plant in Acadia had to be deserted just as the
sun was beginning to shine upon it.

Such a thing as a settlement supporting itself, as those of New
England did, was never dreamed of in New France. The Pilgrim Fathers
came out to Plymouth of their own free will, to escape persecution for
their religion at home, as the Huguenots of France would have been
only too glad to do, had they been allowed. The first settlers of
Canada were taken out by some rich nobleman, like De Monts, to whom
the king had given a charter. When the Viceroy of Acadia could no
longer keep up Port Royal, it was deserted, and the fields that had
been cleared and planted were left to Membertou and his tribe.

While the French had thus been striving to keep a hold upon Acadia,
English sailors were reaching into the heart of the northern regions.
Henry Hudson had made three voyages to America and had left his name
on a river of modern New York before he sailed through the straits
called after him, into the vast bay which also bears his name. He
spent the winter upon its shores, but his cowardly crew rose against
him and set him adrift in an open boat along with his son and a few
loyal sailors. They were never heard of again.

Always searching for a passage to the Pacific, English explorers kept
on sailing into Hudson's Bay, in spite of the fate of its discoverer;
but they did no more than christen unknown waters, such as Baffin's
Bay and James Bay.

=1610.= The same year that Hudson was lost saw Poutrincourt back in
Acadia. He was determined not to give up the land which had been
granted to him, and which was his by right. It was three years before
he could get the king to listen to his claim, but when at last he
landed again in Port Royal with a shipload of settlers, he found the
houses and furniture just as they had been left. The Indians had
stolen nothing, and they were overjoyed to see the Frenchmen back
again, especially the chief, Membertou, who was now over one hundred
years old.

Poutrincourt had a brave young son, called Biencourt, eighteen years
of age, whom he sent home to France to get help for the colony, but by
that time Henry the Fourth was dead, and with him had died all
interest in Acadia except among the Jesuit priests and a few of their
wealthy converts. Beincourt came back and Poutrincourt went over, but
in his absence a crushing blow fell on Port Royal.

=1613.= Captain Samuel Argall, of Virginia, sailing northward to the
fishing banks of Newfoundland, was filled with patriotic wrath at
hearing of the French settlement, for had not Cabot claimed the whole
of the mainland for England before Verrazano took possession of it for
France? The Virginians landed and utterly destroyed Port Royal.
Biencourt was from home at the time, or they might not have had so
easy a victory. With Charles de la Tour and a few remaining followers,
he spent the winter in the woods, without a roof for shelter, and
there his father, Poutrincourt, found him in the spring.

Argall's raid called the attention of England to Acadia, and King
James the First resolved to settle some of his own countrymen in it.

=1620.= He granted the whole of Acadia to a Scotchman, Sir William
Alexander, who brought colonists to the Port Royal Basin.

Poutrincourt died in 1615, but Biencourt had never given up his rights
to the region, and at his death he left the property to his friend and
comrade, Charles de la Tour. This brave young man made his
headquarters near Cape Sable, at the place now named after him, while
his father, Claude de la Tour, had a post on the Penobscot.

For awhile the Scotch and the French dwelt in peace, as Acadia was
large enough for both, but presently war broke out between France and
England, and Sir William Alexander thought the time had come to claim
the whole country, and divide it among the proposed Order of
Knights-Baronets of Nova Scotia, who would bring out settlers to their
estates--when they got them.

To further this end, Sir William offered to include the La Tours,
father and son, among the Knights-Barons, if they would peaceably give
up their rights to the whole country, and be content with a portion.
Claude de la Tour was well content to do this, for he had been to
England as a prisoner, had married a wife there, and been well
treated; so that he sailed with a load of colonists to occupy the
estate promised to him and his son. They were both Huguenots, and
could look for more kindness as English subjects than as French; but
Charles de la Tour would not forsake his country. He held out in his
Fort St. Louis, even against his own father, and Claude was obliged to
take his settlers round to where the Scotch were already planted near
Port Royal, which had been taken by the English.

=1632.= When peace came again, and the whole of Acadia was given back
to France by the Treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye, Claude de la Tour had
to seek safety with his son, who for his loyalty was made
Lieutenant-General of Acadia. Other Frenchmen of high and low degree
came out to lord it over the Scotch settlers, and to keep the English
of Massachusetts at a proper distance; but Port Royal was deserted.

=1643.= The Seigneur d'Aulnay Charnisy, commander of a new Port Royal
on the other side of the Basin from the old one, was very jealous of
Charles de la Tour, to whom the king had granted land directly across
the Bay of Fundy, at the mouth of the river St. John, where he had
better trade with the Indians of whom he was an old and tried friend.
La Tour being a Protestant, there were many enemies ready to bear
false witness against him when Charnisy sailed to France on purpose to
gain his arrest. He got his desire--an order to take Charles across
the sea to stand his trial--but the stouthearted La Tour refused to be
taken, so Charnisy blockaded him in his fort and then lay in wait for
a vessel with one hundred and forty emigrants and supplies that was
coming from the Protestant city of Rochelle. When at length she
appeared, Charles de la Tour and his wife managed to slip through the
blockade in a rowboat, and got on board the Rochelle vessel, which
took them off to Boston, and there they got help.

Charnisy never knew that his prey had escaped him till five ships from
Boston appeared at his back and chased him across to his own side of
the Bay of Fundy. Once more he tried to take the fort of La Tour when
the master of it was away in Boston, and only the mistress left to
defend it. This she did so bravely that Charnisy had to withdraw, very
angry at being beaten by a woman for the second time. He had tried and
failed to get her arrested for treason while she was in France
clearing the good name of her husband.

Two months later, when Charles de la Tour was almost home with help
from Boston, Charnisy came again to attack Madame de la Tour, and by
this time the food was all done and her followers were in despair. She
gave up the fight on the strength of the victor's promise to spare the
brave men who had defended her husband's property and herself, but
Charnisy basely broke his word and hanged them all. Madame was brought
out, with a halter round her neck, to see them die, and Charnisy took
her back to Port Royal with him, where she lived only three weeks.

=1667.= This bad man prospered for a time, but five years later he was
drowned in a little river on his own estate, and who should marry his
widow and fall heir to his command but Charles de la Tour? The King of
France came to see that he was a much-wronged man, and made him
governor of all Acadia. No sooner was he settled once more, and
beginning to grow rich through the fur trade, than the country was
taken by the English. La Tour went over to England, and laid before
the Protector, Oliver Cromwell, the grants made to himself and his
father by Sir William Alexander, and these were restored to him. He
had to do the same when Charles the Second came to the throne, but
finally the whole of Acadia was given back to France by the Treaty of
Breda.

By this time the English had planted a settlement in Newfoundland, but
it did not grow very fast because the rich fish merchants did not want
people coming in, as they thought, to spoil their trade. The French
came in, however, and by 1660 they had a strong post at Placentia,
although they had only got leave from the English to land on the
island for the purpose of drying fish.




[Illustration: NOVA SCOTIA coat of arms]

CHAPTER V

THE FATHER OF NEW FRANCE


Samuel De Champlain was born at Brouage, on the Bay of Biscay, in
1567, and he was therefore thirty-six years of age when first he went
sailing up the St. Lawrence with the merchant, Pontgrav. He had seen
enough on that trip to make him long to explore the great river
farther, and five years later, he set out again in the same company,
this time to found the colony for De Monts which he had failed to
place in Acadia.

=1608.= That it could be easily defended was a point always looked for
in the planting of a new settlement, and Champlain was too good a
soldier not to see how well a fort could command the great river if
built on the high, steep bluff at a place called by the Indians
"Quebec," meaning the narrows, or a strait. The three buildings that
were first put up were so close together that they were more like one,
and that one was a curious mixture of dwelling, storehouse, armory,
and blacksmith's shop, called the "Habitation." It had a dove-cote
too, and though entirely of wood, it tried to copy a feudal castle in
moat and drawbridge. Beyond these was Champlain's garden, in which it
was his great delight to see how the different seeds would come up
that he brought with him from France.

The "Habitation of Quebec" must have stood near the present corner of
Notre Dame and Sous le Fort Streets, not far from the Lower Town
Market. A wooden wall was built about it on which were mounted three
small cannon, that guarded it well enough, for as yet the Indians had
no firearms. But its first foes were from within.

Some of the men who had come out to stay did not see why they should
labour at felling trees, or at ploughing up the rather rocky soil,
when it would be so much easier to make themselves rich at once
through the fur trade, as others were doing. Had the commander been a
weak man, his colony would have been strangled at its birth, but
Champlain was both strong and wise. Getting wind of a plot, he hanged
the maker of it, and when Pontgrav sailed in September with his load
of furs, he sent other three of the worst plotters back to France with
him, to be punished there.

Champlain was strong in body as in mind, so that he did not suffer
from the scurvy, but twenty of his men died of it that first winter,
and only eight were left alive when Pontgrav came back in the spring.

The Spaniards who first landed in North America killed the Indians as
if they were wild animals; the English took no account of them, except
where they stood in the way of white settlers, but the French always
tried to make friends with them. That had been the rule in Acadia, and
Champlain followed the same at Quebec, though very troublesome friends
they often were. The nearest to him were the Montagnais of the
Algonquin family, who had no settled homes, but moved their wigwams
from place to place during the hunting season. They would eat up all
their food at the beginning of the winter, so that they were generally
starving towards the end, and would come begging to the "Habitation of
Quebec," though the French there had often little enough for
themselves.

To keep friends with these Indians, as well as those to the westward
whose country he wanted to explore, Champlain found that he would have
to take up their quarrel with the Iroquois, the noted Five Nations who
lived to the south and west of him. He has been much blamed for doing
this, but the war was not of his making. It had been going on for
years, and he had to take one side or the other if he did not wish to
make enemies of both. It seemed right to him to fight for his first
friends, the Montaignais, and their allies, the Algonquins and Hurons
of the west.

=1609.= About sixty of them met in the end of May at the mouth of the
Richelieu, called at that time the "River of the Iroquois," because it
flowed directly from their country into the St. Lawrence. Champlain
and two other Frenchmen went with the war party in their canoes the
whole length of the Richelieu and onward into the lovely lake which is
still called after the first white man known to have seen it, Lake
Champlain. They fell in with two hundred Iroquois near the modern
Crown Point, and the fight was but short. The three Frenchmen went in
front of their allies, and when the Iroquois saw their arrows glance
off from the strangers' armour without hurting them in the least, and
heard the terrible crack of their guns which brought down one of their
own chiefs stone dead and wounded another and yet another, these
bravest of all Indians took to their heels and ran off into the woods
like a pack of frightened children, with the allies after them,
killing and taking prisoners.

Next summer the Hurons and Algonquins begged "the man with the iron
breast" to lead them once more against the Iroquois, and once more he
agreed. This time they met the foe about three miles from the present
town of Sorel, which stands at the mouth of the Richelieu. They had
made a fence to hide themselves by cutting down trees and bushes, but
Champlain and his Indians broke through it, and the hundred Iroquois,
fighting bravely to the last, were all killed or drowned in the river,
except fifteen who might well wish they had been killed too, instead
of being kept alive for the torture.

The colony at Quebec could not yet keep itself, and De Monts, its
supporter in the old land, was rapidly growing poor. He was no longer
the only one who had the right to trade with the Indians, and the men
who came for that purpose to Tadousac and Quebec merely wanted to make
money and go away again. They did not care whether the country were
ever settled or not. Champlain alone never sought riches for himself,
but faithfully kept the trust committed to him, whether by one person
or by many, and looked only to the prosperity of Canada.

For ten or twelve years he went to France every autumn and sailed back
to Quebec every spring. These voyages in the small, badly-found ships
of the time were by no means pleasure excursions, but Champlain was a
man who never spared himself when duty called him, whether it was to
seek from the great ones of France the desired aid for his colony or
to visit the Indians in their wigwams and put up with their customs,
in order to gain their help when he needed it.

=1613.= The dream that a way to China and the East might yet be found
through North America was still common among Europeans, and Champlain,
having faith in it, went on a long and hard canoe journey up the
Ottawa River, so far as the island of Allumette, visiting the Indians
there, who told him that there was no near outlet into a great
northern sea, as he had been led to believe.

Two summers later he followed the same route again, but went on and
on, with Indian guides, and passed into a branch of the Ottawa called
the Mattawan. From the head of that stream the two canoes were carried
across to Lake Nipissing, thence paddled by way of the French River
into Georgian Bay, the island-bordered wing of Lake Huron.

For two weeks Champlain stayed in the country of the Huron Indians and
visited twenty of their villages. The people took it for granted that
he had come to lead out their warriors against the Iroquois, and that
is what he had to do, although those Indian wars, with their horrible
cruelties to prisoners, were not much to his taste.

The journey was a long one through a part of the country new to white
men, but now called the Province of Ontario. Since it was entirely
covered by woods at that time, the Indians went by water wherever they
could, and the war party left the Huron country by way of Lake Simcoe.
Carrying their canoes through the forest, here and there, from one
lake or stream to the next, they reached the Trent River, which
brought them down to the wide, blue water of Lake Ontario. Champlain
was the first white man who had seen it, and it was looking its best
with the trees on its banks and islands decked out in their autumn
colours, ruby and gold.

Crossing the lake at its eastern end, the party reached the southern
shore not far from the present city of Oswego, and soon they were
marching afoot, Indian file, that is, one behind another, along a
narrow trail, into the country of the dreaded Iroquois. In their
previous fights under Champlain, it had been the most eastern of the
Five Nations, the Mohawks, they had attacked, but now they were bent
on destroying a village of the Onondagas, the very centre of the
union. The place was well fenced about, and the Hurons had not the
patience to carry out their leader's plans for the taking of it, so
they were defeated. Champlain himself being wounded, had to be carried
off by his Indian friends, who were now in as great haste to get away
from the fight as they had been to get into it. When they once more
reached the shores of Lake Ontario, which Champlain was sure led into
the St. Lawrence, then called "the great river of Canada," he begged
for a guide and a canoe to take him back directly to his own
countrymen, but the Hurons were in too great fear of the Iroquois to
venture that way, and told him he must return as he had come, by the
French River and the Ottawa.

It was now the month of October, and by the time the war party had got
back to the Huron country, they declared it was too late in the season
for Champlain to go to his friends by the northern route, and that he
must spend the winter with them. This he did, making the best of his
time by learning more about the people of that part of the country,
their customs, and their language. When at length he took the
roundabout way back again in the spring, the people in Quebec wept for
joy at seeing him once more, for they had all believed him dead.

=1617.= The first family which settled in Quebec was that of a man
called Hbert. He came up from Acadia, where he had been with
Biencourt, and brought his two daughters, who were married shortly
afterwards. Hbert and his sons-in-law were the first to grow grain
and vegetables on the ground of Quebec, and when times of famine came,
as they often did, they could have sold their little produce ten times
over.

=1620.= Madame Champlain lived with her husband in the colony for four
years, and though but a girl of twenty when she came out, did her best
to teach the Indian squaws and their children, but the work was too
hard for her, and the climate too harsh. She returned to France, and
after her husband's death, having no children, she became an Ursuline
nun. The only memento of her left in Canada is Ste. Helen's Isle, near
Montreal, which her husband had named after her the year of their
marriage, 1611. He had noticed that island with the eye of a soldier,
as being a good place for a defence, just as he had remarked the
importance of having a trading post on the island of Montreal, and had
gone so far as to choose the site for a settlement, near where the
Custom House is now.

Though he had been two winters in Acadia and one in the Huron country,
that of 1620-21 was but the second Champlain had passed in Quebec, and
he employed himself building a fort to protect it better. This was set
up on the cliff behind the "Habitation," on part of the ground that is
now covered by Dufferin Terrace, the favourite promenade of Quebec
people on summer evenings.

The governor had worries in plenty besides the keeping of a foothold
at all on the rock of Quebec. None but a man of very good judgment, as
well as good nature, could have got on so well with the mixed lot he
had under him. He needed plenty of tact for his dealings both with
white men and red, with Catholics and Huguenots, and he was respected
by all as a man who had a humble opinion of himself, but a high one of
his country and the credit that Canada ought to be to her.

It was a crushing blow to his hopes when war broke out between France
and England, and the ships of the enemy were reported at Tadousac on
their way up to take Quebec. Soon enough they appeared, and Admiral
Kirke called upon Champlain to surrender; but the brave Frenchman
replied, "We will fight to the last!" and the Englishman did not know
how little he had to fight upon. Quebec looked like a place not to be
easily taken, so Kirke sailed off down the river again to try if he
could not meet and capture the supply ships coming out from France,
and thus starve out the people below the rock. That is what he
succeeded in doing, but it took him some time to dispose of the whole
eighteen vessels laden with colonists, arms, and provisions for
Quebec, and therefore it was the next year before he came back to
complete his conquest.

=1629.= Things were in even worse shape by that time, and Champlain
could do naught but surrender. Kirke was a very gentlemanly conqueror,
and he treated well both the people who stayed in Quebec and those he
brought off to England. Champlain was among the latter, and he was a
prisoner on parole in London for about a month before he was allowed
to return to France.

He had worked too hard and too long for Canada not to regret its loss,
but there were many of his countrymen who thought it a good riddance.
The cost of the colony had outweighed any good it had done to the
mother country, and to defend it against the Iroquois, as well as
against the English settlers that were rapidly filling up the seaboard
of the Atlantic, would take more men and money than it was considered
worth to keep a handful of colonists on the St. Lawrence. When taken
by Admiral Kirke there were only five families in Quebec, and a total
of less than one hundred souls. The houses of the colony were all
built of logs, excepting a single stone one at Tadousac. There was
another trading-post at Three Rivers, between Quebec and the island of
Montreal, and at Cap Tourmente were a few sheds for sheltering cattle.

=1632.= Nor did England greatly prize her new possession, though her
people were by no means pleased when it was given back to France at
the declaration of peace. The next summer Champlain was once more sent
out as governor.

=1635.= He was now a man of sixty-six, and might have looked for ease
in his old age, but he took none, and, like the high-minded,
honourable gentleman that he was, he laboured to the last for the good
of others. He died at Quebec on Christmas Day in the Fort of St.
Louis, which he had set upon the cliff, and he was buried close to the
church he had built in honour of the recovery of the colony.

A pious man of pure life, Champlain was mourned long in the colony of
which he had been the heart and soul, but five years after his death
the church of Notre Dame de la Recouvrance was burned, and his
burial-place was lost sight of for centuries. In 1856, some men who
were laying water-pipes discovered a mouldering coffin and a few bones
in a lofty vault on the hillside in Little Champlain Street, at the
foot of Breakneck Stairs. It seemed as if a person of some consequence
had been buried there, and that person is supposed to have been Samuel
de Champlain, the Father of New France.




[Illustration: BRITISH COLUMBIA coat of arms]

CHAPTER VI

THE MISSIONARIES


The earliest visitors to America had nearly always a priest on board
their vessels, for the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church never
hesitated to risk their lives nor to endure great hardships in the
hope of saving souls. From the first attempts at colonising by Spain,
France, or Portugal, the conversion of the Indians was thought to be
of first importance, and this was specially true in Canada.

De Monts being a Huguenot, it was ministers of his own faith he took
with him to Acadia, but he agreed that the teaching of the natives
should be left to the priests. To this end Poutrincourt, a liberal
Roman Catholic, brought one out when he returned to make his second
attempt at the settlement of Port Royal in 1610. Membertou, the aged
chief of the Micmacs, and a number of his followers, became
Christians, and wanted to scalp those of their own tribe who would not
likewise be baptised. But even this proof of conversion did not
satisfy a certain wealthy and pious widow in France, who was as
anxious to send out Jesuit missionaries as they were to come; and come
they did, for the lady raised the funds, and it was she who became
mistress of Acadia when Poutrincourt lost all his money. He disliked
the Jesuits, who were noted for meddling in other affairs than those
of religion. "Show me my path to heaven," he cried to one of them, "I
will show you yours on earth."

But the Jesuits would not be governed by Poutrincourt, nor by his son,
Biencourt, and much trouble arose, which ended in the priests making a
settlement of their own at Mount Desert, an island so named by
Champlain, off the coast of Maine. That settlement was afterwards
destroyed by Argall, the Virginian sailor, who took Port Royal later
in the same summer (1613).

=1615.= The next priests that came to Canada were of the Franciscan
order, who, unlike the Jesuits, take a vow always to be poor, and,
therefore, have not so much interest in the affairs of this world.
These four Rcollet friars, dressed in coarse gray gowns, with pointed
hoods to pull over their heads, and sandals on their bare feet, came
out with Champlain on one of his annual voyages. So eager was one of
them--Le Caron--to be about his chosen work, he did not wait to help
the others build a monastery at Quebec, but went before the governor
on that notable journey to the country of the Hurons. He writes of his
trip up the Ottawa, which must have seemed strange indeed to a friar
just from France:--

"It would be hard to tell you how tired I was with paddling all day,
with all my strength, among the Indians; wading the rivers a hundred
times and more, through the mud and over sharp rocks that cut my feet;
carrying the canoe and luggage through the woods to avoid the rapids
and frightful cataracts, and half-starved all the while."

Le Caron made a hut of bark for himself near Thunder Bay, there set up
his altar, and began to study the Huron language--not an easy task,
for there was no European tongue the least like it. To gain
interpreters the French would send Indians to France, or their own
young men to winter among the savages. One of the latter, called Jean
Nicolet, who spent many years among the native tribes, was the first
white man known to have seen Lake Michigan, as Father le Caron was the
first to reach Lake Huron. Nicholas Viel, who succeeded him in his
mission, and who finished the dictionary of the Huron tongue Le Caron
had begun, was drowned by his Indian guide in the rapids near
Montreal, which are called Sault au Rcollet to this day.

Another of the gray friars went off on a mission to the Montagnais,
more difficult to work with than the Hurons because they had no
settled homes, and still another, de la Roche Dallion, visited the
Neutrals, near the Niagara River. Within ten years the Rcollets had
five missions in Canada--at Tadousac, Quebec, Three Rivers, Lake
Nipissing, and among the Hurons. The field was too large for them, and
they asked that Jesuits might be set out to help.

=1625.= Of the three who first accepted the invitation, Father Masse
had already endured much hardship with the Micmacs of Acadia, Jean de
Brbeuf, large and strong, looked as if he could stand anything, but
Lalemant was of a more delicate built. Other Jesuits came later, and
in a few years none but priests of their order were to be found in
Canada, for, when a fresh start was made after the English had been in
Quebec, the Rcollets were forbidden to return.

=1636.= New France was now the property of a fur company called the
Hundred Associates, and it was they who sent out a successor to
Champlain in the person of a pious nobleman called Montmagny, who was
governor of Canada for eleven years. During that time the power of the
Jesuits grew very much, both in worldly matters and those of religion.
Indeed for thirty years they were the real masters of Quebec; but
their chief glory rests in their missions to the Hurons.

Before these could be established the priests had to live among the
Indians, enduring, as best they might, the smoke and dirt of
dwellings, where dogs and fleas and children had equal liberty. It may
have been the necessity for keeping the peace in lodges, where so many
families were gathered under one roof, that taught the red men how to
hold their tongues. When a man wished to speak he was listened to with
attention and never interrupted, no matter how tedious he might
become; and this habit misled the missionaries very often. The Indians
would agree to everything they were told, whether they believed it or
not, that being their idea of politeness, and it was therefore hard to
tell if they were really converted.

When they met the French in council it was wonderful what dignity they
could assume. They thought it was weak and unworthy of a warrior to
show any sign of feeling, even when being tortured to a frightful
degree. If a prisoner could endure having his finger-nails torn off,
the soles of his feet burned, his flesh cut in strips, his tongue and
his eyes gouged out, without uttering a groan, he would be called a
hero, and his enemies would drink his blood or eat his heart, in order
that they might be made as brave.

The Indians did not eat one another, except in the case of extreme
famine, but it was a part of their religion to feast on the flesh of
their foes. This was one of the ideas the priests had to fight
against, and another was the notion that dreams were sent to foretell
events and to guide conduct. It was this belief that gave so much
power to the champion dreamers, or "medicine men," the worst enemies
of the Jesuits. Those conjurers told the people that the "black robes"
had brought the small-pox and were the cause of every bit of
ill-fortune that came to the tribe.

Over and over again the missionaries were in danger of losing their
lives, but the harder the task the more energy they brought to it, and
though their conversions were often no more than the baptism of dying
infants, they constantly risked their lives in doing even so much.
Their bravery and patience at last won the Hurons to look upon them as
friends, and in about ten years there were half a dozen missions,
named after as many different saints, established in the country
between Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay.

The Jesuits have left to the world what are called their Relations, or
reports sent home to the head of their order, and upon these all
Canadian historians have relied for an account of the events of this
period. They are well written by scholarly men, notably Father le
Jeune, who describes minutely his winter travels with a wandering band
of Montagnais hunters on the Lower St. Lawrence, and the cold and
famine from which he suffered in their company. When the Relations
were published in France a great interest in missions was aroused,
especially among wealthy ladies, like Madame de la Peltrie, who
determined to found a school for Indian girls at Quebec. She carried
out her scheme, and the nun she chose for Lady Superior was Marie de
l'Incarnation, a tall, strong woman, forty years of age, with a good
head for business; no mere dreamer, though she had visions in plenty.

=1639.= Two other Ursulines and three hospital nuns came out on the
same ship, and the Ursuline Convent and the Htel Dieu were founded.
The latter was first placed at Sillery, three miles above Quebec,
where there was a mission to the Algonquins, but fear of the Iroquois
caused its removal nearer the fort. The Ursulines made their first
building of stone, and part of it still stands in the Upper Town.

Madame de la Peltrie was a lady with a love of variety, and she next
joined an expedition to the island of Montreal to establish a
religious settlement there. This was under the leadership of a devout
soldier, called Maisonneuve, who came from France with forty men and
four women. He was not to be turned from his purpose by the advice of
Governor Montmagny, who thought it extremely rash for so small a
company to place themselves in the very track of the Iroquois, and who
recommended the island of Orleans instead.

=1641.= "It is my duty and my honour to found a colony at Montreal,"
said Maisonneuve, "and I would go if every tree were an
Iroquois"--which every tree shortly became. An Algonquin, chased by
those terrible hunters of men, ran for safety to the new French fort
below Mount Royal, and thus showed the Iroquois where it was. They had
now got firearms from the more reckless of the fur traders as well as
from the Dutch at Albany, and for twenty years and more Canada writhed
under their attacks. They would prowl about a lonely settlement and
lie in wait for hours or days at a time in order to cut off a solitary
tiller of the soil. Two or three men had to work close together in a
field, for numbers alone would keep off the Iroquois.

Instead of soldiers, Maisonneuve had nuns to protect his tiny town,
Ville-Marie de Montral. The hospital stood without the walls of the
fort, but it had a palisade of its own, and being built of stone was a
solid little fortress in itself. Mademoiselle Mance was the head, and
she and her nuns laboured long for the cure of the Indians, both body
and soul. They gathered every year at Montreal in great numbers to
sell their furs to the traders, but the Iroquois were ever on the
watch to cut them off on their way down from the west.

Champlain had hoped to unite the whole of the Algonquin family to the
Hurons, and if he had succeeded and the French had kept control of the
league, which would have been the largest and strongest on the
continent, they need no longer have feared the Iroquois. But the
Algonquins were not strong-minded enough to make good links of a
chain, and neither were the Hurons. The latter were as brave and more
amiable than the Iroquois, but not so clever. The influence of the
Jesuits was all towards peace, but that did not prevent the Iroquois
from making war upon their converts. In 1648-49, one Huron village
after another was destroyed and its people slain or carried off to be
adopted into the tribes of their conquerors. The Jesuits did not
escape. Brbeuf and Lalemant were put to death with frightful
tortures, and Daniel also was killed.

The remnant of Hurons and their remaining priests took refuge upon
Christian Island at the southern end of Georgian Bay, in the hope that
the Iroquois might not find them there; but fear and famine soon
proved too strong for the refugees. Some of them scattered in small
bands farther west, some openly asked for adoption into the tribes of
the Senecas and got it; while the rest were led by the priests to the
island of Orleans. Even there they were not safe. In 1656, the
Iroquois made a raid and carried off a number of prisoners, making
them dance and sing in scorn as they passed below the guns of Quebec.
Those that were left fled into the town itself and stayed there for
ten years, till the danger was over, when they were sent out to the
village of Ste. Foye and thence to Lorette, where their descendants,
mixed in blood with the French, remain to the present day.

The Huron captives among the Iroquois always welcomed the Jesuits as
their friends, and whenever the Iroquois wanted peace, or pretended to
want it, they would come to Quebec and demand that a missionary be
sent to live among them. The Jesuits might well have refused to go,
but none of them ever did, though death by torture was what they might
expect. Father Jogues, the first white man to see Lake George, lived
through frightful tortures, and gave thanks that he was permitted to
teach the Iroquois. Once he made his escape, but went back to them
again, and that time he was murdered by the Mohawks. The Onondagas
also wanted a missionary, who had at length to use fraud to save the
lives of himself and the Frenchmen with him. They invited the Indians
to one of the great feasts at which it was correct to eat up all that
was presented, and when the guests were helpless with overfeeding, the
Frenchmen made their escape into Lake Ontario in some boats they had
built in secret for the purpose. Others, elsewhere, were not so
fortunate. Eight at least of the Jesuit missionaries were killed by
the Indians; one was frozen to death in the snow, and scarcely one
escaped the torture.

=1660.= Montreal, Quebec and Three Rivers were trembling for their
safety when Adam Daulac, Sieur des Ormeaux, commonly called Dollard,
came to the rescue. He led out a small band of young men like himself
from Montreal to lie in wait for a large war party of Iroquois which
was coming down the Ottawa. The Frenchmen posted themselves at the
foot of one of the rapids on that river, and though deserted by their
Huron and Algonquin allies, they held out for eight days against
fearful odds, till not one man was left alive to tell the tale. It was
useless slaughter, one might say, but the Iroquois were discouraged
from coming against Montreal at that time and the whole colony was
saved.




[Illustration: PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND coat of arms]

CHAPTER VII

A ROYAL PROVINCE


While the terrible Iroquois were on the war-path against the very
existence of New France, one would imagine that her chief men would
join together to protect her, and would think of nothing else; but
such was far from being the case.

=1659.= When the Jesuit rulers of Canada thought it time for her to
have a bishop, they were determined that a man should be sent out for
the office who would uphold their power; and they got exactly what
they wanted in M. de Laval. He was very clever, but narrow in his
ideas, and set on having his own way; for, as head of the church, he
thought he could do no wrong. He would travel long distances in a
canoe or on snowshoes, deny himself every luxury, sleep on a hard bed,
eat food that others would not taste, and wait upon dirty poor people
to show his holiness and humility. As a person, there was nothing too
low for him; but as a bishop there was nothing too high. He quarrelled
with every governor who was sent out during his time on such points
as--which should have the chief seat in church or at table; which
should be bowed to first on state occasions. The question really
was--Is the bishop above the governor, the religious above the civil
power, the church above the state?

Laval and the Jesuits answered "Yes," but the Vicomte d'Argenson, who
had governed Canada for a year before Laval came out, answered "No."
He was just as anxious to do his duty to the king as the bishop was to
do his duty to the church; and neither would give way to the other.

After Montmagny, the governors were sent out for three years only.
They came and went, but Laval stayed on and grew in power and
influence. He had lands given to him and gained riches, which he used
for the good of the colony. He started a school at Cap Tourmente where
youths might learn trades, and established two seminaries in Quebec; a
preparatory one for boys, the other for the education of priests; and
from these sprang Laval University (1852).

A standing subject of dispute between governor and bishop was the sale
of brandy to the Indians. Laval preached against it, and threatened to
put the sellers out of the church, which was the punishment most
feared by good Catholics. The matter was hard to arrange, because the
Indians had become very fond of strong liquors. If they did not get
them from the French they would carry all their furs to the Dutch and
English, and that would ruin Canada. There was not enough of her soil
under cultivation to keep the people, and the fur trade was their main
support. It was certainly necessary to control the sale of brandy,
because the Indians could not control themselves in the drinking of
it; but no half-way measures would do for Laval. The punishments for
selling liquor grew more and more severe, and more and more young men
turned _coureurs de bois_.

These runners of the woods, or what the English called bushrangers,
often became as skilful hunters as the Indians themselves, dressing
and fighting after their manner, even to the taking of scalps. It was
not the lowest class in the country, but the highest who were most in
love with the free life of the woods, which was much more to their
taste than staying in Quebec, where they were punished for not going
to mass and had to submit to strict rules of many kinds. Their fathers
were generally poor, for the land system of Canada, unlike that of
older countries, was more favourable to the tenant than to the owner.
The seigneur, or lord of the soil, had to do more for the habitants on
his estate than they did for him. To be sure, they had to fight for
him; but his battles were theirs--against the Indians--and they paid
him only a few cents an acre in rent, while he had to build a mill to
grind their corn for them and also to serve as a fortress in time of
need. M. Giffard of Beauport was the first seigneur in Canada not
belonging to one or other of the religious bodies which were the chief
landowners.

Another of Laval's troubles was the opposition of Montreal. The order
of priests in power there was the Sulpician, whose members had no love
for him nor the Jesuits, and around their seminary had grown up a
hardy lot of colonists who were noted Indian fighters and not so much
inclined, as the people further down the river, to obey the church
blindly in everything.

=1661.= The governor that came after d'Argenson was the Baron
d'Avaugour, a bluff, honest old soldier, who had small patience with
the bishop's desire to rule, and therefore Laval, through his powerful
friends in France, not only had him removed before his term was up,
but managed to get his choice of a successor over whom he thought to
have complete control; but in this he was disappointed. Governor Mzy
opposed the bishop and the Jesuits just as forcibly as the two before
him had done; but the church party were too strong for him. He, too,
was recalled at their request, but he died in harness.

=1663.= On the 5th of February there was an earthquake, which
frightened the Canadians very much indeed and was looked upon as a
judgment on the brandy-sellers. Walls and chimneys fell down; the ice
in the river, three or four feet thick, was broken up, and smoke and
clouds of sand flew out from the water. Hills were thrown into the St.
Lawrence, to make islands there; and the jumbled-up look of the north
shore about Les Eboulements marks the effect of that big earthquake,
though there have been many smaller ones felt in the same region
since.

The councillors appointed by Laval grew rich though the people stayed
poor and did not grow in numbers; for while the lords of church and
state squabbled, the lords of the forest stalked forth and scalped or
carried off as prisoners whom they would.

This state of things made a deep impression on the mind of the King of
France, Louis XIV., who was young and full of energy. He made up his
mind to do what should have been done in Champlain's time, to turn New
France into a royal province and manage its affairs himself. His first
act was to send out one hundred families, a more hopeful kind of
colonist than the single men whom love of adventure or the pursuit of
wealth had brought hitherto. The king thus increased by five hundred
the population of twenty-five hundred, of whom eight hundred were in
Quebec.

=1665.= His next step was to make the Marquis de Tracy viceroy of all
his American possessions, with the duty of adjusting affairs in
Canada; and as a means to that end the king sent out with him the
famous regiment of Carignan-Salires, twelve hundred hardened soldiers
who were not likely to run away from any number of Iroquois. The
western nations of the Five were at peace with the French at that
time, because they had their hands full in a war with the Eries, a
family of Indians living near the lake named from them. The Mohawks,
however, the nation of the Iroquois farthest east, took no part in the
Erie war, but kept up their raids upon New France, by way of Lake
Champlain and the Richelieu River, in spite of the three forts that
had been put up in the hope of stopping them.

=1666.= M. de Tracy knew that they must be punished, and he set out
for that purpose in the month of October with six hundred regular
soldiers, six hundred Canadians, and a hundred Indians. The expedition
went the same way that Champlain had gone more than fifty years
before--through the lake called after him into the no less lovely one
now named Lake George; thence by a long and difficult land and water
journey of a hundred miles into the Iroquois country. The men were
half-starved and quite worn out by the time they came to the first
village of the Mohawks; but, happily, there was no fighting to be
done, for the Indians had got word of their coming and had fled in
dismay at the size of the army. They ran from the second village to
the third, and on to the fourth and the fifth, all of which were
burned by Tracy's men after they had taken as much food as they
needed. Left without homes or provisions for the winter, the Mohawks
were glad to make peace with the French, and Canada had little trouble
with them for nearly twenty years.

The Marquis de Tracy left some of his soldiers behind him as
colonists, but sailed for home with the rest; while M. de Courcelle
stayed as governor, and M. Talon as intendant. The former, a soldier,
was at the head of military matters; the latter, a lawyer, attended to
business affairs. The one kept up the honour and glory of the king;
the other acted as his private agent and looked after his money
interests.

In truth the Canadians of old were a much-governed people, and would
have got on far better if they had been left more to themselves, as
the New Englanders were. Merchants were not allowed to bring over from
France the goods they needed for trading with the Indians, but had to
get them from a new company to whom the king gave the sole right to
trade for forty years. During that time none but the company's vessels
could take either freight or passengers to or from Canada.

Rules of that sort were enough to keep the people from striking out
for themselves in any direction; but Intendant Talon worked very hard
to instruct them in the working of metals, the spinning of their own
yarn, the weaving of their own cloth, and the making of their own caps
and shoes. He visited the different _ctes_--a Canadian name for the
homes strung along the banks of the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu.
Each little village consisted of farmhouses facing the river, as the
natural highway, and built close together for protection against cold
and Indians, while the farms stretched for miles back into the
country. The opening up of roads, the encouragement of porpoise
fisheries, the giving of charity from the king--these were but a few
of Talon's labours. The colonists were too well cared for to learn
independence. Not only did the intendant import cows, sheep, and
horses, he undertook to bring out wives for the settlers, chosen, as
far as possible, from hardy country girls in France. About twelve
hundred of them arrived within five years, and were married thirty at
a time. Woe betide the luckless bachelor who refused to take a chance
in the lottery! He was fined, forbidden to trade with the Indians, or
to go into the woods for any purpose, and made so uncomfortable
generally that, as a rule, he was glad enough to go to the appointed
place within a fortnight after the ship's arrival to pick out a bride
for himself.

The Sulpician, Father Dollier de Casson, wrote a history of Montreal
which takes the place of a Jesuit Relation. A very large, strong man,
full of good-humour, Dollier had been a soldier before he was a priest
and never quite forgot his old calling. He was a prominent figure on
Tracy's expedition against the Iroquois. His order became seigneurs of
Montreal, and in the division of their lands they gave a large free
grant at Lachine to Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, a young man of
twenty-three just out from France, whose duty it then became to bring
settlers who would clear the ground of trees and build a village of
farmhouses, surrounded by a wooden fence or palisade, for a defence
against Indians. Lachine was directly in the track of the tribes
friendly to the French, coming down from the west with their furs; but
it was also in the track of the Iroquois, coming more often in war
than in peace.

La Salle, however, always got on well with all sorts of Indians, and
had no trouble in learning their languages. A party of the Seneca
nation spent a whole winter on his seigneurie and told him much about
the Ohio, "the beautiful river," that started in their country and
became a wide and winding stream, flowing, La Salle imagined, into the
Gulf of California. With a great mind and an enterprising spirit, he
was not likely to confine himself long to the narrow limits of Lachine
and the fur trade; but he was poor, and before he could set out on his
longed-for expedition he had to sell his property back to the
Sulpicians.

=1669.= When the head of the Montreal Seminary came in this way to
hear of his plans it was decided to send a couple of Sulpician priests
along with La Salle, so that the Jesuits might not have all the glory
of converting the Indians of the west; and the chosen two were Fathers
Galine and Dollier de Casson. The party of twenty-four men in seven
canoes, with Seneca guides, set out on the 6th of July, and by
paddling and portaging up the St. Lawrence, reached Lake Ontario on
the 2nd of August. Paddling the whole length of the big lake, they
met, in a village of the Neutral Indians near the head of it, Louis
Joliet, a Quebec merchant, on his way back from Lake Superior, where
Talon had sent him to inspect the copper mines. The Sulpicians were so
much pleased with Joliet's map of the route he had followed, from Lake
Erie, by way of the Grand River, they decided to go that way, but La
Salle's mind was set upon the Ohio, and he was never the man to be
turned from his purpose.

Therefore the party divided, the priests reaching Lake Erie and
spending the winter near Long Point. In the spring they passed into
Lake Huron and paddled away up to Sault Ste. Marie, where the Jesuit
missionaries were not very glad to see them, so they only stayed three
days and returned to Montreal by the French River and the Ottawa. The
sole result of their long journey was a map which Father Galine drew,
very exact as to the parts visited, but wrong in making Huron and
Michigan all one lake. La Salle corrected that error by coasting the
shores of Lake Michigan the following year, when he also discovered
the Illinois River. After the priests left him, he actually had
reached the Ohio with the help of some Onondaga Indians, and had
followed it down to the falls at Louisville.

=1670.= The Sulpicians were one means of lessening the power of the
Jesuits, and Talon added another when he got leave for the Rcollets
to come back to Canada. They took up their old quarters at the convent
on the St. Charles, and were as popular as before with the colonists;
but for living among the Indians and keeping them loyal to the French
they were not so useful as the Jesuits.

Nor did Talon confine his schemes for the good of Canada to the
neighbourhood of Quebec and Montreal. He and Governor Courcelle were
at one in their desire to extend the boundaries of New France far to
the west and south, so that the English settlers might be confined to
the Atlantic seaboard. With this view, though opposed to the lawless
_coureurs de bois_, they encouraged respectable explorers, of whom the
Jesuits were the most persevering.

=1672.= Charles Albanel, a priest of that order, was the first white
man to reach Hudson's Bay by the overland journey from the head waters
of the Saguenay, and he took possession of the whole region for the
French king. Two years before that, it had been granted by the English
king, Charles II., to his cousin, Prince Rupert, and about twenty
lords and citizens calling themselves the Hudson's Bay Company.

After being driven by the Iroquois out of the Huron country, some of
the Jesuits had gone west with their converts, and as early as 1660
they had made a map of Lake Superior. Father Marquette was in charge
of the mission to a remnant of the Hurons at Michilimackinac, the
straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan, but, like most of his kind,
his zeal was now divided between making conversions and making
discoveries. He had been present at the gathering of Indians brought
together at Sault Ste. Marie, the entrance of Lake Superior, by the
famous explorer, Nicholas Perrot; and he, like La Salle, had heard of
the great river called by the natives, "The Father of Waters." He
resolved to find it, if he could.

=1673.= With Louis Joliet and five other men in two canoes, Marquette
started from his mission on the 17th of May. The party worked their
way up the Fox River, already explored by Father Allouez of the Jesuit
mission at Green Bay, and from the head of the stream, led by two
Indian guides, they carried their canoes for more than a mile to the
Wisconsin. Paddling down that river, they reached, on the 17th of
June, the Father of Waters, the Mississippi, that they sought. They
sailed down it as far as the mouth of the Arkansas, and then made the
return journey by way of the Illinois to Lake Michigan, upon whose
shores, two years later, Father Marquette found a lonely grave.




[Illustration: ONTARIO coat of arms]

CHAPTER VIII

FRONTENAC AND LA SALLE


It was after the failure of his attempt to find a way to China by
means of the great river he sought, that La Salle's late seigneurie on
the island of Montreal came in scorn to be called Lachine; but he was
not the man to give up. When one plan failed, he quickly made another.
If the Mississippi, or the Ohio, which he thought the main stream, had
no outlet into the Pacific Ocean, it must flow into the Gulf of
Mexico. The Spaniards were strong in the south, but if the French
could place a fort here and there along the banks of the great river
and another at its mouth, a magnificent domain for their king might be
built up in a climate milder than that of Canada. He thought, too, of
the magnificent trade in furs that would include the skins of the
bison, usually called the buffalo, which then roamed the western
prairies in countless herds.

=1672.= The new governor, Count Frontenac, was just the man to see
both the patriotic and the profitable sides of the question as La
Salle saw them. He, too, was poor, and as he was fifty-two years of
age he had less time to get rich than La Salle who was still under
thirty. The first step they took together was the building of the
fort, planned by Courcelle, at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, where
the artillery barracks of the City of Kingston now stands. Frontenac
went there in person with a goodly show of followers in order to
impress the Iroquois whom he had told to meet him.

He was the first governor of Canada who was able to control those
Indians, and he actually seemed to like them, as they did him. Indeed
in character Frontenac was a bit of an Iroquois himself. He had all
the fierce, unbending pride of one; was brave as their bravest, and
cared almost as little for the suffering he caused. Other governors in
trying to be friends with the Iroquois had called them "Brothers";
they let Frontenac address them as "Children," and scold them, as if
they were really his children, when they did not do as he wished. He
ruled them by fear, as well as by love, and kept his word to them,
both about their presents and their punishments. Duchesneau, the
intendant who came out after Talon, sided with Laval and the Jesuits,
who hated Frontenac because he would in no way bend to their will, and
even chose Rcollets for his advisers in religion. They hated La
Salle, too, and did not want him to go exploring in the west, because
they intended that field should be kept for the Jesuits; but La Salle
went in spite of them.

=1678.= He sailed from his post at Frontenac, on Lake Ontario, as far
as the Humber River, near the present site of Toronto, and then across
to the mouth of the Niagara, a winter voyage made with great
difficulty; but La Salle was a man who spared neither himself nor
those under him. Being very strong, both in mind and body, he expected
too much of others, and that may have been the reason why, from white
men at least, he gained more hate than love.

Father Hennepin who was on this expedition has left us the first
description of the Falls of Niagara, though he exaggerates their
height. There was also with La Salle his best friend and supporter,
Henri de Tonty, an Italian by birth, who had lost a hand in battle
before he came to Canada and had a steel one instead, with which he
could give the Indians most astonishing blows in a fight.

=1679.= After setting up a storehouse for furs, near the Niagara's
mouth, the party went on above the Falls and there built a vessel,
which would carry forty-five tons, called the _Griffin_. She was the
first to set sail upon Lake Erie, and it was in the month of August
that she started, going on and on, through the Detroit River, up Lake
Huron and down Lake Michigan till the head of Green Bay was reached.
La Salle decided to send the _Griffin_ back from there to Niagara with
a load of furs to pay his debts. He never saw her again. Whether she
was lost in the big storm that came up, or whether the pilot in charge
stole the furs and sank her, La Salle never found out.

Meanwhile, unheeding cold and hunger, he and his men pushed on, by way
of the St. Joseph and Kanakee Rivers, into the country of the Illinois
Indians, from whom a branch of the Mississippi was named, and they
built a fort upon it, called Crvecoeur. There Tonty was left in
charge, while La Salle went back to Frontenac for supplies, walking
and paddling by turns fifteen hundred miles, through swamps,
half-melted snow and drifting ice; but his labour was in vain, for
when he got back to his fort on the Illinois he found it in ruins. The
men he left with Tonty had rebelled so soon as his back was turned,
and had stolen all they could, while the Iroquois, on the war-path
against the Illinois, had completed the destruction.

Father Hennepin, whom La Salle had sent with a couple of laymen to
explore the Mississippi above the mouth of the Illinois, was taken
prisoner by the Sioux Indians, and had many strange adventures before
he was rescued by Du Lhut, the most famous _coureur de bois_ of the
time, who was said to be a partner of Frontenac in the fur trade.

Tonty and his few faithful followers made their way back to Green Bay,
but La Salle did not find them till the next year, 1682, when they all
once more set out for the Illinois, reached the Mississippi in canoes
on February 6th, and followed its windings for two long months till
the open water of the Gulf of Mexico was reached. Upon its shores La
Salle set up a cross, taking possession of the whole country watered
by the Mississippi and its tributaries in the name of the King of
France, and calling it after him, Louisiana.

Returning to the Illinois, La Salle and Tonty chose a new site for a
fort--a high rock on the river bank that could be easily defended--and
upon the lowlands round about them settled hundreds of the Illinois,
the Miamis, and other tribes of the Algonquin family who looked to the
Frenchmen for protection against their common foe, the Iroquois. To
keep control of these Indians and of the whole west, it was necessary
to have goods for trade; but when he went back to Canada to get them,
La Salle found everything against him. Frontenac, his firm friend, was
no longer there, for the king had grown tired of the quarrels between
governor and intendant and had recalled them both. The two sent out
instead agreed well with one another and also with Laval and the
Jesuits.

Governor de la Barre was as weak as Frontenac was strong. He would
have liked to make money in the fur trade, but he had no control over
the Iroquois who had much control over it. These shrewd warriors were
at the very height of their power, having learned their own importance
through both French and English trying to keep friends with them.
Though they certainly leaned to the British, they were clever enough
not to go over for good to either side, but claimed to be a free
people who could do as they pleased in their own country.

La Barre was afraid of the Iroquois, and therefore they had no fear of
him. He was quite willing that they should go on the warpath against
the Illinois, and thereby ruin La Salle, if they would only leave in
peace the tribes of the great lakes so that they might bring their
beaver skins to Montreal instead of taking them to trade with the
English at Albany. Louis XIV. saw before long that the governor of New
France was not fit for his post, and brought him home again in three
years, sending out an old soldier, Denonville, in his place.

=1685.= The new governor, like the old, was friendly to the Jesuit
party, and there was peace within the colony, but the Iroquois kept up
the war without. Denonville did not act honestly either with them or
with the Indians friendly to the French. In making terms with the Five
Nations, Frontenac had always said that his allies of the Algonquin
family must be included in every treaty of peace, but Denonville was
weak enough to leave them out. Then he made a raid into the Iroquois
country, in spite of pretended friendship, and, worse still, he
invited a great number of those whom La Salle had coaxed to settle in
the neighbourhood, to a feast at Fort Frontenac, and there held them
as prisoners, sending the strongest of the men home to France to row
in the galleys.

=1689.= The vengeance of the Iroquois was terrible; and it fell upon
La Salle's old settlement at Lachine. One dark night in August,
fifteen hundred painted savages, yelling and shrieking, fell upon the
sleeping people, and butchered all the men, women, and children in
cold blood, excepting those who were kept alive to be tortured and
burned. There were soldiers in camp only three miles away, who marched
out to the rescue but were ordered back by Denonville, who had quite
lost his head. The country for twenty miles around was laid waste by
the Iroquois, and Montreal itself was paralysed with terror. It was
then that a great cry went up for the return of Frontenac, and
Frontenac came; a man of seventy now, but strong of will as of yore,
and the only man who was a match for the Iroquois.

He was too late to help La Salle, who was lying in a nameless grave
near a lonely river in Texas. The great explorer had known it was
useless to seek aid for his schemes in Canada so long as his enemies
were in power there, and leaving Tonty in command of the Fort St.
Louis, on the Illinois, he had gone to France for support and had got
it. With three vessels and a goodly supply of colonists and stores, he
sailed for the Gulf of Mexico, meaning to go up the Mississippi from
there, but he passed its mouth and landed at last four hundred miles
to the westward, on the shores of the present State of Texas. There he
built a fort to protect one part of his people, including the women
and children, while he with some of the men tried to reach "the fatal
river," as they called it, overland.

=1687.= Disaster had met La Salle from the first of the expedition.
Two of his ships had been wrecked, his followers had died of disease
or had rebelled against his authority, but still the strong heart of
the man would not give way. It was not the first time he had attempted
more than he could do. He grew colder and more silent than ever with
the men now trudging the dreary wilderness with him, and two of them
at length shot him dead, beside a southern branch of the Trinity
River. His murderers were afterwards killed by other members of the
party, and but five or six of the whole with the help of the Cenis
Indians, reached Fort St. Louis in safety. Tonty had taken a trip from
it the year before down to the mouth of the Mississippi to look for
his friend and commander, but had found no trace of him.

France and England were at war when Frontenac came back to Canada, so
that he had an excuse for waging war against the English colonies whom
he blamed for stirring up the Iroquois against the French. He brought
back with him the Indians who had been sent over to be galley slaves,
and thus made peace with the Iroquois. Though he had too few regular
soldiers to make a big war and capture New York, as he would have
liked to do, he could command the services of a daring band of
_coureurs de bois_, who would bring in troops of Indians, scarcely
more wild than themselves, to do his bidding. With these it was
possible to make "the little war," by which was meant the springing
upon a peaceful settlement by surprise and killing or making prisoners
all the people in it, men, women, and children.

=1690.= One of Frontenac's war parties of two hundred and ten men,
half French and half Indians, fell upon the village of Schenectady, in
the dead of a winter's night, and within two hours one hundred and
fifty souls were killed or taken prisoners. Another band of fifty
French and Indians made a raid upon Salmon Falls, a hamlet between
Maine and New Hampshire, where again the sleeping people were made
captive if not slain by the tomahawk or Indian hatchet. The third
expedition, one hundred strong, made for Casco Bay, the site of
Portland, where the English had a fort into which they fled with their
wives and families. On the promise of their lives, they surrendered,
but the French broke their promise and turned the helpless folk over
to the savages.

These raids had the effect Frontenac intended of making the Iroquois
afraid to attack the French; but the English colonists were not
Iroquois, and the burning of their villages, the massacre of their
people, did not lead them to beg for peace. An expedition sailed from
Boston that same year under Sir William Phips, and began by plundering
Port Royal, the chief place in Acadia, which was not in a state to
defend itself; but when thirty-four ships appeared before Quebec on
the 16th of October Frontenac was ready for them. His post was strong
by nature, and he had made it stronger still by placing towers of
stone at the weakest parts of the wooden walls. Phips sent him word to
give up Quebec within an hour, but he boldly replied that his guns
would answer for him; and answer they did to such purpose that the
ships were badly battered while their cannonballs had no effect upon
the "city set on a hill." Having failed to make a landing anywhere on
their way up the river, the enemy retired in disgust and Canada
breathed freely once more.

The English succeeded better in getting the Five Nations to go on the
warpath, particularly against the settlements between Montreal and
Three Rivers, which were most exposed. There is no braver story in
Canadian history than that of Madeleine de Verchres, a girl of
fourteen, who with her two little brothers of ten and twelve held the
fort on her father's seigneurie against forty or fifty Iroquois, for a
whole week, keeping up such a show of spirit that the Indians believed
the place to be full of soldiers, and were afraid to attack it.

Frontenac's last expedition was against the Iroquois. He went himself
into the country of the Onondagas at the head of twenty-two hundred
men, and so great was the fear of his name, the Indians burned their
largest town and fled from before him.

One of the most remarkable men of Frontenac's time was Pierre le Moyne
d'Iberville, son of the famous Charles le Moyne of Montreal, who had
ten other sons, most of whom made their mark in the colony.
D'Iberville had been trained in the French navy, and most of his
daring deeds were done afloat, but he was one of the party that
marched six hundred miles on snowshoes and destroyed three out of the
five Hudson's Bay factories, or trading posts, on the shores of that
vast sea. His next exploit was to capture the stone fort which Sir
William Phips had built at Pemaquid to protect New England; and when
that was demolished he sailed off to Newfoundland, where he burned the
village of St. John, and many smaller settlements besides, leaving
hundreds of poor fishermen homeless in mid-winter. Then he sailed into
Hudson's Bay and had a gallant sea-fight with three British ships
against his one. D'Iberville beat them all, and destroyed the last
fort of the Hudson's Bay Company. He claimed the whole region for
France, but it was given back to England by the Treaty of Ryswick in
1697.

Frontenac was seventy-seven when he died the next year in the Chteau
of St. Louis which he had built on the edge of the cliff at Quebec,
and where he so proudly received the messenger of the English invader.
He had served the land well as a military governor, and had also held
his own against bishop and Jesuits. Laval was still in the colony, and
he died there about ten years after Frontenac, aged eighty-five; but
he had been succeeded in his office by Bishop St. Vallier, who in 1693
founded the General Hospital of Quebec.

Frontenac lived long enough to see the power of the Iroquois broken,
the western tribes firm in their friendship for Canada, the south and
west held for France. The dream of keeping the English to the east of
the Alleghanies might yet come true.




[Illustration: QUEBEC coat of arms]

PART THIRD

_TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY_




CHAPTER IX

NEW FRANCE SPREADS HER WINGS


During the thirty years of peace that followed the Treaty of Utrecht,
the people about Quebec came to have no ambition beyond raising large
families on their long, narrow farms, which, through frequent
subdivision among the children, grew still more narrow, for each, of
course, must keep a frontage on the river.

Montreal, on the other hand, was the chief market to which the Indians
from the west brought their furs, and with them came also the
_coureurs de bois_, who now liked better to be called _voyageurs_.
There was a good deal of traffic with Albany, too, in time of peace,
so that Montreal was far more in touch with the outside world than
Quebec, and not so easily ruled, either by church or state. Her young
men went into the woods every year, in spite of the laws against it,
and in spite of the complaints of the merchants they left at home that
every new post in the western wilds was but a means of lessening the
supply of furs brought to Montreal. The governor at Quebec, as
military head of the colony, saw the importance of these posts in
keeping back English settlers. He was often in league with the
_voyageurs_, and shared with them the profits of their trade, so it
went on.

=1701.= Du Lhut had set up a temporary trading post at Detroit in
1686, but it was La Mothe-Cadillac, a gentleman rover, who made a
permanent one near the same spot and gathered about him numbers of the
Huron and Ottawa Indians from Michilimacinac. His chief end was to
keep the English out of the fur trade, and to get into it himself.

The Iroquois were now called British subjects, and they were always
trying to make the western Indians sell their furs to the English
through them, but it was the aim of the French to prevent this,
without falling out with the Iroquois.

Indian wars in the west would spoil the trade for everybody, and for a
time it seemed as if the Outagamies, or Foxes, were being stirred up
by the Five Nations, with the English at their back, to put an end to
the ten-year-old French fort at Detroit. They would have succeeded in
their purpose had not six hundred friendly Indians come to the rescue.
The Foxes were besieged in their turn and defeated with great loss;
but their spirit was still unbroken, and two years after the attack
upon Detroit they made a raid upon La Salle's old friends, the
Illinois. There was a flourishing little French colony among them at
Kaskaskia, on the Mississippi, and sixteen miles up the river was Fort
Chartres, built by the French from Louisiana. It was made first of
wood and earth, afterwards of stone, and it held the northern
Mississippi to keep the way open between the two wide-apart wings of
New France. But the warlike Outagamies gave the district no peace till
the vengeance of the French had pursued them to their homes on the
far-off Fox River, and so many of the tribe were killed that they had
to join themselves to their neighbours, the Sacs.

M. de Callires had been twenty years in Canada, part of the time
governor of Montreal, before he became governor-general, and he
brought to his office much experience in colonial affairs as well as
the prudence and common sense that were natural to him. An honourable
man and a statesman, he did not copy Frontenac, the governor before
him, in making "the little war" upon the outlying English settlements,
for he declared that these raids did no good, but harm, to Canada. He
would rather have attacked Boston and New York with a fleet from
France, but the fleet from France never came, while the fleet from
England did.

=1711.= That was during the time of the next governor, Marquis de
Vaudreuil, under whose direction the little war was kept up so
vigorously that England, Old and New, felt there would be no peace in
America till Quebec was taken. The fleet sent for the purpose was
commanded by Admiral Sir Hoveden Walker, and a land force was to
proceed to Montreal by way of Lake Champlain in order that Canada
might be conquered at one swoop. She had only 3,350 fighting men, so
that French, as well as English, were sure the expedition would
succeed; and well it might, had not the commander-in-chief been
utterly unfit for his post. What mattered his array of ships, when not
one of his twelve thousand men could pilot them up the St. Lawrence?
Unheeding the thick fog in the river, the admiral stupidly persisted
in going forward, against the advice of his officers; and his vessels,
sailing too close to the north shore, ten of them were wrecked on the
reefs of Egg Island. Seven hundred men were drowned, but there were
still enough left to have gone on and besieged Quebec, had not
Walker's courage failed him. The military commander on board was a
coward too, and what was left of the fleet put about and ran home
again without doing anything. The land expedition could not act alone,
so it too came to nothing; and the Canadians, looking upon their
deliverance as a miracle in answer to prayer, held services of
thanksgiving.

M. de Callires had followed Frontenac's method with the Iroquois, of
whom there were now a number of Christian converts who had been
persuaded by their Jesuit teachers to leave their homes in New York
and settle in Canada at Caughnawaga, Lake of the Two Mountains, and
St. Regis. These, of course, did not care about fighting their own
race, nor did their former friends care about fighting them. Besides
the missionaries a French officer, called Joncaire, was of great help
to the governor in keeping the Iroquois neutral in the wars between
French and English. He had been captured and adopted by the Seneca
Indians, had married a squaw, and lived among them like one of
themselves. Joncaire was often able to quiet their anger when it was
rising against his countrymen, and when he could not do that he would
send word to the French what the Iroquois were about to do. His
half-breed son trod in the same path after his father died.

The Le Moyne family of Montreal had much influence among the Onondaga
section of the Five Nations, which, in 1713, became Six Nations by
taking in the Tuscaroras from the south. Maricourt and Longueuil, sons
of Charles le Moyne, held one after the other the difficult and
dangerous post of "consul" to the Onondagas, who christened the former
_Taouistaouisse_ (little bird which is always in motion), and truly
the same title would have applied to any one of the Le Moyne brothers,
so full of life and enterprise were they.

Le Moyne d'Iberville succeeded where La Salle had failed. Henri Tonty
had begged for help to carry on the explorations of his late
commander, but he had not D'Iberville's influence at Court, and
therefore it was the latter who sailed from France for the mouth of
the Mississippi in 1699. He went up "the fatal river" far enough to
decide it was really the one sought; and the best proof was a letter
given him by an Indian chief with whom Tonty had left it for La Salle
when he came down the stream fourteen years before to look for his
unfortunate friend.

D'Iberville built his first fort at Biloxi on the Gulf of Mexico, but
the next year he changed his quarters to Mobile. His brother,
Bienville, a youth of eighteen, who had come out with him as a
midshipman, became Lieutenant of the King and afterwards governor of
the colony. He founded New Orleans in 1718.

Louis XIV. took a special interest in the new settlement named for
him, but as in Canada, he made the mistake of handing over its trade
first to one man then to a company. The emigrants brought out were not
of the right sort. They had no desire to turn farmers, but were keen
after gold mines and pearl fisheries. To be sure, the soil about
Mobile was the reverse of fertile, but there were game and fish in
plenty, and the people need not have starved if they had been willing
to work. Year after year numbers of them had to be sent to live with
the natives, who were noted for never refusing to share their food
with the hungry, so long as they had any to share.

Bienville's way of managing the Indians was not always honest, but he
had many cares, not the least of them being the letters that his
companions in office were constantly writing to France, finding fault
with him. It was wonderful what little things the king and his
ministers liked to hear when they came from one of their servants
about another in Louisiana, Acadia, or Canada.

La Mothe-Cadillac was governor of Louisiana for a time and gave a very
poor account of the colony. Certainly, the climate was against it, and
before long negro slaves were bought to assist in the growing of
tobacco and coffee. Thus was introduced another factor, and one not
easy to reduce, into a settlement which was already a curious mixture
of soldiers, priests, nuns, beggars, convicts, and _coureurs de bois_.
Had King Louis let the Huguenots emigrate there, as they wanted to do,
instead of adding their strength to the English colonies, the whole
valley of the Mississippi would in time have filled up with a hardy
and industrious population, more likely than a few scattered forts to
have held it for France.

Since the beginning of the century the walls of Quebec had been
strengthened little by little, but they did not yet enclose the whole
town, and Vaudreuil was anxious to complete them; but his death in
1725 put a stop to the building for a time. He had served Canada for
twenty-one years as governor-general and had been governor of Montreal
for seventeen years before that, so he knew the colony well. In his
time many ships were built at Quebec for trade with Montreal, Cape
Breton, and Prince Edward Island. Card money in place of coins had a
run for a couple of years and came in again during the term of the
next governor, the Marquis de Beauharnois, who also ruled Canada for
twenty-one years. He was a naval officer, fifty years old, when he
came out, and the customary squabbling between governor and intendant
continued, for indeed the king's minister in France never wanted the
two to be friends, because the one was most useful as a spy upon the
other. The population of the colony at that time was almost thirty
thousand.

Beauharnois did not try to subdue the spirit of enterprise which was
abroad in New France, but did what he could to profit by it. He was
one of a trading company which built a post at Lake Pepin, on the
upper waters of the Mississippi, to collect furs from the Indians of
that far-distant region, and he was also a firm supporter of the most
noted explorer of his time, Pierre Gautier de la Vrendrye, son of the
governor at Three Rivers. He held a small post at Nepigon on Lake
Superior, and was thus brought into contact with the Indians from the
far west, who told him such wonderful tales of the lakes and rivers in
that vast unexplored region, Vrendrye thought he might, by one or
other of them, reach the Pacific Ocean.

=1732.= His three sons and a nephew went with him on his expedition,
and there were also a number of _voyageurs_, Indian guides, and the
Jesuit missionary, without whom no exploring party was thought to be
complete. To take a priest along was a sign that they were not mere
_coureurs de bois_, going for their own good, but had at heart the
good of the Indians with whom they might trade.

The company followed the tedious canoe route with many portages, that
took them by way of the Rainy Lake and Rainy River into the Lake of
the Woods, where one of Vrendrye's sons was killed in a fight with
those "Iroquois of the West," the Sioux. His nephew died soon
afterwards, and most of his men were rebellious and troublesome, as in
the case of La Salle, and partly from the same cause--the enterprise
was not supported in Canada, and the promised supplies were not sent.
More than once Vrendrye had to journey back to Montreal to make
arrangements with his creditors. The undertaking was at his own
expense, and the only way he could hope to support it was by the fur
trade. To control that it was necessary to build fortified storehouses
here and there along his route, and to keep these provided with food
for the few men left in charge, and with goods to supply the Indians.
One such fort was set up on Rainy Lake, another on the Lake of the
Woods, two on Lake Winnipeg, and one each on Lake Manitoba and the
Assiniboine River. These caught much of the trade that had hitherto
gone to the English on Hudson's Bay.

=1742.= Before this time the spare strength of the Hudson's Bay
Company had been spent in sending out ships in search of a north-west
passage to the Pacific through the ice-floes of the Arctic Ocean, and
the Indians had brought their furs to the Bay of their own accord. Now
that the French had made their way into the region and were likely to
disturb the traffic, the Hudson's Bay Company branched out to meet the
Indians--first one hundred and fifty miles up the Albany River, then
further and further till, before the century closed, their posts were
dotted over the whole North-west.

Vrendrye was fifty-seven when his sons left him at Fort Rouge on the
Assiniboine, the future site of Winnipeg, to make the remarkable tour
upon which they were gone for a whole year. They had but two men with
them--Canadians--and they visited among strange tribes of Indians on
the banks of the Missouri River in the present State of Dakota.

=1743.= Going as far as the base of the Big Horn Range in Wyoming,
they were the first white men, so far as recorded, to see the Rocky
Mountains. After his father's death, in 1749, one of the sons explored
the River Saskatchewan.

Like La Salle, these brave _voyageurs_ gained nothing for themselves.
Beauharnois had favoured their enterprise, but the next governor, La
Jonquire, was a miser, and to him was joined Intendant Bigot, who had
no objections to spending money, but it must be for his own pleasure
or profit. The stealing from king and from people alike that began in
their time was kept on until Canada was lost. The forts that the
Vrendryes had built, the furs they had collected were all handed over
to strangers in the pay of these new rulers, and the pioneers who had
led the way into the great North-west died very poor.




[Illustration: NOVA SCOTIA coat of arms]

CHAPTER X

THE FIGHT FOR NOVA SCOTIA


It was on account of being so easy to reach from the sea that Nova
Scotia, the Acadian peninsula, changed masters every few years. The
settlements on the St. Lawrence could be invaded from New England only
by a long and tedious march through thick, tangled woods; or by an
equally long and tedious sail up the great river of Canada, where
pilots were needed and where the warlike people along the banks were
well able to fight for their homes. Perched on a rock, Quebec could
look down with scorn upon the foe; but Port Royal was poorly defended,
and the Acadians were not so hardy nor so enterprising as the
Canadians, not having had the same amount of Indian fighting nor of
fur-trading adventures in the far west.

The men of New England, placed as they were on the Atlantic coast,
became bolder by sea than by land, and found their way to Nova Scotia
both in peace and in war. In the one case they would trade with the
Acadians; in the other they would capture their forts. In the latter
event, an expedition would be sent down from Canada to drive out the
invaders; or the country would change hands again, when peace was
declared. Both France and England used Acadia as a sort of balance, to
be thrown in on this side, or on that, when the results of the war in
other parts of the world were being weighed and settled.

That was what happened in 1667, when, by the Treaty of Breda, the
present Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and a part of Maine became once
more the property of Louis XIV. of France. There were but few
settlements besides those along the Bay of Fundy, and Port Royal was
the only place that had a stone fort and a garrison; therefore whoever
took Port Royal considered that he took the whole country. Sir William
Phips did so, in 1690, but he had neither the men nor the means to
hold the place after he had taken it, and a French governor came back
the next year.

If there were few white men in Acadia, there were plenty of red,
mostly Abenakis and Micmacs, among whom the Jesuits had been at work
so long they had them completely under control. The Indians were
taught that it was their Christian duty to kill the English whenever
and wherever they could, and whether or not there was peace between
France and England. The priests often led them in person on their
raids and persuaded them to save their prisoners for a ransom, instead
of torturing and burning them. They made little other attempt to
civilise their flocks, thinking it unwise to teach them to read and
write, or even to speak French.

If the natives cleared the ground and settled down upon farms, like
white men, it would not be so easy to start them off on the war-path
against the English. Knowing the Indian character, the Jesuits
governed them through their fears and their jealousy. The Abenakis at
times grew tired of the war and would have been glad to live at peace
with the English. The blankets, hatchets, knives, and so on, they gave
in exchange for furs were cheaper and wore better than the French
articles, trade being freer in New England than New France. But the
French were determined there should be no peace, and when the Abenakis
showed signs of weakening they were spurred on to a new attack which
the English would revenge when they could, and so keep the trouble
alive. Orders came from King Louis himself that the Indians must be
taught that they could make a better living hunting the English than
hunting the beaver, for if once the borders were quiet, settlers from
the south would push over into Acadia, as the French said they were
doing already; for there was a difference of opinion about the
boundary line.

The English thought they had a right to the country as far north as
the river St. Croix, while the French claimed it as far south as the
Kennebec; and in the disputed part lived and reigned the bold Baron de
St. Castin, at Pentegoet, on the Penobscot. He had married the
daughter of an Indian chief and was a mighty man among his wife's
relations, whom he often led to "the little war" against the English,
though he was not above making money by trading with the "Bastonnais"
in times of peace.

The Marquis de Vaudreuil, governor at Quebec, who had set himself to
ruin New England, thought he could kill a sturdy tree by lopping off a
few of its outermost twigs. He had one great advantage over the
English colonies, in that he could, whenever he chose, call out every
able-bodied man in Canada to go to war; and they would have for
officers young men of good family, trained in fighting, who thought it
beneath their dignity to do anything else. Indeed there was little
else for them to do, if they wanted to advance themselves, for trade
of every kind was kept among a few, and all the civil offices were
given to favourites from France. The English colonists, on the other
hand, though far more in number than the Canadians, were divided up
into little republics, each jealous of one another and of any
interference from the mother country. Virginia, Rhode Island, and
Pennsylvania being beyond the reach of French invasion, thought that
Massachusetts could look after her own borders; and the Assembly of
that colony was slow in voting money, even for her own defence. Her
soldiers were mostly farmers who ran from the plough to a blockhouse
when they heard of the Indians coming; but generally they got no
warning.

=1704.= Besides the smaller raids, when two or three families were
taken at a time, and their houses burned, the little war which
Vaudreuil kept up, included attacks such as the one upon Deerfield on
the Connecticut River, at that time the most northerly settlement of
Massachusetts. Three hundred Canadians and Indians went from Montreal
by way of Lake Champlain and the Onion River, and surprised the
Deerfield people in their beds on a winter night. In one hour
thirty-eight were killed, and one hundred and six taken prisoners, to
endure the long tramp of two hundred and fifty miles back to Canada.
Two dozen of them, women, children, and old people, died from cold and
hunger, or were knocked on the head by the way, when they could not
keep up with their captors. The survivors were divided among the
villages of so-called Christian Indians, to work like slaves till
their time came to be exchanged for French prisoners. Some of the
children were never given up, but remained savages the rest of their
lives, forgetting even the English language.

It was not an Acadian party which had done this particular deed, but
it was Acadia that could be struck in return; and Massachusetts,
rising in her wrath, sent Colonel Benjamin Church thither with seven
hundred men in whale-boats. He began with a raid upon the St. Castin
place on the Penobscot, and then sailed to the head of the Bay of
Fundy, burned Grand Pr and Beaubassin and took a number of prisoners
to keep for exchange. Three years later another expedition was sent
out to take Port Royal, but failed.

=1708.= When Haverhill, on the Merrimac, was devastated as Deerfield
had been, Massachusetts stirred up New York and New Hampshire to help
her seek revenge. A fleet sailed from Boston to Port Royal and
besieged it for a week, when the French, knowing that their walls were
out of repair and that they were as short of food as of powder and
shot, gave up their Acadian capital. It was never theirs again, though
for long they hoped and planned, by open means and secret, to win it
back.

=1713.= The name Port Royal was changed to Annapolis Royal, in honour
of Queen Anne, and by the Treaty of Utrecht, Acadia and Newfoundland
were handed over to England, while France was left with a few islands
in the Gulf, of which the largest were those now called Prince Edward
and Cape Breton. The last was considered the most important, as a
gateway to the St. Lawrence, and the French determined to place a
strong fortress upon one of its harbours, from which vessels could
make raids upon the New England coasts during the next war, and would
also have a good chance to retake Acadia. A harbour in Cape Breton
would not be ice-bound for half the year, like that of Quebec, and
fishing-boats could always take refuge there.

Louisbourg, the stronghold was christened, and more than a million
pounds were spent upon its fortifications, which were twenty-five
years in building. It was not an attractive site for a settlement, the
ground being marshy and the climate damp, but the people of
Newfoundland and Acadia who did not want to live under British rule
were invited to go there. The poor fishermen of Placentia consented;
but the Acadians were too comfortable where they were, and did not
care for hewing down trees, when they had made clear fields for
themselves by simply building dykes to keep back the high tides of the
Bay of Fundy. It would have been better for England either to have
insisted upon their going, or to have sent enough troops among them to
protect them from their late masters; but England's eyes were
elsewhere. It did not suit her to have a strong colony grow up on Cape
Breton while Nova Scotia was left empty, and therefore the Acadians
were treated kindly to keep them where they were. For years they were
excused from taking the oath of allegiance to the British sovereign,
and their young folks grew up with the idea that no allegiance was
necessary. They called themselves the "Neutral French," but they were
not that at all, for they secretly gave help to their countrymen in
every way that they could, going so far as to disguise themselves as
Indians in order to fight against the English, when war broke out once
more.

=1744.= The commander at Louisbourg sent a force at once to take
possession of Canso, but Annapolis held out against him. Governor
Shirley, of Massachusetts, had made up his mind that there would be no
peace for his colony until Louisbourg was taken, and he resolved to
take it, though he had but a few British ships to help him and the
troops, which for once the other colonies contributed readily, were
quite untrained. Four thousand farmers, fishermen, carpenters, and
blacksmiths, with officers who knew no more about war than did they
themselves, would not appear to have much chance against that
formidable fortress which had been built by the best engineer of the
time and had a garrison of thirteen hundred French regulars.

=1745.= The command of the English was given to William Pepperrell, a
good-tempered merchant with a sound business head who knew how to
manage men and was popular with his soldiers--a great matter in an
army of that sort where every man thought himself as good as his
neighbour. The kind of work they had to do when at length they forced
a landing upon the island of Cape Breton, severely tried their
manliness, but it was not found wanting. Heavy guns had to be dragged
on sleds through the marsh, under cover of the night; but once within
firing distance of the walls they did good service, and the sallies
from the fort to take them were stoutly beaten back. Victory for once
fell to the unlearned. The commander at Louisbourg had not been so
well chosen as most French commanders were. He foolishly gave up the
Grand Battery, facing the entrance to the harbour, and its guns were
turned upon the fort. The British ships waiting without captured a
French one trying to get in with supplies; and the garrison was short
of powder. After a siege of seven weeks New England gained Louisbourg.
A fleet that sailed from France the next year was dispersed by storms
and could not retake it, while an attempt on Annapolis failed
likewise.

=1748-1749.= The great rejoicing in Boston when the fall of Louisbourg
became known was turned to bitter anger when the fortress was coolly
given back to France in the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. It was still
there to menace Nova Scotia; and to act as a guard, in some degree, a
fortified town was built by the English on Chebucto Harbour. This was
called Halifax and made the capital of Nova Scotia. Started after the
French manner by a royal decree, colonists were sent out to it, and in
a couple of years there were four thousand of them. Around the
dwellings was built a wooden wall and a square stone fort was set on
the hill.

Though they had now been British subjects for forty years and had
enjoyed far more liberty than the French had ever given them, the
Acadians kept on being insolent whenever France seemed likely to win
back their country, humble when they feared Britain held it for good.
Some of them had gone to Prince Edward Island to be under French rule;
but they still outnumbered the English in Nova Scotia and looked for
support in their disloyalty to the French fort at Beausjour. The same
means that had been used with the Indians were employed to keep the
Acadians true to France, notably the Abb le Loutre, supposed to be a
missionary to the Micmacs, but in reality an active agent of the
Quebec Government. An ignorant people, devout Roman Catholics, dreaded
his threats of putting them out of the Church even more than his
threats of letting loose his Indians upon them if they ventured to
obey the English.

They had, on the other hand, been well warned what would happen if
they continued their double-dealing, but they paid no attention,
feeling sure that such easygoing masters would never have the heart to
turn them out of their homes. That was what happened at last, however,
and a cruel measure it undoubtedly was, but not half so cruel as the
Indian ravages from which New England had long suffered, and for which
the French were chiefly to blame.

=1755.= The British began by taking Beausjour, and soon afterwards
all the men living in its neighbourhood were shut up in the fort until
such time as they could be carried away with their wives and families.
The men about Grand Pr were collected, unarmed, in the church; and in
Annapolis and other districts the same plan was followed. About six
thousand souls in all were thus captured, taken on board ship and
distributed among the different English colonies.




[Illustration: ONTARIO coat of arms]

CHAPTER XI

CANADA HOLDS HER OWN


On board of the French fleet which was scattered in 1746, was the new
governor for Canada, Admiral de la Jonquire, so he did not arrive at
that time; nor had he any better luck the next year, when the ship in
which he sailed was taken by the English. To fill the gap at Quebec,
the Comte de la Galissonire was appointed, a man with a small,
misshapen body, but a large, straight mind, of which the colony for
two years had the benefit. His first work was to strengthen all the
trading posts on the great lakes; and his second was to send out
Cloron de Bienville in 1749, to take possession of the valley of the
Ohio. This he did by burying five plates of lead at the foot of five
different trees throughout the district between the head waters of the
Alleghany and the banks of the Miami and Maumee Rivers. Each plate
bore an inscription to the effect that Cloron in this manner claimed
the whole country for the King of France; but what cared the English
traders for Cloron and his boundary lines or his plates of lead? They
came over the mountains from Pennsylvania and Virginia at the rate of
three hundred in a year. Their manners were not so good as those of
the French, but their wares were better and cheaper, and on that
account most of the natives put up with the ill-usage they got from
them and from the land-grabbers who followed in their train.

The French had forts now all the way between Montreal and New Orleans,
beginning with the one at Ogdensburg, then called La Prsentation,
where the Abb Picquet had a mission to the Iroquois. On Lake Ontario
had been built Fort Rouill (Toronto) and Niagara, to counteract
Oswego, by which the English had nearly ruined the trade of Frontenac.
Not beyond portaging distance from Presqu'ile, on Lake Erie's southern
shore were the head waters of the Alleghany River. Le Boeuf was built
there and Venango some miles farther down the stream. These two were
the forts that roused the wrath of the governor of Virginia in 1754,
and made him send the afterwards famous George Washington to request
their commander to withdraw, which, it is needless to say, he did not
do; and at a later skirmish between Washington's men and the French
were fired the opening shots of the Seven Years' War.

The Marquis Duquesne, who had come out to replace La Jonquire in
1752, was, like him, an officer in the French navy. His bearing was
cold and proud, so that he found little favour with the Canadians, but
he honestly did his best, both for them and for the king, his master.
Defying the fortified trading posts, the British kept on pushing over
into the rich lands of the Ohio, with a broad front that was very
unlike the French occupation of a territory. As Duquesne himself put
it to an Iroquois: "Are you ignorant of the difference between the
King of England and the King of France? Go, see the forts that our
king has established, and you will see that you can still hunt under
their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places
which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in
possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls
before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare, so that you
can scarce find the wherewithal to erect shelter for the night."

=1754.= Both sides saw that the point for controlling the whole Ohio
valley was where the Alleghany and the Monongahela join to form "the
beautiful river," and the English had begun to build a wooden fort
there when they were driven out by the French, who made a solid one of
stone, named after the governor who had planned it, Fort Duquesne.

In times of peace the superior number of the English colonists told,
but in war the French commanders had the advantage. They had not to
wait for an assembly of the people to vote their supplies or to tell
them what they should do, and they were trained soldiers, not men of
other trades and professions doing military duty for the time. The
English colonies rarely acted together, and always acted slowly, but
now the mother country sent troops for their defence, and the small
garrison at Fort Duquesne trembled when they heard that General
Braddock was coming against them with twenty-two hundred men.

=1755.= The English army cut a road for itself as it came, through the
woods and over the mountains from Virginia, and the line of march,
with cannon, baggage waggons, and men on foot was four miles long,
though it need not have been more than half a mile. General Braddock
was a strict old soldier, brought up to European ideas of fighting,
and with but little idea of how it was done in America. He soon
learned. His soldiers had almost reached Fort Duquesne, and thought
they had nothing to do but batter down its walls with their cannon,
when suddenly the front ranks were attacked by enemies they could not
see. Every tree had become an Indian, and from a neighbouring ravine a
hot fire of musketry began a steady blaze. According to the correct
rules of warfare, the British stood firm in the middle of the road, a
solid block of red as a target for their foes, and for three hours the
fight was kept up, till Braddock, who had had five horses shot under
him, ordered a retreat. On the way back he died of the wounds he had
received. Much plunder and many prisoners fell to the lot of the
French and their Indian allies.

From the papers they found in Braddock's baggage it was learned that
the English were about to make an attack upon the French fort at Crown
Point on Lake Champlain, and therefore the Baron Dieskau, who had just
come out from France with two regiments of regulars, was sent to meet
it. The British were commanded by a noted man of the day, called
Johnson, who lived in a fortified house on the Mohawk River, among the
Five Nations, and had by his honest dealings gained much influence
with them. He built a fort at the head of Lake George and another at
the nearest point to it on the Hudson River, and it was between these
two that he met the Baron Dieskau and beat him badly. For his services
he was made Sir William Johnson, and he called the lake fort William
Henry, and the river one Fort Edward, after the two grandsons of the
King of England, who had so honoured him; but after all he had not
taken Crown Point.

That same year Canada got a new ruler, the Marquis de Vaudreuil, son
of the previous governor of the same name, and a native Canadian, so
he pleased the people. He pleased the Indians too, for he talked to
them like a father, and promised to lead them to the little war
against the English. That style of fighting was not to the taste of
the Marquis de Montcalm, who had been sent out to command the army, an
honourable gentleman and a scholar, as well as a brave soldier and
most capable general.

=1756.= Montcalm's first exploit was the destruction of Oswego, on
Lake Ontario, the most hated of all the British posts, for it did most
harm to the French fur trade. His troops were of the four different
kinds employed by the French--"troops of the line" from France; the
marine corps, or colony regulars, in which were many Canadians; the
militia, that included every man in Canada who could carry a gun; and
the Indians. Oswego had not been built to resist cannon, with which
Montcalm was well supplied, and by its surrender a large quantity of
food, military stores, and sixteen hundred prisoners were gained by
the French. Still greater was their gain in the effect upon the
Indians, particularly those of the Ohio valley, who had been leaning
towards the English. Now all the border settlements of the latter
suffered from their raids. Even the Iroquois, excepting the Mohawks,
who were kept back by Sir William Johnson, came in crowds to Montreal
to show their friendship for _Onontio_, as they called each governor
of Canada in turn.

=1757.= Captain Robert Rogers, a famous New England scout, the tale of
whose adventures sounds like fiction, proved himself equal to a
Canadian as a partisan officer, or leader of a party acting by itself
in "the little war." He got together a band of rangers, used to bush
fighting and to enduring every kind of hardship, and for a year or
more these were the only "Britishers" who distinguished themselves.

The French were strong in the Lake Champlain district, but instead of
attacking them there, and thus striking at their heart, Lord Loudoun,
the English commander-in-chief, wasted his time at Halifax, making up
his mind whether or not it was possible to take Louisbourg. While his
back was turned Montcalm laid siege to Fort William Henry with over
seven thousand men. Nearly two thousand of these were Indians, half of
them from the mission villages and half from the far west, including
even bands of the Sacs and Foxes, whom the recent victories of the
French had turned from foes into friends. Besides facing the
difficulties that were always springing up between the colony troops
and those from France, the general had to keep that ungovernable horde
of savages in a good humour by telling them all his plans and
pretending to take their advice in everything. A sudden attack suited
them better than a siege, and he never knew the minute they might go
off home in a huff, like spoiled children, or fall to fighting with
other tribes on the same expedition.

Fort William Henry had less than three thousand troops to defend it,
even after a small reinforcement came from Fort Edward, whose
commander said he could send no more. Volunteer soldiers were not
quickly raised in the English colonies. Well skilled in the art of
war, Montcalm soon had his cannon placed in the best positions, and
for three days they hammered at the fort, whose guns were in bad order
and could do but little in return. Small-pox had broken out among the
men, women, and children crowded together in so small a space, and on
the 9th of August a white flag was hoisted; the firing ceased, and
arrangements were made for the surrender.

Montcalm did not care to carry many prisoners into Montreal, where
food was scarce, so he agreed to let all the English soldiers go to
their own Fort Edward on the Hudson, with the understanding that they
were not to fight against the French again for a year and a half, or
until an equal number of French prisoners had been received in
exchange. With all the honours of war the British marched out of the
fortress they had so bravely defended, but the next morning, when they
were getting ready to walk to Fort Edward, and some had already
started, Montcalm's savage allies lined the road. They began by
stealing the prisoners' clothes, and ended by murdering wounded men,
women, children--any one who opposed them. The Canadian partisan
officers had seen many similar sights on their raids with the Indians,
and they calmly turned their backs upon this one; but when Montcalm
and de Lvis, the second in command, heard of the massacre they rushed
in among the savages and did all they could to put a stop to it; but
they were too late.

The troops of the line should have been told off to protect the
prisoners, for Montcalm had seen enough of the Indians to know the
outrages of which they were capable, and he had also seen enough of
the Canadians to know that they would say, "Let them alone; savages
will be savages. If we did not give them their will of the prisoners
we could never get them to come to war with us at all."

Montcalm and his officers succeeded in saving four hundred of the
unfortunates, bought their clothes and even their lives back from the
Indians, and sent them with a strong escort to Fort Edward. Governor
Vaudreuil did the same for about two hundred that their captors took
to Montreal, and those were sent to Halifax. Vengeance for the
massacre was chiefly wrought by the small-pox, which the Indians
caught from their victims and carried home to their villages, where it
spread with fatal power.

Fort William Henry was burned, but the fighting in that historic
region was not yet done. The next year the English sent an expedition
under General Abercrombie to make its way through to Montreal, but
first it had to reckon with the gallant little Marquis de Montcalm,
who held the fort at Carillon (Ticonderoga). It had been begun three
years before and was not yet finished, so Montcalm feared that his
thirty-six hundred soldiers, though mostly troops of the line, stood
no chance against fifteen thousand. He had bands of scouts on the
watch in the woods, and one of these came in contact with an advance
party of the enemy under Captain Rogers, and was defeated; but the
English lost more than they gained in the death of Lord Howe, a better
man than Abercrombie. His army, sure of victory, came on with great
pomp, sailing down Lake George in a fleet of batteaux to the music of
bands and bagpipes, for the Highland regiment, the famous Black Watch,
was there over a thousand strong.

=1758.= Since the fort could not be defended, Montcalm went half a
mile from it, and there settled his men, the battalions of La Sarre,
Languedoc, Berry, La Reine, Royal Roussillon, Barn, and Guienne, all
in their white coats with facing of different colours--grimy enough
before the fight was over. He made them hew down trees in the
neighbouring forest that might have sheltered an oncoming foe, and
pile their trunks higher than a man's head on the side of the camp
that was open to attack. Beyond this were placed the stoutest
branches, with smaller ones whittled to sharp points and turned
outwards, making a formidable barrier to a bayonet charge, though a
few cannon could have easily knocked it over. A few shells would
quickly have cleared the enclosure, but Abercrombie had neglected to
bring artillery, and that fact gave the victory to France.

Again and again the British charged up the hill against the spiked
wall of trees without effect, while the French took deadly aim at them
through their loopholes and showed nothing but the tops of their hats.
Half of the Black Watch were slain during that hot fight, which lasted
for the whole of a long July afternoon. Abercrombie realised his
mistake at last and ordered a retreat, leaving nearly two thousand of
his men behind him.

There was great joy in Canada when the victory was known, and the
soldiers who had taken part made many jubilant verses, such as:--

    "Allons  Carillon
    Allons voir la merveille
    O chaque bataillon
    D'une ardeur sans pareille
    Fixe, frappe et bat,
    Dans un seul combat
    O trois mille Franois
    Chassent vingt mille Anglois."




[Illustration: NOVA SCOTIA coat of arms]

CHAPTER XII

LOUISBOURG TO QUEBEC


The expedition of General Abercrombie against Montreal was but one of
those planned by King George's prime minister, William Pitt, who was
putting new life into the affairs of the nation, both at home and
abroad. England awoke to the importance of her possessions beyond the
seas and was bound to keep hold of them; but Louis XV. cared nothing
for the fate of the colony his father had tended with such care. "A
few acres of snow in Canada" were of no account in the eyes of a
monarch bent upon pleasure only, and the men and money that might have
saved a continent for him were spent in useless wars in Europe. The
Court danced and gambled, while the peasants starved. The awakening of
France did not come till thirty years later, in her terrible
Revolution.

Pitt's plan was to promote men to command who had shown fitness for
the sort of work to be done, and not those who had been longest in the
service or had powerful friends at Court. So far the French officers
in America had shown themselves to be much smarter than the English,
and had made the most of the very mixed lot of troops they generally
had under them. Now there was to be less difference between the two
sides in that respect.

=1758.= Once more a fleet and an army set out for Louisbourg: the one
under Admiral Boscawen, called "wry-necked Dick" by his sailors, from
his habit of carrying his head on one side; the other under General
Amherst, a good commander though slow. The New Englanders and Nova
Scotians had suffered much from French privateers, who made raids upon
their ships or their ports and then ran for refuge under the guns of
Louisbourg. That fortress was thought by outsiders to be exceedingly
strong, but those who had to defend it knew better. Intendant Bigot,
the vampire that fed on the lifeblood of Canada, had had a hand in the
building of its walls, and although the best materials had been paid
for, the worst had often been used. The whole was now out of repair
and ready to crumble at the first cannonade. Like Quebec, Louisbourg's
chief strength lay in her natural situation. It would not be hard to
destroy her if once she could be got at, but to get at her was the
difficulty. Her best defences were the rocks and breakers of the
island coast, for her fighting men were less than four thousand.

The harbour, large and sheltered, could only be entered by a narrow
channel defended by batteries on either side and one facing it, across
the bay. The British fleet kept guard without, but several French
vessels with supplies ran safely into the haven, and now there were
twelve warships riding at anchor within, who dared the English to come
and get them. One hundred and fifty-seven British vessels there were,
including ships of the line, frigates, and transports, carrying more
than twelve thousand soldiers. How to land these was the question, in
the face of a riotous surf, and an active, ever-watchful foe.

There were four places at which the French feared a landing might be
made, and these were specially guarded; but on the 8th of June the
British, while sending boats full of soldiers in different directions
to scatter the defenders, pulled for the strongest of the four spots,
a cove called La Cormorandire. It seemed unprotected to them, but
when their boats came within gunshot they received a volley from a
solid parapet, so well screened by branches of trees and bushes that
it looked like the natural woods.

Seeing the mistake, Brigadier Wolfe waved back his men; but three
boatloads of them pretended to think he meant them to go on, and on
they went, scrambling ashore at length upon a rocky point that the
French thought could not be climbed. There they kept their foothold
till only ten of them were left to face seven times their number of
French and Indians; but help soon came. Plunging and wading through
the breakers with only a cane in his hand, urging on his men to reach
the shore, in spite of the deadly surf, and the still more deadly fire
of the enemy--that is the first view we get of James Wolfe. He did not
look like a nation's hero--a thin, delicate young man of thirty-one,
with chin and forehead sloping backwards, tilted nose, and red hair
tied in a queue, but with plenty of fire in his blue eyes.

Over a hundred boats and many men were lost before all were landed,
but the landing once made, the French retreated to their fortress,
fearing that its fall was only a question of time. The British guns
and the British trenches drew nearer and nearer to the stronghold as
the summer advanced; and one by one the batteries that protected the
harbour had to be given up.

Two of the French ships had made their escape, but another, trying to
run to Quebec for help, was captured by Admiral Boscawen, lying in
wait. The gallant little _Arthuse_ did more harm to the besiegers
than any of the others, and she succeeded in running the blockade and
getting safely off to France; but the rest were blown up or burned by
the fire of the English.

It is easy for men to keep on fighting when they hope for a victory,
but the defenders of Louisbourg had no hope. The Chevalier de Drucour
held out for seven weeks, knowing that if he kept the English employed
at Cape Breton till the season was half over they would not think of
going on to besiege Quebec. He would have let them storm his walls
sooner than yield, but he thought of the families of the town who had
taken refuge in the fort, of how much they had suffered already and
how much more they were likely to suffer if the English carried the
place by assault; so he surrendered on the 26th of July.

Within two years afterwards not one stone was left upon another to
tell where Louisbourg had been. The English did not need it for
themselves, when they had Halifax, and there was always the danger of
its being given back to France by treaty, as it had been once before.
So great was the joy in England and her colonies over the fall of
Louisbourg, it more than balanced the disappointment for the disaster
at Ticonderoga.

The latter affair was not so soon forgotten by General Abercrombie,
and to revive the spirits of his army, he sent three thousand men,
under Colonel Bradstreet, to besiege Fort Frontenac on Lake Ontario,
where the French were not looking for an attack. The party crossed
from the ruins of Oswego, and when once their big guns were brought
into position the fort held out but a few hours, for it was not built
to resist cannon. By the surrender the English gained guns and armed
vessels, provisions, and more than a hundred prisoners, a valuable lot
of furs, and a great quantity of goods intended for the posts on the
Ohio. The last was most important in view of the expedition against
Fort Duquesne.

=1758.= Brigadier Forbes commanded that, a heroic soul in a body
racked with pain. He had to be carried in a litter along the rough
road which his soldiers and woodmen made in a straight line from
Bedford, Pennsylvania, to Fort Duquesne; but so long as his clever
head was able to direct operations he took no heed of his sufferings.
He did not use the road Braddock had built, nor copy that general in
stringing out his forces to the length of four miles; but placed the
stores and baggage in fortified houses along the route, so that the
soldiers could advance quickly, a short distance at a time.

The commander at Fort Duquesne could no longer count on the support of
the Indians, who had been won over to make peace with the British; he
could neither feed them nor trade with them, for all his goods had
been lost at Fort Frontenac. When his scouts brought him word of the
twenty-five hundred men coming against him, he did not wait to receive
them, but blew up the walls of his fort, set fire to the ruins, and
got safely off with his small garrison.

When the invalid hero arrived with his men on the 25th of November,
they built a few wooden huts for their own use, and Forbes christened
the place Pittsburg, which has now expanded into one of the chief
manufacturing cities of Pennsylvania. The army marched back once more,
over the road they had made, carrying with them their suffering
leader, who died in Philadelphia the following spring.

The wings of New France were now severely clipped. Canada and
Louisiana were still her own, but the country between them was lost
and so was her guardian at the door of the St. Lawrence. Montcalm's
victory at Carillon and Drucour's stand at Louisbourg had kept the
British away from Quebec for a season, but what could now prevent them
from sailing there in the spring? Nothing but help from France, and
that had been already refused.

Quebec was doing her best in a small way to imitate the Paris
fashions. Her upper circle gambled and was gay, while the people cried
for bread. Bigot and his friends grew rich, robbing the king with one
hand, the habitants with the other. The troops of the line had to be
fed on horseflesh, much to their disgust, but Montcalm made out a
humorous bill of fare, containing the different ways in which it could
be cooked, and Lvis set his soldiers an example by eating it himself.
He was greatly beloved by his men, and much liked both by the
governor's party and the general's party between which the colony and
the army were divided.

Hitherto the governor of Canada had been also its sole military
commander, and Vaudreuil did not like to share the charge with
Montcalm, especially when he got orders from France to submit to the
general's judgment in military matters. Vaudreuil was an honest man,
but weak, and not shrewd enough to see through M. Bigot, who kept
friendly with him by flattering his vanity and was left to make money
as he chose. The intendant entertained right royally, but the people
had to pay for it.

Though small in stature, Montcalm had a handsome face, and there was
all the fire of youth in his flashing black eyes, though he was now
forty-seven years old. Like many southerners, he had a hot, impulsive
temper, and needed a clever, cool-headed friend at his side to keep
him out of trouble, but even Lvis often failed to keep the peace
between him and Vaudreuil. The governor was inclined to think too
highly of himself and his native colony; the general was too apt to
care only for the honour of the king's troops and his own advancement
in the army.

=1759.= Montcalm knew that Quebec could not withstand the blows of
English cannon, and that if he shut up his soldiers within the walls
they would very soon run short of food; so in the spring, when it was
known that the English were moving upon Quebec, he laid out his camp
from the St. Charles to the Montmorenci. That would prevent the enemy
from getting to the weak side of the town, where the land slopes down
to the St. Charles River; the high side next the St. Lawrence was
thought to need little or no protection. There were more men up in
arms against Canada than her whole population, all told; but with
little ground for hope, to the last she did not despair, having faith
that her religion would save her, or that France would send help.

General Amherst's part in the campaign was played upon Lake Champlain,
where he spent the whole season building vessels and repairing forts,
as the French blew them up and left them. They still held out at
Ile-aux-Noix, a well-fortified island in the Richelieu, and Amherst
appeared to be in no hurry to dislodge them in order to advance to the
help of General Wolfe before Quebec. It seemed as if the latter were
not going to succeed in taking the capital that year, for the summer
wore on and nothing was accomplished but the burning of villages and
the laying waste of the country on both sides of the St. Lawrence.

The British fleet of seventy ships had come up the river in June,
guided by pilots decoyed on board by the hoisting of French colours;
but Montcalm thought Wolfe had acted foolishly in dividing his forces.
Part of the English army was encamped on the other side of the
Montmorenci from the French; part on the island of Orleans, and part
at Point Levi. Could the French general have spared the men, he might
have attacked any one of these sections before the others could have
sent help; but Montcalm had no troops to spare. Eight hundred were off
with Lvis in Montreal, watching for the advance of Amherst, and three
thousand were with Bougainville, guarding the river above the town
against a possible landing of troops from the British ships which had
passed upward. Montcalm must play the waiting game--must lie low and
see if he could not tempt Wolfe into attacking him. That is what Wolfe
had done on the 31st of July, and been badly beaten. His men landed on
the Beauport shore, and tried to climb the hill to get at the French
camp; but had it not been for a storm of wind and rain that kept the
foe from seeing them, the whole British force would have been slain.
As it was, they retreated to their boats with heavy loss.

When the month of September came the Canadians began to take heart.
True, their capital was in ruins, for the English batteries at Point
Levi had shelled it furiously--a useless destruction of property that
brought no nearer the possession of the town. If the enemy did not get
in soon they would have to give up the siege for the season, or their
ships would be caught in the ice and their men left without food in a
hostile country.

On the night of the 12th Montcalm took little rest. He felt sure that
the English, with such power in their hands and with so daring a
leader, would not leave the country without making a last desperate
attempt to take Quebec. He walked about his encampment till nearly
dawn, and then was roused from a troubled sleep by the booming of big
guns along the Beauport shore. Were the English trying again to land
there? The question was answered by news that reached him at six
o'clock and sent him spurring his horse towards the bridge of boats
that was laid across the St. Charles. From there he saw, only too
plainly, a body of redcoats drawn up in line upon the plains of
Abraham, the high land within a mile of Quebec. Was it a squad or a
whole army, and how did they get there? Probably the gallant general
never learned how the British had dropped down the river from their
ships above the town; how they had made the French sentries think
their boats were some expected provisions; how they had climbed the
heights by a path so steep that only a small guard had been thought
necessary to defend it, and that was soon overpowered.

Fortune favoured Wolfe, and frowned upon Montcalm. The latter should
have waited till Vaudreuil sent up the rest of the troops from
Beauport; till Bougainville came from Cap Rouge to attack the
thirty-five hundred British in the rear; but he thought it would be a
mistake to delay until more of the English got up the cliff and had
time to dig trenches. They were already between him and his supplies.
So with his forty-five hundred men, white-coated regulars, Canadians,
and Indians, Montcalm passed through one of Quebec's gates and out by
another, to meet his fate.

He barely gave his men time to take breath till he hurled them against
the foe, and of course they advanced in bad order, while the British
stood firm, and reserved their fire till the French were near enough
to receive it with deadly effect. Within twenty minutes all was over,
and the French in full retreat, chased back to the city gates, or over
the rough hillside down to the bridge of boats by the redcoats and
kilted Highlanders. Without a leader strong enough to rally them, they
left their camp in disorder, and never stopped their flight till they
had reached the natural fort of Jacques Cartier, thirty miles up the
St. Lawrence.

Wolfe and Montcalm both lost their lives in that bloody skirmish; the
one dying on the field, the other living long enough to be supported
into the town on his horse. Montcalm was buried in a grave made by the
bursting of a shell in the chapel of the Ursuline Convent; Wolfe's
remains were taken home on a warship, and there is a noble monument to
him in Westminster Abbey.




[Illustration: MANITOBA coat of arms]

CHAPTER XIII

THE FIRST FEW YEARS OF BRITISH RULE


When news of the battle of September 13th reached the Chevalier de
Lvis in Montreal, he lost no time in starting for Jacques Cartier to
meet the defeated army. The death of Montcalm had given him the
command under Vaudreuil, and his presence put new life into the
soldiers. Even the governor began to think he had left Quebec in too
great a hurry, and was ready to march back again. New France was not
lost in one battle, nor was even its capital, so long as the
victorious British could be kept without the walls.

Bougainville, bitterly regretting that he had not known his dearly
loved general was in such dire need of his help on that fatal morning,
still held out at Cap Rouge, and was now moving towards the town with
his cavalry. Every man carried a sack of biscuits across his saddle
for the relief of the starving garrison; but they came too late.
Vaudreuil in leaving had told Ramesay, the commandant of Quebec, to
make the best terms he could with the enemy; and when there seemed to
be no help coming from any quarter, the town surrendered and the
British marched in.

Lvis knew that he was playing a losing game; that unless there was a
revolution in France, to put the management of her affairs into other
hands, Canada was lost to her for ever. Still he resolved to put a
stout heart to a steep hill, and for the honour of his country try to
save at least a part of her American possessions. His army made many
plans for the retaking of Quebec in the spring; but meanwhile it was
held by a garrison of seven thousand men under General Murray. Like
Wolfe, he had been in the front ranks at the battle of September 13th,
but the harder task was left to him of keeping that which Wolfe had
taken. The town was in ruins. There was barely a roof left to cover
his soldiers; the winter was coming on; the country people were
unfriendly, and could not be relied upon to bring in provisions, while
Murray was short of funds to pay for them. He might have given out
paper money, as the French rulers had done for years--paper they never
meant to change into coin--but the sturdy, honest young Scotchman
preferred to borrow money from his own soldiers. It was surprising how
much the thrifty Highlanders were able to lend him.

A part of that kilted regiment was quartered in the Ursuline Convent,
one of the few buildings in the town left standing, and they did so
many friendly services for the nuns, hauling and cutting wood, drawing
water for them, that the good sisters in return knitted them long
stockings to draw up over their bare knees. None of the soldiers had
clothes warm enough to suit so severe a climate, and there was much
sickness among them, which the hospital nuns did their best to
relieve.

The habitants held aloof from the town for a time. They would not make
friends with the new-comers, feeling sure that in the spring France
would send out a fleet and an army to claim her own again. General
Lvis, in his winter camp at Jacques Cartier, was kept well posted in
Quebec news. He had spies even among Murray's own soldiers, and those
of the townsfolk who had been induced to come back and try to rebuild
their ruined homes, lost no chance of sending him word about the great
amount of sickness in the garrison, the small amount of money and
provisions.

Firewood was an urgent necessity for the five months of a Quebec
winter, and to procure it the British soldiers had to go to Ste. Foye,
two miles and a half from the gates, and draw it in on sleds, to which
they harnessed themselves. There were bands of Indians always prowling
about, intent on cutting off some of these logging parties, so that
each had to have an extra guard of soldiers. Several skirmishes took
place during the winter with scouts from Lvis's army, but both sides
looked anxiously to the spring for the final settlement of the
question, "Who shall own Canada?"

General Murray's was called military rule, but it was different from
what usually passes under that name, though punishment followed crime
a good deal more quickly than is possible with a civil government. The
"new subjects" were protected in their rights of property, allowed to
worship as they pleased, and the Protestant emigrants from the English
colonies were kept from lording it over them. Murray struck the
keynote for the treatment of the French-Canadians by their new rulers.

The snows that had lain all winter in the narrow, steep streets and
among the blackened walls of the town began at length to yield to the
April sunshine. The ice-bridge between the town and Point Levi
opposite gave way on the 23rd, and the large masses of ice that came
floating down the river seemed the forerunners of Lvis and his men.
Murray sent all the Canadians out of the town. If he were to be
besieged he could not feed them, and, besides, it was not safe to have
a strong party within the walls friendly to a strong enemy without.

=1760.= The French army came in boats from Montreal till they were
within thirty-five miles of Quebec, when, finding the outposts well
guarded, they marched the rest of the way by land, approaching the
town from Lorette and Ste. Foye, the sloping side next the valley of
the St. Charles. Murray thought it best to march out of the gates and
attack Lvis on the 28th of April, before his men should have time to
dig trenches or even to get rested after their long tramp through the
half-melted snow. So many of his garrison were in hospital, he had
less than four thousand to take out to battle, while Lvis had nearly
double the number; but the English had the advantage in cannon, and
also in holding the higher ground, where there were rough hillocks for
protection. The fight lasted for two hours. There were more men
engaged on each side and more men in proportion killed than at the
September battle in the same place, but the result was different. This
time it was the British who were beaten and who retreated into the
town in disorder. A third of their number were slain at this battle of
Ste. Foye, and Lvis now laid siege to the town.

It would have been better for his army if he had kept away from Quebec
till sure of the support of French ships, several of which had been
caught in the ice and wintered at Gasp. His victory went for nothing
two weeks after the battle, when the weary watchers in the town saw
the first sail of the season rounding the island of Orleans. The
frigate was afraid to show her colours, not knowing if the British had
been able to hold Quebec through the winter, but when she drew close
enough to see that the red flag, and not the white, floated from the
citadel, she hoisted the same and fired a salute, to which every gun
in the town replied.

Lvis's men in the trenches heard the firing and knew that the game
was up for them. They retreated as they had come, back to Montreal.
Bougainville still held the post at Ile-aux-Noix, but to it was
advancing General Haldimand from Lake Champlain, and, knowing that the
British were too strong for them, the French left the island fort and
made for Montreal.

Murray had done well in Quebec; he did even better on his memorable
journey to Montreal with twenty-two hundred men to meet General
Amherst, who was coming down from Lake Ontario, but took time to
destroy the fort at Ogdensburg on the way. Landing here and there
along the river, Murray assured the inhabitants of safety and
protection, provided they stayed quietly in their homes, which most of
them, having had enough of fighting, were only too glad to do. The
forces of the British--seventeen thousand in all--had now gathered
about Montreal, from the east, the south, and the west, and Lvis,
with his gallant two thousand troops of the line, could do naught but
surrender. Late in the autumn the last of the French soldiers were
shipped back to France, and a few of the seigneurs and their families
who did not want to live under British rule went with them. Bigot and
his crew left to enjoy the fortunes they had made in Canada, but they
were brought to trial and severely punished.

A later stand was made for France in America by the Indians of the
west. The English had never taken pains to be friends with them, as
the French had done, and now that the latter were driven out of
Canada, the former were no longer afraid of the red men and cared less
than ever about their friendship. Sir William Johnson, living among
the Iroquois, alone saw the danger, and warned his countrymen to keep
on holding councils with the Indians and giving them presents; but
none listened to him.

The French still held Louisiana, as well as Fort Chartres on the
Mississippi. From there _voyageurs_ engaged in the fur trade roved the
western lands; and they told the Indians that their great father, the
King of France, was but asleep; presently he would awake and drive out
the English from all the forts they occupied. It did not take much
persuasion to induce the Indians to assist in the driving, and a
widespread plot was laid to win back every post in the west.

=1763.= The leader in the movement was an Ottawa warrior, called
Pontiac, who on the 9th of May attacked the fortified village of
Detroit and besieged it with eight hundred and twenty men for more
than five months. This was a remarkable feat for Indians, who excel in
the more rapid warfare of surprise and retreat, but rarely have the
patience for a long siege. Within the enclosure of Fort
Michilimackinac, as at Detroit, there were a number of small houses,
built there at the time when it was not safe to settle without. The
homes of a later date were outside, and the Canadian traders and
half-breeds who lived in them were on good terms with the scores of
Ojibwa and Ottawa Indians camping near by. These warriors invited the
British garrison to look on at a game of lacrosse between themselves
and a party of Sacs who had just arrived from their hunting-grounds on
the Wisconsin River. The English, off their guard, sauntered out of
the fort gates, leaving them open, and some squaws sauntered in.
During the excitement of the play, the ball was tossed close to an
entrance, and the screaming pack of players rushed into the fort,
seized their guns and hatchets, which the squaws had hidden beneath
their blankets, and massacred every man, woman, and child they could
find.

About the same time, according to the plan of Pontiac, the smaller
western posts also fell into the hands of the Indians. Union had given
them a fleeting strength, and they used it as savages will--in
scalping, burning, torturing, even eating their captives. The forts at
Sandusky, St. Joseph, Presqu'ile, Le Boeuf, Venango, Miami on the
Maumee, and another on the Wabash, were all taken; but Detroit still
held out, though bands of Indians, victors in other places, came to
increase the number of the besiegers.

Though he stayed in New York, Sir Jeffrey Amherst was still
commander-in-chief of the forces in Canada, but they numbered many
less than they had done at the close of the Seven Years' War, most of
them having been ordered home. To Colonel Henry Bouquet, a Swiss
soldier of fortune fighting for England, is due the chief credit of
putting a stop to the war in the Ohio valley. He had been second in
command to Forbes in the expedition which changed Fort Duquesne into
Fort Pitt, and when the same place was in danger from the Indians
Amherst sent him to its relief with some of the Black Watch and a few
rangers. After a hard-fought fight he succeeded in beating the red
allies at a place called Bushy Run.

Colonel Bradstreet, the same who had destroyed Frontenac, was now sent
to the relief of Detroit; but he had not Bouquet's courage and skill
in dealing with the Indians, and it was not till Sir William Johnson
took the helm that the war was really brought to a close in 1766. If
the Iroquois had taken part in it, the results would have been far
more serious for Canada; but Sir William had kept so firm a hold upon
them that only the Senecas joined the remarkable league. Louisiana had
now been ceded to Spain by the French, who, having no longer an
interest in the affairs of the continent, let the Indians alone.

Canada numbered seventy thousand souls when she came under British
rule, and of these Quebec had seven and Montreal nine thousand. The
settlements on the St. Lawrence reached as far down as Rimouski on the
south shore and Murray Bay on the north. A change of government could
not long depress a light-hearted people, especially when the change
gave them more freedom than they had ever enjoyed. There was not a
printing-press in the colony until after the conquest, so that books
were scarce; but the people did not miss them, for very few were able
to read or write. The _Halifax Gazette_ had a run for a few months in
1752, but was not published regularly till eight years later, and
Quebec had her first newspaper in 1764.

British rule brought free trade in the East, but the Hudson's Bay
Company had the sole right to buy furs in the North-west. That fact
did not stop adventurers from striking out into the wilderness,
chiefly from Michilimackinac, and getting skins from the Indians, to
whom they gave far too much liquor in exchange. They did not deal
honestly with the natives either, and much disorder followed which
hurt the business of the Hudson's Bay Company. But the Company roused
itself to extend its bounds to the far north, and sent out Samuel
Hearne, who explored the Coppermine River and was the first white man
known to have got within the Arctic Circle (1769).




[Illustration: QUEBEC coat of arms]

CHAPTER XIV

THE UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS


=1766.= Sir Guy Carleton, who succeeded General Murray as governor of
Canada, had been a personal friend of Wolfe and his comrade-in-arms
during the campaign of 1759. He had also spent the first hard winter
with Murray in Quebec, and fought in the battle of April 28th, so
that, besides being a tried and capable soldier, he knew something of
Canada and the Canadians, and he liked them well. He worked hard for
the passing of the Quebec Act in the British Parliament, by which the
government of Canada was placed once more in the hands of a governor
and council, as it had been under the French, and not into the hands
of an assembly of representatives, as the English who were moving in
wanted it to be--an assembly in which no Roman Catholic could have a
seat, and by which therefore the few Protestants would rule.

Such a Parliament, the first on Canadian soil, had met in Halifax in
1758, but the Nova Scotians were mostly British or New Englanders,
educated up to the point of knowing how to govern by their own
representatives, as the French Canadians were not. By the Quebec Act,
the Ohio country was included in the limits of Canada--an item which
opened up the old quarrel with Virginia and Pennsylvania--but Great
Britain carelessly signed away the whole region in the next treaty of
peace.

It was well for England, if she wished to retain a foothold upon the
American continent, that she let her "new subjects" in Canada keep
their language, their religion, and most of their laws just as they
had been before the conquest. Her "old subjects" in the southern
colonies, so soon as they no longer needed her strong arm to beat off
the French from their northern, the Indians from their western
borders, forgot past favours and remembered only present grievances.
When they broke into open revolt, they counted upon the French
Canadians siding with them, but few of the new subjects did. The
Jesuits, to be sure, favoured the movement, but their order had lost
its power since the Pope had suppressed it in 1773, and the rest of
the clergy, as well as the seigneurs, stood firm for British rule.
They well knew that the Americans, if successful in gaining their
independence, would never put up with an established Roman Catholic
Church, nor continue the old feudal system of holding land.

=1775.= Most of the habitants, as the country people were called,
refused to fight either for England or against her, but those in the
Lake Champlain district sided openly with the troops of Congress when
Ticonderoga and Crown Point fell into their hands. These forts the
Americans took by surprise; before their garrisons knew there was any
war; but not so the one at Chambly, whose commander yielded
disgracefully, without a struggle. St. John's, though weaker by far,
stood a siege of seven weeks before it, too, surrendered; and thus the
way was left open for General Montgomery and his troops of Congress to
march upon Montreal.

That city had then about thirteen thousand people, many of whom had
come from New York or New England since the conquest, and these of
course looked upon the invaders as their friends. Here was a chance to
do away with the Quebec Act, they thought. The original French
citizens had no choice in the matter, for they knew that their town
could not be defended, so they made the best terms they could with
Montgomery. Three Rivers too sent word that she would submit to his
rule, and the Americans were sure that Quebec would do the same. She
might have done so had it not been for her gallant governor. Sir Guy
Carleton stayed on in Montreal till just two days before Montgomery
arrived, on November 13th, and when he gave up hope of holding that
town he made all haste down to Quebec, going in disguise as a habitant
on board of a coasting vessel. He arrived none too soon.

Colonel Benedict Arnold, whom Congress had sent to unite with
Montgomery, was already before Quebec, having brought six hundred and
fifty men from Casco, now Portland, Maine, a six weeks' march by the
route of the Kennebec and Chaudire Rivers.

Quebec had a garrison of eighteen hundred, made up of British soldiers
and sailors, and French Canadian volunteers. When Montgomery joined
Arnold, the besiegers had about the same number of men, but they
reckoned wrongly when they counted upon getting help from within the
walls. The first thing Carleton did was to turn out of the gates all
the citizens who were in favour of giving in to the Congress troops.
Those who remained were to be relied upon. England was a long way off;
she had let them alone and had not been unkind to them. The
"Bastonnais" were near, and enemies of old standing; they should not
take Quebec.

Montgomery knew that help would come to Canada from Great Britain in
the spring, so soon as the ice was out of the river; therefore Quebec
must be taken in the winter, which was now well advanced. He had not
cannon enough to knock down the walls; the only chance lay in a
surprise. The defenders also knew that a sudden attack in an
unexpected quarter was the one way by which the enemy could get in;
and though their numbers were too few to guard every possible
approach, they kept constantly on the watch, sleeping in their
clothes, ready to rush from one point to another at the first alarm.

On the last night of the year, the Quebeckers knew there was something
on foot, because they saw rockets going up from below the cliff to the
west of the town. Montgomery was thus letting Arnold know that he had
started to carry out the plan which they had formed. This was to make
a pretence of attacking the walls from the Plains of Abraham, to draw
the garrison off in that direction, while the real attempt was being
made in the Lower Town. Arnold was to advance upon it from St. Roch,
the suburb round the corner of the cliff, near the St. Charles River,
while Montgomery marched down the bank of the St. Lawrence into
Champlain Street. The forces were to meet, storm Mountain Hill
together, and force their way into the Upper Town; but the meeting did
not take place.

=1776.= Carleton had ordered three barricades with cannon upon them to
be set up in the Lower Town--one at either end of the street called
Sault-au-Matelot, and one at the western end of Champlain Street. It
was about four o'clock on the morning of New Year's Day that
Montgomery and his men drew near the last-named barrier. It was pitch
dark and a mixture of snow and rain was falling. Everything was so
quiet they thought they were going to surprise the post, but when they
came near enough there was a blaze of cannon and musketry; Montgomery
fell dead along with a dozen of his men, and the rest retreated in
disorder.

Arnold, advancing to the other side of the town, had no better luck.
With his seven hundred men he got as far as Sault-au-Matelot Street,
but the guard was on the watch there also; he was wounded in the first
attack and had to be carried to the rear. His second in command
succeeded in forcing the first barricade, but was caught in a stinging
fire from the houses between it and the second, so that he had to
surrender, and more than four hundred of his men were made prisoners.

The Americans did not again try to take Quebec by surprise, but
Congress sent more troops and the siege was still kept on, in spite of
the ravages of small-pox among the men. There was much sickness in the
town too, but help came for it at length on the 6th of May, in the
shape of a British frigate, soon followed by another and a sloop of
war with reinforcements that made the Canadians able to march out of
their gates upon the foe. But the Americans did not wait to be
attacked; they retreated so quickly that even some dinners were left,
uneaten, behind them.

A fight took place in May at the Cedar Rapids of the St. Lawrence,
where three hundred and ninety Americans surrendered to about the same
number of English and Indians. An American force tried to take Three
Rivers in June, but was defeated by a like number of French Canadians
and British regulars. The Congress troops had held Montreal all the
winter without opposition, but in the early summer they thought it
safer to draw back to Lake Champlain.

Sir Guy Carleton forthwith set to work to build a fleet upon that
lake, to replace the one destroyed by the Americans the year before,
and, if possible, to regain the forts upon it. The summer was over
before his ships were ready, but on the 11th of October, along with a
number of Indians in canoes, he gave battle to Arnold and defeated
him. The Americans destroyed Crown Point, but Ticonderoga was
afterwards retaken by the British, so that Canada once more held the
lake and was freed from her invaders.

=1778.= Governor Carleton was succeeded by General Haldimand, who
planned and partly made the citadel at Quebec. It was he, too, that
began the system of canals on which Canada prides herself to-day.
Those that overcame the Cascade, Cedar, and Coteau Rapids of the St.
Lawrence were the first canals in America.

Being at war with Spain, France, and Holland, as well as with her
revolted colonies, Great Britain had her hands too full with her foes
to remember her friends. The faithful among her old subjects in
America were not encouraged in their loyalty, but left to be bullied
and beaten, tarred and feathered, robbed and even killed by the party
who wished to break all connection with England. Canada opened wide
her doors to receive these refugees from the States, who were called
United Empire Loyalists. Among them was the greater part of the Mohawk
nation, who were given lands upon the Bay of Quint, and on the Grand
River, flowing into Lake Erie, where their descendants abide till this
day, though it is doubtful if there is a full-blooded Iroquois among
them.

=1783.= The year that the treaty of peace between England and the
United States was signed at Versailles, a number of Montreal merchants
formed the North-west Company and entered into the fur trade in the
region where the Hudson's Bay Company had been supreme for over a
hundred years.

=1786-1792.= Captain Cook, famous for his voyages round the world, was
sent by England, in 1778, to the Pacific coast of what is now British
Columbia to see if there was a channel likely to lead through to the
Atlantic, but he did not find even the Straits of Juan de Fuca, though
he was as near to them as Nootka Sound, Vancouver Island. He got so
many costly furs from the Indians there that other voyagers were
encouraged to go out, and one of these, Captain Meares, built the
first vessel launched upon the Pacific. It was called the
_North-west_, and could carry forty tons. He also set up a fortified
storehouse at Nootka, but it was taken by the Spaniards, who claimed
the whole coast on account of voyages that had been made to it by
their sailors. Captain George Vancouver was then sent out to make the
Spaniards leave Nootka, which they did, and the English claim to the
whole coast of British Columbia was made good.

Meanwhile the U. E. Loyalists had kept on pouring into Canada. Those
whose courage, or whose cash, could only carry them a little way over
the border, settled near Montreal, in the Eastern Townships; but many
went on up the St. Lawrence in open boats, camping out on shore by
night, and took up land to the north of Lake Ontario. They founded
Kingston in 1783. Others crossed the Niagara River from New York
State, laying out their farms along the southern shore of the lake;
and this was the beginning of Upper Canada.

=1783.= About twenty thousand U. E. Loyalists came from the New
England States into the Acadian country, where they settled in the
valley of the river St. John and founded the town of that name. The
next year the separate province of New Brunswick was made, and two
years after that its capital was chosen in Fredericton, which had been
founded by the U. E. Loyalists in 1784. The fur trade, that had so
long been Canada's chief support, now began to give place to lumber.
The tall forest trees of New Brunswick made the best possible masts
for the ships of the king's navy.

Nova Scotia also got her share of the new colonists, and they
increased her desire for the things of the mind. Even in 1788, "the
hungry year," King's College was founded at Windsor, and four years
later it became a university, the first in Canada. In Prince Edward
Island, named from the Duke of Kent, father of Queen Victoria and
commander of the British forces in America, and also in Cape Breton,
the U. E. Loyalists mixed well with the Scotch Highlanders, who had
begun to emigrate in large numbers to both islands in 1773.

Many of the Loyalists had been very well off in their old homes, but
they cheerfully endured the hardships that cannot be avoided in the
opening up of new settlements. The British Government gave them help
after a time, supporting some of them for three years, until their
farms could keep them, and giving them cows and implements for
clearing and tilling their lands.

=1791-1793.= When the Revolution came to France, the French Canadians
were heartily glad they had nothing to do with it. A people devoted to
church and king, they could look only with horror upon the overthrow
of both. The Quebec Act satisfied their ideas of government, but
naturally the new settlers to the westward, who had been used to send
members to an assembly, did not like it, and the result was that a
division was made between Upper and Lower Canada. Sir Guy Carleton,
now Lord Dorchester, came back as governor-general over all the
provinces, each having a lieutenant-governor of its own. The first for
Upper Canada was Colonel J. G. Simcoe, who left his mark in the roads
he laid out as a result of walking and paddling throughout his
province. Dundas Street from Toronto to London, with its continuation,
the Governor's Road and Yonge Street from Lake Ontario to Lake Simcoe
were opened up with a view to giving access to the new capital of
Upper Canada which he had founded--Toronto, then called York. The
first assembly for the province had met at Niagara, but that was
thought to be too near to the United States. It was during Simcoe's
time that slavery was abolished in Upper Canada. There had never been
many negroes in the province, but their numbers were largely
increased, as the years went on, by runaway slaves from the United
States, who were protected in a genuine "land of the free."

=1796.= Lord Dorchester and Simcoe were recalled in the same year.




[Illustration: ONTARIO coat of arms]

PART FOURTH

_TO THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY_




CHAPTER XV

THE WAR OF 1812-14


=1807.= In the early years of the nineteenth century Great Britain was
much troubled by her sailors deserting to the American navy, where the
rules were not so strict and they received more pay. Her right to
search United States ships for deserters was bitterly denied by their
captains, who often coaxed English sailors to work for them. When the
British ship _Leonard_ caught up to the U.S. frigate _Chesapeake_, and
told her to give up the English sailors among her crew, she refused to
obey, and therefore got a broadside from the _Leonard's_ guns, whose
sailors then boarded her and took off the deserters by force. This was
done in time of peace and the Government in England blamed the doers
of it, but the ill-feeling between the two nations kept on getting
stronger, and five years afterwards it burst into open war.

Canada had hitherto felt only the benefits of being a British colony;
now she was called upon to bear some of the ills. She had no quarrel
with the United States, but was attacked by them as the weakest and
nearest part of a great empire; and most nobly did she rise to the
defence. The result of the good treatment given to the Indians in
Canada was shown by the way they came forward to fight her battles,
particularly the Mohawks, whose name had once spread terror throughout
her borders. The Shawnese came to the front too, a band which had been
driven from their homes on the Wabash River by the Americans and
burned to avenge their wrongs. The chief of this tribe was called
Tecumseh--a fine-looking man of thirty-five, brave, as many Indians
were, but wise and kind-hearted, as many were not, he kept his
warriors from scalping and from other savage tricks. Sir James Craig
had been appointed governor-general of Canada when it seemed likely
that there would be a war with the United States, because he was a
good soldier, but he made himself very unpopular with the people,
ruling them as he would a regiment. Prompt and decided in everything
he did, Governor Craig would have been a capital man for the head of
affairs when the war really did begin, but by that time he had been
replaced by Sir George Prevost, a general too, but not a good one, and
most of the Canadian disasters were due to his slowness and bad
management. Happily, some of those who had control under him were
wiser and more daring. There was General Brock, for example, whose
name will be held in high honour by Canadians when Prevost's is long
forgotten.

Brock was a tall, robust man of fifty-two, who had been ten years in
the country and knew how to get on with the Canadians better than most
Old Country officers. He did not expect the militia to be like regular
soldiers, and when they could be spared he let them go home to attend
to the work on their farms. He was lieutenant-governor of Upper
Canada, where most of the fighting took place, but the whole country
leaned on him; his spirit put confidence into the soldiers wherever he
appeared, and he only lost one man by desertion during the three years
of his command.

It was the Niagara peninsula which the United States longed for--that
fertile triangle of country which follows Lakes Erie and Ontario to
the southward--but they did not doubt that the whole of Canada would
speedily become theirs; for was not England fighting for her very life
against the all-conquering Napoleon, and what could Canada do with her
four hundred thousand people opposed to the six millions in the United
States, and with but five thousand regular troops to defend a frontier
of seventeen hundred miles? She soon showed what she could do.

=1812.= On the 17th of July, at the very opening of the war, the post
at Michilimackinac was taken by surprise by a band of fur-traders, and
Canada thus got control of Lake Michigan. No more than in 1776 did the
Canadians jump for joy at the idea of becoming citizens of the United
States. General Hull, who had crossed the river from Detroit on the
12th of July, camped near the village of Sandwich, but he found his
proclamation about the liberty he had brought to a down-trodden people
treated with scorn, and when it came to fighting he was badly beaten
by Tecumseh and his band. General Brock followed the Americans back to
Detroit and took possession of that town on the 16th of August. Its
surrender was followed by that of twenty-five hundred troops and the
whole State of Michigan.

Their former experience made the Americans hesitate about attacking
Quebec; Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were safe, because New England
did not approve of the war and took no part in it; it was the nine
hundred miles between Quebec and Detroit that were threatened. The
United States troops tried to place themselves firmly on the St.
Lawrence, so that they might keep supplies from reaching Upper Canada.
It seemed easier to starve her out than to fight her, though Brock had
under him only thirteen hundred men, of whom the half were Indians.

He had less than a thousand with him in October at Fort George, which
faced Fort Niagara at the mouth of the river, when he heard that
fourteen hundred Americans had crossed in the darkness and had made
their way to a strong position on Queenston Heights, below the falls.
Brock rode to the scene in hot haste, but while leading his men up the
steep hill to dislodge the invaders, he was shot through the breast
and died almost at once. His last words were, "Push on the York
Volunteers!" and the York volunteers did push on, driven mad by the
death of their beloved general; but it was not until more men came up
from Fort George, to raise their numbers from six hundred to a
thousand, that the Canadians, under General Sheaffe, stormed the
heights and drove the Americans backwards over the steep bluff up
which they had climbed. Nine hundred and sixty of them preferred to
surrender as prisoners. This victory did much towards giving the
Canadians confidence in their power to defend their borders, even
against a superior force; and the tall stone monument erected to
General Brock, on Queenston Heights, keeps the memory of it ever
green.

The third as well as the second landing of American troops on Canadian
soil took place on the Niagara River, this time above the Falls, where
again they crossed by night, hoping to take Fort Erie at the head of
the stream; but Fort Erie refused to be taken.

Canada needed all her land victories to make up for the losses England
was having at sea. Her best ships were busy near Europe, and those
that came to the American war were mostly old and out of repair. Their
guns could not carry so far as those of the United States, whose
gunners quickly found that they could batter a British ship to bits
while keeping out of range of her cannon; or if she sailed too fast
for them, they had plenty of home ports to run into for refuge. In the
first five sea-fights of the war the Americans were victorious, but in
each case the United States vessel was the heavier of the two, carried
more guns, and had a larger crew.

=1813.= The first battle of the new year took place in the west, where
the whole country had been in the hands of the Canadians since the
fall of Detroit. A body of Kentucky riflemen trying to retake it were
met and defeated on January 23rd at Frenchtown, on the Raisin River,
by a somewhat larger force of British. Seldom had Canada the advantage
in numbers. Her troops on the Niagara frontier were but half so many
as those across the river; and there were twenty thousand men in arms
ready to be poured into the country between Kingston and Montreal,
where there were less than five thousand to oppose them.

But battles are not always to the strong. When the Americans had
crossed the St. Lawrence on the ice and made a raid upon Brockville,
robbing houses and taking off peaceful villagers as prisoners, they
were repaid by an attack on the fortified town of Ogdensburg, further
down the river. Major Macdonell of the Glengarry Highlanders was the
hero of that exploit, leading four hundred and eighty men of different
regiments. They surprised the garrison, took seventy-five prisoners,
burned the barracks and four war vessels, but did no harm to citizens
or to private property.

From Sackett's Harbour, opposite Kingston on Lake Ontario, came most
of the American war vessels that did damage to the Canadians, and it
would have been taken at the first but for Prevost's want of
enterprise. Twenty-five hundred men sailed from there to York
(Toronto), a defenceless village of less than a thousand people, but
then, as now, the capital of Upper Canada. They burned the public
buildings, and took away much plunder from private houses; then
crossed the lake to the mouth of the Niagara River; but the Canadians
blew up Fort George, and deserted all the other frontier posts at
their approach. The garrisons of these, joined together, made up an
army of sixteen hundred men, under General Vincent, who ordered their
retreat to Burlington Heights at the head of Lake Ontario. The
Americans followed them as far as Stoney Creek, a tiny stream running
into the lake about seven miles from the Heights, and there they
encamped.

On the night of June 5th, under cover of the darkness, seven hundred
of Vincent's men, led by Colonel Harvey, fell upon the American force,
five times larger than their own, and completely routed it, took the
two leaders prisoners and more than a hundred men besides. The
invaders retreated towards the Niagara, and gave up all the posts they
had taken upon it except Fort George. The Canadians advanced as they
retired, and two hundred Mohawks from the Grand River and Caughnawagas
from the St. Lawrence came along to help them.

Five hundred Americans sallied out of Fort George one dark night in
June, bent on surprising the Canadian outpost at Beaver Dam; and they
would surely have succeeded in their plan but for the brave act of
Laura Secord, a farmer's wife of the neighbourhood, who walked
nineteen miles through the woods and swamps, past the pickets of the
enemy, and warned the British of the proposed attack. So it came to
pass that it was the Americans who were surprised by falling into an
Indian ambush, and when Lieutenant Fitzgibbon appeared and demanded
their instant surrender if they would be saved from massacre by the
savages, they thought they were surrounded by a large force and gave
themselves up as prisoners. This was rather awkward for Fitzgibbon,
who had only fifty men, but he did not let the enemy know that, and he
managed to prolong the business of the surrender until another party
of British soldiers came to keep him in countenance.

The Canadians now returned to the Niagara frontier to be the
attackers, not the attacked. They captured Forts Schlosser and Black
Rock on the American side early in July, but the same month saw a
number of their vessels taken by the fleet from Sackett's Harbour, and
saw also another burning and robbing raid upon York. British boats
were victorious on Lake Champlain; but the hottest fight of the year
was upon Lake Erie on September 10th, when Captain Barclay, with six
ships, met Commodore Perry with ten smaller ones, and the Canadians
were defeated. This gave the Americans control of Lake Erie, and the
power to shut out supplies from Detroit, so General Proctor decided to
give up that post, which the Canadians had held for a year, and make
his way back into Canada with his four hundred British and eight
hundred Indians under Tecumseh. He was followed by an army of three
thousand Americans, and a battle was fought on the 5th of October at
Moravian Town, an Indian settlement on the Thames. The British had no
faith in their leader, and they ran away after the first attack; but
not so the Indians, who stood steadfast with their brave chieftain.
Tecumseh was at length shot dead, and then his tribesmen scattered,
while the victors burned Moravian Town, and they held Amherstburg
until the close of the war.

This defeat in the west was balanced by victories in the east over the
two American armies that were marching upon Montreal. Three hundred
French Canadian volunteers were foremost in the famous fight at
Chateauguay, where ten times their number were defeated. By a clever
blowing of bugles and yelling of Indians the United States troops were
led to think themselves in the middle of an immense army, and they
fled in great disorder. The other victory was at Chrystler's Farm,
above the Long Sault Rapids of the St. Lawrence, where the invading
army of three thousand was met and beaten by eight hundred British on
November 12th.

The month of December left scars on the banks of the Niagara. The
harmless village of Newark was burned for no cause by the New York
militia, and its old people, children, and invalids turned out
homeless on a cold winter night. That cruel deed made the Canadians
very angry, and they in their turn crossed to the American side and
burned every place from Lewiston to Buffalo.

The British defeats at sea of 1812 were not continued in 1813. It was
in the month of June, in the latter year, that the well-matched battle
took place between the _Chesapeake_ and the _Shannon_, which crowds
from Boston went out in pleasure boats to see. They had the
displeasure of seeing their frigate taken in about ten minutes and
towed off as a prize to Halifax.

=1814.= Four thousand United States troops on the way to take Montreal
in the spring were stopped by three hundred and forty Canadians posted
in a strong two-storey mill on the Lacolle River, a branch of the
Richelieu. Oswego was taken by the Canadians in May, but Fort Erie was
lost to them in June. They were beaten also at Street's Creek near
Chippewa, but made up for that by covering themselves with glory at
Lundy's Lane. That battle was fought near Niagara Falls; it lasted
from nine o'clock at night till midnight on July 25th, and was the
hardest fought fight of the whole war. The Americans were double in
number to the Canadians, and both sides claimed the victory, but the
Canadians held their ground, while the Americans retreated to Fort
Erie. The British failed in an attempt to dislodge them from there,
but on November 5th the Americans retired to their own side of the
river, for the war was over. Its last scene in Lower Canada was the
failure of Sir George Prevost to take Plattsburgh on Lake Champlain,
for which he was greatly blamed.

The United States did not get off scot-free for the damage she had
done to Canada. When Great Britain had beaten Napoleon, and was free
to turn to America, she sent a fleet to blockade and bombard the
Atlantic ports of the United States. The Capitol and other public
buildings in Washington were burned in return for what had been done
at York. At the very close of the war the British army lost two
thousand men before New Orleans; but the Treaty of Ghent brought peace
and goodwill on Christmas Day. Neither side kept anything that had
been taken, so that the war left boundary lines where they had been
before; but the United States had suffered terribly in her commerce
and shipping, while Canada had gained in patriotism and in
self-reliance.




[Illustration: NEW BRUNSWICK coat of arms]

CHAPTER XVI

MISGUIDED PATRIOTS


After the war was over Canada went forward at a quick march. The St.
Lawrence was just two years behind the Hudson in having steamboats.
The _Accommodation_, which made the first trip between Quebec and
Montreal in 1809, was designed by John Molson, and her hull was built
on the river bank behind his brewery in Montreal. The first steamship
to cross the Atlantic was built in Quebec in 1831, and called the
_Royal William_; the famous Cunard line was started in Halifax, but
the first Atlantic liners owned in Canada belonged to the Allans of
Montreal.

The Rapids of St. Louis, which had barred the way to the west for
Jacques Cartier and every later voyager, were overcome by the Lachine
Canal in 1821, and even Niagara Falls were surmounted by the building
of the Welland Canal, eight years later. Vessels now sailed without
hindrance from Quebec to the head of Lake Huron.

=1825.= New Brunswick had a set-back in the terrible forest fire that
began at the Bay of Chaleur and spread over the country until eight
thousand square miles of woods were burned. Two thousand people were
left homeless, and over a hundred were either burned or drowned in the
waters on which they had set out for safety in rafts too insecure.
Even the fishes in the streams, the seagulls, the snakes in the woods,
died from the intense heat, and many cattle were lost that had no
stream near to run into and save themselves. Help for the sufferers
came in from the United States as well as from Great Britain and
Canada, to the amount of 43,607. Fredericton, New Brunswick, was half
burnt up the same day, though not in the same fire; and three times
has St. John's, Newfoundland, been laid in ashes, the last time in
1892. Vancouver, British Columbia, had her fiery trial in 1886, when
fifty lives were lost and only four houses left standing; but the help
that one province gives to another on these occasions binds them all
more closely together.

New Brunswick College, Fredericton, dates back to the first year of
the century, and the free schools of Lower Canada to the second, while
McGill College, Montreal, was founded in 1813. Public schools were
started in Upper Canada in 1816, and in 1827 Toronto stepped forward
with her university. Nova Scotia, whose chief support had been
hitherto her fisheries, found a new outlet for her energies in
coal-mining, begun at Stellarton, though coal had been shipped from
Cape Breton a hundred years before. The first railway in Canada was a
line of fourteen miles between the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu. It
was begun in the first of the two Cholera Years, 1832 and 1834. That
dire disease was brought to Quebec on an emigrant ship from Ireland,
and it carried off its thousands in the two summers.

The rush of emigrants continued, but no increase, either in population
or in prosperity, made any difference to the Colonial Office in
London, usually spoken of as "Downing Street," from the place where it
is. The rulers there were anxious to do right by the colonies, but
they did not understand that they had passed the kindergarten stage
and were ready to enter the school proper.

True, they elected members to their assemblies, who were supposed to
manage the affairs of the country, but these were really in the hands
of the Council in each province. The members of that body held office
for life, and when once they got in they did not care whether what
they did pleased the people or not. Each new governor that came out
depended on the Council for advice, and through him it managed to keep
control of all public offices and lands, as well as of the money
collected in custom duties. The councillors were not robbers, like
Bigot and his crew, but they loved power, and were bound to have it
all locked up in a certain little circle composed of themselves and
their friends. In Upper Canada this clique was called "The Family
Compact."

The governors of the period, too, were honest men; not one of them
tried to get rich at the country's expense, and several of them were
personally popular with the Canadians--the Duke of Richmond, for
example, the worst ruler of the lot, whose death from the bite of a
tame fox caused great grief in the colony. He and all the rest came
out with the idea firmly fixed in their minds that their first duty
was to see that the Canadians obeyed orders from Downing Street, even
about their smallest local affairs, though the postage on a letter to
England was four or five shillings, and it took weeks to get there.

The same kind of mistakes had ended in the revolt of the thirteen
colonies, but British America was too well mixed with U. E. Loyalists
to think of following their example. What each province wanted was to
have its Council composed of men not only elected by the people but
responsible to the people for what they did; holding their places only
so long as they kept the public confidence and were re-elected. That
is what is meant by Responsible Government, and that is what Canadians
enjoy to-day; but in the year of Queen Victoria's coronation it was
not so much a matter-of-course as it was in the year of her Diamond
Jubilee.

One standing grievance of the Reformers was the way in which lands set
apart for the clergy were given to those of the Church of England
alone, though there were in the Canadas more Presbyterians and
Methodists than Episcopalians, and more Roman Catholics than all other
denominations joined together. This was a point upon which William
Lyon Mackenzie had much to say. He was a Scotchman, and the editor of
the _Colonial Advocate_, published in Toronto. Some of his remarks
about the land laws, the Post Office, the way in which education was
discouraged, and public meetings for the discussion of politics
forbidden by the Family Compact, were highly displeasing to the
friends of that body. One light June evening in 1826, when Mackenzie
was out of town, fifteen young men, who considered themselves
gentlemen, broke into his printing office, smashed his machines, and
threw the types into the bay. These "kid-gloved roughs" were fined,
and Mackenzie, who had been on the point of giving up his paper
because it did not pay, was able to keep it going on the strength of
the 625 damages he obtained. The ill-usage he had received made him a
hero in the eyes of his townsfolk; he was elected to the Assembly, and
when "muddy little York" had twelve thousand inhabitants and called
itself the City of Toronto, William Lyon Mackenzie was its first mayor
(1834).

The Family Compact had so much power they could generally have members
that pleased them elected to the Assembly, and these felt bound to do
their bidding. Mr. Mackenzie did not please them, and therefore they
had him expelled three times, and three times the people sent him back
again. The excuse the Tories made for their tyranny was that so many
Americans, drawn by the cheapness of land, had come into Upper Canada,
there was danger of its being annexed to the United States; and that
their party, being mostly U. E. Loyalists, were the best guardians. In
their determination to give England her due, they forgot what was due
to the colonies. A commissioner was sent out from Downing Street to
look into the complaints, but the only result of his report was that
the Reformers were told that they could not have Responsible
Government; that if the Assembly refused to vote money to be spent by
the Council, the latter could take it out of the public funds without
asking leave.

Some of the Reformers, sure that they had right on their side,
believed that sooner or later Downing Street would become sure of it
too, but Mackenzie could not wait. Fifteen hundred men put down their
names on his list as being willing to take up arms for their
rights--provided they could get the arms. There were four thousand
muskets stored in Toronto City Hall; these must be taken by surprise.
Sir Francis Bond Head, the lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada, had
sent away all the regular troops to Lower Canada to quell the uprising
there, refusing to believe that there was any trouble at his own door,
though he was well warned by Colonel Fitzgibbon, the hero of Beaver
Dam.

=1837.= Seven or eight hundred men met Mackenzie at Montgomery's
Tavern, on Yonge Street, a few miles out of Toronto, but they were
badly armed, and before they could march into town the bells rang out
an alarm. Fitzgibbon mustered the volunteers to defend the City Hall
and remove the arms it contained to a safer place. Help came from
Hamilton too, under Colonel, afterwards Sir Allan, Macnab, who marched
out Yonge Street with five hundred militiamen and quickly routed the
rebels on Montgomery's Farm.

Mackenzie made his escape to Buffalo, New York State, whence, buoyed
up by the sympathy given him, he and his friends established
themselves on Navy Island and pretended to rule Canada from there. The
little side-wheel steamer _Caroline_ went back and forth between the
island and the American shore carrying provisions to the rebels, but
one dark winter night a party of Macnab's "Men of Gore," who were
guarding the Canadian side, rowed across the swift and dangerous
current, seized the _Caroline_ as she lay at her wharf, put the crew
ashore, set the steamer afire, and sent her all ablaze over the
Niagara Falls. The rebels were thus starved out.

The President of the United States had forbidden any of its citizens
to help the insurgents, but his orders were not obeyed, for there were
always plenty of idle men in the larger towns glad of an excuse for a
plundering excursion into Canada. Four hundred of them were met on the
ice of the Detroit River by a smaller band of British regulars and
driven back to their own shore. There was another fight in the same
district the next year, when four hundred and fifty rebels and their
friends crossed from Detroit to Windsor, and did a lot of damage on
their march towards the village of Sandwich. There Colonel Prince met
them with half the number of militia, and succeeded in beating them so
badly that they made no more raids.

=1838.= The most heroic stand of the rebellion was made at Prescott in
November of that year, under a brave and skilful soldier from Poland,
Colonel Van Schultz. Of the six hundred men who joined him at
Ogdensburg, partly "patriots" and partly American seekers of land,
only one hundred and seventy reached the Canadian shore. There they
were caught in a trap, for the American authorities seized their boats
and they could not get back again, nor could the rest of the six
hundred come to help them. Being hotly attacked, the invaders took
refuge in a big stone windmill near Prescott, and held out there for
three days, till regulars came from Kingston with cannon strong enough
to batter down the walls. Then they gave up, and Van Shultz with
eleven others was brought to trial and hanged.

=1837.= In Lower Canada, the rebellion took more the form of a war of
races. The French Canadians, who numbered three times more than the
British, thought it was not fair they should have no voice in the
governing Council. Their leader was Louis J. Papineau, Speaker of the
House of Assembly, who well knew how to stir up the excitable minds of
his countrymen against the powers that be. He was better as a talker
than a fighter, and when the "Sons of Liberty" were called to arms, it
was Dr. Wolfred Nelson who commanded them. He lived at St. Denis on
the Richelieu River, and before there had been any fighting in Upper
Canada, a battle took place there which lasted from nine o'clock in
the morning till four in the afternoon of November 23rd. The troops
from Montreal, who were tired before it began with their twelve-hour
march through the mud, could not drive the rebels out of the
four-storied stone building in which they had placed themselves; but
the victory did Nelson no good. He had not the means to keep up a war;
and when his followers heard that another body of soldiers was coming
against them they went home, and he made his way over the line into
the States. So did Papineau.

There was another skirmish two days later in the neighbouring village
of St. Charles, but the rebels ran away at the first cannon-shots. At
St. Eustache, north of Montreal, some "Sons of Liberty" took
possession of a stone church, and had to be burnt out of it. A final
attempt to turn Lower Canada from her allegiance to Great Britain was
made by a brother of Dr. Nelson in the autumn of 1838. After a fight
with the Caughnawaga Indians, in which the rebels were beaten, the
latter marched on to Odelltown, where it was the militia who gained
the church and the insurgents were not able to put them out. As in
Upper Canada, citizens came from the United States to help the
"patriots," and stayed only long enough to help themselves. Priests
and seigneurs stood firm for British connection, and when the leaders
of the revolt had all sought safety in the States, the people soon
came back to their senses.

There was no fighting in Nova Scotia nor in New Brunswick, simply
because the leaders of the reform party had better judgment than to
seek to gain their ends in that way. Joseph Howe, editor of the _Nova
Scotian_, and a statesman who served his country honourably to the day
of his death, was a very different man from William Lyon Mackenzie, of
Toronto. Howe hated the rule of the few over the many just as
heartily, and he too, as a member of Assembly, lifted up his voice
against the oppression of his own province; but he had a cooler head
than Papineau, and a keen sense of humour that helped to keep him
sane. Lemuel Allan Wilmot was the leader in New Brunswick and a good
speaker too, though not so witty as Howe. The plan of both men was to
keep on appealing to the lawgivers at Downing Street, without breaking
the laws, on the principle that constant dropping wears out a stone.
The stone did wear out in the end, but its yielding was delayed by the
rebellion, for of course so much talk about annexation sent all the
moderate Reformers over to the Tory side.




[Illustration: BRITISH COLUMBIA coat of arms]

CHAPTER XVII

THE NEW DOMINION


=1838.= At length there was sent to Canada a governor-general who was
clever and strong-minded enough to think for himself, and not to be
ruled by Council or Family Compact. Lord Durham was only six months in
the country, from May till October, but in that time he took pains to
get at the root of the trouble, and he fully succeeded. Nor was he
afraid, as the governors before him had been, to tell unpleasant
truths to Downing Street, about how much cause Canadians had had to
revolt. Great Britain had learned something by the loss of her other
colonies in America and was more than willing to act upon Lord
Durham's report.

In course of time each province gained her heart's desire, Responsible
Government.

=1840.= Lord Durham's advice was also carried out in the union of
Upper and Lower Canada, with Kingston for a capital. The French
Canadians did not like that arrangement very well, looking upon it as
a scheme for doing away with their language, laws, and religion. The
English minority in Lower Canada would be turned into a majority, and
have things all their own way in the Assembly, when joined by the
English of Upper Canada. Before very long the Upper Canadians wanted
to send more members to Parliament because they had more people than
Lower Canada; but the latter would not let them. So the two provinces
jogged along in an uncomfortable harness, pulling together about as
well as an ox and a mule might do.

=1842.= French and English colonists had fought about the boundary
line of Acadia; the quarrel was now between lumbermen of New Brunswick
and the United States. They had come to blows in 1839, and their two
Governments saw that the time had arrived when the matter must be
settled. England was far away and did not care very much about it, so
by the Ashburton Treaty, a handsome slice of New Brunswick was given
to Maine. The Americans were sharp enough to keep out of sight a
correct map they had of the boundaries agreed upon at the Treaty of
Versailles.

=1849.= The Canadian Parliament voted money to pay damages to those
who had had property destroyed in the late rebellion; but Upper Canada
objected to any of this fund going to Lower Canada, where, it was
said, all the people had been rebels at heart. Montreal was having its
turn of being capital, and when the governor, Lord Elgin, signed the
Rebellion Losses Bill, he was mobbed in the streets. The rioters then
went to the House of Parliament, turned out the members, and burned
the building to the ground.

=1858.= That settled Montreal's fate as the capital of Canada; and
Queen Victoria was asked to choose a new site, where good buildings
would be erected for Parliament to meet in every year, instead of
being changed from place to place as it had been. The Queen fixed upon
Bytown, a small lumber village on the Ottawa River, named from Colonel
By, engineer of the Rideau Canal. Neither Toronto nor Kingston,
Montreal nor Quebec could be jealous of so humble a rival, and it was
farther away from the frontier than any of them. The name was changed
to Ottawa, which thus became the permanent capital of Canada. The same
year saw a submarine cable laid from England to Halifax, and dollars
and cents used instead of pounds, shillings, and pence.

=1859-1860.= The next year was noted for a change in the land system
of Lower Canada. The Government bought out the seigneurs and gave each
habitant the chance to buy his own farm--thus doing away with the
feudal system which had been in force since the settlement of the
country. The lands set apart for the clergy were given up to be used
for the purposes of education, and Canada has never since had an
established Church. The visit of the Prince of Wales was a great event
in the colony. He opened the Victoria Railway Bridge which spans the
wide, swift St. Lawrence at Montreal, and is the largest tubular iron
bridge in the world. His Royal Highness also laid the cornerstone of
the Parliament Buildings at Ottawa.

=1866.= When the war between the North and South in the United States
was over, a number of idle soldiers were let loose upon the country,
and some of these who belonged to the Fenian Brotherhood thought that
the time had come to revenge Ireland's wrongs by making a raid on
Canada. The United States Government took no steps to stop them. In
the month of May, one Colonel O'Neil, with nine hundred Fenians,
crossed from Buffalo in scows and made for the Welland Canal, to
destroy it; but before they got there they were met at the village of
Ridgeway by five or six hundred militia from Toronto and
Hamilton--shopmen, clerks, and mechanics, who had never smelt powder.
The 16th Regiment of British regulars was approaching from another
direction, but the volunteers were in too great a hurry to wait for
it. Seeing some horses' heads on the horizon, the colonel, an
auctioneer from Hamilton, shouted the command, "Form square to receive
cavalry!" No cavalry came of course, but those youths whose faces had
been turned homewards by the stupid order, charged in that direction,
and their comrades quickly did the same when fired upon by the
Fenians. The invaders ran away too when they heard that the regulars
were coming, and so the canal was saved.

During the next three or four years the Fenians made several trips
over the Canadian border at different points from Quebec to Manitoba,
but at length the officer in command of the American fort nearest to
Winnipeg, on the Red River, arrested Colonel O'Neil, and his followers
soon scattered.

It was in the autumn of 1864 that the first steps were taken towards a
union or confederation of all the British colonies in North America.
The Maritime Provinces--Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward
Island--had sent delegates to meet at Charlottetown, the capital of
Prince Edward Island, for the purpose of talking about a union among
themselves. To this meeting came a strong deputation from the Canadas,
Upper and Lower, proposing the larger scheme of uniting all the
provinces, and this was further discussed at a conference held in
Quebec a month later. Thirty-three delegates met there for eighteen
days, and seventy-two resolutions were adopted which met with approval
in Great Britain, but were not at once agreed to by the different
provinces. Upper and Lower Canada were the strongest in favour of
confederation, and so soon as it was settled they changed their names
and became the provinces of Ontario and Quebec.

Nova Scotia was displeased because her Government agreed to
confederate without taking a second vote from the people about it, and
stirred up by the eloquence of Joseph Howe, still her most famous
statesman, she went so far as to try to get out of the union a year
after it was made. Her wounded feelings were soothed in time, chiefly
by the generous help given by her sister provinces at the time when a
large portion of her population was brought to the point of starvation
by a bad season in the fisheries. New Brunswick was not very
enthusiastic, until the unfriendliness of the United States made her
long for the support of the other provinces. The New Dominion of
Canada, which was born on the 1st of July, 1867, is worthy of having
its birthday ever remembered with pride and joy by future generations
of Canadians.

From the American war the provinces learned one lesson of importance,
and that was how to confederate. The trouble in the United States had
arisen through the central government at Washington having too little
power and each individual state too much. The thirteen English
colonies had sprung up with different laws and with different kinds of
colonists. Though they agreed to unite in throwing off the yoke of the
mother country, they were still jealous of one another and afraid that
state rights would be taken away by the central government, so they
yielded no more of them than they could possibly help. Hence it came
to pass that the Southern States thought they could go out of the
union, whenever its plans did not please them, and for this right they
fought and were defeated.

Canada, on the contrary, gave all power to the central government at
Ottawa, and it decided what each province should do for itself. The
building of schools, for example, and public works of all sorts; the
granting of licences and the payment of taxes; the punishment of crime
and the arrangement of any affairs which the various towns cannot
settle for themselves--these are some of the duties of the provincial
government which is stationed in the capital of each province, and has
its House of Parliament on the same plan as the one at Ottawa.

The Dominion Government has control of the banks, the Post Office, the
Indians and their lands, the trade between provinces and that with
foreign nations, the defence of the country by land and sea, the
fisheries, and any other matters that concern the Dominion as a whole.
England reserves to herself the right to interfere if the Parliament
at Ottawa makes laws that clash with those that the Parliament in
London has made in respect to the dealings of the British Empire with
other nations; but if one of those other nations should dream of
conquering Canada, it would find itself face to face with the army and
navy of Great Britain.

The governor-general of Canada is appointed by the Queen, for five
years, and his power, like hers, is moral and social, rather than
political, for he can do nothing without the consent of his Council,
or cabinet of thirteen members, responsible to the people. The
governor and his cabinet appoint the lieutenant-governor for each
province, and also the senators, who hold office for life and
correspond to the Lords of England. The judges too are appointed for
life, instead of being elected, as in the United States; and it has
been found that justice is more apt to be done by a man who has
nothing but the right and wrong of a case to think of, than by one who
is likely to be tempted to consider how his judgment will please the
voters who have made him a judge and can unmake him at the next
election.

Canadians proudly affirm that their government is more stable and
gives more security to life and property than that of the United
States. Its officials are not certain to lose their places whenever a
new party comes into power, and are not therefore tempted, in the same
degree, to help themselves out of the nation's pocket during the short
time that they have the chance.

=1873.= Prince Edward Island did not come into the confederation till
it had been tried for six years and proved a success. Newfoundland saw
no advantage to herself in it above the Responsible Government which
had been granted her, and the "Ancient Colony" prides herself in not
yet being swallowed up in the Dominion. Nor is Canada overanxious for
Newfoundland to join the sisterhood till she gets rid of her "French
shore." Better for England to have that affair in her own hands,
because it arose out of her having agreed, in the Treaty of Utrecht,
to let the fishermen of France land and dry their fish, erecting
stages or huts for the purpose, anywhere in the seven hundred miles
between Cape St. John and Cape Ray on the west coast of Newfoundland.
This agreement was made in 1713, when cod-fishing only was meant, but
that is at an end, so far as the French shore is concerned. The
industry now carried on there is lobster-catching, and permanent
buildings have been put up, wherein the lobsters are boiled and
tinned, ready for the market. Against the terms of the treaty, the
Frenchmen engaged in this work stay on the island all the year round,
and they will not let the English take part in the same business nor
settle on the disputed shore, and in these claims they have been
upheld by British ships of war.

France owns the two little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, close
by, which are the most famous smuggling resorts in North America and a
cause of great loss to the Canadian Customs; but the quarrel is
chiefly between France and England. It is Great Britain who must
demand of her neighbour across the Channel what right she has to keep
her Newfoundland subjects shut out from a valuable part of their
island; and to ask her also if she does not know the difference
between a lobster and a cod.




[Illustration: MANITOBA coat of arms]

CHAPTER XVIII

THE NORTH-WEST


The great lone land reaching from Lake Superior to the Rocky
Mountains, at the beginning of the nineteenth century owned no rulers
but the Hudson's Bay Company and its younger rival, the North-west
Company. Neither of these wanted settlers to come in, nor did the
Indians. The farmer was the foe to the fur trade, driving away the
wild animals; and therefore the outside world was led to believe that
the grassy prairies, now known to be one of the greatest wheat-growing
and cattle-ranching regions of the world, was naught but a dreary
waste, unsuited for bearing crops of any kind.

The employs of the Hudson Bay Company were mostly men from the Orkney
Islands, but the North-west Company found itself better served by
French Canadian _voyageurs_ and half-breeds, a wild, rollicking lot,
but obedient to their commanders and far more enterprising, as well as
better liked by the Indians, than the staider Scotchmen. When the
governor of the older Company was the Earl of Selkirk, the same who
had taken out Highlanders to Prince Edward Island, he thought he could
check the Nor'-westers by bringing out a number of his countrymen to
settle upon the Red River, where the Assiniboine flows into it.

=1811.= He secured a large grant of land there, and his colonists
sailed in July direct from Scotland to Hudson's Bay, the shortest sea
route; but as they were not landed until September, they got no
further than Nelson River that first winter, and suffered severely
from sickness and want of food. The next summer they reached Red
River, only to be met by a band of Nor'-westers, painted and dressed
like Indians, who warned them off the lands allotted to them and
forced them to continue their toilsome journey on foot to the nearest
Hudson's Bay post, which was at Pembina, in the territory of the
United States. There they spent the winter, supporting themselves by
hunting, and in the spring came down the Red River again. Lord Selkirk
sent out more emigrants, but he neglected to send enough food with
them, or implements to till the soil, so that for several seasons they
had to go to Pembina for the winter.

The North-west Company continued to oppose the settlement. Twice they
destroyed it by fire, and on one of those occasions killed its
governor and twenty-one of his men. That outrage made Lord Selkirk
bring out one hundred disbanded soldiers--French, German, and
Swiss--with whom he attacked and took Fort William, the western
headquarters of the rival Company. Then he brought more colonists,
supplied them with farming tools, and induced the original settlers to
come back. Not being of the kind which is easily discouraged, they
built their log-houses over again and lived on fish, roots, and wild
berries while they planted their fields once more. There were no trees
to be cut down and the rich soil gave a ready return, but before the
harvest ripened there came a plague of grasshoppers, which ate up
every green thing in sight. The hope of winter provision was gone in a
night, and once more the settlers had to take the weary tramp to
Pembina. They spent the next winter there also, for the grasshoppers
had left their families behind them to be fed before those of the
colonists.

Out of the first eight winters that these emigrants had spent in
America, they had so far been able to hold their own for only two at
the Selkirk settlement; and when foes from without ceased to trouble
them the Red River itself, through the jam of melting ice in the
spring following an unusually severe winter, rose nine feet in a day,
overflowed its banks and flooded the fields and houses. Losing heart
through year after year of bad fortune, some of the settlers gave up
trying to be farmers and became boatmen, hunters, or labourers for the
Hudson's Bay Company. About fifty families made their way east to
Toronto, but Lord Selkirk had seed-wheat carried all the way from the
Mississippi to help the rest; and the foreign soldiers he had brought
out settled down among them, thus making quite a mixture of
nationalities in the camp.

The war between the Hudson's Bay and North-west Companies had been
waged ever since the starting of the latter in 1783, but most of the
fighting had been done between the employs of the two in the far-off
wilds, where nobody heard about it. Lord Selkirk's attempt at making a
colony brought the strife to a head, and it was kept up with great
bitterness until his death. Soon after that the two became one under
the government of the Hudson's Bay Company, which bought the Earl's
settlement from his heirs and made their headquarters in it, at Fort
Garry. None of the colonists were allowed to do any fur-trading on
their own account, and they were supposed to get all the goods they
needed from the Company, which in return bought their farm produce.

=1821.= The older Company gained much in enterprise by its union with
the younger, and became more powerful than ever, with an immense
staff, though scattered over so wide an extent of territory there
would often be at a post only one or two white men, who were
completely at the mercy of the surrounding savages; but their fair
dealing kept them safe. Some of the strictest rules of the Company
were that the Indians should be treated kindly, should not be cheated
out of their furs, should be paid in advance for them when they had no
food, powder, or shot, and should be given the smallest possible
amount of strong liquor in return for the results of their winter
hunts. The value of all other skins was reckoned by that of the
beaver, used so much in Europe for the making of gentlemen's hats. A
fox or a bear, a lynx, an ermine, or a sable, was said to be worth so
many beaver skins.

The sixty thousand Indians--Assiniboines, Crees, Blackfeet, Peigans,
Chipewyans, and the rest--became more and more dependent on the
Hudson's Bay Company for their daily bread, as the buffalo grew scarce
and they could not get enough of its flesh to dry and smoke for their
winter supply of "pemmican." Once the herds had made the earth tremble
with their tread as they careered over the plains, chased by Indians
on horseback, who killed, just for sport, far more than they needed,
and paid no attention to the laws the Company made for preserving the
animal.

The Hudson's Bay Company gained respect both for itself and for the
British flag under which it traded, and in its long term of rule there
were no Indian wars such as spread terror through the western parts of
the United States. It kept out lawless fur-traders from the south, who
would have ruined the Indians with liquor, as well as speculators, who
would have stolen their lands. Thus it saved the country for England
and gave Canada a good lesson upon how to govern the vast territory
when it came into her hands.

=1869.= That happened by purchase, the Company still keeping its posts
and a small portion of land around each; but the change of rulers was
badly managed, and directly after she had created the new province of
Manitoba, the Dominion found herself with a rebellion on her hands.
The leader of it was a half-breed called Louis Riel, a man of some
little education and much influence with his countrymen, who looked
upon him as an inspired prophet more worthy of their regard even than
the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. Canada would have done better
to have explained her plans to her new subjects, and not have let
herself be represented in the west by some surveyors and loud talkers,
who had much to say about what they were going to do when the Red
River settlement became Manitoba. The half-breeds feared they would
lose their farms.

The lieutenant-governor sent from Ottawa to the new province by way of
the United States, was met near the frontier by Louis Riel with a body
of armed men, who had placed a barricade across the road and refused
to let him come farther, so he went back to Pembina. The rebels then
took possession of Fort Garry and set up what they called a
provisional government, with Riel at its head. He arrested about fifty
men who would not acknowledge his rule, and one of them, called Thomas
Scott, he tried by a sham court-martial, and then had him shot in a
most brutal manner just outside the gates of the fort. This murder set
all the English-speaking people of the settlement against Riel, though
many before had sympathised with the rebels, and it also raised a
storm of wrath in Ontario, the province to which Scott belonged.

=1870.= Five hundred regular troops and seven hundred militia were
sent west under Colonel Garnet Wolseley, who has since become
commander-in-chief of the British army, and as it was unlawful for
them to pass through the United States territory, the soldiers took
the old canoe route of La Vrendrye, from the head of Lake Superior,
by Rainy River and Lake of the Woods. After six hundred miles of most
difficult travelling they reached Fort Garry, to find its gates
standing open and the rebels gone. Lord Wolseley did not forget the
skill shown by Canadian boatmen on that expedition, and when he headed
another in Egypt (1884) he sent for about four hundred of them to help
him at the cataracts of the Nile.

Settlers now began to pour into Manitoba, and among them came
Icelanders and Mennonites, a German people who had been living in
Russia. Winnipeg, the thriving young capital of Manitoba that had
grown up round Fort Garry, became a university town in 1877. But the
Dominion had not yet done with M. Riel. He had made his escape to the
United States and become an American citizen, when the half-breeds of
the North-west Territory begged him to come back and help them get
their rights by force. Their farms stretched back from the
Saskatchewan River in long strips, after the Quebec fashion, and they
did not want surveyors to come in from Ontario and divide up the
country into square blocks. They had begged the Ottawa rulers to give
them good titles to their lands. They thought their district ought to
be made into a province with self-government, like Manitoba, and they
wanted schools and hospitals, seed-wheat and farming tools for
themselves, as well as hunting grounds set apart for their Indian
cousins, who looked to the half-breeds to plead their cause.

The Dominion Government had been slow in attending to these requests,
which were not all unreasonable, but they were quick enough in sending
out the militia to put a stop to the rebellion after it started. If
Riel had succeeded in his plan of rousing all the Indian tribes of the
North-west to go on the war-path, every lonely settlement would have
been wiped out, if not Winnipeg itself. As it turned out, the most
mischief was done by Big Bear, a chieftain of the Crees, whose
followers massacred a number of people at Frog Lake. Poundmaker, also
a Cree, declared afterwards that he would never have taken up the
hatchet if his people had not been first attacked; and the rest of the
tribes kept neutral.

=1885.= The first fight was at Duck Lake, between the north and south
branches of the Saskatchewan, where two hundred rebels, under Gabriel
Dumont (Riel's second in command and a good fighter), surprised and
defeated a force, half the size, of volunteers from Prince Albert and
North-west Mounted Police, the small, but well-trained body of men
whose duty it is to keep order throughout that immense territory.

Riel had taken up his stand at Batoche, on the southern branch of the
Saskatchewan, and there General Middleton marched to give him battle
with the regiments from Ontario and Quebec who had come part of the
way by the nearly completed Canadian Pacific Railway, but had still
much hard travelling to do at the worst season of the year, when the
snow is melting and the ice in the rivers breaking up. Before they
reached Batoche they were fired upon by Gabriel Dumont and two hundred
and eighty rebels who were hiding in the rifle-pits they had dug along
the banks of Fish Creek. After five hours' hot fighting with
Middleton's three hundred and fifty men, the half-breeds were driven
from one ravine to another and fell back on Batoche, where Middleton
thought it safer not to attack them till the rest of his troops
arrived.

Fort Pitt, between Edmonton and Battleford, had meanwhile been taken
by Big Bear's band, though the garrison of Northwest Mounted Police,
led by Inspector Dickens, a son of the novelist, had made its escape
in scows through the floating ice down the river to Battleford. There
also were gathered about six hundred people from the neighbourhood,
mostly women and children, in deadly fear of Poundmaker's tribe.
Colonel Otter, with three hundred Canadian regulars and volunteers, as
well as fifty mounted police, marched across the two hundred miles of
prairie to the relief of Battleford, and when it was safe he marched
out again to chastise Poundmaker. His men fell into an ambush laid by
the Indians in the ravine, through which runs Cut Knife Creek, and
after a six hours' fight they were obliged to retreat to Battleford.

The chief battle of the rebellion, and the one which ended it, was
begun at Batoche on the 9th of May, by which time the ice in the river
was loosened, and help could come up by steamboat from Lake Winnipeg.
The Canadians had one Gatling gun, worked by an American officer,
which was of great use in driving the rebels from their rifle-pits and
trenches. The fight lasted for three days, and the half-breeds never
stopped firing day nor night. They had many good sharp-shooters, and
were mostly very brave, but at last they had to give way to superior
numbers, and Batoche was taken by storm. Dumont made his escape, but
Riel was taken prisoner, brought to trial for treason, and in spite of
the plea of insanity and the race agitation started in his favour, he
was hanged at Regina, the capital of the North-west Territories.

=1890.= The whole of these--Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and
Athabasca--began to send members to Ottawa, and soon had Responsible
Government of their own. The half-breeds gained most of the things
they wanted, and the number of the North-west Mounted Police was
increased to one thousand, so that these brave red-coated troopers
have needed no more help in keeping the peace along "the far-flung
fenceless prairie."




[Illustration: BRITISH COLUMBIA coat of arms]

CHAPTER XIX

BRITISH COLUMBIA


"Alexander Mackenzie from Canada by land, the twenty-second of July,
one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-three."

That notice was painted up on a high cliff above the Pacific Ocean by
an officer of the North-west Company, who was afterwards knighted. He
had good reason to be proud of his exploit, for he was the first white
man to follow the Peace River through the Rocky Mountains; the first
to succeed in crossing them from the east; the first to make the
dangerous and difficult journey through another unknown sea of
mountains that extended to the coast; the first to reach the Pacific
Ocean, still the goal of every expedition from the East, whether by
land or sea. Mackenzie had tried it three years before, when he left
Lake Athabasca by canoe and went north through the Slave River and
Great Slave Lake into the mighty stream now called after him. He
sailed to its entrance into the Arctic Ocean before he decided that
the north-west passage was not to be found that way. In his overland
journeys in search of the same, between the years 1819 and 1827, Sir
John Franklin reached the Arctic Sea both by the Coppermine and the
Mackenzie River; but when he went into the frozen north with his two
ships in 1845 he never came out again, and looking both for him and
for the north-west passage, Arctic expeditions became more the rage
than ever. They did no good to Canada, for the tales of every returned
traveller were full of icebergs, glaciers, dog-trains, and Eskimo; and
it will still take many a barrel of Ontario apples and many an annual
report of shows where fruits almost tropical have been exhibited, to
make Europeans understand how great are the varieties of climate even
within the limits of one province such as British Columbia.

=1806, 1808, 1811.= Acting upon the advice of Sir Alexander Mackenzie,
the North-west Company set up trading posts in New Caledonia, as the
country to the west of the Rocky Mountains was then called, and the
first of these appears to have been upon Lake Stuart. The man from
whom it was named and Simon Fraser, the discoverer and explorer of the
famous river called after him, extended their travels as far south as
the Columbia River. There the Nor'-westers ere long came into contact
with the South-west Fur Company, started by John Jacob Astor, of New
York, whose trading post at the mouth of the Columbia was named
Astoria.

After a couple of years of rivalry the Nor'-westers bought out the
Astorians, but they did not long have the field to themselves, for the
Hudson's Bay Company followed them over the mountains. The strife
between the two was as keen as in the North-west Territories, but
after their union in 1821 the Hudson's Bay Company set up new trading
posts throughout New Caledonia and Oregon, which then included
California and Washington Territory. Its governor, Sir George Simpson,
travelled to Europe by way of Alaska and Siberia, and it was he who
had the first forts built on Vancouver Island. The Company held both
sides of the Columbia, from the Rocky Mountains to the sea, and had it
been backed up by the British Government the whole country from the
Russian possessions, now called Alaska, down to Mexico, might have
belonged to England.

=1826.= Little was known, or cared, in Great Britain about a land so
far away; but the United States were not blind to their own interests,
and they clamoured for a division of the territory. The boundary
agreed upon between their possessions and those of the Hudson's Bay
Company was the Columbia River; but the Company was allowed to hold
its trading posts as far south as San Francisco, and having leased
Alaska from the Russians, it kept them out of the fur trade, and
extended its own to Behring Sea.

The headquarters were at Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia River, about
twenty miles from its mouth, in the middle of a fine farming and
grazing country, upon which the Americans soon cast longing eyes. They
had had their own way with Great Britain in the settlement of
boundaries in the east; they expected the same indulgence in the west.
By claiming the whole region up to Russian America, latitude 54 40',
they might at least gain possession of the Columbia valley, so,
according to their custom, they raised a popular cry: "Fifty-four
Forty, or Fight!"

=1846.= Great Britain, far off and indifferent, gave way for the sake
of peace, and at the Treaty of Oregon yielded the country, not so far
as Russian America, it is true, but up to the forty-ninth parallel of
latitude; and thus was lost to Canada a large tract of country which
should now be hers. There was still further difficulty about the
ownership of the island of San Juan, to the south of Vancouver Island;
but the Americans got it at last.

Before the boundary disputes were settled the Hudson's Bay Company
thought it safer to move its headquarters to the southern end of
Vancouver Island, and there, in 1843, was built its strongest fort. It
had a cedar fence twenty feet high about the buildings, and a dozen
cannon mounted at the corners. That was the core around which grew
Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. It sprang from a trading
post into a city at one bound when gold was found in large quantities
on the Fraser River and its tributary, the Thompson, named from the
North-west Company surveyor who had discovered it half a century
before.

=1858.= Twenty or thirty thousand miners trooped in among the lonely
mountains of the mainland, chiefly from the California diggings, where
they had known no law but the revolver. They were hard to control, but
Governor James Douglas, also a chief factor of the Hudson's Bay
Company, proved equal to the task, and for his strong hand in keeping
order and his energy in having good roads built to open up the country
for settlement he is often called "the Father of British Columbia."

=1866.= Vancouver Island and the mainland were under separate
governments for eight years, and during that time New Westminster, on
the Fraser, was the capital of the latter, but the full dignity was
returned to Victoria at the union of the two, which was the first step
towards the entrance of British Columbia into the Canadian
Confederation. The Pacific province was not very anxious to go in. Her
colonists had come direct from England, round Cape Horn or northwards
from the United States; what interest had they in furthering Canada's
ambition to spread herself from ocean to ocean?

Settlers from Ontario, trailing their families and effects in huge
covered waggons over the plains, did well when they got as far as the
prairie province, Manitoba. To the westward was a vast plain over
which the Indian still roved in savage freedom, and then came the
Rocky Mountains, a high wall, hard to climb, guarding the approaches
to British Columbia. But the makers of the Dominion saw that unless
the provinces united and presented a solid front to the encroachments
of the United States, the latter would soon own all the country west
of the Rocky Mountains, up to the Arctic Ocean, for they had now
bought Alaska from Russia.

=1867.= If the British Columbians did not care particularly for Canada
they cared still less about annexation. Though there was much coming
and going with California by sea, the idea of taking second place to
San Francisco for good did not please Victoria. The English colonists
spoke out strongly in opposition to those from the United States, and
determined to keep up the British connection. They would join the
Canadian Confederation if Canada made it worth their while. In the
first place, she must shoulder their debt of $1,500,000, which the ten
thousand settlers in the province were finding a heavy burden;
secondly, and most important, she must build a railway across the
continent, connecting British Columbia with the Canadian railways in
the east.

=1871-1886.= Canada accepted the terms, and accordingly began the
Canadian Pacific Railway within two years from the time that the new
province came into the union; but in agreeing to finish it within ten
she had promised more than she could perform. To survey miles and
miles of unknown and mostly mountainous country in search of the best
route; to bridge deep canyons through which gigantic rivers roar in
torrents; to tunnel through the shoulders of mountains and make safe
roads along the sides of dizzy precipices; to avoid the probable track
of avalanches, and when all was done to build snow-sheds to shelter
the road where the drifts were found to be deepest was a labour in
which many an older and wealthier nation would have spent twenty
years. Canada is proud that she completed it in fifteen. The Dominion
Government undertook the task, but it was afterwards turned over to
the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, which sent a through train from
Montreal to Vancouver just five years after the time first appointed.

The resources of British Columbia are still so slightly developed that
they seem boundless. The Fraser River has treasures other than gold
with which to enrich the industrious. Countless salmon, some of them
seventy pounds in weight, run up into its waters in the summer, and
often there will be as many as two thousand fishing-boats about its
mouth at one time, which will each take two or three hundred fish into
the nets in a single night. These are for the two score of canneries
on the banks of the Fraser, and there are half as many more on the
smaller rivers and inlets of the coast. A tin of British Columbia
salmon has become a well-known article of food in the east, but it
represents only a part of her wealth in fish--she has many other
varieties.

Although it is not for farming lands that the Pacific, like the
prairie province, is specially noted, she has five hundred thousand
acres, chiefly in the Fraser valley and on Vancouver Island, that are
suitable for the purpose, and much that is now used only for grazing
will in course of time be sown with grain. It was not farmers, but
miners and speculators who took up the land, and the trees are so
large and the undergrowth so thick it is not easily cleared. The giant
Douglas fir, which along the coast lifts its head three hundred feet
in the air, clear of branches till half-way up, and measures five or
six feet through, is king of the British Columbia timber, which ranks
only second to her mines.

It was in the year 1851 that some Indians, watching a blacksmith at
work, told him they knew where he could get more of the black stone he
was using on his fire, and that remark led to the discovery of the
coal mines at Nanaimo, which have been worked ever since. It looked
like a special provision for the steamships which began to run to
Japan in 1887, that coal should be plentiful in Vancouver Island, just
as the amount of the same in Nova Scotia seems to have been stored
there on purpose to supply the fast Atlantic liners.

By the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, not only has the
wilderness of the North-west been made to blossom like the rose into
farms and villages, but the long-sought-for short cut to the East has
been discovered. There is no stronger evidence of that fact than the
number of Chinamen seen in British Columbia. Her climate, damp on the
coast, dry among the mountains, will attract many more desirable
colonists as the years go on, for the warm winds and currents of the
Pacific Ocean make her winters milder and her summers cooler than
those of any other province of the Dominion. Tourists, too, need no
longer go abroad for change of air, nor for glaciers, snow-capped
peaks, and other magnificent scenery. Switzerland is but a commonplace
penny pamphlet compared with that new and wildly romantic three-volume
novel, British Columbia.




[Illustration: PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND coat of arms]

CHAPTER XX

"DAUGHTER AM I IN MY MOTHER'S HOUSE, BUT MISTRESS IN MY OWN"


=1888.= Great Britain is beginning to realise that Canada is grown up.
The day is far past when her concerns were settled by English
statesmen without consulting her own. No longer can the United States
get for the asking as much of her territory and as many of her fishery
rights as they want. The Americans do not relish the change, and they
rejected the last Washington Treaty in which Nova Scotian fishery
claims might have been settled, because at length something like
justice was proposed to Canadian interests.

Still less did the United States commissioners relish the decision in
the Behring Sea dispute, which was settled by arbitration in Paris
(1893), for they were told that they could not claim the ocean as well
as the earth, and that Canadians had a perfect right to hunt for seals
in Behring Sea. Both nations bound themselves not to take the animals
in the early summer, nor to use firearms in their pursuit.

While under the rule of France, the sort of man sent out by the king
as governor had much to do with Canada's peace and prosperity; but
after Britain gained the colony, the people came more and more to the
front and the governor went more and more into the background. Since
confederation it has mattered but little to Canadians, except those
living in Ottawa who come in contact with him personally, what the
governor-general is like, though an exceedingly clever statesman, such
as Lord Dufferin, will leave his mark wherever he goes. The
improvements he carried out, or suggested, while in office
(1872-1878), as well as the able manner in which he spoke about
Canada's needs and her future after he went home, has given him a high
place in her regard. By the trip which he and Lady Dufferin took to
the Pacific Coast in 1876, Manitoba was made to feel herself an
important part of the Dominion and to realise what great things were
expected of her; while British Columbia was charmed out of her
irritation at the delay of work upon the Canadian Pacific Railway, on
which all her hopes were built.

The Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise who succeeded (1878-1883)
were acceptable rulers in a social sense, but the real power of the
country rests with the prime minister at Ottawa. The man in whom the
people have shown most confidence by keeping him longest in that
office was Sir John A. Macdonald, a leading spirit in forming the
confederation and the first premier of the New Dominion. Some acts of
his Tory government in connection with the building of the Canadian
Pacific Railway were not approved of, and for five years he was out of
power, when Alexander Mackenzie, head of the Liberal party, took the
helm; but Sir John came back, saw the great railway completed, and was
premier until his death. Whatever may be said of his use or abuse of
power, he did not employ it to enrich himself, for he died a poor man
(1891).

By putting a high duty upon American goods, he had encouraged Canadian
manufactures, and though this "National Policy" is contrary to British
ideas about free trade, so long as the United States keeps up a high
tariff wall Canada must do the same in self-defence. But not by laws
alone does she protect her borders. After confederation all the
British troops were withdrawn from Canada, excepting a few at Halifax,
the well-fortified city which has a cable laid to Bermuda and is the
headquarters for the British navy in the North Atlantic. The same
position in the North Pacific is held by Esquimault, a strongly
defended harbour in British Columbia. There are a few Canadian regular
soldiers at Fredericton, Quebec, Kingston, Toronto, London, and
Winnipeg; but the militia is the chief defence, and the number of men
between eighteen and sixty in a population bordering on five millions
is not to be scorned.

=1893.= Those who stood on the dock at Victoria and watched the first
steamship sail in from Sydney must have felt a thrill of brotherly
friendship go out towards the far-off Queen of the South. The feeling
will grow stronger yet when the submarine cable connects Canada and
Australia, helping Greater Britain to laugh at dividing distances and
to look forward with confident hope to the day when it will come into
a yet closer union with Lesser Britain.

Sir John Macdonald was the first of her statesmen to make Canada feel
herself no longer a colony but a nation, able not only to manage her
own household but to take a hand in the management of her mother's. He
was made a member of the Queen's Privy Council in 1879. Sir John
Thompson, a later premier of Canada, had just received the same honour
when he died, suddenly, at Windsor Castle, and his body was brought
home on a warship (1894).

By the time Imperial Federation is a fact, not a sentiment, Canada
will be not the least important factor in the sum. If size be taken
into account, she has that; if natural products, she will then be the
greatest wheat-grower among nations; nowhere else on the globe is
there so much coal and timber, such valuable fisheries. Already she
ranks as the fourth ship-owning country of the world, and the
fresh-water highway into her very heart is not equalled anywhere. In
1895 the crown was placed upon her canal system by the opening of the
one at Sault Ste. Marie, between Lakes Huron and Superior, and by the
time the St. Lawrence canals are made the same depth--twenty
feet--ships can sail from the ocean to the head of Lake Superior and
be in Canada all the way.

=1896.= The year after the waste lands in the northern part of the
Dominion were divided into the districts, Ungava, Franklin, Mackenzie,
and Yukon, the last-named sprang into worldwide fame by the discovery
of gold on the Klondyke, a Canadian branch of the Yukon River. As
usual on such occasions, there has been a frantic rush of
gold-seekers, and more than the usual number of lives lost by the
upsetting of boats in rivers dangerous with rapids or drifting ice; or
by cold and starvation in toiling through the snow-choked mountain
passes of the sub-arctics. There is said to be more gold there than
anywhere else in the world, but it is harder to get at than elsewhere,
because the ground is frozen hard all the year round and has to be
thawed out--no easy matter where wood and coal are so scarce. Dawson
City, from which the adventurers start for the Klondyke, is called the
greatest mining camp the world ever saw, but, unlike an American
mining centre, it is well governed. Law and order have never lost
their hold, though the district is shut out from the rest of the world
for eight months in every year.

=1897.= French Canadians have always taken a foremost part in Dominion
politics, but Sir Wilfrid Laurier is the first French Canadian prime
minister. Like most of his co-patriots in public life, he is a good
speaker and he was a credit to his country at the Victorian Diamond
Jubilee in London. That event was celebrated by an outburst of loyalty
that took the form of a public holiday with processions and speeches
in every town and village of Canada.

Laurier's government marks the return to power of the Liberal party
for only the second time since confederation. Its first attention was
turned to the settlement of the Manitoba school question that had been
gathering trouble about itself ever since the Separate Schools for
Roman Catholic children were voted down by a Protestant majority in
1890. To please both parties, it has been arranged that priests and
ministers alike shall be allowed to give religious instruction to the
lambs of their flocks for half an hour every day in the ordinary
schools, if enough of the parents desire it to make the clergymen
think it worth while.

The governor-general, Lord Aberdeen, took much interest in the matter,
but indeed there was nothing that concerned the Dominion in which he
and the Countess were not actively interested. Lady Aberdeen will
always be gratefully remembered as the founder of the Canadian branch
of the National Council of Women, and for her many and varied schemes
for the good of the country. The Earl of Minto, the present governor,
is not a stranger to Canada. When he was Lord Melgund he served on
General Middleton's staff in the second North-west Rebellion.

That Canada is beginning to have a say in her mother's house, was seen
when Great Britain altered her trade treaties with Germany and Belgium
at her request and for her benefit; while the Dominion in return
agreed to favour the entrance into her markets of British goods above
those of any other nation. Another sign of the times was the
introduction of the Imperial Penny Postage Stamp, on Christmas Day,
1898, making it cost no more to send a letter from Canada to London,
England, than to London, Ontario.

=1899.= It was in 1897 that the British Association for the
Advancement of Science met in Canada for the second time. One of the
gentlemen there present, Prince Koropotkin, visited the North-west and
was much impressed with Mennonite settlement there. He wrote an
account of his trip in an English magazine when he went home, and was
asked shortly afterwards if Manitoba would not make a suitable home
for the Doukhobors of Southern Russia, who were being fiercely
persecuted for their religion. The result has been the arrival in
Canada of seventy-five hundred of these peculiar people, who are like
the Quakers in believing it wrong to take up arms against a
fellow-man. They are hardy, honest peasants, well worthy of the help
the Dominion Government is giving them, and they will do more for the
future of Manitoba than any number of gold-seekers.

The strongest nations have been built up with a mixture of races, and
the time is at hand when French and English will remember only that
they are Canadians, will glory alike in the deeds that the ancestors
of either tongue have done upon this continent, and, resolving not to
be unworthy of the noble heritage left them, will look hopefully into
the future, will

    "Greet the unseen with a cheer."




INDEX


Abenakis, Indians, 5, 117, 118

Abercrombie, General, 137, 138, 140, 145

Aberdeen, Lord and Lady, 245

Acadians, 113, 116, 120, 121, 122, 125, 126

Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of, 125

Albanel, Father, 86

Alberta, Territory of, 226

Alexander, Sir William, 44, 47

Algonquin, Indians, 5, 6, 7, 51, 52, 53, 69, 70, 71, 73, 93, 94

Allouez, Father, 87

Americus Vespucius, 23

Amherst, General, 141, 149, 160, 163

Argall, Samuel, Captain, 43, 44, 63

Argenson, Vicomte d', 75, 78

Arnold, Benedict, Colonel, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173

Ashburton Treaty, 205

Assiniboia, Territory of, 226

Assiniboine Indians, 220

Athabasca, Territory of, 226

Avaugour, Baron d', 78



Barclay, Captain, 188

Batoche, Battle of, 226

Barn, Regiment of, 138

Beauharnois, Marquis de, 110

Berry, Regiment of, 138

Biencourt, 43, 44, 57, 63

Bienville, Le Moyne de, 108, 109

Bigot, Intendant, 113, 141, 147, 148, 161, 195

Big Bear, Cree Chief, 224

Biloxi, 108

Blackfeet, Indians, 5, 220

Black Watch, Regiment, 137, 138, 163

Boscawen, Admiral, 141, 144

Bougainville, 150, 152, 155, 160

Bouquet, Henry, Colonel, 163, 164

Braddock, General, 130, 131, 146

Bradstreet, Colonel, 145, 163

Brbeuf, Father, 65, 71

Breda, Treaty of, 48, 116

British Columbia, 11, 174, 175, 193, 229, 233-238, 241

Brock, Sir Isaac, 181, 183, 184



Cabot, John, 20, 21, 22, 43

Cabot, Sebastian, 20, 21, 22

Callires, Governor, 105, 106

Canadian Pacific Railway, 225, 235, 237, 241

Cape Breton, 16, 20, 22, 110, 121, 122, 124, 144, 176, 194

Carillon. _See_ Ticonderoga

Carleton, Sir Guy, 166, 169, 170, 171, 173, 177

Carignan-Salires, Regiment of, 79

Caughnawaga Indians, 106, 187, 202

Cartier, Jacques, 24-33, 38, 193

Cayugas, Indians, 6

Cloron de Bienville, 128

Champlain, Samuel de, 37-41, 49-61, 63, 64, 66, 71, 79, 80

Charnisy, d'Aulnay, 45, 46, 47

Chateauguay, Battle of, 189

Chipewyans, Indians, 220

Chrystler's Farm, 189

Church, Benjamin, Colonel, 120

Columbus, Christopher, 14, 19, 20, 23

Cook, Captain, 174

Cortereal, Gaspar, 21, 22

Courcelle, Governor, 81, 86, 89

_Coureurs de bois_, 76, 86, 97, 103, 109, 111

Craig, Sir James, 180, 181

Crees, Indians, 5, 220, 224

Cut Knife Creek, Battle of, 226



Daniel, Father, 71

Daulac, Adam, 73

Davis, John, 33

De Monts, 38, 40, 41, 49, 53, 62

Denonville, Governor, 94, 95

Detroit, 103, 104, 162-164, 182, 183, 185, 188, 200

Dickens, Inspector, N. W. M. P., 225

Dieskau, Baron, 132

Dollard. _See_ Daulac

Dollier de Casson, Father, 83, 84

Donnacona, 27, 28, 30, 31

Dorchester, Lord, 178. _See_ Sir Guy Carleton.

Douglas, James, 233

Doukhobors, 246

Drake, Sir Francis, 33

Drucour, Chevalier de, 144, 147

Duchesneau, Intendant, 90

Dufferin, Lord, 240

Du Lhut, 92, 103

Dumont, Gabriel, 224, 225, 226

Durham, Lord, 204, 205

Duquesne, Fort, 130, 131, 145, 146

Duquesne, Marquis, 129



Elgin, Lord, 206

Ericson, Leif, 15, 16

Eric the Red, 14, 15

Eskimos, 2, 3, 17, 229



Family Compact, The, 195, 197, 204

Fenians, 207, 208

Fish Creek, Battle of, 225

Fitzgibbon, Colonel, 187, 188, 198

Five Nations, or Six Nations, Indians. _See_ Iroquois.

Forbes, Brigadier, 146, 163

Fox, Indians, 104, 134

Francis the First, 22, 25, 32

Franciscans. _See_ Rcollets

Franklin, Sir John, 229

Fraser, Simon, 230

Frobisher, Martin, 33

Frontenac, Governor, 89, 90, 92-95, 97-100, 105, 106

Fuca, Juan de, 34



Galine, Father, 84, 85

Ghent, Treaty of, 191

Giffard, 77

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 34

Greenland, 2, 14, 18

Guienne, Regiment of, 138



Habitation de Quebec, 50, 51, 58

Haldimand, General, 160, 173

Half-breeds, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227

Harvey, Colonel, 187

Head, Sir Francis Bond, 198

Hearne, Samuel, 165

Hbert, 57

Hennepin, Father, 90, 92

Henry the Fourth of France, 36, 43

Hochelaga, 28, 29, 31

Howe, Hon. Joseph, 203, 209

Howe, Lord, 137

Hudson's Bay Company, 86, 100, 112, 113, 165, 174, 215, 216, 218, 219,
    220, 221, 230, 231, 233

Hudson, Henry, 42

Huguenots, 38, 41, 45, 58, 62, 109

Hull, General, 182

Huron Indians, 6, 7, 28, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 64, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72,
    73, 86, 87, 103



Iberville, Pierre le Moyne d', 99, 100, 107, 108

Icelanders, 223

Indians, 1-12, 19, 67, 215, 237

Iroquois, Indians, 5, 6, 7, 29, 52, 53, 56, 69-74, 80, 83, 86, 89, 90,
    93, 94, 95, 98, 99, 101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 133, 164



Jesuits, 43, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 71-75, 78, 84-86, 90, 93, 94, 111,
    117, 168

Jogues, Father, 72

Johnson, Sir William, 132, 133, 161, 164

Joliet, Louis, 84, 87

Joncaire, 107



Kirke, Admiral, 59, 60

Klondyke, 244



La Barre, Governor de, 93, 94

Labrador, 2, 16, 25

Lachine, Massacre of, 95

La Galissonire, Comte de, 127

La Jonquire, Marquis de, 113, 127, 129

Lalemant, Father, 65, 71

La Mothe-Cadillac, 103, 109

Languedoc, Regiment, 138

La Peltrie, Madame de, 68, 69

La Reine, Regiment, 138

La Roche, Dallion, 65

La Roche, Marquis de, 35, 37

La Salle, Robert Cavalier de, 83-85, 87-96, 104, 107, 108, 112, 113

La Sarre, Regiment, 138

La Tour, Charles de, 43-47

La Tour, Claude de, 44, 45

Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 244, 245

Laval, Bishop, 74-79, 90, 93, 100

La Vrendrye, Pierre Gautier de, 111, 112, 113, 222

Le Caron, Father, 64, 65

Le Jeune, Father, 68

Le Loutre, Abb, 125

Le Moyne, Charles, 99, 107

Lry, Baron de, 22, 36

Lvis, Chevalier de, 136, 147, 148, 150, 154, 155, 157-160

Lorne, Marquis of, 241

Loudoun, Lord, 134

Longueuil, 107

Louis XIV., 79, 94, 108, 109, 118

Louis XV., 140

Louisbourg, 122-125, 141-145, 147

Louisiana, 93, 104, 109, 147, 161, 164

Lundy's Lane, Battle of, 190



Macdonald, Sir John A., 241, 242

Macdonell, Major, 186

Mackenzie, Alexander, 241

Mackenzie, Sir Alexander, 228, 230

Mackenzie, William Lyon, 196-199, 203

Macnab, Sir Allan, 199

Maisonneuve, 69, 70

Mance, Mlle., 70

Manitoba, 208, 221, 223, 234, 240, 245, 246, 247

Markland, 16

Maricourt, 107

Marie de l'Incarnation, 69

Marquette, Father, 87

Masse, Father, 65

Meares, Captain, 175

Medicine Men, 67

Membertou, 40, 42, 63

Mennonites, 223, 246

Mzy, Governor, 78

Michilimackinac, 87, 103, 162, 182

Micmac, Indians, 5, 40, 63, 117, 125

Middleton, General, 224, 225, 246

Minto, Earl of, 245

Mohawk, Indians, 6, 56, 72, 80, 81, 133, 174, 180, 187

Molson, John, 192

Montcalm, Marquis de, 132-138, 147, 148, 150-154

Montgomery, General, 168-171

Montmagny, Governor, 66, 69, 75

Montagnais, Indians, 5, 51, 52, 65, 68

Moravian Town, Battle of, 189

Mound-builders, 4

Murray, General, 155-158, 160, 166



National Policy, 241

Nelson, Doctor Wolfred, 201, 202

New Brunswick, 5, 116, 176, 183, 193, 194, 202, 203, 205, 209, 210

Newfoundland, 16, 22, 25, 26, 34, 40, 48, 100, 121, 122, 193, 213, 214

Neutral Indians, 6, 65, 84

Nicolet, Jean, 65

Northmen, or Norsemen, 14-19

North-West Company, 174, 215-218, 228, 230, 232

North-West Mounted Police, 224, 225, 227

Nova Scotia, 5, 16, 22, 115, 116, 122, 125, 176, 183, 194, 202, 209,
    237, 239



Ojibwa, Indians, 5, 162

Oneida, Indians, 6

Onondaga, Indians, 6, 72, 107

Ontario, Province of, 5, 209, 223, 233

Oregon, Treaty of, 232

Ottawa, Indians, 5, 103, 161, 162

Otter, Colonel, 225

Outagamies. _See_ Fox Indians.



Papineau, Louis J., 201-203

Peigan, Indians, 220

Perrot, Nicholas, 87

Pepperrell, William, 123

Perry, Commodore, 188

Phips, Sir William, 98, 100, 116

Picquet, Abb, 128

Pitt, William, 140, 141

Plains of Abraham, Battle of the, 151, 152, 153

Pontgrav, 37-40, 49

Pontiac, 161, 163

Portuguese, 19

Poundmaker, 224, 226

Poutrincourt, Baron de, 38-44, 63

Prevost, Sir George, 181, 186, 191

Prince of Wales in Canada, 207

Prince, Colonel, 200

Prince Edward Island, 26, 110, 121, 125, 176, 209, 213, 216

Proctor, General, 188



Quebec Act, 166, 167, 169, 177

Quebec, Province of, 5, 208, 209, 223

Queenston Heights, Battle of, 183, 184



Ramesay, 155

Rebellion Losses Bill, 206

Rcollets, 64, 65, 85, 90

Relations, Jesuit, 68, 83

Revolution, French, 141, 177

Richmond, Duke of, 195

Ridgeway, Battle of, 208

Riel, Louis, 221-224, 226

Roberval, 32, 33

Rogers, Robert, Captain, 133, 137

Royal Roussillon, Regiment, 138

Ryswick, Treaty of, 100



Sacs, Indians, 105, 134, 162

Saskatchewan, Territory of, 226

Scott, Thomas, 222

Secord, Laura, 187

Selkirk, Earl of, 216-219

Seneca, Indians, 6, 71, 83, 107, 164

Shawnese Indians, 180

Sheaffe, General, 184

Simcoe, Colonel, 177, 178

Simpson, Sir George, 230

Sioux, Indians, 111

Spaniards, 4, 21, 51, 88, 175

Stadacona, 27, 28, 29, 31

St. Castin, Baron de, 118

Ste. Foye, Battle of, 158, 159

St. Germain-en-Laye, Treaty of, 45

Stoney Creek, Battle of, 187

St. Vallier, Bishop, 101

Sulpician, Order of Priests, 77, 84, 85



Talon, Intendant, 81, 82, 85, 86

Tecumseh, 180, 182, 189

Thompson, Sir John, 243

Ticonderoga, 137-139, 168

Tracy, Marquis de, 79, 80, 81

Tonty, Henri de, 91, 92, 93, 96, 107, 108

Tuscaroras, Indians, 107



United Empire Loyalists, 174, 175, 176, 196, 198

Ursulines, 69, 156

Utrecht, Treaty of, 102, 121, 213



Van Schultz, Colonel, 200, 201

Vancouver, George, Captain, 175

Vaudreuil, Philippe de, 105, 110, 118, 119

Vaudreuil, Pierre Francois Rigaud de, 132, 136, 148, 152, 154, 155

Verchres, Madeleine de, 99

Verrazano, 22, 25, 43

Victoria, Queen, 196, 206

Viel, Nicholas, Father, 65

Vincent, General, 186, 187

Vinland, 16, 17, 18

Voyageurs. _See Coureurs de bois_



Walker, Admiral, 105, 106

Washington, George, 129

Washington, Treaty, 239

Welland Canal, 193, 208

William Henry, Fort, 132, 134, 135, 137

Wilmot, Lemuel Allan, 203

Wolfe, James, General, 143, 149, 150, 152, 153, 155, 156, 166

Wolseley, Lord, 222



Zeno, 18


UNWIN BROTHERS, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON




[End of _Canada_ by J. N. McIlwraith]
