Riendeau A Roger E. Brief History of Canada

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

The signiﬁ cance of this brief skirmish became even more far-reach-

ing less than three months later, in September 1609, when Henry Hud-

son sailed up the river that bears his name and traded with the Iroquois.

Within ﬁ ve years, the Dutch had established a trading post—Fort Nas-

sau—where Albany, New York, is now located. Rival European trading

nations now controlled the two main navigational arteries that offered

access to the heart of the continent. The Dutch (and later the English)

supplied the Iroquois with European ﬁ rearms in exchange for furs via

the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers; the French could similarly trade with

the Algonquians and Huron via the St. Lawrence and Ottawa Rivers.

The injection of European technology and economic motives had the

further effect of intensifying the nature and scope of intertribal warfare

in North America. Quick raids by small bands engaging in hand-to-

hand combat to inﬂ ict relatively limited casualties and to capture a few

prisoners for ceremonial torture would give way to sustained, larger-

scale military campaigns featuring the use of ﬁ rearms and steel weap-

ons that resulted in unprecedented brutality and death.

Champlain’s commitment to a commercial alliance with the Algon-

quians and Huron necessitated his participation in another successful

attack on the Iroquois near the mouth of the Richelieu River in 1610.

In a further effort to persuade the northern and western tribes to bring

their furs to Quebec, he inaugurated the practice of sending young

company representatives to live among the Native people to learn their

language, customs, and values. The diplomatic Champlain recognized

the value of showing due respect to his Native business partners, on

whose goodwill, knowledge, and skill French colonists were so depen-

dent. For the French were not only enormously outnumbered by the

Native population but had also learned from their Native allies about

the geography of the country and basic tactics for survival in the wilder-

ness, including the manufacture and use of such essential items as

canoes, snowshoes, and toboggans (Trudel 1973). In 1610 Champlain

arranged for young Etienne Brulé to live with the Huron. As one of the

ﬁ rst coureurs de bois (runners of the woods), the adventurous Brulé

became a skillful interpreter and intermediary during his ﬁ ve years

among the Huron. Traveling with his adopted people, he extensively

explored their trading area and thus was likely the ﬁ rst European to see

the Great Lakes.

In 1615 Brulé served as Champlain’s interpreter as they accompanied

another Huron and Algonquian war party on a raid against the Iroquois,

who were obstructing the ﬂ ow of furs to Quebec. In addition to contin-

ued trade, Champlain hoped that supporting the Huron-Algonquian

war effort would help overcome their reluctance to lead him into the

interior. In July 1615, Champlain and 12 others journeyed up the

Ottawa River, which he had explored two years previously, but this

time he continued westward along the entire route leading to Georgian

Bay on Lake Huron. Traveling south along the shore of Georgian Bay,

the expedition reached the heart of the Huron village encampments

near present-day Midland and Penetanguishene. During the month that

he spent in what became known as Huronia, Champlain learned much

about life within the Huron Confederacy, an alliance of several tribes

with a population exceeding 30,000 living in villages containing

upwards of 2,000 people each. The trade network of the Huron, by

virtue of their good relations with the Algonquians, extended as far as

Lake Superior to the west and James Bay to the north. In early Septem-

ber, the Huron war party with Champlain set out on its southeasterly

trek by way of the Severn and Trent River systems, reaching and cross-

ing Lake Ontario at its eastern narrows, and landing near present-day

Oswego, New York, a month later. On this occasion, however, the Iro-

quois, now equipped with Dutch ﬁ rearms, were able to turn back this

assault on their fortiﬁ ed village of Onondaga near Lake Oneida, and a

wounded Champlain retreated to Huronia with his Native allies.

Despite the military setback, the expedition of 1615 had far-reaching

signiﬁ cance for the development of Canada. Although the fear of an

Despite its limited accuracy, Samuel de Champlain’s map of New France (1632) was a major

contribution to European geographical knowledge of eastern Canada.

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

Iroquois attack prevented the Huron from guiding Champlain back to

Quebec by way of the shorter St. Lawrence route, and thus compelled

him to winter in Huronia and return by the Ottawa route, he had

gained much knowledge about the relationship between the St. Law-

rence River and the Great Lakes, thereby opening the way for further

westward exploration. His return to Quebec in 1616 marked the end of

Champlain’s explorations, but his quest for a western sea was contin-

ued by his young protégés. Brulé reportedly reached Sault Ste. Marie

in 1621–22 and perhaps Lake Superior. Jean Nicolet set out from Que-

bec on his western trek in 1634, and within four years he had reached

Green Bay and approached the headwaters of the Mississippi River,

thus becoming the ﬁ rst European to explore the American Northwest.

Certainly, Champlain’s active support of the Huron-Algonquian

campaign against the Iroquois paid commercial dividends, as this alli-

ance supplied upwards of two-thirds of the French fur trade by the

1620s. On the other hand, the Iroquois, inspired by their victory in

1615 and empowered by their trade connection with the Dutch, took

the offensive. For the remainder of the century, the Iroquois would

threaten the French fur trade empire either by disrupting interaction

with the western tribes or by assaulting the base at Quebec. Yet French

fur traders displayed little inclination toward peaceful relations with

the Iroquois out of a concern that they might allow the northern and

western tribes access to Dutch trading posts on the Hudson or serve as

brokers for them. So long as the Iroquois remained a barrier between

these tribes and the Hudson traders, the St. Lawrence traders held the

upper hand in the competition to control the North American fur trade.

In effect, the Native people, in their role as go-betweens and suppliers

for the fur trade, had become willing pawns of European imperialism

(Trigger 1985, 1989).

Catholic Missions and the Failure of Company Rule

Despite the advance of fur traders into the interior of the continent, no

more than 80 people lived permanently at Quebec by the mid-1620s,

and less than 20 acres there were under cultivation. With the state and

private enterprise unable or unwilling to encourage settlement,

Champlain turned to the Catholic Church for support. To stem the ris-

ing tide of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church was eager

to spread the faith to the emerging colonies of the New World. The

French Catholic clergy, following the example of their Spanish and

Portuguese counterparts, had a vision of converting the pagan hordes

of America to Christianity. As early as 1615, four Recollets missionaries

arrived at Quebec and went to live at Huronia and among the

Montagnais at Tadoussac. A devout Catholic, Champlain hoped that

the missionaries would inspire the Algon quians and Huron to form

settlements, to farm the land, and to intermarry with the French peo-

ple. The Recollets, however, experienced difﬁ culty adjusting to wilder-

ness conditions, language barriers, and general hostility or indifference

to the Christian message. The Native people already had an enduring

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

religious tradition that adequately met their needs, and they had no

wish to abandon it. Accordingly, the Recollets sought the assistance of

the Society of Jesus (commonly known as the Jesuit Order), which sent

eight missionaries to Quebec in 1625–26.

The collaborative efforts of the Recollets and Jesuits were immediately

hampered by the Huguenot traders, who had no desire either to establish

settlement or to convert the natives to Christianity. In 1627 Cardinal

Richelieu, the chief adviser of King Louis XIII, stepped in to ban the

Huguenots from New France and to inaugurate an ambitious policy to

develop French colonies overseas. Impressed by the success of the Eng-

lish colonies of Virginia and New England, which had about 2,000 and

300 inhabitants, respectively, as well as the Dutch colony of New Neth-

erlands with about 200 settlers in the Hudson River valley, Richelieu was

determined to promote agricultural settlement and missionary activity

along the St. Lawrence. In accordance with the prevailing economic phi-

losophy of mercantilism, he hoped that New France could fulﬁ ll the

typical colonial function of enriching the imperial power by exporting

raw materials and by importing its manufactured products. The highly

inﬂ uential Richelieu formed the Company of One Hundred Associates

(also known as the Company of New France), whose investors were

motivated more by religion and patriotism than by expectations of proﬁ t.

In return for a monopoly on all commerce and title to all the land that

France claimed in North America, the company agreed to bring out 4,000

French and Catholic settlers within 15 years, and to promote missionary

activity. This most ambitious colonizing venture yet undertaken by

France began in earnest when the company sent 400 settlers with the

necessary supplies to Quebec in May 1628. However, renewed imperial

hostilities overseas would spill over into North America to interrupt

French colonization and missionary efforts for the next four years.

When hostilities broke out between France and England, the buc-

caneering Kirke brothers—David, Thomas, and Lewis—took advantage

of the opportunity to seize Tadoussac in 1627, to capture the French

ships that were bringing the settlers sent out by the Company of New

France in the following year, and to attack Quebec in 1629. Cut off

from France and lacking in food and supplies, Champlain and his gar-

rison had no choice but to surrender. Champlain returned to France

only to discover that the war between England and France had ended

three months before with the capitulation of Quebec, which now, like

Acadia, was ofﬁ cially an English possession.

England was mildly interested in Acadia because of its ﬁ sheries and

its strategic approach to the St. Lawrence. In 1621 Scotsman Sir Wil-

liam Alexander persuaded King James I of England to grant him title to

all of the land of Acadia so that he could establish the colony of Nova

Scotia. In 1627 his son succeeded in bringing about 70 colonists to Port

Royal, most of whom were merely interested in the quick proﬁ ts of the

fur trade and the ﬁ sheries. The settlement had already disbanded by

1632 when the Treaty of St.-Germain-en-Laye restored all the French

territories that the English had seized in North America.

Having successfully campaigned for the restoration of Quebec to

French rule, Champlain returned in 1633 to rebuild the colony plun-

dered by the Kirke brothers and to resume his effort to bring out

settlers on behalf of the reorganized Company of New France.

Upstream from Quebec, he built another fur-trading post called

Trois-Rivières (Three Rivers) at the mouth of the St. Maurice River,

one of the main routes to the north. Within a few years, the Jesuits

established a mission there, and settlers began clearing the adjacent

land. But three decades of frustrating colony-building ﬁ nally took

their toll on Champlain, who died on Christmas Day in 1635. The

passing of its founder and ﬁ rst governor at a time when the Company

of New France was losing interest in colonization left Canada in a

precarious situation. The various proprietors of the company did not

object to settlement as such, only to its interference with trade or to

any attempt to make them subsidize it. Within the French govern-

ment, Richelieu became absorbed by the Thirty Years’ War in Europe,

and his successors were plagued by recurring civil unrest. For nearly

three decades after Champlain, then, effective colonial leadership

passed by default to the Catholic Church, particularly the Jesuit mis-

sionaries (Trudel 1973).

After the restoration of French rule in 1632, Cardinal Richelieu had

given the Jesuits a monopoly over the mission ﬁ eld of New France. The

following year, Father Paul Le Jeune undertook to minister among the

Algonquin and Montagnais but found that their nomadic lifestyle

offered only a barren ﬁ eld for missionary effort. The most successful

mission among the Algonquians was St. Joseph de Sillery (southwest of

Quebec), which contained about 150 baptized Montagnais by 1641.

However, the threat of Iroquois attack, continued resistance to Cathol-

icism and the French way of life, and the outbreak of European-based

diseases such as smallpox and measles led to the demise of the mission

by the end of the decade. Although similar problems plagued efforts at

Huronia, the more sedentary Huron proved to be slightly more recep-

tive after Father Jean de Brébeuf established the ﬁ rst permanent mis-

sion there in 1634. Sainte-Marie was constructed in 1639 to serve as the

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

headquarters for the 11 other mission stations scattered throughout

Huronia by 1648.

French fur traders considered the missions in Huronia to be valuable

in consolidating their commercial alliance with the Huron Confeder-

acy. But the fur trade itself proved to be responsible for bringing the

missionary work at Huronia to a bloody end. When the Iroquois had

exhausted the furs of their own region, they invaded Huronia to cap-

ture the northern trade route and thereby maintain their vital trafﬁ c in

European goods. In 1648 and 1649, the Iroquois unleashed their fury

on Huronia, obliterating both the Native population and the French

missionaries. The martyrdom of Brébeuf and his associates in Huronia,

however, did not end the work of the missionaries in evangelizing the

Native people. The priests continued their efforts among the Montag-

nais and extended them to such eastern tribes as the Micmac and

Abenaki. The Jesuits also spread westward, establishing a mission at

Sault Ste. Marie as they sought to maintain contact with their disciples

among the dispersed Huron. The Recollets and Sulpicians joined them

in following the path of the fur traders and explorers as they penetrated

the continent, together extending the frontiers of religion, commerce,

and French imperialism.

The religious orders pursued their Native conversion efforts within

the context of colonial expansion and attending to the spiritual and

social needs of the French settlers (Jaenen 1984, 1985). The Jesuits

became the principal agency for recruiting colonists and encouraging

them to clear the land. To this end, and to stimulate donations for their

missionary work, they published the annual Jesuit Relations, which from

1632 to 1673 reported on their activities in New France and praised the

merits of life in the new country. In addition to their value as immigra-

tion propaganda, the Jesuit Relations would later prove to be a useful

source of information about the early history of New France. The Jesuits

established a college at Quebec to educate colonists and natives alike as

early as 1635, a year before Harvard University was established in Mas-

sachusetts. When Marie de l’Incarnation’s Ursuline nuns arrived in

1639, they founded a school for girls and a hospital at Quebec. Mission-

ary zeal also motivated Sieur de Maisonneuve to lead some settlers,

including Jeanne Mance, Canada’s ﬁ rst nurse, to establish Ville Marie in

1642. Strategically located at the conﬂ uence of the Ottawa and St. Law-

rence Rivers, the mission settlement was destined to evolve into the

commercial center of Montreal over the next two decades.

Although the intervention of the Catholic Church helped to increase

the population of Canada to nearly 1,000 by the mid-1640s, colonial

development continued to be hampered by a lack of secular leadership

and the precariousness of frontier life. In 1645 the nearly bankrupt

Company of New France ceded the fur trade monopoly to a group of

local entrepreneurs known as the Compagnie des habitants (Company

of the habitants). In response to general dissatisfaction with the new

company’s rule, a royal decree created the ﬁ rst form of local and repre-

sentative government in the colony. In place of a governor appointed

by the king on the nomination of the monopoly-holding company,

local authority rested in a council composed of the governor of the

colony (who resided at Quebec), the local governor of Montreal, the

Superior of the Jesuits, and syndics, or elected representatives of the

people of the three areas of settlement. Despite several modiﬁ cations to

this structure over the next 15 years, the colony continued to be

plagued by a weak and divided administration.

The most persistently divisive issue—the sale of liquor to the Native

people—pitted commerce against religion. Alcohol had been unknown

to the Native people until the arrival of Europeans, but they quickly

acquired an appreciation for its intoxicating effects and demanded it

eagerly. Indeed, French traders found that they could obtain more furs

for a relatively small amount of alcohol than they could for larger quan-

tities of other goods. On the other hand, the clergy, appalled at the

social and moral consequences of excessive consumption by Natives

who had not yet developed a physical tolerance for alcohol and who

refused to take responsibility for their behavior while intoxicated,

wanted its sale outlawed, and declared such trade to be a mortal sin.

The arrival of Bishop Laval in 1659 and his subsequent government

appointments intensiﬁ ed quarrels between the governor, who invari-

ably supported the fur trade, and the bishop, who saw himself as the

protector of society and the arbiter of morality.

Above all, the slow growth of population in the St. Lawrence colony

by the mid-17th century was directly related to the daunting prospects

of life in the Canadian wilderness. To start with, prospective immi-

grants were confronted with the dangers of the Atlantic crossing, which

could take anywhere from three weeks to three months depending on

headwinds and weather. Problems with food supply, sanitation, and

scurvy onboard ship often meant that upwards of 20 percent of the pas-

sengers did not survive the transatlantic journey. Those who did arrive

safely faced the arduous task of clearing the dense hardwood forest,

building log shelters with crude implements, and clearing land to plant

crops. Even when settlers had progressed that far, they faced the threat

of Iroquois attacks.

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE

A BRIEF HISTORY OF CANADA

The settlements along the St. Lawrence had been largely immune

from Iroquois assaults until the early 1640s, when the escalation of

competition for control of the inland fur trade and French expansion

westward rendered them more vulnerable. By the 1650s Canada was in

a virtual state of siege, with the result that small detachments of French

soldiers began regularly patrolling the St. Lawrence from Trois-Rivières

to Montreal, the most exposed settlement. A mass invasion of Montreal

was thwarted by Adam Dollard des Ormeaux and his 16 companions,

whose heroic stand to the death at Long Sault on the Ottawa River kept

the Iroquois from completing their mission of destruction in 1660. The

fear of the Iroquois was heightened in 1664 when the English captured

the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. The

Hudson River route was thenceforth controlled by an ominous alliance

of France’s most powerful European enemy and its most relentless

Native American adversary. The prospect of both the English and the

Iroquois turning their aggressive designs on the St. Lawrence colony

appeared to seal the fate of the French empire in North America.

The plight of Acadia was even worse than that of Canada. After res-

toration to French rule in 1632, France took a momentary interest in

the colony as Cardinal Richelieu sent his cousin Isaac de Razilly with

This wood engraving by artist John Walker (1831–98) shows Quebec about 1640. The strategic

location of Canada’s ﬁ rst permanent settlement on the heights overlooking the St. Lawrence

River enabled the garrison to withstand numerous attempts to capture it.

(Library and Archives

Canada C-006492)

about 300 colonists to revive Port Royal and to establish a new settle-

ment at La Hève (along the southeast coast), both on behalf of the

Company of New France. De Razilly’s death in 1636, however, proved

to be a major setback for the colony, plunging it into civil strife by the

rival claims of successors who vied for control over the fur trade of

Acadia. While Charles de Menou d’Aulnay laid claim to Port Royal as

de Razilly’s cousin, Charles de la Tour felt that his connection with the

de Poutrincourt family entitled him to govern Acadia from his fort at

the mouth of the Saint John River (in present-day New Brunswick).

Armed conﬂ ict between the two rivals, marked by raiding, plundering,

and destroying each other’s posts, persisted until 1645 when d’Aulnay

captured de la Tour’s headquarters while he was in Boston enlisting

more support for his cause. D’Aulnay remained the sole authority in

Acadia until his death in 1650, thereby opening the way for de la Tour’s

return. Ultimately, the long-standing feud was resolved in typical Euro-

pean fashion when de la Tour married d’Aulnay’s widow in 1653. The

next year, however, an expedition from Massachusetts led by Francis

Nicholson captured Acadia, and once again the colony was part of the

English empire.

Acadia, in essence, was a victim of geography and imperialism. Because

of its strategic but exposed position between the principal French and

English colonies, Acadia was a primary target for conquest in times of

imperial conﬂ ict. But once those hostilities subsided, Acadia’s limited

resources rendered it unworthy of further contention. Consequently, the

colony was tossed back and forth between empires, with little or no con-

cern for its development (MacNutt 1965; Grifﬁ th 1973).

After half a century, the French empire in North America rested on

a precarious foundation. Acadia had been lost through sheer neglect,

and the survival of the larger St. Lawrence colony remained in jeop-

ardy. Under the rule of private fur-trading companies, both colonies

were too weak in numbers, resources, and administration to defend and

sustain themselves, let alone to attract more settlers and entrepreneurs.

With the complete failure of company rule, only decisive and unprec-

edented state intervention could save New France from extinction.

THE COLONIZATION OF NEW FRANCE