IMAGE EVALUATION
TEST TARGET (/VlT-3)
/,
O
O
V
^
^ A*
Q.
r
/
"^o
w..
1.0
I.I
l«i 'III? fi iliii') f:;
In J Ag. Z.J
M
2,0
'111 3. 2
1136
1.8
1.25 1
1.4
1.6
« 6" —
►
V.
^ "^^
•^
cM
c^l
/A
W
W/
°m
Photographic
Sciences
Corporation
23 WEST MAIN STREET
WEBSTER, NY. 14580
(716) 872-4503
4%
V
w
N>
|>
^^
%
V*
^^^
&
<?
L. ^f^
w..
CIHM/ICMH
Microfiche
CIHM/ICMH
Collection de
microfiches.
Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions
Institut cansdien de microreproductions historiques
1980
Technical and Bibliographic Notes/Notes techniques et bibliographiques
The Institute has attempted to obtain the best
original copy available for filming. Features of this
copy which may be bibliographically unique,
which may alter any of the images in the
reproduction, or which may significantly change
the usual method of filming, are checked below.
D
n
n
n
Coloured covers/
Couverture de couleur
□ Covers damaged/
Coi
>uverture endommagde
Covers restored and/or laminated/
Couverture restaurde et/ou pellicul6e
I I Cover title missing/
Le titre de couverture manque
I I Coloured maps/
Cartes g6ogrephiques en couleur
□ Coloured ink (i.e. other than blue or black)/
Encre de couleur (i.e. autre que bleue ou noire)
] I Coloured plates and/or illustrations/
Planches et/ou illustrations en couleur
Bound with other material/
Reli6 avec d'autres documents
Tight binding may cause shadows or distortion
along interior margin/
La reliure serree peut causer de I'ombre ou de la
distortion le long de la marge int^rieure
Blank leaves added during restoration may
appear within the text. Whenever possible, these
have been omitted from filming/
II se peut que certaines pages blanches ajoutdes
lors d'une restauration apparaissent dans le texte,
mais, lorsque cela 6tait possible, ces pages n'ont
pas 6t6 filmdes.
L'Institut a microfilm^ le meilleur exemplaire
qu'il lui a 6t6 possible de se procurer. Les details
de cet exemplaire qui sont oeut-dtre uniques du
poi i de vue bibliographique, qui peuvent modifier
une image reproduite, ou qui peuvent exiger une
modification dans la mdthode normale de filmage
sont indiquds ci-dessous.
D
D
s/
n
D
D
n
Coloured pages/
Pages de couleur
Pages damaged/
Pages endommag^es
Pages restored and/or laminated/
Pages restaurdes et/ou pelliculdes
Pages discoloured, stained or foxed/
Pages ddcolordes, tachetdes ou piqu^es
Pages detached/
Pages ddtach^es
Showthrough/
Transparence
Quality of print varies/
Quality in^gale de I'impression
Includes supplementary material/
Comprend du material supplementaire
C
b
tl
s
fi
s
T
s
T
w
^
d
e
b
ri
r«
rr
I I Only edition available/
Seule Edition disponible
Pages wholly or partially obscured by errata
slips, tissues, etc., have been refilmed to
ensure the best possible image/
Les pages totalernent ou partiellement
obscurcies par un feuillet d'errata, une pelure,
etc., ont 6t6 filmdes d nouveau de fagon d
obtenir la meilleure image possible.
D
Additional comments:/
Commentaires suppl6mentaires;
0This item is filmed at the reduction ratio checked below/
Ce document est i\\m6 au taux de reduction indiqud ci-dessous.
10X 14X 18X 22X
26X
30X
7
12X
16X
20X
24X
28X
32X
re
16tails
es du
modifier
er une
Filmage
!es
The ?opy filmed here has been repioduced thanks
to the generosity of:
N&tional Library of Canada
The images appearing here are the best quality
possible considering the condition and legibility
of the original copy and in keeping with the
filming contract specifications.
Original copies in printed paper covers are filmed
beginning with the front cover and ending on
the last page with a printed or illustrated impres-
sion, or the back cover when appropriate. All
other original copies are filmed beginning on the
first page with a printed or illustrated impres-
sion, and ending on the last page with a printed
or illustrated impression.
The last recorded frame on each microfiche
shall contain the symbol '^^- (meaning "CON-
TINUED"), or the symbol V (meaning END"),
whichever applies.
L'exemplaire filmd fut reproduit grdce d la
g6n6rosit6 de:
Bibliothdque nationale du Canada
Les images suivantes ont 6t6 reproduites avec le
plus grand soin, compte tenu de la condition et
de la nettetd de l'exemplaire filmd, et en
conformity avec les conditions du contrat de
filmage.
Les exemplaires originaux dont la couverture on
papier est imprim6e sent film^s en commengant
par le premier plat et en terminant soit par la
dernidre page qui comporte une empreinte
d'impression ou d'illustration, soit par le second
plat, selon le cas. Tous les autres exemplaires
originaux sont filmds en commenpant par la
premiere page qui comporte une empreinte
d'impression ou d'illustration et en terminant par
la dernidre page qui comporte une telle
empreinte.
Un des symboles suivants apparaitra sur la
dernidre image de cheque microfiche, selon le
cas: le symbole — •► signifie "A SUIVRE ", le
symbole V signifie "FIN".
Maps, plates, charts, etc., may be filmed at
different reduction ratios. Those too large to be
entirely included in one exposure are filmed
beginning in the upper left hand corner, left to
right and top to bottom, as many frames as
required. The following diagrams illustrate the
metnod:
Les cartes, planches, tableaux, etc., peuvent etre
filmds d des taux de reduction diff^rents.
Lorsque le document est trop grand pour etre
reproduit en un seul cliche, il est film6 d partir
de Tangle sup^rieur gauche, de gauche h droite,
et de haut en bas, en prenant le nombre
d'images n^cessaire. Les diagrammes suivants
illustrent la mdthode.
' errata
d to
e pelure,
:on d
n
1
2
3
32X
1
2
3
4
5
6
THE STORY
OF
CANADA.
BY
HOWARD ANGUS KENNEDY.
London :
HORACE MARSHALL & SON,
Temple House,
B.C.
"mf^ff>m-
F50I/
131996
J
"^'JWC ^'-VW™''Tfi '""l** ■
The Story of the Empire
Series.
THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE.
By Sir Walter Besant.
THE STORY OF INDIA.
By Dl^METRIUS C. BOULGER.
THE STORY OF AUSTRALIA.
By Flora L. Shaw.
THE STORY OF CANADA.
By Howard A. Kennedy.
THE STORY OF SOUTH AFRICA.
By W. Basil Worsfold.
THE STORY OF NEW ZEALAND.
By the Hon. W. P. Reeves.
Ready.
Ready.
Ready.
Ready.
1898.
Jan. 31,
Mar. ji.
$
TIf£ STOJ^y OF THE EMPIRE.
Edited by Howard Angus Kennedy.
CHAPTER I.
The Coming of the White Man,
FOR perils and adventures afloat and ashore,
for explorations and martyrdoms, for
feats of war and victories of peace, for
heights of heroism and depths of horror, no
chapter in the history of the world can surpass
the early annals of the great Dominion. In
the Story of Canada trade wears the colour of
romance, and even politics grow picturesque.
This book is not a history of Canada. For
that the reader should open the volumes of
Francis Parkman — he will be in no hurry to
shut them — of William Kingsford, of Francois
Xavier Garneau, of George Bryce; or the
monumental History of America edited by
Justin Winsor.
In such works as these, to which I gladly
acknowledge my own indebtedness, the student
may trace the ins and outs of political and
social movements, the ups and downs of military
8
THE STORY OF CANAOA.
campaigns, and the course of provincial histories,
here very summarily dismissed (with a story-
teller's license) to make room for illustrative
incident.
"And if I have done well," as an ancient
writer says, "and as is fitting the story, it is
that which I desired; but if slenderly and
meanly, it is that which I could attain unto."
In 1492, the Italian explorer Columbus,
leading a Spanish expedition to India by the
unknown Atlantic route, came upon a group of
islands. He thought they were outposts of the
country he had gone to seek, and from that
day onwards the islands have been called the
West Indies, while the natives, not only of those
islands but of both American continents, have
been called Indians. Five years later, the
Italian explorer Cabot, leading an English
expedition, discovered the North American
continent — touching on the coast of Nova
Scotia — and the greatest of American islands,
Newfoundland. In 1500 the Portuguese slave-
hunter Cortereal appeared on the coast of
Labrador and kidnapped a cargo of natives.
Before the fifteenth century closed, or at any
rate while the sixteenth was very young,
another nation appeared on the scene. The
first Frenchmen to visit America were not
ambitious explorers or seekers after gold.
CONTENTS.
Chapter
I. TiiK Coming of the White Man
II. The Red Men and the White
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII
IX.
X.
XI.
XII.
XIII.
XIV.
XV.
XVI.
••• •••
The Martyrs
Raid and Counter-Raid
The Mis'^issippi*
Life in the Old French Colony
The Seven Years' War
The British Conquest
American Invasions
...
The Winning of Liberty
The Experiment of Legislative
Union
••• ...
The Hudson's Bay Company ...
The North-west Rebellions...
The Pacific Slope
• • • • • •
Unity Through Federation ...
Pack
• 7
, 19
29
37
47
51
58
66
78
90
... 104
••. Ill
... 122
... 130
... 145
The Canadians and their Country 161
1
J.
THE COMING |)F THE WHITE MAN.
tl
rowed on up the broad mysterious river, till
they reached tlie first hill of any size they
had seen since leaving Quebec. This extinct
volcano Jacques Cartier called the Royal
Mount. Its wooded crest now towers above the
busy city of Montreal, and even in Cartier's
time the site thus sheltered from the northern
blast was occupied by something more respect-
able than a cluster of wigwams. The town of
Hochelaga was composed of about fifty tunnel-
like dwellings, each one hundred and filty feet
long, the walls and roof of birchbark covering a
framework of bent poles. Encircling the town
was a strong wall of logs, with a parapet from
which the garrison could pelt a besieging army
with stones. The bearded white men, with their
resounding trumpets and outlandish superfluity
of clothes, were received with a mixture of awe
and delight : surely they must be gods ! The
half-naked Indians brought out all their sick
to be healed — to Cartier's great embarrassment
— and on his departure loaded him with gifts of
fish and corn.
Returning to " Canada " — an Indian name
which he applied to the district around Quebec
— Jacques Cartier resolved to pass the winter
there. Such an experiment had never been
tried before. The summer had been hotter
than that of his native land, and he was not
prepared for the intensity of the winter cold, for
I
12
THE STORY OF CANADA.
the sealing up of every stream in adamantine
ice, for the burial of land and water under a
pall of dazzling snow. Scurvy broke cut and
killed five-and-twenty of the Frenchmen before
an Indian taught them to make a healing
decoction from the leaves of the spruce. The
travellers made no attempt to colonize the
country they had discovered. They sailed for
home in the spring, after kidnapping the chiefs
of Stadacona to show King Francis what sort
of creatures inhabited New France, as a modern
explorer would bring home a giraffe or other
curious beast for the Zoological Gardens.
In 1 54 1, Jacques Car tier was again on his way
"to the countries of Canada and Hochelaga,
which form the end of Asia towards the west,"
as his Royal commission said. This time a little
clearing was made on the shores of the St.
Lawrence above Quebec, but the place v/as
deserted again when the winter was past.
Another attempt at settlement was made by a
noblem.an nam .'d Roberval, with emigrants
largely drawn from the prisons of France, but
one-third of the colonists died the first winter,
and the rest were glad to escape to Europe.
For nearly sixty years the red-skinned Canadians
were left in undisputed possession of their native
forests, though all this time the Newfoundland
fisheries were steadily worked by mor^' than
one European nation.
THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN.
9
They were simple seafaring Normans and
Bretons, gathering a harvest of fish from the
teeming codbanks of Newfoundland. Four
hundred years have passed, and the same hardy
race is carrying on the same adventurous trade.
The sea, the "fickle" sea, is the same as ever,
swarming with cod ; while the solid continent
beside it has suffered again and again the
upheavals of conquest and revolution.
King Francis, over in Paris, was not satisfied
with the modest spoils brought home by his
fishermen while the Spanish monarch glutted
himself with American gold. Accordingly, in
1524 a French expedition was sent out under
the Italian leader Verrazzano. Steering farther
south than Cabot and farther north than
Columbus, Verrazzano came on what we now
call the United States, No one then knew that
America was a continent, a double continent,
forming a barrier 7,500 miles long between
Europe and Cathay ; still less did Verrazzano
imagine that the barrier where he encountered
it was 3,000 miles across. So he sailed up
and down for six weeks, trying to find an
opening to the Pacific, till he had to flee home
from starvation. Ten years passed before the
French tried again. This time the leader was
himself a Frenchman, Jacques Carticr by name,
bred in the curious old-world town of St. Malo
on the Breton coast. In the early summer of
lO
THE STORY OF CANADA.
1534, with a little vessel no bigger than a fishing-
smack, he sailed boldly across the angry
Atlantic, past the dreaded "Isle of Demons,"
and into that crack of the earth which separates
tlie north coast of Newfoundland from the
mainland of Labrador. The shores were rocky
and desolate, as they are to this day — greedy
as Scylla and Charybdis for sailors' lives ; but
Jacques Cartier passed safely through into the
land-locked Gulf of St. Lawrence, and even
reached without disaster the island of Anticosti,
since fringed with broken barks and dead men's
bones. Next year he came again, entered the
.same straits of Belleisle, and sailed on till he
had left the Atlantic Ocean a thousand miles
behind him. The channel grew narrower and
narrower ; it was no longer an arm of the sea
— it was a river.
Beside this noble stream, nestling at the foot
of a mighty rock on which the citadel of
Quebec now stands, was the little Indian village
of Stadacona. The natives, who had never
seen a white man before, were very friendly,
and warned Jacques Cartier against the terrors,
natural and supernatural, of a journey up
stream to the more important Indian town of
Hochelaga. The bold Frenchman turned a
deaf ear to all timid counsels, and set out
with fifty sailors in boats for the west. For
a hundred and fifty miles those Frenchmen
I
I
THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN.
13
In 1598, the Marquis de la Roche took out
forty convicts — a hopeful ancestry for the
population of a new empire — and landed them
on the dreary sandhill called Sable Island,
while he and the unconvicted members of his
crew went on to discover a site for the
first French town in America. The ship was
driven home by a gale, and it was five years
before the Marquis could send another expedi-
tion to Sable Island and rescue the dozen
ex-convicts who survived. Meanwhile a mono-
poly of the fur trade — the only source of wealth
that Canada was known to possess — had been
given to a naval captain named Chauvin and
a merchant named Pontgrav^, on their under-
taking to form a French colony of 500 souls.
The scheme came to nothing, unless a wretched
winter spent by sixteen men among the Indians
may be counted as something.
Only in 1603, the year of Queen Elizabeth's
death, did the real founder of French power in
America and father of Canadian coloniza-
tion appear on the scene. This was Samuel
de Champlain. His first voyage was to Stada-
cona and Hochelaga, but the towns Jacques
Cartier had visited had been blotted out of
existence, and the few Indians met with spoke
a language quite different from that of the former
inhabitants. Beyond Mount Royal naviga-
tion was stopped by roaring rapids, and
14
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Champlain turned home again. His ambition
to explore the West had been increased by
Indian descriptions of a series of great lakes or
seas from which the river descended ; but he
was not his own master, and the Sieur de
Monts, on whom the king now bestowed his
Royal favour and a monopoly of the fur trade,
decided on Acadia as the scene of his attempt
at empire building. Jutting into the Atlantic
just south of Newfoundland, Acadia contains
fine harbours, fertile fields, fruitful orchards,
and mines of enormous wealth. But the mixed
company of gaolbirds and gentry whom De
Monts took out with him in 1604 chose as the
site of their pioneer town a wretched little islet
in the mouth of the St. Croix river, where the
floating ice soon cut off their communications
with the mainland, and scurvy destroyed nearly
half of the colonists. When spring came De
Monts set out to seek a happier seat of govern-
ment for his vague and vast domain. Sailing
southward, he passed contemptuously by the
rock- bound land where English pilgrims were
to lay the foundations of the United States
fifteen years later, and at last he turned back
to Acadia.
A more hopeful corner of that wilderness
was now chosen — Port Royal, since christened
Annapolis ; but here De Monts got word that
his monopoly was in danger, and with the furs
THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN.
15
less
Ined
that
Ifurs
he had confiscated from unauthorized trading
vessels he hurried home to defend his interests
at Court. In this he succeeded, for the time,
and next year he sent out a fresh party under
the leadership of Poutrincourt and Lescarbot to
reinforce the colonists. Lescarbot was a man
of uncommon sense and no little wit, as well as
a poet and historian. " A merry heart doeth
good like a medicine," and the winter passed in
cheerfulness and comparative safety.
Spring came; the Frenchmen — nobility and
all — settled down to farming and fishing; the
friendship of the Indians had been well tested,
and altogether the colony had made a very
fair start, when the news came that the king
had cancelled De Monts' privileges. The
settlement was abandoned, and not a French-
man was left in North America. When the
next attempt to colonize was made, another
race had got a foothold, and the contest of
French and English for supremacy in the new
world had begun.
In 1613, the French had not only re-occupied
Port Royal, but had landed and prepared to
settle at Mount Desert, on the New England
Coast. New England, of course, had as yet
no existence, and Virginia was hundreds of
miles to the south ; but our kings were as
generous as their Royal cousins of France in
disposing of American soil. James the First,
r^^»^pw"^«
i6
THE STORY OF CANADA.
claiming the whole continent of North America
because an English ship had been the first to
touch on a cc^rner of it, granted Acadia and
much of the future New England to one com-
pany, and Virginia to another. The Governor
of Virginia accordingly took on himself to
drive the French intruders out of America.
An adventurer named Argall was sent with a
ship on this errand. He first bore down upon
the Mount Desert trespassers and scattered
them to the winds, and then, sailing north, laid
Port Royal in ashes.
Acadia, however, had not seen the last of the
French, or even of French rule. In 1621, Sir
William Alexander received a grant of the whole
peninsula from James the First, and attempted
to organize it as a Scottish colony under the
name of Nova Scotia ; but the scheme came to
nothing, and Charles the First handed the
country back to France to secure the payment
of a dowry which he was to have obtained with
his French wife. Nova Scotia again became
Acadia. King Charles lost his crown, Cromwell
ruled in England, and Acadia was recovered in
1654; but in 1667, the Stuarts having come
back to power, the colony was again restored to
France. The neighbouring British colonists
came up and took possession in 1690 ; in 1697
the country was a third time given back to
France. In 17 13, the see-saw came to an
THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN.
17
end, so far as the mainland of the colony was
concerned, and ever since then Nova Scotia
has been a British province ; but the large
island of Cape Breton waited another half-
century lor its final annexation to the British
Empire,
But Champlain had no part in any of these
events. In 1608, De Monts obtained a brief
revival of his fur-trading monopoly, and sent
two ships up the St. Lawrence. Champlain had
charge of one, and while the other bought
beaver skins from the Indians in the lower
reaches of the river he pressed on and founded
the city of Quebec. It was a poor little wooden-
walled hamlet at first, and the population,
which numbered twenty-eight in the autumn,
was reduced to eight persons as the winter
wore on. But scurvy had spared the leader,
and as soon as the ice had left the river and a
ship had arrived with reinforcements Champlain
was eager to be off, not to an easy life in
France, but to brave the unnumbered dangers
that guarded the secret of the West,
One of these perils we laugh at now, but it
was very real to that superstitious age. The
new continent, according to the zealous mis-
sionaries who set themselves to convert it, was
in possession of Satan, and he was ready to
use every fiendish artifice to keep out the
Christians. When the Indians talked about
■^wupwnw"
^^f^mrmmm
i8
THE STORY OF CANADA.
magic barring the western way, the Frenchmen
could not be sure the story was false ; nor did
they set aside as harmless nonsense the sorcery
practised by the natives themselves. So far as
Champlain was concerned, none of these bug-
bears troubled him, not even a Monster of the
Lakes with pockets big enough to put a ship in;
but the danger of hostile Indians he estimated
at its full value, and took energetic steps to
ward off.
ii
'A
chmen
lor did
iorcery
I far as
e bug-
of the
hip in;
imated
eps to
CHAPTER II.
The Red Men and the White.
THESE Indians, who had shared the North
American continent with the bear and
the beaver from time immemorial — who
were they ? All sorts of fantastic guesses have
been made. By one the red men have been
claimed as the "lost" tribes of Israel; by
another as the idolators expelled from Palestine
by Joshua and driven ever the Atlantic in
Phoenician ships ; various theories have traced
them back to Wales, Egypt, India, and the
sunken continent of Atlantis. It is generally
agreed now that the ancestors of the American
Indians came from the north-east of Asia.
Some perhaps came by the shortest route,
paddling across Behring Straits and landing on
the coast of Alaska. Others may have drifted
unwillingly across the broad Pacific " from
China to Peru." At all events, in South America
C 3
^ r
20
THE STORY OF CANADA.
four hundred years ago a civilization was
found flourishing compared to which the tribal
organization of the North American "nations"
was mere barbarism and anarchy.
The Indians who have to do with our story
belonged mostly to two great branches of the
copper-coloured race — the Algonquin and the
Iroquois. The Iroquois, however, had been
divided into six tribes, and between the famous
confederacy of the ** Five Nations " and their
kinsmen of the sixth or Huron tribe there was a
bitter feud. The Hurons had their headquarters
in a score or so of little towns at the south-east
corner of the inland sea that bears their name.
They were separated from their mortal enemies
by another great body of water, for the
Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas and
Senecas built their villages and grew their
patches of maize in what is now the western
end of New York State, south-east of Lake
Ontario. But the warlike spirits on either side
were constantly making raids on the territory of
the other, stealing noiselessly upon a sleeping
foe, tomahawking right and left, then carrying
off the male survivors for a grand carnival
of torture, and the women to increase the
numbers of the victorious tribe. Now and
then these independent raids were supplemented
by larger war parties under the orders of the
federated chiefs; but the only difference was
THE RED MEN AND THE WHITE.
21
■
that the devastation and cruelty were on a
larger scale. Neither side wanted the territory
of the other; as a rule they fought simply
to gratify their lust for blood and vengeance,
and to prove their possession of a tiger-like
cunning and bravery.
The Canadian Algonquins, who lived on the
banks of the Upper Ottawa, had no particular
love for either of these contending parties, but
as they were themselves the objects of Iroquois
persecution they gradually became reconciled
to an offensive and defensive alliance with
the Hurons. The straggling Indians found
lower down on the St. Lawrence, after the
disappearance of Hochelaga and Stadacona,
were Algonquins, but they were particularly
poor specimens of the race, and led a wretched
wandering existence. Other branches of the
tribe lived in villages and cultivated the soil:
the women scratching the ground with most
primitive implements, and raising a little crop
of Indian corn to supplement the animal food
killed by the stone-tipped arrows of the hunting
sex.
The Iroquois and Hurons had more skill in
the arts — making pottery, spinning twine for
fishing nets, weaving mats of rushes, fashioning
birch-bark canoes with as much skill as they
showed in navigating the tipsy craft when built,
embroidering their winter furs with slips of
22
THE STORy OF CANADA.
porcupine quill, and elaborately tattooing their
own skins. Their most valuable possession was
wampum — beads, cut and drilled with great
difficulty out of the hardest of shells, strung
together in patterns to record the principal
events in the tribal history, and regularly
exhibited and interpreted to the tribe by the
old men whose memories were equal to the
tasj-. A gift of wampum was necessary to
confirm a treaty made by the tribe, and even
the remembrance of this solemn ceremony could
not always be trusted to curb the instincts of
treachery and murder. The almost incredible
self-control which gained the admiration of
friends and respect of enemies gave way on
occasion to frenzied outbursts of unbridled
passion. These Indians would suffer the most
exquisite torture, as if they were made of wood
instead of flesh, and would die the most lingering
and frightful death without a sign or sound of
pain. Yet when vanity and custom permitted,
an Indian village would become a pandemonium
of rage, and in battle there was a dreadful
amount of noise with an utter lack of discipline.
To crown all, the Iroquois and Hurons were
unclean in person, inveterate gamblers, and
shamelessly licentious.
For the feeble French colony to keep on good
terms with all the powerful neighbouring tribes
seemed a plain necessity, but, if neutrality were
THE RED MEN AND THE WHITE.
as
possible for the moment, it did not harmonize
with Champlain's ambition. To carry out hi.s
plans of western exploration he needed Indian
help, and this help was offered by the Hurons
and Algonquins if he would pay them in
u rdvance by joining in a raid upon the Iroquois.
! I If he had known the military record of that
• ^ aggressive confederacy he might have thought
twice before throwing in his lot with their
enemies. As it was, he consented. In the
midsummer of 1609, he and two of his men
accompanied some three score naked warriors for
many miles up the Richelieu River, which brings
the waters of the south to mingle with the St.
Lawrence. Paddling when the river was
smooth, carrying their canoes through the
forest when navigation was broken by rapids,
and tortured all the time by insatiable mosquitoes,
the war party pressed eagerly on till beside the
shores of Lake Champlain they came upon two
hundred of the enemies they sought. The
Iroquois threw up a hasty barricade of logs,
and began the fight with all their native
defiance ; but this was changed to panic when
the plumed and steel-clad Frenchmen stepped
out in front of the attacking force and raised
their mysterious weapons. At the second shot
the Iroquois turned and fled, leaving two of
their chiefs slain by the ''reeking tube." The
savages for whom Champlain had won this
34
THK STORY OF CANADA.
victory gave him a human head and a pair of
arms to be sent to the king in Paris as a token
of respect. In the following year Champlain
and four of his countrymen presented their allies
with another of these vicarious victories. Five
years later the explorer succeeded in visiting
the home of the Hurons, after a wearisome
length of paddling up and down stream,
carrying the canoes from one watercourse to
another by "portages"; and he was finally
rewarded for his pains by a sight of that
magnificent lake which appears to the travellers
on its shores as boundless as the ocean. A
few weeks before the explorer's arrival the
Hurons had welcomed their first white visitor
in the person of a missionary named Le Caron —
the pioneer of a mission as fruitful in tragedy
as any in the history of religion.
Leaving Father Le Caron to begin his peace-
ful operations among the old men and women
of the tribe, Champlain now set out with the
warriors of the friendly nation and their
Algonquin allies, to strike a final blow at the
power of the Iroquois. Crossing Lake Ontario
near the point where its waters narrow to form
the St. Lawrence, the great war party soon
found an Iroquois town to attack ■ but the assault
was made with such an utter lack of discipline
that even a group of French arquebusiers firing
over the ramparts from a hastily conbtructed
THE RED MEN AND THE WHITE.
25
wooden tower could not achieve a victory.
The valour of the besiegers melted away, and
they slunk off in confusion to their canoes.
Champlain, suffering more from disgust than
from a couple of arrow wounds, only agreed to
go home with them when they positively refused
to escort him down to Quebec. He made the
best of a miserable winter, however, travelling a
little further west to visit the Tionnontates, or
Tobacco Nation — who not only smoked the
weed, but cultivated and cured it for other
tribes — before returning in the spring to the
little outpost of civilization he had planted on
the St. Lawrence.
Even there at Quebec civilization was but a
weakly plant. The population, numbering fifty
or sixiy, was torn by commercial and sectarian
rivalries. The traders who had the king's
license to buy beaver skins from the Indians
were often defied and outwitted by traders who
ventured to make fortunes without his Majesty's
leave, and who even threatened the existence
of the colony by selling guns to the Indians.
The presence of Huguenots was a constant
thorn in the side of the priests, who were
feverishly anxious to keep the heresy of Pro-
testantism from taking root in the New World ;
and the Roman Catholics themselves were
divided by the jealousies of two rival orders,
the R^coUets and the Jesuits. At one time
26
THE STORY OF CANADA.
the Iroquois retaliated upon Champlain by an
impudent raid under the walls of his own
town; at another the "friendly" Algonquins
were found to be plotting against him on their
own account.
By 1626 a stone wall had replaced the old
wooden fortifications, but it only sheltered a
population of a hundred souls, and most of
these were simply sojourners in a foreign land —
eager, no doubt, to get back to France as soon
as their fortunes were made, though quite as
likely to die of starvation as to make fortunes.
The first marriage in the colony had only been
celebrated in 161 7, and few of the residents
had brought wives with them from France. In
1627 the great French statesman Richelieu
made a determined effort to galvanize the
struggling settlement into vigorous colonial life.
A new company was formed, and was endowed
with the nominal sovereignty of the whole
vast territory claimed by King Louis in the
New World, and a monopoly of the fur trade
for ever.
Curiously enough, before the new owners of
Canada could take the glo.ious gift conferred
on them by the King of France, it was no
longer his to give. The King of England was in
possession. Charles and Louis had gone to war;
and though the Royal forces of England were
wanted nearer home, an adventurer named
THE RED MEN AND THE WHITE.
27
1
*#
Kirke, backed by London merchants, sailed
across the ocean and carried the war into
Canada. At first he hesitated to attack Quebec,
thinking it stronger than it was ; but he captured
a Uttle fleet which the new French company
had sent out with supplies for their fellow-
countrymen. Next summer Kirke returned,
and Champlain, brave as he was, surrendered
without a shot. On July 20th, 1629, the
English flag was hoisted over the only French
town in Canada, and the sixteen hungry soldiers
who had formed the garrison were shipped over
to Europe. As it turned out, the two monarchs
had ended their war three months before, and
hy the terms of peace Canada was to be
returned to France. The English who held
Quebec for the king told him *' Wee doe not
care what the French or any other can doe
thoe they have a 100 sayl of shipps and
10,000 men." As it happened, the king was
more eager for French gold than for either
the military honour of his country or the
interests of the young English colonies in
America. France, it must be admitted, thought
almost as little of the possession which she
recovered in this easy fashion. For three years
Canada was left derelict, English adventurers
ruling the handful of French civilians at
Quebec without authority from either France
or England. In 1632, Richelieu took the
38
THE STORY OF CANADA.
trouble to send over a ship and hoist the
Bourbon flag, and in 1633 Champlain arrived
for the last time — to die two years later where
he had spent his life in founding an empire for
an unappreciative nation.
CHAPTER III.
The Martyrs.
THE chief objects of the shareholders in
the new French Company were to make
money by trade and to create a new
France in fact as well as in name. But
those who brought the Company into exist-
ence had another great aim — to win the new
world for the Church. The Company, there-
fore, had to promise that every emigrant to
Canada should be a Frenchman and a Roman
Catholic, and that a State establishment of
religion should be provided at the rate of three
priests for every settlement. The French-
Canadians owe a great debt of gratitude to the
early priests who watched with fatherly zeal
and self- sacrifice over parishioners scattered
through a waste of woods and waters. But
at the time of which I write not even the scouts
and skirmishers of invading populations had
30
THE STORY OF CANADA.
ventured within tlie edge of the forest primeval.
The clerical work to be done was not that of
parish priests, but of foreign missionaries. We
may leave for a while the traders and soldiers
and artizans who gathered at Quebec, and
follow the fortunes of a little band of pioneers
compared to whose lot the hardships of their
fellow-countrymen within the walls were luxury
and ease.
When the Protestant Englishmen were well
out of the way, six Jesuit fathers took up their
quarters at Quebec. This, however, was not
to be their home : it was only a fresh starting
place. In the autumn Father Le Jeune went
off with a wandering band of Algonquins to
their winter quarters in the back country of
the north. The Indians treated him as one of
themselves ; but that is not saying much. He
shared a little one - roomed bark hut with
eighteen Algonquins. A roaring fire kept one
side of his body uncomfortably hot, while the
other was almost frozen. The smoke, which
could only escape by a hole in the roof, made
breathing difficult aiid nearly destroyed his
sight. Food ran short, and on Christmas Eve
the party dined upon a rabbit and a hedgehog.
A horde of undisciplined dogs, and the swarm-
ing insects which devoured man and dog alike,
added to the physical woes of the missionary ;
and his mental sufferings were no more easy to
THE MARTYRS.
31
bear. The family sorcerer was jealous and
angry because the visitor denounced his magic
and claimed to represent a higher supernatural
power. The reverend father had submitted
himself to Indian life with a notion of picking
up the Indian language ; but his malicious
instructors taught him to use the filthiest
Algonquin words to express the holiest Christian
ideas, and the whole kennel made fun of him
when he fell into the trap. When he got back
to Quebec in the spring, he had come to the
conclusion that these " wretched infidels, who
spend their lives in the smoke and eternity in
the flames," were of small importance compared
to the friendly tribes of the north-west. The
Hurons, as we have seen, had entertained a
Jesuit missionary nineteen years before, and
now three members of the Order were sent to
develop the work Father Le Caron had begun.
The Indians who came down to Quebec in
1634 to dispose of their winter crop of furs were
induced with some difficulty to take the Jesuits
home with them. The missionaries were not
much better off among the Hurons than their
comrade had been among the Algonquins.
Smoke and fleas, intolerable noise, and incor-
rigible heresy, put Christian patience to a severe
test. Some of the fathers acquired great influ-
ence in the tribes, but not enough to prevent the
torture of an occasional Iroquois prisoner, and
■■■■ ■ i y ii ? »<^^<
32
THE STORY OF CANADA.
not enough to shield themselves from insult
and attack. The crops failed for lack of rain :
the rainmaker blamed the priests for his failure.
Pestilence filled the villages with death : the
priests were accused of causing the disease.
By tact on the first occasion, by boldness on the
second, the missionaries saved their lives ; but
they made little progress with the work to which
those lives had been devoted. Few healthy
Indians could be persuaded to accept the
new religion ; and the eagerness of the priests
to baptize any pagan who seemed about to die
gave rise to a belief that baptism was the cause
of death. As to the religion that the mission-
aries aimed at destroying, it was a confused
mass of beliefs in charms, spells, and ghosts,
benevolent and malicious. The future of the
dead Indian was spent in hunting spirit animals
among shadow trees and ghostly rivers. Every-
thing had its " manitou," or spirit, and one of
these might be stronger than another ; but there
was no " Supreme Spirit " till the pagan creed
began to borrow the beliefs of Christianity.
There was no word for " God " in the Indian's
vocabulary, and the missionaries had to convey
their meaning by some such phrase as *' the
Great Chief of Men " or ** He who lives in the
sky."
In the course of years, with infinite patience
and inexhaustible enthusiasm, the missionaries
THE MARTYRS.
33
gathered round them little groups of Indians
who consented to call themselves Christians
and performed the ceremonies of the Roman
Catholic Church ; and with almost equal zeal
the Jesuits undertook the harder task ot per-
suading the converts to give up the vile
practices of paganism. But only a beginning
had been made when a great disaster over-
whelmed the heathen nation and their Christian
teachers together.
The Iroquois were growing bolder and bolder.
Long before this, even before the coming of
the white man, they had established a sort of
supremacy in North -Eastern America, and
had begun to use their power in the extermina-
tion of their neighbours. The white men's
advent rather hastened than checked this
process. The terror inspired by Champlain's
guns soon evaporated, and now the Iroquois
had obtained guns of their own by trading with
the Dutchmen of the Adantic coast. In 1648,
a ferocious horde swept down upon two of the
Huron towns, which went up in flames, and
seven hundred of the inhabitants were carried
ofl: to slavery and the stake. Brave Father
Daniel, their missionary, was shot down and
burnt in his little church. He had been warned
in time to escape, but stayed beliind to baptize
the Hurons, who crowded round him for pass-
ports to heaven when earth had nothing more
- D
34
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Sfc
to offer. Next spring the raiders came back
to the Huron country and finished their work.
This time the Hurons fought like tigers in
defence of their homes. They scored at least
one victory in the course of the campaign ; and
a town which the Jesuits had christened St.
Louis was only captured when the Huron army
was reduced to twenty wounded men.
The Iroquois were no braver, but they were
better organized, and they had bullets instead
of arrows. When the inv. d jrs drew off, the
remnant of the conquered tribe abandoned
their country, and starved for one wretched
winter on an island in Lake Huron. Even
then the fury of the Iroquois was not satisfied,
and at last the little fragment of the persecuted
nation made a mournful flitting all the way
down to Quebec, where a handful of dusky
half-breeds still bear the Huron name.
Two fathers of the Huron Mission, Br^beuf
and Lalemant, had the misfortune to escape
the speedy death of Father Daniel, and the ink
seems to turn red as we read the story of their
fate. Brdbeuf was bound to a stake, and
scorched with preliminary flames; his lip was
cut away ; as he still persisted in exhorting and
encouraging his Huron fellow-prisoners a red-
hot iron was driven into his throat. He was
adorned with a necklace of red-hot axes ; he
was " baptized " in mockery with a slow stream
THE MARTYRS.
35
rdbeuf
jscape
le ink
their
[, and
jp was
Ig and
red-
le was
s; he
kream
of boiling water; his flesh was cut off and
eaten piecemeal — and this was not all. Yat
with more than Indian endurance he kept down
every sound and sign of weakness for four
hours, till the blood that his torturers were
drinking had ebbed away. A chief tore out
and devoured his heart, believing that even a
Mohawk warrior might borrow bravery from
such an indomitable Frenchman. Lalemant's
torments were prolonged for seventeen hours ;
but he too endured, and earned the reward of
bravery at last in a merciful blow from a
tomahawk.
Two other black-robed heroes must at least
be named in telling the story of early Canada.
Isaac Jogues, a learned and refined young
Frenchman, was carried off by Iroquois in
1642 while on his way to reinforce the Jesuit
Mission among the Hurons. To begin with,
he was beaten senseless with clubs, and his
hands were mangled by the teetl. oi his captors.
Arriving in the Iroquois country, he was taken
to one Mohawk town after another and tortured
at each for the amusement of the inhabitants.
For months he was kept a prisoner, thinking
himself happy because allowed to minister to
the Huron captives, who were brought in by
scores for a lingering and fiery death. At last
the Dutchmen, with whom the Iroquois were
on friendly terms, succeeded in rescuing him —
D 2
m^^mmmm^mm^mmmmmm
PiJMlH ,W tfiMmfmim"
V,
36
THE STORY OF CANADA.
though they were Protestants and hated Jesuitry
— and sent him home to France. He was
honoured as he deserved, and the Queen
thought it a privilege to kiss the maimed
remnants of his hands; but his home lay
where his duty called, and returning to his
persecutors he soon fell a victim to their
tomahawks. Joseph Bressani, an Italian
Jesuit, though equally tormented and maimed,
proved equally undaunted and went back to a
similar martyrdom.
-^ -^ -^^
- /V t^
CHAPTER IV.
Raid and Counter-Raid.
SUCH was the time and such the country
chosen by a group of pious folic in the old
world for the foundiag of a new French
settlement. The site they fixed on was one
which Cham plain had long before marked out,
at the foot of Mount Royal, or Montreal. It was
just the place for a military or trading centre, for
there the two great waterways of the Ottawa
and St. Lawrence meet ; and in our own time
Montreal has grown to be the commercial
metropolis of the Dominion. The founders of
the city, however, had no thought of trade or
conquest. It was to be simply a missionary
outpost, where priests and nuns should convert
the heathen, teach the children, and nurse the
sick \ and the name of the city should be Ville
Marie. The Sieur de Maisonneuvc, a brave
officer who was also a good man, was chosen to
conduct any defence that Iroquois aggression
W
^ET
38
THE STORY OF CANADA.
might call for — a Canadian Miles StanJish;
but the garrison consisted chiefly of agricul-
turists and artizans to build houses and
raise crops. In 1641, the future Ville Marie
was dedicated by a solemn service at Notre
Dame Cathedral in Paris, and before the year
was out the missionary-emigrants got as far as
Quebec. The Quebeckers, suspecting that a
nevi' town farther up the river would cut off
their supplies of beaver-skins, painted the perils
of Montreal in the most lurid colours. ' I
would go," answered Maisonneuve, '* if every
tree were an Iroquois ! " The winter was
spent in boat-building, and on May 17th the
adventurous party landed on the island of
Montreal, singing solemn hymns, and kneeling
before a priest whose prophetic utterance has
been handed down to this day — " You are a
grain of mustard seed which will spring up and
grow till its branches overshadow the land."
The little plant found its growth sorely
checked at first ; for the Iroquois peril was now
at its height. The little bands of friendly
Indians who were persuaded to come and live
beside the town were soon swept away, as,
indeed, were many ot the Huron refugees who
had settled under the walls of Quebec. Raiding
parties, or even solitary Iroquois braves, would
lie in wait for days together, silent and still,
to catch any Frenchman who might venture
"l ^M WB
RAID AND COUinER-RAIU.
39
outside the walls. Only by training dogs to
act as SCO. Its could Maisonneuve ever be si:re
whether an enemy was larking in the neighbour-
hood, and only by the gar^-ison sallying out in
a body to their task could any field work be
accomplished. As the builders of Jerusalem
worked with a trowel in one hand and a sword
in the other, so the founders of Montreal dared
not wield a spade without a musket slung over
the shoulder.
The colony grew, but so did the danger.
In 1660 the Iroquois, having destroyed every
Indiar power that could oppose them, organ
ized an army to sweep the Frenchmen them-
selves off the face of America. The three
isolated settlements on the St. Lawrence — for a
little town called Three Rivers had sprung \ip
betvveen Quebec and Montreal — were to be
surprised one after the other. If the plan were
to half succeed, before ships could bring help
from France there might be nothing left of the
color.y but a few handfuls of starving settlers
imprisoned within their own stone walls. At
Quebec, the colonists had not an inkling of the
scheme on foot till a captive Iroquois, dying
in the torture fires which the "Christian"
Indians of Quebec were still allov.ed to kindle,
told his tormentors that 1,200 warriors had
already smarted for such a raid as had never
been.
40
THE STOKY OV CANADA.
At Montreal, suspicion had been aroused
by the news that a large party of Iroquois had
spent the winter beside the frozen waters of the
Upper Ottawa, apparently with the intention of
descending the river as soon as it was free from
ice. A noble officer named Dollard, and sixteen
ether young men whom he persuaded to join
him, swore to give their lives for the salvation
of the colony. They made their wills, attended a
last Communion Service, received the blessing
of the Church on men about to die, and set out
in canoes to meet the Indian host. Far up the
Ottawa, where it foams over the rocks of the
Long Sault, Dollard and his comrades chose
the scene of their martyrdom. An abandoned
and dilapidated Indian "fort," a little space
enclosed by a palisade of tree trunks, would
at any rate help them to sell their lives at
the dearest possible rate. Four Algonquins
and forty Hurons, hearing of their departure
at Montreal, paddled after them to join in an
adventure after an Indian's own heart. The
allies had not long to wait. The vanguard
of the enemy came floating down the stream,
expecting no opposition till they reached Mon-
treal, and were infuriated when a volley from the
shore told them that they were expected. Two
hundred strong, they rushed upon the fort, but
three times they were driven back by a hot fire
from the loopholes. Then they sat down and
.,.^,,..1„
T^^w
RAID AND COUNTER-RAID.
41
watched their dangerous prey at a safe distance.
The defenders had nothing to eat but dry
crushed corn, and nothing to drink but muddy
water that trickled into a well they dug. The
Hurons' courage failed them when some of
their renegade countrymen in the Iroquois
camp called to them that reinforcements were
coming, and leapt over the ramparts to join the
enemy. Only one Huron remained, the chief
Annahotaha ; but the four Algonquins all stood
fast, After five days of suspense the reinforce-
ments came, and the attack was renewed with
yells of corfident hate. The odds were now
700 against 22, and by this time, it must be
remembered, the Indians had guns and knew
well how to use them. Nevertheless the little
garrison held the fort against every assault.
Three days more of failure quite disheartened
some of the besiegers, but ihe rest only grew
more desperate. Warily covering their advance
by pushing great log shields before them, the
bravest spirits got up to the palisade, and
their axes tore a way in. Then followed a
furious hand-to-hand fight, till the noble band
within had been cut to pieces. All but five of
the deserter', shared their fate, or, rather,
suffered the worse death that Indians reserved
for prisoners of war.
Dollard had not shed his blood in vain. The
defeat had all the effects of a victory. The
4a
THE STOKY OF CANADA.
extermination of a French colony had lost its
charms, and the Iroquois army melted away.
The heroism of Dollard, and a snowshoe
expedition into the Mohawk country in the
winter of 1666-67, compelled the Iroquois to
keep the peace for an unusually long interval;
but in 1680 they invaded the country of the
Illinois tribe and other western allies of the
French. This time their object was not so
much to shed blood as to satisfy the New
Yorkers' inordinate desire for beaver-skin, and
their own for the white men's guns and brandy,
which beaver-skin alone could buy. The French
felt doubly bound to protect their western
friends, because it was the hunting of these tribes-
men that supplied beaver-skin for the Canadian
trade. It was most important that this trade
should not be captured by the English, as it
certainly would be if the Iroquois controlled the
western sources of supply. The Canadian
Governor, La Barre, therefore planned cam-
paigns against the Iroquois, and talked much
of what he would do to them ; but being afraid
to follow up his words by deeds, he only
succeeded in earning the contempt of his foes
and the disgust of his native allies. Another
Governor, Denonville, went so far as to lead an
expedition against the aggressive Iroquois in
1687; but the English objected to this as an
encroachment on their "sphere of influence,"
■PIT
RAID AND COUNTER-RAID.
43
and a fort set up by the French at Niagara had
to be abandoned. Two years later the Iroquois
fell upon Canada like a midnight thunderbolt.
The village of Lachine, that had risen beside
the St. Lawrence rapids nine miles above
Montreal, was wiped out of existence. The
inhabitants were either burnt alive in their own
houses, or carried over the river to be tortured
in fires that their friends on the other side could
see. A little detachment of eighty French
soldiers was caught and annihilated ; and when
the raiders' fury was spent, they left two
hundred dead Canadians in the desolated land
and carried home a hundred and twenty more
to be murdered at leisure.
By this time King James the Second had
fled from the wrath of his subjects, and his
successor, William of Orange, was at war with
James's protector, the King of France. Neither
France nor England could spare many troops
to carry the war into America ; but the Ameri-
cans fought on their own account with a
ferocity worthy of savages. To tell the truth,
the frontier raids in which white and red men
now fought side by side were conducted more
in the red man's style than in the modified
forms of brutality that white men call war. The
village of Schenectady, in New York Colony,
was surprised one winter's niglit by Frenchmen
and I?^dians, whose massacre of the women and
44
THE STORY OF CANADA.
children reads like a chapter from the history
of Armenia.
Singularly enough, all the Iroquois who
happened to be in Schenectady were spared
by their Huron conquerors. By this time a
suspicion seems to have crept into the Indian
mind that in exterminating each other the
native tribes were playing the white man's
game rather than their own; that they were
only being treated with respect as independent
allies till the white men were strong enough to
ignore or even dispossess them. At a critical
point in the war the Indians seemed more than
half inclined to make peace on their own
account. This was not an agreeable prospect
to the white men on either side. Two of the
five Iroquois nations resisted all the English
persuasions to continue the war; and the
western Indians were on the point of making a
treaty with their hereditary foes when their
friends the French put a stop to the negotiations.
There wa.s an Iroquois prisoner in camp, and
he was about to be surrendered to his brethren
as a peace offering. The Frenchmen egged on
their allies to torture him instead, and, as a
last resort, began the barbarous job themselves,
burning the man with red-hot irons. The
Indians then joined in the congenial task,
and nothing more was needed to fan the
smouldering feud into a blaze of war.
RAID AND COUNTER-RAID.
45
Two little incidents will show the part that
woman's wit and woman's courage played in
that war. During one of the raids upon the
English frontier settlements — carried out this
time by Indians only — the wife of an English
farmer was captured, in the absence of her
husband. Her week-old infant was dashed
to death against a tree ; and after being
dragged through the forest by a dozen Indians
for several weeks, Hannah Dustan was told by
her captors what her own fate was to be at the
journey's end. With another white woman and
a boy, who were kept in the same tent, she
planned a desperate escape. In the middle of
the night the prisoners rose, silently seized
three tomahawks, and struck such swift and
steady blows that ten of the redskins died
where they lay. One was spared — a little boy
— and one, a woman, fled wounded into the
woods. In those days the colonial authorities
used to pay a bounty on Indian scalps, as the
Government of India now gives a reward for
every man eating tiger and snake destroyed.
Hannah Dustan and Mary Neff brought ten
scalps home with them, and got fifty pounds as
their share of the bounty.
The heroine of the other incident was a girl of
fourteen. She had been left with two younger
brothers at the fort of Vercheres, not far from
Montreal but on the south side of the River
46
THE STORY OF CANADA.
St. Lawrence. When a raiding party of Iroquois
suddenly made their appearance, and the two
cowardly soldiers who formed the whole garrison
hid themselves in fear, Madeleine took com-
mand with the air of a general, and so
distributed her little force that the Indians
thought the place was full of watchful soldiers.
She even ran down to the landing-place when
she saw a settler's family coming in a canoe,
warned them of the situation, and escorted
them up the fort. Verch^res was saved, and
Madeleine got a pension for life.
It was in this war that Sir William Phips,
after conquering the French in Acadia, sailed
up the St. Lawrence with a little fleet of New
England vessels, and demanded the surrender
of Quebec. The gallant old Governor, Count
de Frontenac, defied him, and the ships went
home in a rather battered condition. A land
expedition that set out to capture Montreal
ended in an even worse fiasco. This was in
1690. It was in this war, also, but seven years
later, that the French from Canada made a
descent on the undefended colony of Newfound-
land, and blotted out nearly all the English
settlements ; after which the leader of the raid,
Pierre Le Moyne d'lberville, sailed up arr.o^g
the icebergs of Hudson's Bay, and captured
Fort Nelson — for the second time, by the way —
after beating three English ships with his one.
^1
mm'.
ImM
^SnH^ff^ V •j/^^n
^VfflVBBtt "^
-^ ^BagaoMF
jiS
^^
CHAPTER V.
The Mississippi.
IN the following year, 1698, the good news
came from Europe that the two kings had
ended their war; and the still greater
blessing of peace with the Iroquois came three
years later. The Canadian leaders were now
free to push on with one of the greatest empire-
building schemes that ever failed. The supre-
macy of France was to be established over the
whole interior of the continent. To trace the
story of that tremendous undertaking we must
go back to the year 1 666. Even before that time
French missionaries and fur-traders had looked
out upon the vast expanse of Lake Superior,
and talked with Indians whose canoes had
floated on a great and mysterious river called
** Messipi." But it was not till 1666 that the
hero of the west, Robert Cavelier de la Salle,
arrived in Canada. He was a born discoverer,
and already, at the age of twenty-three, had
devoted himself to the exploration of the west.
His first colonial experience was gained at a
48
THE STORY OF CANADA.
little fort on the Island of Montreal, where the
massacre occurred in 1689. The name La
Chine was given to the place, perhaps in joke,
because in 1669 it saw La Salle's departure to
find a western route to China. On this journey
he discovered first the Ohio and then the Illinois,
both flowing westward, but he did not follow
either river to its junction with the Mississippi.
That father of rivers was first reached in 1673
by the fur-trader Joliet, who also discovered
that it flowed south towards the Gulf of Mexico
instead of westward to the Pacific. La Salle,
on learning this, gave up the idea of reaching
China, and resolved on a much more hopeful
scheme. He would plant a .French colony on
the fertile plains of the Mississippi valley, thus
defeating any English attempt at westward
extension ; and he would sail down the river to
its mouth, and thus challenge the Spaniards in
their monopoly of Central America. Going
home to Paris, he obtained leave to explore and
build forts, though not to form colonies. The
hardships he underwent in trying to fulfil the
first part of his commission would have filled
volumes, if that had been a book-making cen-
tury. The little ships he built were wrecked;
hostile Indians made war upon him, and friend-
lies refused to guide him; his own men
mutinied, deserted, or tried to poison him ; his
property at home was stolen or seized for
t4V*.i-*-^(.JJ«»r'-'
THE MISSISSIPPI.
¥J
debt; but he never wavered, and on April 9th,
1682, the thrr»e canoes which bore his expedi-
tion floated out upon the Gulf of Mexico.
Here he formall) proclaimed the sovereignty of
France, not only over the coast on which he
stood; but over all the countries through which
the Mississippi and its tributaries might flow.
Yet the enemies of the great explorer had
poisoned the king's mind against him, and his
Majesty expressed his conviction " that the
discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless,
and that such enterprises ought to be prevented
in future." La Salle was anything but a
courtier; nevertheless, when he appeared in
Paris to plead his cause, the magnificence of his
achievement and of its possible results began
to dawn upon the royal mind. The discoverer
was sent back to the Mississippi, not to repeat
his painful journeys through the wilds of
Canada, but to enter the river at it5; mouth,
erect a new French fort, and bar this southern
highway to the rich interior as the St. Law-
rence route was already barred at Quebec.
With four ships the Frenchmen sailed away to
" singe the King of Spain's beard," and with
three — one having been captured by his Spanish
Majesty — they entered the forbidden wdters of
the Mexican Gulf. Unhappily, they had only
the vaguest kiiowledge of the sea they had to
navigate, and they sailed hundreds of miles past
50
THE STORY OF CANADA.
their destination. One of the ships was wrecked
in trying to enter a channel which La Salle
thought might be the Mississippi's mouth. Two
ships were left, the " Joly " and the " Belle." The
"Joly" landed the colonists she had brought,
and sailed away to France. A little exploration
soon showed La Salle that he had made a
terrible mistake ; the Mississippi was nowhere
to be found. The "Belle" went aground, and
there was no way of escape from a fever-stricken
shore, except the desperate venture of an over-
land journey to Canada — nearly 2,000 miles of
marching and canoeing and portaging through
wildernesses haunted by countless savage
tribes. There was no time to be lost, for the
two hundred men and women who had landed
were now reduced to forty-five. With nineteer
of these La Salle set out in the beginning of
1687, and on March i8th he was murdered by a
discontented section of his own followers. A
few survivors of the forlorn hope reached the
Mississippi, and so found their way north to the
St. Lawrence, while smallpox and Indians left
only a fragment of the French trespassers on
the Gulf of Mexico to be carried into Spanish
captivity. Nevertheless, Iberville followed where
La Salle had shown the way, and before the
century was out the French flag waved over
the Lower Mississippi as it waved over the
St. Lawrence.
^ -m-
CHAPTER VI.
Life in the Old French Colony.
THE question will naturally be asked:
What was the domestic history of the
Canadian people while all this fighting
and exploring was in progress ? It may be an-
swered, first, that Indian fighting ran through
the home life of the settlers as he weft runs
through the warp. They could 1 rdly plough
their little clearing without exposin hemsel es
to the chance of an Indian arrow j uiey could
scarcely go to sleep without the risk of an
Indian irruption before morning. Apart from
this supreme and overshadowing dread, the
habitants lived a life of hardship tempered
by health, in a climate stimulating though
severe. The life of pioneer settlers, hewing out
homes and farms in the forest, is never one of
luxury and ease.
The progress of the Canadians was handi-
capped from the start by the system under
£ 2
'mmmm
mmmr»
52
THE STORY OF CANADA.
which they were governed. While the English
colonies were very largely left to manage their
own affairs, the French colony was smothered
in perpetual swaddling clothes. The govern-
ment of Canada was despotic from beginning
to end, and the fact that the despotism was
generally benevolent, and occasionally wise,
did not mend matters very much.
The authorities busied themselves, for one
thing, with some very remarkable schemes to
promote the increase of the population. In
the early days the king sent out cargoes of
young women for the settlers to marry, paid
the settlers well for marrying, and pensioned
them for haviiig large families. Fathers who
did not get their boys married at twenty and
their girls at sixteen were fined ; and bachelors
were punished still more severely. Sometimes
male emigrants also were sent out, and soldiers
on duty in Canada were encouraged to remain
in the country instead of returning to France
on their discharge. On the whole, however,
the rulers of the mother country were no more
in favour of emigration than their people were
anxious to emigrate. There was one exception,
and an important one, for the Protestants were
driven out of France by the thousand ; but
they were not allowed to devote their energies
to the building up of this new France beyond
the sea.
LIFE IN THF OLD FRENCH COLONY.
53
The paternal king was represented at Quebec
by a governor and an intendant, who, with the
help of a small nominated council, treated the
community as a nation of children. The
country people, for instance, were fined heavily
if they dared to come to town without leave.
Public meetings were strictly prohibited. " It
is most important," one of the intendants said,
'* not to let the people speak their minds." The
townspeople were at first allowed to choose a
" syndic," who presented petitions in their
name ; but even this morsel of liberty was
snatched away by the jealous authorities. A
feeble imitation of the feudal system was set up
in Canada, the land being parcelled out among
a class of seigneurs; but the kings who had
robbed the feudal lords at home of their semi-
royal powers had no intention to create a set
of kinglets in the colony. An ambitious
Canadian might have a tide if he liked, or if
he chose to pay for it, but the exercise of
despotism was the king's monopoly. The
tenant-farmer, or ceiisitaire, had to work for his
seigneur about one day in the year, and the
seigneur, who was expected to put up a mill,
could prevent the farmers from taking their corn
elsewhere to be ground. The rents, however,
were merely nominal — say four or five shillings
and a few chickens for a good-sized farm.
The farmer could not be turned out at will, and
54
THE STORY OF CANADA.
he could sell his rights in the holding if he gave
up to the seigneur eight per cent, of the price.
If the seigneur wanted to sell, he had to pay a
much higher percentage to the king, and he
could only sell land that he had cleared.
Finally, the seigneurs acted as local magis-
trates ; but they were very seldom allowed to
sit in serious cases.
The Canadian who wanted to trade found
himself hedged in by a jealous law. The only
trade of importance was the buying and export-
ation of beaver-skins ; and this was a strict
monopoly, bestowed on one company after
another as the king's favour happened to be
lost and won. Flogging and branding were
the mildest punishments decreed against the
unauthorized trader. Yet the temptations of
the fur trade proved stronger than the risks.
Hundreds of young men took to the woods, and
spent their lives roaming from one Indian camp
to another, living as the Indians lived, and
buying up in advance the skins which should
have gone down to the Company at Quebec.
At one time, when the whole population of
the colony was only about ten thousand,
as many as eight hundred men were away
in the forest, forgetting their religion and
defying their king. These coureiirs de bois, or
forest-runners, were useful when fighting had to
be done, and their wanderings in the undiscovered
LIFE IN THE OLD FRENCH COLONY.
55
west form a romantic chapter in history ; but it
was a serious thing for the colony to have its
members relapsing into savagery, and making
even the native savages more intractable by sell-
ing them brandy. The priests complained, the
. king threatened and cajoled by turns ; but t\ 't
coureurs ran the woods as before, protected not
only by the all-concealing forest but by the
very men who were supposed to be hunting
them down. The otficials of the colony were
quite ready to serve two masters if both were
ready to pay. The governor himself did not
scruple to engage in illicit trading on a large
scale, in partnership with outlaws who smuggled
the beaver-skins over to the Dutch and English
colonies.
I have said that both the governor and
intendant represented the king ; but they often
gave his Majesty a good deal of trouble by
quarrelling over their various prerogatives and
dignities. The greatest governor the colony
ever had, Count de Frontenac, lived such a cat-
and-dog life with his intendant that the king
gave up trying to pacify them and recalled the
governor to '"ranee. Then there was another
power represented in Canada — namely, the
Church — and at times there was a great deal
of friction between the bishop and the secular
officials on questions of precedence and autho-
rity. Bishop Laval took a particularly high
^HlHHi
56
THE STORY OF CANADA.
view of his rights as spiritual head of the colony.
On one occasion this prelate and Governor
Argenson were to be present at a catechism.
Each claimed beforehand the first salute from
the children, and as the question of precedence
was still unsettled when the day arrived the
children were ordered not to look up from their
task on the entrance of the visitors. Two un-
lucky boys so far forgot themselves as to look
up and salute the governor, and the bishop
compensated himself by having the urchins
thrashed.
The quarrels of their rulers had little effect
on the mass of the people, at any rate outside
the chief centres ; for the habiiants who formed
the bulk of the population had no newspapers,
and for that matter could not read. Along the
river banks they built their little houses of logs
or of limestone — both equally plentiful on the
long narrow farms that stretched like ribbons
side by side from the water's edge to the depth
of the forest. In summer a primitive agriculture
was carried on — Indians permitting. In winter
there was wood-cutting to be done, and hunting;
and the cattle had to be looked after — the
popular preference for keeping horses was
sternly repressed by law. Then the spinning and
weaving had to be done ; for money was rare,
and at any rate the " stuff of the country " made
a stouter coat than any superfine cloth that the
LIFE IN THE OLD FRENCH COLONY.
57
yearly ships might bring to luxurious folk at
Quebec. After all this there was time tor a
song or a game or a dance ; for Gallic gaiety
will out, in the backwoods as on the boulevards.
The parish priest, who was the patriarch of the
settlement, was something of a puritan, and
kept a sharp eye on the dancing, as he did
indeed on all the proceedings ot his ^ock. A
simple and hardy life these farmers lived. It
can hardly be said that they prospered, so far
as material or mental acquisitions mean pros-
perity. They certainly multiplied ; but as their
natural increase was not assisted by any large
stream of emigration from France, the whole
white population of Canada was only sixty or
seventy thousand when its history as a French
colony came abruptly to an end.
lie
CHAPTER VII.
The Seven Years' War.
THE imagination of the world was taken
captive by General Wolfe when he took
Quebec ; and that was right, for the fall of the
Canadian fortress was stupendous in results as
well as brilliant in execution. Yet the dazzling
jewel must not blind us to its setting : we must
not forget that the battle on the banks of the green
St. Lawrence was only one event of a war that
raged for seven years on three continents. It
was really two wars rolled into one. In Europe,
the great struggle was between Frederick the
Great (with some help from England) and the
three women who ruled Austria and France and
Russia. In India and America the contest was
simply between the English and the French.
In India the fighting on our side was done
by a company, resolved to get and keep the
commercial and political control of a land
where no true English colony could be planted.
^-'^■"^■—'V'
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.
59
In America, on the other hand, the English
were at home, and the war was waged to pre-
vent a dozen healthy and growing colonies
with over a million of people from being
hemmed in and crushed by the military power
of France. The British settlers had no desire
for an incJi of the territory which the French
settlers had occupied ; they wanted liberty to
grow not northwards but westwards, and their
6o
THE STORY OF CANADA.
westward growth was made impossible not by a
French colony or set of colonies but by a row
cf military outposts. While the English colonists
busied themselves with the duty that lay nearest
'": meir hands, making English homes without
tho least idea of building up a new English
empire, the French were striving to make an
empire without a population, and drawing an
imperial frontier from the Great Lakes to the
Gulf across the westward path of their rivals.
Around the military outposts that marked this
frontier only a handful of Frenchmen had been
induced to settle, and the neighbouring Indian
tribes inclined to the English side. "It is
true," said a French writer in 1751, " that they
like our brandy better than the English rum ;
but they prefer other English wares to ours,
and they can buy a better silver bracelet at
Oswego for two beaver-skins than we can sell
them at Niagara for ten." One might have
thought that a single strong push from the
English colonies would have demolished the
artificial barrier that hemmed them in. Unfor-
tunately, a strong push was just what they
could not give, because they would not push
together. Their energies, instead of being
thrown whole-heartedly against the common
foe, were distracted by quarrels with their
governors or paralyzed by jealousy of each
other. The sixty thousand French Canadians,
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.
6i
meanwhile, had no internal politics to quarrel
over, no local liberties to be jealous for ; they
were an organized army, which only required to
be led. There was plenty of incapacity among
the British generals who went over to fight
America's battles, and plenty of inexperience
among the soldiers whom they led ; but without
the help of the mother country the victory
would not have been won. Even with that
help the war lasted five years, and it only ended
then because King Louis required nearly all his
soldiers at home.
In the summer of 1754, a party of British
colonisis crossed the Alleghany mountains and
began to build a fort on the banks of the Ohio
river. A larger party of Frenchmen drove
them away, and built a fort themselves on the
same spot — Fort Duquesne, now represented by
the city of Pittsburg. Shortly afterwards, a
little force on the watch for British " tres-
passers " was caught by our colonial troops,
who killed ten and took the rest prisoners.
The British commander who thus drew first
blood in the war was a young Virginian officer
— by name, George Washington. The French
retaliated by attacking a British post, Fort
Necessity, which Washington agreed to evacuate,
and the trespassers were got rid of for a while.
At home France and England were at peace,
but both took care to send fleets across the
62
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Atlantic, and two of the French ships were
captured by the English. This was in 1755.
The English troops landed, and General Brad-
dock led two thousand of them over the Alle-
ghany Range to recover Fort Duquesne; but
they were caught in the woods, and stood help-
less while the hidden Indians and Canadians
shot them down like cattle in a slaughter-house.
The defeat had most disastrous results for the
colonies, for the Indians, thinking the British
sun had set, swarmed down upon the outlying
settlements. The carnival of massacre and
outrage that followed may be imagined.
The fatal forest in which Braddock's army
was trapped at that time formed a barrier,
stronger than any line of fortifications, between
the French and English colonies ; but there
were three points where the opposing forces
could get at each other by water. In the east,
where the Atlantic Ocean gave free play to
naval operations, there were coast towns and
ports to be attacked. In the north-west, the
French forts of Niagara and Frontenac, and the
English fort of Oswego, stood within striking
distance of each other on the shores of Lake
Ontario; and between the two Lake Champlain
and the Richelieu River provided a tempting
though narrow waterway by which Canada
could be invaded. The British plan was to
force a way to the enemy by all three routes at
THF SEVEN YRARS' WAR.
63
once. The Lake Ontario expedition, however,
came to nothing. The expedition to Lake
Champlain won a victory, but lost heavily in
doing so, and could not follow up the advantage
gained. On the Atlantic coast three Acadian
forts were taken by British ships. It was in that
year, 1755, that six thousand French settlers were
forcibly taken from their homes in Nova Scotia,
which had then been a British colony for forty
years, and transported by our men-of-war to other
parts of the continent. Longfellow has thrown a
halo of martyrdom over the victims in his story
of ** Evangeline," and the real story is pathetic
enough ; but the responsibility for the harshness
with which the Acadians were treated must
be shared by the French Government, which
secretly stirred up the dying embers of dis-
loyalty to British rule.
While all this campaigning was going on in
America, the home governments kept up the
pretence of being at peace, and it was not
till May i8th, 1756 — when about three
hundred French ships had fallen prizes to the
British fleet — that war was formally declared.
Both the governments now sent fresh generals
to bring the American war to a climax. The
French 'commander, Montcalm, speedily proved
his capacity by destroying Fort Oswego. In the
following year he also captured Fort William
Henry, near Lake Champlain. Unhappily,
64
THF, STORY OF CANADA.
Montcalm failed to control the horde of wild
western Indians he had brought with him, and
in defiance of his pledge of protection these
savages killed and ate many of the English
prisoners.
Another summer came, but it brought no
better fortune to British arras in the valley of
Lake Champlain. The French fort of Ticon-
deroga barred the road, and General Aber-
crombie vainly hurled his brave Highlanders
at defences which artillery alone could have
destroyed. When nearly two thousand men had
been killed or disabled, he gave up the suicidal
attempt and went back the. way he had come.
Meanwhile another body of Highlanders had
been sent west as part of an army which
intended to capture Fort Duquesne. After
a terrible march, and a disconcerting taste of
Indian forest warfare, the expedition found
the fort abandoned and the Ohio valley
open for peaceful possession. This was in
November. Two months before, a third English
force had taken Fort Frontenac, on Lake
Ontario, reducing the French garrisons of the
west to helplessness by cutting off their com-
munications with eastern Canada. But the
greatest achievement of 1758 was on th
Atlantic coast where the strong Frenc'
of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton IsK . tu^
before the persevering skill of General vVolfe
TBPf"
THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.
65
The mouth of the St. Lawrence, the front door
of Canada, was now unguarded, and early in
1759 Wolfe entered with a floating army of
nine thousand men, hoping that General
Amherst would get in by the side entrance,
through Lake Champlain, and that a third
force would come down to join them through
the back door, on Lake Ontario. As it turned
out, not a man got through by either way, and
Wolfe's nine thousand had to take Q^uebec as
best they could without assistance. How well
they did it history will never forget.
iCki
olfe
Wl
^qE^
M
<lk^l^^
sB/'^^j^WWJ
[i.y&^S %^-^
^m^M
iK^S
WF^idK
CHAPTER VIII.
The British Conquest.
ON the 2 1 St of June, 1759, General Mont-
calm, hoping against hope for some little
reinforcement from his mother country,
saw the dreaded English ships sailing serenely
up the river instead. Serenely, so far as the
ships were concerned ; but the heart of the young
English general was heavy with the greatness
of his task when the rock of Quebec rose high
and huge before him.
The city and citadel were built on a peninsula
between the St. Lawrence and its tributary the
St. Charles. The greater part of the defending
army, sixteen thousand strong, had come out of
the fortress and crossed the St. Charles, and
now lay stretching eastwards along the northern
shore of the St. Lawrence, looking down from
an inaccessible height of three hur\dred feet on
the rash invaders. Fireships soon came floating
down upon the British fleet, providing a grand
THE nRITISH CONQUEST.
67
and costly dis])lay of fireworks, but doing no
harm beyond the destruction of seven French-
men who had stayed too long on board.
The superior numbers of his enemy gave no
alarm to Wolfe. He thought little of the
Canadian mililia who formed a large part of
the French army, and he was only anxious to
make them come out and fight. He trusted
his own men as they trusted him, and as a rule
he had them well in hand. But once their
bravery burst the bonds of discipline. He had
laid a scheme, audacious enough for the boldest,
to storm those easterly heights by a double
attack. One force, having climbed the heights
still farther east, was to dash in across the
Montmorency torrent just above its leap of two
hundred and fifty feet to the St. Lawrence —
while another force was to land right in front
of the French position, on the flats left bare by
the retreating tide, and scale the heights while
the flankhig movement kept the defenders I aisy.
The British Grenadiers told olf for the front
attack would not wait for the order to move,
but dashed up the precipitous slope with mad
impetuosity — to be hurled back bleeding and
helpless by a torrent of lead. The whole plan
was spoiled, and the French governor declared
exultant that he iiad no longer any anxiety
for Quebec.
Wolfe now made up his mind that Quebec
F 2
'Wflr.
68
THE STORY OF CANADA.
would have to be taken from above instead of
from below. wSoon after his arrival he had
planted artillery on the south shore of the St.
Lawrence, just opposite the capital, and much
of the town had been destroyed by the storm of
shot and shell to which it was thus exposed.
Under cover of a furious bombardment some of
his ships now dashed up the river, and the
general strained his eyes to discover a possible
landing-place on the north shore from which
a descent might be made on the city. Mont-
calm had laughed at the idea of danger from
this quarter, "unless the enemy had wings," — so
steep were the cliffs. Nevertheless, a strong
force had been posted on these heights some
distance west of Quebec, and now followed the
movements of the saucy British ships with
watchful eyes. Between this army and Quebec
there was an insignificant footpath winding up
the face of the precipice, but the few tents at the
top showed that a very small detachment was
thought enough to guard such an unlikely
approach. On the night of September 12th
General Wolfe and nearly five thousand of his
followers got into their boats, and floated silently
down towards that neglected path. Twice they
were challenged by sentinels on -hore, but a
French-speaking officer quieted all suspicions by
saying that these were the provision boats —
really expect-^d about that time — from Montreal,
THE BRITISH CONQUEST.
69
stealing quietly down in hiding from the
British ships. The landing-place was found j
twenty-four brave volunteers swiftly scaled the
cliff, and dashed into the tents at the top ; the
Frenchmen awoke and fled, and a long line of
British soldiers toiled up the path till the
whole force was ranijed in battle order on the
Heights of Abraham. Montcalm, hurrying
across the St. Charles with whatever force he
could bring, lost the battle and his life. Wolfe,
pierced by three bullets, lived only long enough
to hear that he was a conqueror.
It was a little fight, that of the Heights of
Abraham — only six or seven hundred killed
and wounded on the British side, and perhaps
twice that number on the other : a mere
skirmish compared uith the battle-massacres
that soaked the soil of Europe. Yet the
winning of that little fight was the master
stroke which decided that the whole of North
America should pass to the British race.
Carlyle, strippmg the laurel bushes to crown
his German hero, pauses a moment to fling a
wreath on the British general's head. ** Truly
a bit of right soldierhood, this Wolfe. How
could a Friedrich himself have managed this
Quebec in a more artistic way ? The prettiest
soldiering I have heard of among the English
for several generations."
Curiously enough, the fame of Wolfe to-day
70
THE STORY OF CANADA.
rests as much on a single modest remark as on
the " pretty soldiering" that conquered Canada.
Gliding down the river to his crowning victory,
he entertained his officers by reciting Gray's
** Elegy " on the dead in a country church-
yard : —
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
I'lieir homely joys, and destiny obscure ;
Nor Grandeur hear widi a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power.
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike tli' im.nitable hour, —
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
** Gentlemen," said the young commander as
he ended, "I would rather have written those
lines than take Quebec ! "
After the defeat and death of Montcalm the
governor of the colony made no further attempt
to hold his capital. A few months before he
had written to King Louis, "Canada shall bury
us under its ruins before we surrender to the
English " : he now instructed the military com-
r-iander to surrender when the summons should
arrive, and took himself and his boasting to Mon-
treal. The French garrison marched out, and
the English marched in seven thousand strong;
but before sur^mer came again the conquerors
had paid deaii; for their victory. Scurvy swept
down iqion them like a plague, and when their
wmmmim.
THE BRITISH "JONQUEST.
71
effective strength had been reduced to three
thousand a bold French general came down
from Montreal, and besieged them with an army
of eight thousand meji. The English commander
thought fit to sally out and risk a battle,
in which he lost one thousand men, and
then crept back into his fortress. Three weeks
later, when the ice was gone from the river
and the British warships could sail up and
relieve the garrison, the French forces hastily
retreated to Montreal, Here, the governor
thought, a last stand would be made ; but
happily he changed his mind, and Montreal
was spared the horrors of a siege. So far as
the colonists were concerned, the struggle was
over already. The English had issued a pro-
clamation that if the people in arms did not return
to their homes at once they would find no homes
to return to — nothing but heaps of ashes. The
governor replied by proclaiming that if the
people attempted to go home they would be
shot ; but the governor could only threaten,
while the English could enforce their threat, so
the Canadian militia melted away, and left the
French regulars to continue a hopeless struggle
if they liked.
The invaders were now pressing in from
every side. In the west, Fort Niagara had
now fallen like Fort Frontenac, and pouring
down from Lake Ontario on the bosom of the
ii
73
THE STORY OF CANADA.
St. Lawrence came an English army in a fleet
of boats. As many as eighty-four men were
drowned in the rapids, but of human opposition
there was none. The forces that had barred
the way through Lake Champlain with such
success in former years now fell back, and the
English streamed in from the south, meeting no
check till they reached Fort L^vis on the St.
Lawrence. After three days' fighting the fort was
captured, and most of the Indians who fought
on the British side went home in th*. sulks
because they were not allowed to kill the
prisoners ; but their help was no longer needed.
The three armies, numbering in all about
seventeen thousand men, joined hands before
the walls of Montreal, and called on the
governor to surrender. There was a little hesi-
tation. One of the conditions laid down was
disagreeable enough : the French soldiers were
to give up their arms and promise not to fight
again in that war. This the British general
insisted on as punishment for the atrocities
committed by the Indians under French com-
mand. On September 8th, 1760, the articles of
capitulation were signed.
Governor Vaudreuil, Intendant' Bigot, and
several other French officials were thrown into
the Bastille as soon as they got home to France :
not because they had given up Canada — that
was plainly the fault of the mother country —
m
^?i!S^
THE BRITISH CONQUEST.
73
but because some of them at least had been
guilty of colossal frauds upon the public purse.
Commissary-General Cadet, for instance, on one
occasion succeeded in buying from the govern-
ment stores for six hundred thousand francs
and then selling them back to the government
for one million four hundred thousand.
The greater part of the French army was
shipped over to Europe with its commanders,
though many soldiers deserted in order to
remain in Canada. The old rulers, civil and
military, were now safely out of the way.
Four more years passed, however, before the
Canadian people knew what was to become of
them. The ups and downs of war might yet bring
back the flag of France to wave over the cities
of Champlain and Maisonneuve. In Europe
the tide of Frederick's fortune reached so low
an ebb that Prussia seemed on the point of
collapse. Even on American soil the French
contrived to make themselves felt, for in 1762
St. John's, the chief settlement in Newfound-
land, fell into their hands. This, however, was
only a dying convulsion. On February loth,
1763, the treaty of peace was signed by which
France gave up to England all her enormous
territories in North America, except a shrunken
colony on the Gulf of Mexico and two little
islands off the coast of Newfoundland. In
Europe the slaughter of eight hundred and
74
THE STORY OF CANADA.
fifty tliousand soldiers left the map absolutely
unchanged.
A feat of arnns had captured Canada, but
not the Canadian. Military force and skill
were powerless to solve the problem that now
confronted the British rulers of the colony.
A population of sixty or seventy thousand
French Roman Catholics had to be trans-
formed into loyal British subjects. Nearly
every man in the colony, and many mere lads
to boot, had been in arms against the con-
queror. Their governors, their generals, their
clergy had filled their minds with detestation of
the English name. They had been taugh*: to
regard the invaders as enemies of God and
king alike. To fight against the English was
to wage a holy war against infidelity. Gf.neral
Montcalm had told the people, in a letter
written just before the conquest, what such an
event would mean for them. They would be
deprived of their laws and customs, their
religion and their language. " In a word, if
you are conquered by Englishmen you have to
become English yourselves. I am so certain
of what I say that I will not give ten years
after the conquest of Canada before it is all
accomplished." The prophet was not altogether
without excuse. To this day the Englishman
often show^ his contempt, if not aversion, for
the manners and customs of those who chance
THE BRITISH CONQUEST.
75
to differ from him in race or In religion. When
Montcahn wrote, not only were the Roman
Catholics of the United Kingdom prevented
from sending men of their own faith to repre-
sent them in Parliament, and subjected to many
other civil degradations, but the performance
of public worship laid a priest open to the
charge of high treason. In Scotland, a little
while before, an attempt had been made to
cure the disloyalty of the Highlanders by for-
bidding them to wear their national dress, and
the exercise of the Episcopalian religion had
been made almost impossible by stringent penal
legislation against Jacobite clergymen.
Nevertheless, the Government of King George
in a fit of political wisdom decided on a policy
of toleration for Canada. His generals had
already promised, when Quebec and Montreal
surrendered, that the exercise of the Roman
Catholic religion should be preserved. In
1774, the British Parliament passed the famous
Quebec Act, which presented Canada with a
Roman Catholic Church establishment : that is
to say, the Church authorities received power
to levy taxes which the law compelled every
Roman Catholic to pay. The colony was also
allowed to Iceep the old French system of civil
law, though English law was enforced in
criminal matters. On the whole, the Canadians
were allowed to do very much what they had
76
THE STORY OF CANADA.
been in the habit of doing, and with that they
were content. The governor was an English-
man, to be sure — a foreigner ; but he was away
at Quebec. The common people, in their
villages and on their farms, had been accus-
tomed to look upon the parish priest as their
ruler, and the priest was still there with as
much power as ever, so it mattered little who
represented the supreme secular authority in
the cities.
The people did not receive the boon of a
parliament, but that they had never thought of
asking. They had no inclination to quarrel
with King George for withholding political
liberties which they had never had the least
hope of acquiring under Kin^, \ouis.
One effect of the conquest for which the
French settlers in Canada and the English in
the other colonies had equal reason to be
thankful was the restraint it put upon the
Indians. With the white men divided, the red
men could make themselves feared and at least
outwardly respected. With the white men
united under one great power, the red men's
favour was no longer of such importance, and
their independence was in danger of extinction.
If the Indians had realized how completely the
power of the French was destroyed, they might
have settled down and made the best of a bad
job. As it was, even after the western fort
^ 111
THE BRITISH CONQUEST.
77
of Detroit and Micliillimackinac had been
taken over by the British garrisons, the French
coureurs de bois deluded the neighbouring tribes
into a beUef that the EngHsh flag would soon be
hauled down and the intruders expelled by the
overwhelming power of France. An Indian
named Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawas, with
great secrecy and skill organized a conspiracy
by which the English newcomers should be
swept back from the western woods and waters.
He had the less difficulty in persuading his
fellow tribesmen to rise, because the English
garrisons had proved far less tolerant of Indian
ways — unpleasant and annoying ways, very
often — than the French had been. On May
7th, 1763, Pontiac and forty of his confederates
arrived at the gate of Detroit, with peace on
their faces but guns hidden under their blankets.
Some inkling of the treacherous scheme had
reached ':he English the day before, and the
murderers were shut out. The mask of friend-
ship was then thrown aside and the Indians
besieged the fort. The garrison of Detroit held
out for two months, till relieved by a little ship
sailing up from Niagara; but nine other British
outposts, scattered through the present States of
Michigan and Indiana and the western parts of
Pennsylvania, had not been forewarned, an<l
therefore fell an easy prey before measures
could be taken to suppress the rising.
f
f^-
CHAPTER IX.
American Invasions.
THE union of Canada with the old English
colonies was not to last long. Indeed,
the conquest of Canada was one cause
of the American rebellion. While the north
and the west were held by a foreign and hostile
power, the English colonists were not inclined
to push their quarrel with the mother country.
Now that the colonial liberties were no longer
in danger from France, the settlers turned to
face the peril with which they were threatened
by England herself. King George and his
Parliament, by insisting on their legal right to
tax the colonies, lost not only that right but the
colonies themselves, and split the British family
in two. It was useless to contend that the taxes
were required for purposes in which the colonies
had the deepest possible mterest. Taxation
without representation was a grievance which
no high-spirited English community would put
AMERICAN INVASIONS.
79
up with. In the first part of the war the
Americans did not intend to break off their
connection with Britain. Even when they raised
a flag of their own ihey continued to declare
their allegiance to the motlierland. If the
British Government had been moved by the
tradi^onal liberty-loving spirit of the British
people, if the head of the nation had seen that
the road to unity lay through the valley of con-
cession, the world would have been spared a
fratricidal war, and a century of bitterness and
suspicion. As things were, obstinacy in London
drove the Americans to the extreme course of
cutting themselves off from the rest of the
nation.
The Americans thought, or at any rate
hoped, that the Canadians would speedily join
in the revolt. Surely, if a people endowed
with a large amount of self-government were
ready to tight their own king to get more, a
people who had none at all would be twice as
ready to fight their foreign conqueror. There
were only five hundred regulars and a few
militiamen to represent the British power in
Canada, and when General Montgomery's
army of Americans pressed in through I^ake
Champlain, the city of Montreal fell into their
hands like a ripe plum. This was on November
13th, 1775. Montgomery then joined forces
with another American army, which had reached
8o
THE STOr-.V OF CANADA.
Quebec, in a miserable and half-starved condi-
tion, by crossing the highlands north of Maine
and floating down the turbulent Chaudi^re
river. Montgomery, however, had neither the
skill nor the fortune of General Wolfe, and
Quebec defied every attempt at capture. If
only the inhabitants would rise against their
governor and open the gates ! Governor
Carleton, doubtless, had his anxieties on this
score ; but he had made himself popular with
the colonists, and Frenchmen fought shoulder
to shoulder with Englishmen in the city's
defence. Outside the walls of Quebec the
invaders could overrun the province at their
pleasure ; but, with all their persuasions and
proclamations, they could only bring two
hundred Canadians to their standard. The
political ambition to which the Americans
appealed had scarcely begun to simmer in the
Canadian breast. Religious sentiment was
strong, and the priests directed all its force
against the revolutionists. True, King Ceorge
was a Protestaiit, but the New England settlers
were Puritan, which was several degrees lower
in the scale of heresy. The British Parliament
had announced that Protestantism was to be
encouraged in Canada, but in the same
breath had given special privileges to Roman
Catholicism. No such favours were to be
expected from the American revolutionists.
AMERICAN INVASIONS.
8l
:ondi-
.idibre
2r the
;, and
■e. If
their
vernor
m this
It with
loulder
city's
ec the
,t their
ns and
ig two
The
ericans
n the
was
force
George
settlers
s lower
ament
s to be
same
Roman
10 be
sis.
It
The winter passed, and the hopes of the
besiegers vanished with the snow. The ice
that bridged and barred the river broke and
fled, and a British fleet sailed up from the sea.
Montgomery was dead, killed at the head of
his troops ; the other American commander,
Arnold, was wounded, and his successor had
been taken prisoner with several hundred men.
Smallpox and other diseases wrought havoc in
the American ranks, and the British reinforce-
ments soon cleared the colony of the survivors.
When the war was over, and the English
colonies had become a full-fledged republic,
another and a greater invasion of Canada by
Americans took place — a peaceful but melan-
choly procession of refugees. A large minority
of the American settlers had been against the
revolution, and thousands of them had fought
on the king's side. They included, of course,
officials and other persons interested in up-
holding the Royal government ; but there was
a multitude of others who hated rebellion and
republicanism with a sincere hatred. Some
were hanged, others were banished, and still
others exiled tiiemselves, leaving nil their
property to be coniiscated by the successful
revolutionists. Twenty thousand of these
" United Empire Loyalists" took refuge in
Nova Scotia, out of which the additional
G
8'?
THE STORY OF CANADA.
province of New Brunswick was carved for
their benefit; other parties settled in the
neighbouring Prince Edward Island and New-
foundland ; ten thousand toiled up the St.
Lawrence to drive back the northern forest and
create the fertile and busy province of Ontario ;
and a large number received land in the
unreclaimed part of lower Canada between the
St. Lawrence valley and the frontier of the new
republic. This great and sudden increase of
the population, and especially the planting of
the new settlements in the west, compelled
some rearrangement of the administrative
system. Accordingly, the colony was in 1792
divided into two provinces, l^pper and Lower
Canada, and each was permitted to elect a
legislative assembly, while the governor and a
nominated upper house represented the Crown.
The Assembly at York — as Toronto was then
called — at once proceeded to enact a thoroughly
English system of law for Upper Canada. Lower
Canada, in spite of the British immigration that
had been flowing in ever since the conquest, and
the recent arrivals of American loyalists, was
still French by a very large majority. The
go\ernor however, chose his cabinet, or Execu-
tive Council, from the British minority, who were
also allowed to control the upper house of the
Legislature, As might be expected, t;here was
a good deal of friction between these higher
AMEPICAN INVASIONS.
8:?
authorities and the popular Assembly, which
represented the French sentiment of the pro-
vince. There was plenty of friction in Upper
Canada, too. Thousands of Americans, who
had begun by acknowledging the republic, had
been drawn to Canada by Governor Simcoe's
liberal offers of land. The original loyalists did
not like this belated loyalty, and passed a
remarkable law for the summary arrest o iny
newcomer who might be suspected of sedition.
When the United States declared war on
England in 1812, in resentment at the shipping
policy by which the British sou^'.^ to check the
schemes of Napoleon, Canada was invaded
at three points by American armies. The
Canadians rose as one man to meet them,
adjourning domestic quarrels till a more con-
venient time. In the west, the invading army
was not only driven back across tne Detroit
river, but pursued and compelled to surrender
— two thousand five hundred pi-isoners at a
blow. Farther east, the invaders were
defeated after landing on the Canadian side
of the Niagara, and eleven hundred more
_^;risoners were taken. Mackinaw, which
w^e have heard of befot ; as Michiilimackinac,
was surprised and captured by a party of
two hundred Canadians, of whom only thirty-
three were soldiers. The good fortune cf the
G 2
n
84
THE STORY OF CANADA.
British lasted well into the new year. In
January, 1813, a republican army that marched
to recapture Detroit was totally defeated, the
general and five or six hundred of his men
being captured. The Indians played a brave
part in this engagemert ; but when it was over
their inherited barbarism broke out upon the
wounded Americans, their chief, Tecumseh,
proving unable to restrain their tomahawks.
In February a dash across the frozen St. Law-
rence brought the American town of Ogdens-
bu:g into the hands of a British garrison. When
summer came the Americans had their turn.
Their fleet on Lake Ontario enabled them to
throw an invading force into the heart of
Upper Canada, and to burn the government
buildings at the capital. On the south-
west shore of the lake, where the Niagara forms
the international frontier, Fort George was
captured by an American land and water attack,
and the British remaining in that district v;ere
altogether outnumbered ; but while two thousand
five hundred of the invaders were asleep one
night, seven hundred of the king's men burst in
upon their camp and routed them, cajituring the
two American generals and a hundred men.
Seven hundred Americans attempted to wipe off
this score by an adventure of the same kind,
but they conld not keep their plan secret, and
a settler's wife carried the news through twenty
AMERICAN INVASIONS.
85
miles of forest to the British camp. When the
invaders arrived they fell into an ambush, and
nearly the whole force were compelled to
surrender. These checks did not prevent the
Americans from making a second descent upon
the north shore of the lake. The British had a
squadron in those waters, and succeeded in
taking two of the enemy's little ships, but a
second fight brought no decisive advantage to
either fleet. On the second of the chain of
inland seas, Lake Erie, the battle for naval
supremacy was fought to a finish, with dis-
astrous results. On September loth, Captain
Barclay (who had lost an arm at Trafalgar),
led six British ships, grievously undermanned,
against nine American vessels. At the end of
four hours' figliting the whole fifteen ships, in
a fearfully shattered condition, were in the
hands of the Americans. On their side, twenty-
seven men were killed and ninety-six wounded ;
on ours, forty-one were killed and ninety-four
wounded. On the Atlantic Ocean the Americans
had proved themselves worthy chips of the
British block by naval victories equally striking;
but just now we are only concerned with the
Canadian part of the war. With our flag swept
off Lake Erie, the Canadian shore lay at the
mercy of the victors. The British who had held
Detroit all winter now evacuated Michigan, and
fled eastward through Canada, with General
86
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Harrison close on their heels. On the banks
of the Thames General Proctor was persuaded
by his Indian ally, Tecumseh, to turn round and
make a stand against the pursuers. The
position was strong enough, and the Indians
fought well till their leader was killed ; but the
English soldiers lost heart, their commander
fled, and a crushing victory left Harrison master
of the Canadian west. This was on October
5th. A young Englishman, writing in camp at
the western end of Lake Ontario a week later,
gives a melancholy picture of the situation
there: — "We had a most dreadful time from
the Cross-Roads. Upwards of three hundred
men were straggling upon the road, and wagons
loaded with miserable objects stuck fast in mud-
holes, broken down and unable to ascend the
hills, and the men too ill to stir hand or foot.
One thousand western Indians arrived last
night from Detroit, besides two thousand
women and children. Poor creatures ! What
will become of them ? "
While the English seemed to despair of
holding Upper Canada, the invaders could
make nothing of the lower province. Two
American armies set out to capture Montreal,
one descending from Lake Ontario by the St.
Lawrence and the other coming north byway of
Lake Champlain. The battle of Chateauguay,
by which the latter attempt was foiled, should
AMERICAN INVASIONS.
87
be remembered, because it was won for Britain
not by men of British blood but by French
Canadians, Colonel de Salaberry, their com-
mander, had fought under our flag both in the
East and the West Indies. He had with him
now, on October 26th, about one thousand
eight hundred of his fellow-countrymen and a
few Indians. By skilfully scattering his men
at various points behind log-work fortifications
he concealed the smallness of his force, and
the three thousand five hundred invaders went
back the way they had come, after a fight in
which only three hundred of the Canadians
were actually engaged. A few miles away, at
Chrysler's Farm, one thousand two hundred
men belonging to the other American army
were defeated by eight hundred British troops.
The rest of the invaders paused on their voyage
down the St. Lawrence, and betook themselves
to their own country for the winter.
The third year of this senseless war saw each
side victorious by turns in the Lake Champlain
district. On the waters of the west, enough
British ships had been built to win back the
supremacy of Lake Ontario. Fort Oswego, on the
southern shore, was captured from the Americans.
Their determined efforts to conquer the British
forces on the Niagara River led 10 a good deal
of hard fighting on Canadian soil, and in the
battle of Lundy's Lane about eight hundred
88
THE STORY OF CANADA.
men were killed on each side, but the end of
the campaign saw the invaders back on their
own side of the river.
On the Atlantic coast the British had
matters all their own way. A little force
of four thousand five hundred made a dash
across country to Washington, destroyed the
government buildings in retaliation for the
burning of the Upper Canadian Parliament
House, and got safely back to their ships. The
raid was a daring one, and only succeeded
because there was no opposition worthy the
name. As a recent American historian* says,
" The British advanced for five days into the
heart of an enemy's country, away from their
base of supplies, heavily laden, in a severe
climate, through a country favourable for
incessant attack, without meeting the slightest
resistance." At Bladensburg an American leader
who could not lead had gathered "a force quite
double that of the enemy, with tlie additional
advantage of position and the neighbour-
hood of a base. The British troops were worn
out with their march, and hardly in a condition
to resist a vigorous attack, even from an inferior
force"; yet a superior force left them almost
unmolested. On the Gulf of Mexico the British
attempted invasion on a larger scale, but this
* Prof. J. R. Soley, U.S. Navy, in Justin Winsor's
iind Critical History of America,"
Narrative
AMERICAN INVASIONS.
Hcj
time the leadership was on the other side, and
the ten thousand men who flung themselves on
the American entrenchments at New Orleans
were repulsed with a loss of 2,000 killed and
wounded. This battle was fought on January 8th ,
181 5. If there had been a submarine telegraph
cable in those days it would no^ have been
fought at all, for a treaty of peace had then
been signed by the American Commissioners
in Europe.
The war was over, and the combatants had
time to sit down and wonder why it had ever
been begun. It had destroyed a vast amount
of valuable property, a large number of still
more valuable lives, and a good many military
reputations. Neither side had gained an inch
of the other's territory. The United States had
learnt a severe but valuable lesson on the risk
of going to war with untrained soldiers and
incomp(-^tent generals, and had gained in
national confidence by their passing triumphs
on the sea and the more substantial victory at
New Orleans. Little Canada, too, had gained
in confidence, for her great neighbour had
failed to achieve any lasting success on
Canadian soil. Better still, the fires of war
had begun to weld together in co-operation
and mutual respect the rival races who formed
the population of the colony.
CHAPTER X.
The Winning of Liberty.
PROUD as we are that our *' Freedom
broadens slowly down From precedent to
precedent," we cannot forget that in the
past the process occasionally stopped, and hard
knocks had to be given before a fresh start was
made. It is not without reason that we date
many of our liberties from the signing of Magna
Charta by King John with a sword at his throat;
from the defeat of King Charles by the rebellious
Ironsides; and from the Ic.ter revolution which
set aside King James and the "legitimate" line
in favour of King William and the ancestors
of Queen Victoria. In like manner, Canadian
liberties were only won when dammed-up
discontent broke out in armed rebellion.
While this useful calamity was approaching,
Canada was growing fast. The inrush of
loyalist refugees from the lost colonies was
followed by a considerable immigration from
the mother country, and the human tide flowed
ta
i8o
THE WINNING OF LIHERTY.
91
more strongly liian ever after the end of the
war with Napoleon. At that time the United
Kingdom contained less than half her nresent
population, yet she was supposed to oe over-
crowded, and the wisdom of her political
physicians could find no better cure for the
disease of poverty and depression than to bleed
the patient. Scotland and Ireland especially
were drained of their people, because an
infantile political economy could find nothing
for them to do at home. Thousands upon
thousands of homesick peasants poured down
lamenting from their native glens. Crowded
like cattle in ships that would not be allowed
to carry an ox to-day, they spent weeks and
even months on the horrible journey, misery
often turning into disaster under the scourge of
smallpox and ship-fever. It is believed that in
the early years of the century twenty-five
thousand Scottish pea^^ants settled on Cape
Breton Island alone, while great numbers were
taken to the southern parts of Nova Scotia, and
various counties in Upper and Lower Canada
were peopled almost entirely from the same
source. The members of a clan, or the in-
habitants of a district, commonly emigrated and
took up homes together in the New World,
under leaders chosen or accepted by themselves.
The young Earl of Selkirk, for instance, in
1803 planter] eight hundred Irish and Scottish
IMAGE EVALUATION
TEST TARGET (MT-3)
/
{./
fc
o
*1
1.0
I.I
1.25
IIIIM IIIII2.5
- IIIIM ||||Z2
2.0
1.4
i.8
1.6
-^
im
<^
n
/.
'^A
■d7.
S"
^W/ e'
<P3
^W..^
/A
/
/
o
^W
w
Photograpliic
Sciences
Corporation
n.
V
^^o
23 WEST MAIN STREET
WEBSTER, NY, 14580
(716) 872-4503
m
«
il,
i Cp<
C^,
92
THE STORY OF CANADA.
peasants in Prince Edward Island, giving them
a good start in their new careers. He even
sent a party of Highlanders round by Hudson's
Bay, to lay the foundations of the present
colony of Manitoba ; but we shall hear of them
later on in the story. In 1804, eight hundred
evicted Highlanders who had been temporarily
employed in putting down an Irish rebellion
were led over the sea by a priest whom they
trusted, and formed the county of Glengarry
between the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers.
About the same time an Irish officer, Thomas
Talbot, threw himself with the **go" of a
cavalry charge into an emigration movement,
and never rested till he had settled twenty-eight
townships north of Lake Erie.
One Highland chief, the Macnab, not only
sent a large company of his clansmen to
Canada at his own expense, but took up his
abode among them on the township allotted
him by the Government. At a later period, in
the early thirties, we hear of four hundred
discharged Irish soldiers coming over in a body,
with their old regimental officers at their head,
and forming a regular military camp in the
Upper Canadian backwoods, till their united
efforts had cut out the roads and fields and
built the houses of a civilized settlement. In
England, about the same time. Lord Egremont
organized an expedition of seven hundred and
THE WINNING OF LIBERTY.
93
sixty Sussex folk, who also made homes for
themselves in the upper colony. The emigrant
ships were thick on the Atlantic, and in four
years one hundred and sixty thousand British
emigrants landed on Canadian soil. As the
land seemed limitless to the government in those
days, enormous areas were given away to
companies and individuals who from philan-
thropic or interested motives offered to bring
their fellow-countrymen across the sea. The
Canada Company, which was founded in 1826,
obtained for nothing a million acres of public
land — which it then proceeded to retail to the
public — and bought two million three hundred
thousand acres more for ^250,000 or ;^3oo,ooo.
The first secretary of this great corporation was
a certain John Gait, the Ayrshire novelist, from
whose works the dust of oblivion has lately
been brushed.
Many of General Wolfe's soldiers settled in
the land they had conquered ; the loyalists
were largely men who had fought against the
revolution ; and the later immigration included
whole regiments of British regulars. No wonder,
then, that the tone of Canadian society was
somewhat military. This was most marked in
official circles, especially when the governor
himself was an old soldier. Among the rank
and file of the colonists the ingrained habit
of obedience doubtless helped to smother
94
THE STORY OF CANADA.
discontent, and they handled the pruning hook
none the worse because it had once been a
sword. While the silence of the desert spread
OA'er Scottish hillsides, the Canadian wilds
awakened to vigorous life. From Lake Huron
to the Atlantic, Canada was ringing with the
settler's axe ; the air was black with smoke, for
fire cleared the forest faster than steel. The
stones were gathered into formidable piles, and
the plough, driven deviously among the
blackened stumps, prepared the virgin soil for
its first crop of oats and potatoes. T have talked
with a man who was nearing middle-age when
he left the Breadalbane Highlands in 1015 — as
he sailed down the Clyde the guns were roaring
for joy at the news of Waterloo — and who
helped to create a new Breadalbane on
Canadian soil. He was now one hundred and
two years old, but his spirit was jovial and his
voice was strong as he told of his early trials
and toils. Trial, indeed, was not the word he
used ; he had not been aware of any special
hardship ; yet only a stone's throw from where
he sat was the edge of the forest that he had
beaten back to make room for his cornfields.
The labour which forced the wilderness to
blossom as the rose was enormous ; but the
men who gave it had been used to wrestle with
nature. Nevei thinking of ease, they won
prosperity.
THE WINNING OF LIBERTY.
95
Two years after that obscure and optimistic
old Highlander arrived, there settled in Upper
Canada another Scotsman who was not content
to be obscure, and who greatly irritated the ruling
poweis by hinting that all was not being done
for the best in that best of all colonies. At this
Robert Gourlay's suggestion, settlers' meetings
were held in all parts of the country, and a good
deal of healthy British grumbling reached the
ears of the authorities, while Gourlay himself
denounced official corruption with unmeasured
wrath.
The administration of the colony was in the
hands of the governor and a little ruling caste,
which filled the executive and legislative
councils and came to be known as the Family
Compact, These men had not banded them-
selves to rob the king above them and the
people below, as the French officials did before
the conquest. One great object of the Compact
was to defend the colony against sedition and
republicanism. Only a small minority of the
population, late arrivals from the United States,
were tainted with disloyal sympathies ; but
suspicion finds danger wherever it looks.
Besides, the United Empire Loyalists and their
successors had very high and mighty notions
in regard to the true principle of government.
They were more monarchical than the king ;
and their authority was apt to make itself felt
96
THE STORY OF CANADA.
in tyrannical ways. The public land the
government considered theirs, to do as they
liked with ; they had unchecked control of
considerable revenues ; the appointment and
payment of officials lay also in their hands.
However disinterested their aims to start with,
no set of men could long possess such powers
without abuse. In this case long possession
was guaran*:eed by the fact that the governor
was generally hand-and- glove with the official
clique, and the half-fledged parliament had no
power, even when it had the desire, to compel
a change of government.
The agitator Gourlay was imprisoned for
seven months without trial, and was finally
convicted and banished under a Sedition Act
which did not apply to his case. Not long
afterwards, in 1820, a daring constit' "^ncy
elected to the Assembly a former American, who
had even been a member of the United States
Congress. The Assembly purged itself of his
contaminating company by a vote of expulsion,
and a special law was passed forbidding the
election of men who had held such positions in
other countries. The more violently agitation
was suppressed, the more it flourished. Not
even the United Empire Loyalists and British
veterans could stomach the policy inflicted on
them in loyalty's name; arid in 1824 an
Assembly was elected in which for the first time
THE WINNING OF LIBERTY
97
the opponents of the Family Compact had a
majority.
Religious differences threw fuel on ♦^he flames.
Under the Constitution of 1792, one-seventh of
the public land in each province had been
set aside to form " Clergy Reserves," for the
endowment of Protestantism. The early settlers
in Upper Canada, the refugees from re-
publicanism, were nearly all members of the
Church of England. For many years, there-
fore, that communion monopolized the Clergy
Reserves Fund, unchecked and even un-
challenged. The Scottish immigrants, however,
were largely Presbyterian, and claimed a share
of the fund for their own ministers. As early
as 1823 the Assembly supported this claim,
and in 1826 a motion was carried demanding a
division of the endowment among all the
Christiar denominations. The agitation had
some little efi'ect. A grant of ^750 a year was
made to the Church of Scotland in the colony,
and a similar amount to the Roman Catholics
— whose leader, Bishop Macdonell, already
received his salary from the Home Government,
and was a strong supporter of the Family
Compact. The Methodists were left out in the
cold, for Methodism had come in by way of the
United States, and was suspected of political
as well as religious heresy. The Assembly,
though it had no power to remedy this grievance,
H
pwBW^wwnnw*™-
98
THE STORY OF CANADA.
passed a Bill enabling the Methodist Church to
hold property, and allowing its ministers to
perform marriages.
In 1830 the colonial government got back
their majority in the Assembly, for the moderate
reformers had begun to fight shy of their more
radical partisans. As before, however, the
reactionary triumph stirred up the reformers to
greater energy. The hero of the struggle now
was the editor of the Canadian Advocate^ a fiery
little Perthshire Highlander named William
Lyon Mackenzie. He might almost be called
the John Wilkes of Canadian history, though the
darling of the London mob was by no means
so respectable a character. Mackenzie was
thrice elected to the Assembly, and every time
the Assembly expelled fim for attacking the
Family Compact in his newspaper. In 1834, the
people of the capital, now no longer York but
Toronto, took up his cause and chose him to be
their first mayor. In the seesaw of politics, the
following year brought the election of an
Assembly with an opposition majority; but in
1836 the house was dissolved, and a cry of
" British connection in danger " was raised by
the governor, with such effect that in the new
Assembly the Compact had a large majority.
There is no reason to suppose that any but
an insignificant fraction of the people really
wanted to break off the British connection ; but
THd. WINNING OF LIBERTY.
99
Mackenzie, exasperated by the helplessness of
the Reform Party in the Legislature, threw
loyalty to the winds. In the summer of 1837,
when the girl-Queen Victoria ascended the
throne, her discontented subjects across the
sea were forming a ** Committee of Vigilance "
to rouse the colony against her local representa-
tives. In the end of November, Mackenzie, who
had been secretary of the committee, raised the
standard of rebellion as " Chairman /r^? tern, of
the Provisional Government of the State of
Upper Canada," and with eight hundred armed
followers prepared to attack Toronto. One
little fight with the militia was enough to
scatter the insurgents, and a smaller party who
had planned a similar attack on another town
dispersed as soon as they heard of a govern-
ment for e coming against them. Mackenzie,
though the government offered ^1,000 for his
arrest, escaped to an island in the Niagara
river, between the Canadian and American
shores. There he proclaimed the birth of
" The Republic of Upper Canada," and opened
fire oii the king's men who watched him from
the river bank. Most of those who joined him
now were Americans, and American sympa-
thizers supplied him with guns and ammunition.
One night a British party rowed over to the
American shore, captured the steamboat in
which the rebels used to fetch their supplies,
H 2
100
THE STORY OF CANADA.
set her on fire, and sent her blazing over
Niagara Falls. The British Government
apologized to the United States for the ille-
gality of the incident. A few weeks afterwards
the rebels were driven from their island, and so
far as Canadians were concerned the rising
collapsed ; but for a whole year more the
country was annoyed by the frontier raids of
American filibusters. A few of the prisoners
were executed by the Canadian authorities, and
Mackenzie himself spent years of hardship in
the United States.
If Englishmen and Scotsmen were provoked
to rebel in a colony which owed its very
existence to exuberance of loyalty, how could
submission and contentment be expected from
Frenchmen? In Lower Canada, as in the
upper province, the government was not
responsible to the Assembly ; and the jealousy
between the elected house on the one side,
and the nominated Executive and Legislative
Councils on the other, grew more and more
bitter.
The Roman Catholic clergy exerted them-
selves to prevent a civil war, and later on,
when hostilities broke out, the Church ranged
itself openly on the side of authority against
rebellion. Religious influence certainly did
much to keep the movement within the
THE WINNING OF LIBERTY.
lOI
bounds it actually reached. Nevertheless, the
French-Canadians were no longer indifferent to
political rights, nor was their appetite for civil
liberty appeased by the sops thrown over to
Quebec from Downing Street. The Home
Government knew very well that the situation
was a dangerous one, and in 1832 made a
notable concession to the malcontents. Here-
after the elected Assembly was to have control
of the colonial revenue. The Assembly at once
began to use its new power as a weapon to win
more, for the Government remained entirely
irresponsible, and the upper house, or Legis-
lative Council, was still composed of the
governor's nominees. The people's repre-
sentatives steadily refused to vote supplies, and
in 1837 the salaries of judges and other
officials had fallen into arrears to the extent
of ;^i 42,000.
In their zeal against British tyranny the
French-Canadian Assembly-men refused even
to wear British clothes, and one enthusiast, not
content with outer garments of homespun,
appeared in the House without a shirt rather
than patronize English manufactures. Great
meetings were held, in defiance of the governor's
prohibition, to protest and organize against
"coercion"; and the "Sons of Liberty," as
the new protesters called themselves, began to
drill for a fight.
^mmmtm
^^^J^BWSWiBB
102
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Ihe Struggle in Lower Canada was not a
simple one between English and French. At
the outset it was a struggle between people bent
on governing themselves and the authorities
appointed to govern them. A great many of
the English-speaking citizens were in favour of
colonial self-government in principle. It was
clear, however, that selfgovernment in the
hands of a French Roman Catholic majority
would be government in accordance with
French and Roman Catholic ideas. Moreover,
as the agitation grew hotter the malcontents
denounced not merely the colonial govern-
ment, in which the English were supreme, but
the British connection itself. Roughly speaking,
therefore, the British population ranged itself
on the side of the authorities. A few, however,
were prepared to go all lengths with their French
fellow-subjects. The recognized leader of the
agitation was the French Speaker of the
Assembly, Louis Joseph Papineau ; but by his
side stood a wealthy and cultivated English-
man, Dr. Wolfred Nelson, who had served as a
British army surgeon in the war of 1812. The
rebel leaders in Upper Canada were in close
communication with the heads of the Lower
Canadian movement, and on the day before
Mackenzie issued his proclamation at Toronto
Dr. Nelson and his followers beat back the
loyalist force which attacked his fortified
■fippupn
THE WINNING OF LinFKTY.
103
distillery at St. Denis. This was the only trifle
of success the rebels won. Their principal
stronghold, the ''fort" of St. Charles on the
Richelieu river, was captured after more than
fifty of them had been killed ; and a hundred
more lost their lives at St. Eustache. Papineau
fled to the United States; Nelson was exiled to
Bermuda; a dozen others were hanged; and
the rest of the prisoners were freely forgiven.
The horse having been stolen, great diligence
was shown in locking the stable door. Lord
Durham, son-in-law of the Earl Grey who gave
England the Reform Bill of 1832, was sent out
as governor to see what could be done for
Canada. He was clear-headed enough to see
that irresponsible government must go, and
his advice was accepted by the Imperial
authorities. On July 23rd, 1840, the Queen
signed an Act endowing Canada with a brand
new constitution.
#
mmsmm^Kommmmtmmmfmm
mmsmimmimimmmmmmm
CHAPTER XI.
The Experiment of Legislative Union.
THE new political system was a com-
promise, and both sides found fault with
It. The Upper Canadian Assembly was
persuaded to acquiesce, but not withoutdifficulty.
The existence of the Lower Canadian Assembly
had been suspended in consequence of the
rebellion, but a monster petition against the
new constitution showed what forty thousand
French Canadiaiis thought of the matter.
Nevertheless, the constitution was set up and
got to work. It provided that there should be
only one parliament for the two provinces, com-
posed of an equal number of members from each.
The population of Lower Canada was then over
six hundred and fifty thousand, and Upper
Canadians only numbered four hundred and fifty
thousand. Representation according to popu-
lation world, therefore, have given the French
mmmmmf.
EXPERIMENT OF LEGTSLATIVE UNION.
TO5
province absolute control of the elected house,
and Upper Canada would not hear of such a
thing. There was to be a Legislative Council,
appointed by the governor, but the Assembly
was to be supreme in nearly all financial matters.
The governor was instructed — not by the Act,
but by a special despatch from Downing Street
— that he "must only oppose the wishes of
the Assembly when the honour of the Crown
or the interests of the Empire are deeply
concerned."
The first cabinet formed under the new
scheme was a coalition, but it resigned in 1 843
when Governor Metcalfe insisted on making an
appointment without the consent of his ministers.
Lord Elgin, who became governor in 1847, was a
son-in-law and politicaladmirer of Lord Durham,
and governed in a strictly constitutional way.*
Yet he brought as much insult on himself by
taking the advice of his ministers as he could
have earned by ignoring it. His troubles were
a legacy from the rebellion. A Bill had been
passed granting ;,^4o,ooo to the Upper Canada
loyalists as compensation for property destroyed
during the insurrection; but when ;!^'io,ooo
was voted to Lower Canada for a similar
purpose there was a great outcry that the
* In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick responsible government
was not completely ef:tablished till 1848, and in Prince Edward
Island n>. t imtil 1830,
io6
TKE STORY OF CANADA,
money was going into the pockets of rebels
instead of loyalists. Lord Elgin, for signing the
Act, was attacked in the streets of Montreal, and
the Parliament House in that city was burned
by a " loyalist " mob. Parliament never met in
the commercial capital after that. The legislators
did their work in Toronto and Quebec by turns,
till the Queen chose Ottawa as a permanent
capital.
The burning of a Parliament House, one would
think, was bad enough ; but the next attack on
loyalty was a blow struck at the heart. It is
amazing, indeed, in these days of staunch im-
perial brotherhood, to recall the almost forgotten
separatist movement of 1849. On July 9th in
that year an independent newspaper published
at Montreal drew a striking picture of the
situation for the information of its readers in
the upper province. The article was headed
" Strange Times in Canada," and told at length
how almost the whole of the Press — the clerical
organ was one of the exceptions — had come
out openly for the annexation of Canada to the
United Stales. *• Nor is it to be wondered at,"
this writer went on, " that the newspapers here
are so nearly unanimous in favour of some great
and thorough change, for such a sentiment is,
so far as we have opportunities of judging,
nearly universal among their subscribers and
supporters." It was not only political disgust
EXPERIMENT OF LEGISLATIVE UNION.
107
but commercial depression that led even
loyalists to despair of their country's future
under the British flag. According to a mani-
festo issued by the annexationists, Canada was
shunned by settlers as " a foreshadowed battle-
field," and exhibited " every symptom of a
nation fast sinking to decay." The supreme
government in England was charged with being
imperfectly acquainted with Canadian affairs,
and somewhat indifferent to Canadian interests.
Here we are getting near the bottom of the
mystery. The mother country had " with-
drawn from the colonies their wonted protection
in her markets" by abolishing the differential
duty system. The Legislative Assembly itself
had three years before voted an address to the
Queen, in which this frank passage occurs : —
'* It is much to be feared that, should the
inhabitants of Canada, from the withdrawal of
all protection to their staple products, find that
tliey cannot successfully compete with their
neighbours of the United States in the only
market open to them, they will of necessity
begin to doubt whether remaining n portion of the
British Empire will be of that paramount advan-
tage which they have hitherto found it to he."
It is instructive now to see the various
remedies proposed for the country's ills, and the
reasons given for rejecting all except the drastic
measure of turning the country politically
lo8
THE STORY OF CANADA.
inside out. To begin with, as there was
not the least hope of England re-establishing
the Corn Laws, might not Canada set up a
protective tariff (as she afterwards did) on her
own account? " No," said the annexationists ;
though that " might encourage the growth of
manufacturing interests," the effect on the evil
would be slight while Canadian manufactures
were shut out of the United States. Then
might not " a federal union of the British-
American provinces" be tried (as it is now
being tried before our eyes), and Free Trade
be established, at any rate between the sister
colonies ? No, even that would not do —
nothing would do but throwing Canada into
the great American melting-pot. The annex-
ationists, it must be said, admitted that without
the mother country's consent separation was
" neither practicable nor desirable " ; but they
were quite certain that that consent would be
given, in view of "the colonial policy of the
parent State, the avowals of her leading states-
men, and the public sentiments of the Empire."
That is to say, the Empire fifty years ago was
perfectly ready to hang, draw, and quarter itself
at a moment's notice. The guess was not so
very far wrong. If at the present day a self-
governing colony deliberately resolved to cut
herself adrift, the mother country would say
" Go in peace," but she would say it with a
EXPERIMENT OF LEGISLATIVE UNION.
109
heavy heart. Fifty yeais ago she would not
have cared, and she might even have muttered,
" Good riddance !"
Before that memorable year closed an
"Annexation Association" had been organized,
with seven or eight hundred enrolled members;
and it is astonishing to find that men whom
we have known in recent years as senators,
judges, cabinet ministers, and even an English
prime minister of the Canadian Confederation
— men who have been knighted by the Queen
— were once banded together to procure the
dismemberment of her dominions. The agita-
tion gradually subsided. A reciprocity treaty
was obtained in 1854, giving Canada's natural
products free entry to the United States, and
though the treaty only lasted eleven years there
has been no serious renewal of the attempt to
purchase American favours at the price of
Canadian independence. The lapse of the
treaty, it may be said, largely helped to bring
about federation.
Lord Durham's constitution lasted about
twenty-seven years. To catalogue the men and
measures that filled the political stage between
1840 and 1867 would be usele«:> ; but two of
the matters decided during this period must
not be quite passed by. In Upper Canada
there was a church question, in Lower Canada
a land question.
mm
m
no
THE STORY OF CANADA.
For many years, as we remember, the Upper
Canadians had differed as to the division of the
"Clergy Reserves" fund. In 1840 the Imperial
Parliament divided the revenue from clergy
lands then unsold among the various claimants,
giving half to the clergy who represented the
English and Scotch Established Churches in
the colony, and half to the other denominations.
This satisfied nobody, and a long agitation
ended in disestablishment. A Bill was passed
by the Canadian Parliament in 1854 devoting
the Clergy Reserves Fund to educational pur-
poses, only providing that ministers then sup-
ported by the fund should have their incomes
continued for life.
The BYench semi-feudal system of land tenure
in Lower Canada was abolished in the same
year. For nearly a century after the British
conquest the set'gneufs had gone on drawing
rents and dues authorized by the King of
France. The tenants, whose ancestors had
cleared the land, did not see why they should
pay for the right to live on it. Accordingly,
in 1854 the legislature decided that they should
pay rent no longer, and voted ;^5oo,ooo to the
seigneurs by way of compensation. Not long
afterwards another notable reform was carried
out, the upper house being made an elective
body ; but, as we shall see, when the constitu-
tion of 1840 disappeared, the experiment of
an elective upper house was also dropped.
^^B^^C
^^M
w^^
^1 ^Kt^^SaH
ij^^s
feJii\*
V^R^^H
CHAPTER XII.
The Hudson's Bay Company,
TH E Canada where all this strife and disputa-
tion was going on, the Canada for which
the French and British and Americans
had fought, the Canada to which self-government
was given in the early years of Queen Victoria's
reign, was after all a mere snippet of the
continent, a mere corner of the Canada that
reddens the map of the world to-day. By far
the greater part of the Canadian Dominion was,
thirty years ago, the realm of an ancient and
close corporation, known as the Hudson's Bay
Company, whose story we have now to tell.
B'ar back in Queen Elizabeth's time, in 1576,
a little British ship of twenty tons sailed out of
the Thames on an impossible voyage. Her
adventurous master, Martin Frobisher, was bent
on finding a way round the northern coasts ot
112
THE STORY OF CANADA.
America to China and Japan. Passing New-
foundland and Labrador, he entered a channel
the right-hand side of which he verily believed
was the coast of Asia. As a matter of fact the
channel led nowhere, being only the mouth of a
bay — Frobisher Bay, in Baffin Land, as we
call it now. But a lump of mineral picked up
on shore excited a belief that the barren,
blighted country was a land of gold. Accord-
ingly, the funds were easily raised in London
for a second voyage, and even for a third.
Financially, the venture was a failure ; but
Frobisher discovered a new inlet, which became
a highway of commerce under the name of
Hudson's Strait. The great explorer, Hudson,
however, did not appear on the scene till
1 6 ID, and his first appearance was his last.
Passing through the strait, he rounded the
north point of Labrador, and, turning south-
ward, sailed out upon a body of water so vast
that three months' exploration left the work
unfinished. Caught in the ice when winter
came, Hudson's ship remained frozen up till
the following June. Food was now running
short, and the homeward journey promised to
be one of great privation. Some of the crew,
with reason or without, believed that Hudson
meant to land them on the desolate shores of
the bay, so that the remainder might get home
to England without starvation. A mutiny
THE HUDSON'S BAY COMPANY.
113
broke out, and Hudson, with his son and half a
dozen others, was put into a boat and cast
adrift. Nothing was heard again of the great
explorer ; but the sea that he won for a grave
still bears the modest name of Hudson's Bay.
Many a brave man since has met his death
in the icy chaos of the North-West Passage to
Asia, but their names and deeds must be sought
in the chronicles of Arctic exploration. There
were some, howev^er, who saw in Hudson's
Strait and Hudson's Bay a practicable route to
the interior of North Amerfca — a way by which
the wealth of the great North-West might be
drained off to England in spite of the French
monopolists who held the keys of the St.
Lawrence route. In 1670, King Charles the
Second gave to his cousin, Prince Rupert, and a
few other nobles and commoners, a charter of
incorporation as " The Governor and Company
of Adventurers of England trading into Hud-
son's Bay."
The domain thus granted by the Stuart King,
without the sanction of his ministry or parlia-
ment, included " all the lands, countries, and
territories upon the coasts and confines" of
" all those seas, straits, bays, rivers, lakes,
creeks and sounds lying within the entrance
of Hudson's Straits," excepting only such land
as might be in the possession of other Christian
nations. As we look on the map we see that
wmmmmmmmmmmm
114
THE STORY OF CANADA.
the area signed away included not only a strip
of land two or three hundred miles wide around
the eastern and southern shores of Hudson's
Bay, but the vast empire of forest and prairie
stretching westward to the Rocky Mountains —
a thousand miles across at the narrowest part.
Over the whole of this territory of " Rupert's
Land " the company was to reign, with powers
greater in some respects than the king himself
dared to exercise in the mother country. An
absolute monopoly of trade ; power to make
laws, inflict punishment, plant colonies, build
towns and forts, maintain armies — all these
were conferred on Prince Rupert and his
partners ; and, to crown all, no British subject
was so much as to set foot on the soil of
Rupert's Land without the company's written
leave. The excuse given for this imperial gift
was that the adventurers had " at their own
great cost and charges " undertaken an ex )edi-
tion " for the discovery of a new passage into
the South Sea, and for the finding some trade
for furs, minerals, and other considerable com-
modities," by which the king professed to hope
for " very great advantage " to himself and his
kingdom. As rent for 2,500,000 square miles
the company was to pay his Majesty "two
elks and two black beavers " per annum.
For many years the company had no idea
of the size of its domains, and made no attempt
THE Hudson's n.w company.
"5
to occupy even the best-known districts of the
interior. " Forts " were set up on the shores
of Hudson's Bay, to which the Indians for
hundreds of miles round brought their annual
catch of furs. The scene when one of these
yearly parties appeared was picturesque, but
not altogether pleasant. Pitching their camp
outside the palisade of the fort, the red men
celebrated their arrival by drinking as much of
the white men's spirits as they could get ; and
although, in the joint interests of economy and
safety, the liquor was plentifully mixed with
water, trading was out of the question for two
or three days. When the Indians were ready
for business they were admitted to the fort
with their bundles of furs. Each skin was
carefully examined, and the price decided on
was paid in the form of little sticks. With these
counters each red man passed on into another
room, where axes, guns, blankets, mirrors,
beads, trinkets, and all the other useful or
useless objects of an Indian's desire were
spread before him. If he wanted more than
the counters in his hand would buy he was
often allowed credit, the company advancing
goods on account of the next year's furs.
When the last beaver or sable skin had been
turned into the store, and the last counter had
been exchanged for British goods, the tribes-
men vanished away into the ^wilderness, and
I 2
n-
ii6
THE STORY OF CANADA.
the piles of fur were sorted and packed for the
ocean voyage. Every summer a single London
ship sailed into the Bay, discharged her cargo
of provisions for the white men and merchandise
for the red, filled her hold with the precious
*' peltries," and sped away home before the
early winter barred the straits with ice.
If the company had only had the Indians to
reckon with it might have gone on gathering
the furry tribute of the tribes with imperial ease.
But there were other white men in America
who had no notion of submitting to such a
monopoly. The King of France claimed as his
own the territory that King Charles had pre-
sumed to give away ; and more than once a
French fleet sailed into Hudson's Bay and
destroyed the English forts. The forts, however,
rose anew from their ashes, and the buying and
selling went on as before. The raids from the
sea were only unpleasant incidents, wiping out
the profits for a year or two, but doing no
permanent harm. A far more serious danger
constantly threatened the company in the rear.
The coureurs de hois, or *' forest-runners," whose
defiance of the French monopoly gave so much
trouble to the authorities at Quebec, were not
likely to pay any more regard to the pocket of
an English company. Boldly invading the
forbidden west, these enterprising Frenchmen
bought in the Indian camps the furs for
•!.iViNK
THE HUDSON'8 BAV COMPANY.
117
which the company's men sat waiting on the
coast.
If the merchant lords of Rupert's Land thought
their monopoly would be any the safer when
Canada passed out of French hands, they little
knew the spirit of their own fellow-countrym';n.
A numi^er of Scottish merchants who had settled
at Quebec formed in 1783 a rival North-West
Company, which took into its service great
numbers of the French forest-runners, and their
semi-Indian offspring, and sent them skirmishing
for trade among the tribes of the far west.
Vigorously directed, and well backed by capital,
this army of fur-hunters soon made the Hudson's
Bay Company feel the pinch of organized
competition. The old company had some time
before abandoned its easy-going plan of sitting
still on the sea-shore, and sent its agents far
inland in quest of the coveted furs. Forts were
built at points of vantage along the river high-
ways, and young Scotsmen, enlisted chiefly in
the Orkneys, were scattered over the interior to
uphold the prestige of their masters among the
Indians, Greater energy was now thrown into
this forward policy, and bands of half-breeds
were organized by the old company to resist
those employed by the new.
In a "civilized" land, with the law wide
awake, competing merchants have to be satisfied
with the slower methods of ruining each other,
ii8
THE STORY OF CANADA.
such as mutual slander, deceptive advertising,
and selling below cost till the rival is forced
out of the market. In the wild north-west a
hundred years ago the voice of civilization was
feeble as the echo of a whisper, and law was
yet unborn. The passion of gain was there-
fore free to indulge its naturi.1 tendency to
crime. Parties of rival traders, meeting in
solitudes where no witnesses were to be feared,
fought out their differences with gun and
hatchet. Many deeds of violence remained
hidden in the breasts of the perpetrators. Of
those that came to light, the most notorious
was the "Red River Massacre" in 1816, when
Governor Semple and twenty of his Hudson's
Bay men were killed in a fight with the rival
" Nor'-Westers."
The worst effects of all this furious competi-
tion, unfortunately, fell not on the rivals but
on the native races for whose custom they
competed. Each side made strenuous efforts
to win over the tribes, and one of the principal
inducements offered was " fire-water." The
red man is far more easily maddened and
destroyed by alcohol than the white, and with
spirits thrust upon them at every opportunity
the Indians were plunging headlong to ruin,
when the murderous competition suddenly
stopped. The rival companies had become
sensitive — not in the heart but in the pocket —
THE Hudson's bay company.
119
to the evil effects of their feud, and in 1821 the
Nor'-Westers merged their enterprise in the
Hudson's Bay Company. In the same year
the Home Government gave the Canadian
courts jurisdiction over all the west; but the
company's trading privileges, so far from being
checked, received an enormous extension. The
mountains and valleys and islands of what we
call British Columbia were added to the central
regions granted by King Charles. The com-
pany's monopoly now stretched from the
Atlantic end of Hudson's Strait to the very
shores of the Pacific Ocean.
Dotted at long intervals over the company's
2,800,000 square miles of earth stood the log
or stone forts where the furs were collected,
and where the authority of civilization was
exercised by Scottish peasants. These Orkney
islanders, entering the company's service
in youth, gradually made their way up till
they entered the privileged class of chief
factors or chiet traders, among whom forty
per cent, of the company's annual profit was
divided by way of salary. The profits were
extravagantly high, for the goods sold by the
company cost a mere trifle compared to the
value of the furs received from the Indians in
payment. Even with such a partnership in
prospect, the young men found the life at first
very hard to bear. They were cut off not only
120
THE STORY OF CANADA.
from home but from all the social and religious
observances which ordinary colonists take with
them from one land to another. Around the
company's fort no village was allowed to
spring up. The whole territory was nothing
but a gigantic game preserve, jealously guarded
against the intrusion of settlers. A postal
service had been organized by the company,
but the postman only came once a year, and
the letters were many months old when
delivered. Communication was not difficult —
that is to say, there were no great physical
obstacles, at any rate till the Rocky Mountains
were reached ; there were rivers navigable by
canoe from the mountains to the bay, and in
winter dog-sledges and snowshoes could glide
in all directions over the frozen snow ; yet the
immensity of the distances to be covered made
travelling seem intolerably slow. The traders
condemned to live at the most northerly forts,
beyond the Arctic circle, not only suffered the
extremity of isolation, but had to endure for
years together such hardships as bitter cold
and long darkness in winter, virulent mosquitoes
in summer, and lack of vegetable food all the
time.
The company was not allowed to enjoy its
princely revenues in peace. Merchants who
wanted to share in the riches of the west, and
more disinterested criHcs who objected to see
■I
THE HUDSON S BAY COMPANY.
121
I
.1
the nation shut out of the national domain,
besought Imperial Parliament to cancel the
Hudson's Bay monopoly. The company,
however, lay entrenched behind a double wall
of influence and secrecy. The nation was kept
in the dark not only as to the profits of the fur
trade, but as to the value of the territory in
dispute. Governments were actually persuaded
that the north-west was an irreclaimable wilder-
ness, incapable of supporting a white population.
On the discovery of gold in 1858, as we shall
see in the next chapter, the company was
compelled to give up British Columbia ; but all
the territories originally granted to Prince
Rupert and his partners remained in the grasp
of their successors till 1869. In that year the
newly-formed Canadian Confederation bought
out the company's monopoly of trade, paying
;^3oo,ooo and forty-five thousand acres of land.
The company was left in possession of all its
" forts," and with full liberty to go on trading
in competition with others — which it continues
to do, with handsome profits, to the present
clay, the white settlers whom it tried to exclude
being now among its best customers. As the
original capital of the company was only
;^io,5oo, and as the furs obtained in two cen-
turies of trading had sold for about ;,r2 0,000, 000,
the shareholders had no cause to complain of
their bargain.
CHAPTER XIII.
The North-West Rebellions.
11
THE Canadian Gc'emment had hardly
entered on its new possessions when a
rebellion broke out. As far back as 1 8 1 1 ,
one of the chief proprietors of the Hudson's
Bay Company, the Earl of Selkirk, had overcome
for a time his partners' objection to immigration,
and planted a little colony of Highlanders on the
banks of the Red River, near the American
f'-ontier. When the Earl died, a few years later,
his immigration policy died with him, and for
half a century his Red River colony lay forgotten
in the heart of the continent. Forgotten, but not
dead. The Highlanders had been reinforced
by hundreds of half-breeds', the children of
French and Scotch fur traders (mostly French),
who had married Indian wives and settled
down on vaguely-outlined prairie farms. When
THE NORTH-WEST REBELLIONS.
123
Canadian surveyors arrived in 1869, and began
to "run lines" of scientific precision through
the country, the half-breeds imagined that their
rights to the land were in danger. Friction
between the squatters and the surveying parties
was followed by open insurrection, and a young
half-breed, named Louis Riel, set himself up as
" President" of a " provisional government." A
number of loyal settlers who opposed the
movement were imprisoned, and in the spring
of 1870 a plain-spoken young loyalist was
barbarously murdered under the authority of a
rebel court-martial. A storm of helpless indig-
nation swept over Canada — helpless because
the revolt was separated from the seat of power
and population in the east by a thousand miles
of lake and river. An officer then known only
as Colonel Wolseley was put in command
of a boat expedition, which, after a three
months' journey, arrived — to find the rebellion
extinct.
The Red River district was organized as
the Province of Manitoba, and the British
emigrants swarming in to cultivate its mar-
vellously fertile soil soon placed the half-breeds
in the position of an insignificant minority.
The wilder spirits sold their land and flitted to
the banks of the Saskatchewan, four or five
hundred miles away to the north-west ; but
even there the stream of white immigration
124
THE STORY OF CANADA.
followed, and the land-surveyors began to map
out the country with ruthless regularity. In
the autumn of 1884 it was plain that a storm
was brewing. Louis Kiel, after many years of
exile, returned from the United States and put
himself at the head of an agitation for the
redress of grievances. Such grievances as
actually existed might have been remedied,
and the agitation easily allayed, if the central
government had given a little attention to the
matter. But in fourteen years, while the half-
breeds had learnt nothing the authorities had
forgotten everything. Agitation was allowed to
flame up in revolt, and Louis Riel was " Presi-
dent of the Saskatchewan " before the govern-
ment machine began to stir. The half-breeds
began, in the spring of 1885, by possessing
themselves of the persons and property of their
white neighbours at Duck Lake. A detachment
of the Mounted Police — the soldiers of the north-
west — went to the rescue, accompanied by
some volunteers from the neighbouring town
of Prince Albert, but were driven back, leaving
eleven of their number dead or wounded on the
snow. Again a storm of indignation swept
over Canada, and again the indignation was
embittered by a sense of impotence. By this
time the Canadian Pacific Railway was nearly
finished, but the line did not pass within two
hundred miles of the rebel centre, and there
n
THE NORTH-WBST REBELLIONS.
125
was much laborious carting of soldiers over the
prairie before the scene of operations could be
reached. This time the rebels showed fight.
They chose their ground well, lining the wooded
gullies with well-hidden rifle-pits, and inflicting
severe loss on the Canadian soldiers, who lay
in the open and fired blindly down upon the
unseen foe. General Middleton, who com-
manded the loyal troops, fought two battle^;,
of which the second was a series of skirmishing
manoeuvres lasting three days, in the neigh-
bourhood of Kiel's headquarters at Batoche.
At last a charge of volunteers into the woods
sent the rebels flying out of their rifle-pits;
another dash captured the village of Batoche ;
and the half-breeds scampered away in all
directions. Kiel himself was caught by a
couple of scouts, who thereby earned a reward
of five thousand dollars, and a state trial ended
in the rebel leader's execution. The rank and
file settled down quietly in their homes, and
their grievances were removed without any
more delay.
So much for the revolt of the half-breeds.
But they were a feeble folk compared to the
pure-blooded north-western Indians, who rmm-
bered (omitting the tribes of the distant north)
about 25,000, and included powerful bands of
seasoned warriors. Throughout the rebellion
Kiel did his best, by threats and cajolery, to
126
THE STORY OF CANADA.
bring them under his flag. Adopting the
name David in addition to the Louis by which
his father had known him, he claimed to be a
new Messiah sent to drive out the white men
and restore the North-West Territories to the
red. It says a great deal for the sense of
the Indians, for the fairness with which as
a rule they had been treated by the Canadian
Government, and for the influence of
missionaries in their councils, that the most
dangerous tribes decided to sit still and mind
their own business. The half-breed * ' Messiah's "
persuasions, however, were not without result.
Two hundred miles north-west of Batoche,
a particularly wild band of redskins under
Chief Big Bear swooped down upon the infant
settlement of Frog Lake. It was Good Friday
morning, and two Roman Catholic priests were
preparing to celebrate Mass. The Indians,
therefore, began by marching the whole white
population, a dozen or so, to church. Never,
perhaps, had such a service been held before.
The savages, with muskets in their hands and
yellow war-paint daubed over their faces, stood
guard at the porch and occasionally knelt in
the aisle : their prisoners, the clergy and
congregation, expected at any moment to be
butchered in their prayers. The service ended,
the people were taken back to their homes;
but in the afternoon they were ordered off
THE NORTH-WEST REBELLIONS.
137
to the neighbouring Indian camp, and nearly
every man was shot down in cold blood before
the camp could be reached. There were two
white women among the prisoners, but
they were ransomed by some generous half-
breeds at a cost of three dollars and four native
ponies.
More serious in its possibilities than even the
Frog Lake Massacre was the fact that the
powerful Cree Chief Poundmaker had gone
on the war-path when he heard magnified
reports of Kiel's first success. At the head of a
combination of tribes he laid desultory siege to
the little town of Battleford, where the whole
white population for many miles round had
fled for refuge. For weeks these unhappy
settlers remained crowded within the stockade
of the Mounted Police barracks, watching the
columns of smoke that rose from their burning
homes. It was my good fortune to accompany
the column sent north for their rescue while
General Middleton's column farther east moved
up against the half-breeds. On our approach
the Indians raised the siege, and vanished into
the west. Pressing on to find them, we rode
all through a moonlit night, and soon after
dawn were climbing a gentle hill, with wooded
gullies on either hand, when the cry arose
"The nichis are on us ! " Pouring out of their
tents a few hundred yards in front, the
mm
1x8
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Indians made a dash for the top of the hill, and
on being beaten back disappeared in the gullies
surrounding us, stole unseen into the rifle-pits
they had prepared for our reception, and
soon from every side were picking off with
deadly aim the exposed Canadians. Lying
down along the edges of the hill, for five
hours our tired and hungry riflemen did their
best to reply, and a brave best it was ; but the
terms were too unequal, and the Indians might
have gone on killing white men till night-fall
without harm to themselves if a series of sharp
charges had not cleared them out of the rifle-pits.
Loading our dead on one wagon and our
wounded on two, we made all possible speed
back to Battleford, considerably out of heart.
Poundmaker, overcoming any hesitation he had
felt before, now resolved to join forces with the
half-breeds, and was hurrying eastward to do
so when the news of Kiel's capture upset his
plans. The Indians now surrendered ; the
murderers were hanged, the chiefs imprisoned,
and the warriors disarmed. The eagerness
with which peace was accepted, added to
the reluctance with which war had been begun,
gives ground for a belief that the north-western
race question will never give serious trouble
again.
The later history of the territories is one of
peaceful agricultural progress and political
"W^|Wi^>IP
THE NORTH-WEST REBELLIONS.
120
development, culminating in 1897 in the
establishment of a system of responsible
government at the little capital town Regina.
K
'ft.
f
CHAPTER XIV.
The Pacific Slope.
THE west coast of North America has had
a very curious history. To begin with,
its very existence was denied, for the
early Spanish explorers thought that North
America was simply an extension of Asia.
Their successors were surprised to find that no
matter how far north they sailed in the Pacific
the coast was always on their right and never
ahead of them. When the French and English
began to settle on the eastern edge of America
they had still but the faintest notion of what
the western edge was like, and no idea what-
ever of the regions between. Even when
the English colonies on the Atlantic coast had
grown into a great nation, the Pacific coast
remained untouched by civilization — except for
the Spanish mission-stations of California — and
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
^31
i
I
K 2
132
THE STORY OF CANADA.
largely unexplored. As lately as 1846 the
whole great slope from the Rocky Mountains
down to the Pacific Ocean, between California
on the south and the Russian fur-traders'
territory of Alaska on the north, was a
no-man's-land.
The object of early Spanish voyagers in the
Pacific was the same as that of the North- West
Passage seekers on the eastern side of the
continent — to discover a way by which ships
might sail between Europe and the Inuies
through America. Captain Cook hiniself, after
exploring vast breadths of unknown southern
seas and adding Australia to the British Empire,
bent his energies to the winning of a ^20,000
prize offered by the British Government for the
discovery of the North-West Passage. Sailing
up the Pacific as far as Behring Straits, he did
not find what most he sought ; but, by peering
into every river mouth and inlet, he added
much to men's knowledge of the present British
Columbia.
Captain Cook was not the only inquisitive
Englishman who visited these coasts ; in fact,
two years before his arrival Captain Meares had
gone so far as to build a house on Nootka
Sound. The Spatiiards; who claimed the whole
Pacific side of the continent as the French had
claimed the centre, warned off the trespassing
heretics, seized several British ships, and in
mm
''
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
133
1790 planted a little Spanish settlement on the
disputed shore. The governments of the two
countries then came to a makeshift agreement
that neither should interfere with the settlements
of the other till the ownership of the soil could
be determined. The naval representatives of
Spain and P]ngland met on the spot, dined in
each other's cabins, went on exploring expedi-
tions together, and joined their names in the
provisional title of" Vancouver-Cuadra " Island.
Beyond this the rival powers could not get.
In 1 8 19, Spain gave up to the United States all
her claims to the Pacific coast north of Mexico:
but the British claims north of California re-
mained, and for twenty-seven years the two Eng-
lish-speaking governments, at Westminster and
Washington, exercised joint control over what
was known as the Oregon territory. In the
early forties, however, so many Americans had
arrived and settled in the neutral territory that
it could remain neutral no longer. The United
States government not only withdrew from the
joint arrangement, but claimed the whole terri-
tory between California and Alaska for itself.
This would have shut off the British colonies
from all access to the Pacific Ocean, as
absolutely as the French claims a century
before would have shut off the Americans. To
guard against emergencies, as well as to report
on possible solutions of the difficulty, her
134
THE STORV OF CANADA.
Majesty's ship "America" in 1845 visited Van-
couver Island, and Captain Gordon is reported
to have exclaimed, " I would not give one of the
bleakest knolls of all the bleak hills of Scotland
for twenty islands arrayed like this in barbaric
glories." The captain's brother, Lord Aberdeen,
was Foreign Minister at that time, but happily
he did not throw away the future of British
America because its present glories were bar-
baric. The trouble was ended in 1846 by a
compromise. All the western territories north
of the forty-ninth degree of latitude (except, of
course, Alaska) were to belong to Britain, and
all south of that degree to the United States.
It was the most charmingly simple way of
creating a frontier that could be imagined : rule
a straight line across the map from the Great
Lakes to the Pacific shore, a line twelve
hundred miles long without a break, and the
thing is done.
Between that 1,200-mile boundary and the
Arctic Ocean the British power was repre-
sented, as we saw in the last chapter, by a
great trading corporation. The Hudson's Bay
Company had had its commercial monopoly
extended to the Pacific shore as early as
182 1, and it was no more anxious for the
spread of civilization among the mountains
and on the western islands than it had been on
the prairie and in the woodland of the interior.
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
135
The rising tide of white population would
drive away the game and demoralize the
native huntsmen. A little agriculture was
indulged in, so that the company's forts should
not go without fresh vegetables, and early in
the present century a certain number of
farmers were encouraged to take up land
because the company had contracted to feed
the Russian fur-traders up in Alaska. This
was all. And yet, when there was talk of
organizing a colony on the Pacific coast, the
company asked to be entrusted with the task.
Mr. Gladstone and others argued that history
proved the company to be quite unfit for such
an enterprise ; as well ask the wolf to guard
the sheepfold. The protest was in vain, and
in 1849 Vancouver Island was organized as
a colony under company rule. The experi-
ment was an utter failure. The company
charged ;^i an acre for land, while any
settler could get three hundred and twenty
acres for nothing on the American side of
the frontier. After five years the white and
half-breed population of Vancouver Island
numbered four hundred and fifty in all, and
only five hundred acres were under cultiva-
tion. A riai'-;ulous little parliam.ent of seven
members was elected in 1856, and assembled
at the miniature capital called Victoria ; but
they had little power and less revenue. The
mmmmmmm
136
THE STORY OF CANADA.
company was still the master, and its chief
agent held at the same time the position of
royal governor. The settlers petitioned for
direct imperial rule, and in 1H58 an event
occurred which compelled the Home Govern-
ment to grant their request. This event was
the outbreak of the gold fever.
Several years before, Indians canoeing down
from Queen Charlotte's Islands to trade at
Victoria had brought with them specimens of
gold, and now a rumour spread that quantities
of the precious metal had been found along
the river bottoms of the mainland. The men
who had turned California into a mining camp
pulled up their stakes and flocked northward
to collect what th'*y imagined would be
easier and richer spoil in British territory.
Victoria, the little provincial capital on Van-
couver Island, suddenly awoke to the noise
and bustle of a commercial city. In a single
summer twenty-five thousand men landed there,
while eight thousand more found their way to
the frontier by land after a three weeks' ride on
horseback. Those who had come by water
deposited their capital — sacks of raw gold
— in the office of the Hudson's Bay Company
at Victoria, and set themselves to build rafts,
boats, and canoes on which to reach the main-
land and ascend the golden Fraser river.
Many of them were drowned on the way ; and
~ml
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
137
of the thirty-three thousand who reached the
river, thirty thousand turned back in disgust to
their deserted Cahfornia. The three thousand
who remained had to be kept in order and
provided for in some way. Governor Douglas,
of Vancouver Island, was ready to undertake
this awkward task, but on the mainland he had
no authority except that of a Hudson's Bay
factor. On November 17th, 1858, proclamation
was made that company rule over the moun-
tains and islands of the west was ended for
ever — surviving company rule over the plains
of India by just eleven weeks. The Hudson's
Bay Company might continue to exist, but its
trading monopoly on the mainland and its
political supremacy on Vancouver Island were
extinguished together. Douglas, giving up the
attempt to serve two masters, resigned his
connection with the company. He received
in exchange her Majesty's commission as
governor not only of the island but of the new
colony, " British Columbia," stretching four
hundred miles eastward from the Pacific Ocean
to where the Rocky Mountains look down upon
the inland plains.
The immigrant might well be appalled by
his first experience of British Columbian gold-
streams, for these do not meander along gentle
valleys, but pour through gloomy gorges, walled
for hundreds of miles by precipitous mountai
•I
4
;«
t3H
THE STORY OF CANADA.
sides. At the season when the human tide
poured in the water was at its highest too,
and the sand-bars where men thought to find
gold were hidden deep under the torrent of the
Fraser. Such ground as still lay high and dry
was soon crowded with miners, each hunting
for a fortune in a little patch of earth twenty -five
feet square. Those adventurous spirits who
pressed on to the upper reaches of the stream,
and into the tributary gorge of the Thompson
river, had to scramble along trails where the
mountain goats alone had trod before. All
provisions had to be brought up on the backs
of men, and before a mule track could be cut
along the precipices the men were reduced to
a diet of wild berries.
About ;;{^i 00,000 worth of gold was taken
out in 1858, but it had cost the miners a
good deal more than that in the getting. The
next year's yield was estimated at ^300,000.
This, however, was only a preface to the volume
of riches that was being opened to a wondering
world. In i860, a young Nova Scotian named
Macdonald, and two j^mericans named Dietz
and Rose, left the Fraser and Thompson rivers
behind them in search of virgin goldfields
forthernorth. In consequence of the discoveries
they made, an unknown and uninhabited
wilderness of forest and ravine sprang into
fame as an Eldorado to which the miners of
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
139
California and Australia and amateur gold-
hunters from all the world were madly rushing.
In seven years this Cariboo district, about fifty
miles square, yielded gold worth ;^'5,ooo,ooo.
In one day live men washed ^,.'40 out of the
soil ; four men in the same space of time got
£2)1^' -^^ old river bed was found where
nuggets could be picked up to the amount
of ;!£^2oo per square foot. The mountain lion
and grizzly bear looked on in wonder as mush-
room towns sprang up in the silent hunting-
grounds and the rocks re-echoed with the white
man's oath and pistol Provisions still had
to be carried up from the coast on mule back,
and were often intercepted and devoured by
miners travelling the same road. In the winter
of 1861, flour in Cariboo cost jQi4 los. a
barrel, and bacon 3s. a pound. Next year men
came in so much faster than meal that the
population was brought to the verge of
famine.
The miners were a rough set for the most
part, given to furious gambling on the gold-
fields and to excesses of every sort when they
returned to the comparative civilization of
Victoria or San Francisco. Still, the mining
towns had their well-filled reading-rooms, their
concerts and debates, and the authority of
law was uncommonly well respected. " Gold
commissioners" were appointed to deal out
'^m
140
THE STORY OF CANADA.
justice promptly in every camp, and over this
whole system presided a judicial genius whose
name was a terror to evildoers. " Old Judge
Begbie soon made them understand who was
master," says an old miner. *'I saw a fellow
named Gilchrist, who had killed two men in
California, on trial there. He killed a man on
Beaver Lake, in the Cariboo country, who was
gambling with him. Whilst sitting at the table,
a miner came in, threw down his bag of gold
dust, bet an ounce, and won. Gilchrist paid.
The man bet again, and won again, flippantly
inquiring of the gambler if there was any other
game he could play better, as he drew in the
stakes. Gilchrist took offence at the remark,
and, lifting his pistol, shot him dead. Gilchrist
was tried, and the jury brought in a verdict of
manslaughter. Turning to the prisoner, the
judge said : ' It is not a pleasant duty for me
to have to sentence you only to prison for life.
Your crime was unmitigated murder. You
deserve to be hanged. Had tliejury performed
their duty, I might now have the painful
satisfaction of condemning you to death. And
you, gentlemen of the jury, permit me to say
that it would give me great pleasure to
see you hanged, each and every one of
you, for bringing in a murderer guilty only of
manslaughter.' "
Thirty thousand rough whites could hardly
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
141
invade an Indian province without some little
trouble from the natives, and one or two serious
fights took place ; but as a rule the two races
got on very well together. The newcomers
washing sand along the river beds did not
destroy the game on which the old inhabitants
depended for their living; justice was measured
out to red man and to white with equal hand ;
and the Indians of British Columbia took
readily to such work as white employers
wanted done. An American historian* has
left on record his opinion that " never in the
pacification and settlement of any section of
America have there been so few disturbances,
so few crimes against life and property."
Fifteen years after the first rush Cariboo was
utterly deserted by the white miners, though
the frugal Chinese continued to derive satisfac-
tion from the golden dregs left in the district. In
those fifteen years many other districts in the
"sea of mountains" had been invaded by
detachments of gold hunters, some of whom
acquired fortunes to squander, while many
came out poorer than they went in, and some
never came out at all. Of the three lucky
Cariboo pioneers mentioned a little while ago,
Dietz died a pauper in 1877, and the body of
Rose was found in the woods, .starved to death
while searching for new goldfields to conquer.
* Hubert Howe Bancroft.
npi^^
14a
THE STORY OF CANADA.
In the last ten years or so there has been
a revival in British Columbian gold mining,
particularly in the south-eastern or Kootenay
district ; and even Cariboo is found to contain
something more than dregs.
Even coal-mining has had its romantic
episodes in the history of British Columbia.
In 1835, some Indians visiting a Hudson's Bay
outpost on Vancouver Island happened into
the smithy. They were astonished to find
the blacksmith burning coal, and when told
that it had been brought a six months' journey
from over the sea they burst out laughing.
There was any quantity of the same '* black
stone," they said, at the north end of that very
island. Other deposits were found from time to
time, and as California with all her gold is
poor in the more useful mineral, the whole
Pacific slope has drawn upon the British
territory for its coal for over half a century past.
Just a word or two must be said of the
later political development of the two colonies.
In 1864, British Columbia — the mainland
territory, that is — was endowed with a separate
governor and an infant legislature of which only
three members out of thirteen were elected
by the people. Two years afterwards Van-
couver Island and British Columbia were united
under the latter name; and in 1871, when
the whole colony entered the Canadian
THE PACIFIC SLOPE.
143
Confederation, the political swaddling bands
were removed, and the provincial legislature
became an elected body, with full control
over the executive cabinet.
One other striking episode in the history
of our Pacific colonies has still to be chronicled
— an episode that nearly caused a war with
the United States.
When the frontier question was settled, or
supposed to be settled, in 1846, a serious
omission was made. On the mainland the
British and American territories were divided,
clearly enough, by the forty-ninth parallel of
latitude ; but when the sea was reached the
line was simply ordered to follow '* the middle
of the channel " between Vancouver Island and
the American part of the mainland. Now,
there are a number of islands between Van-
couver and the American main, and therefore
several channels through which the frontier
might be imagined to run. The island of San
Juan, which was British or American according
as one channel or another might be considered
the frontier, had been used by the Hudson's
Bay Company as a cattle pasture since 1843.
In 1852, the Americans landed a sheriff and a
customs officer on the island and tried to collect
duties from the British herdsmen, who refused
to pay and hoisted the Union Jack. Here were
the makings of a pretty quarrel; and in 1859,
144
THE STORY OF CANADA.
when an American setiler killed a Hudson's Bay
hoj^ for rooting in his garden, the naval and
military forces of Queen and President came
within an ace of opening fire on each otlv
Before this calamity could occur, howevi
the British Government proposed arbitration.
The dispute dropped out of sight when the
energies of the American Government were
distracted by the Civil War. For twelve years
the settlers and hogs of San Juan were kept at
peace by British and American detachments of
equal strength, and the two forces got on
famously together. At last, in 1871, the German
Emperor was called in as arbitrator, and traced
the frontier through a channel which gave San
Juan to the United States.
CHAPTER XV.
Unity Through Federation.
THE political system set up after the
rebellions, though it marked a long step
in advance, had ont fatal defect : It
fastened together in the boi 's of legislative
union two peoples differing "dely in race,
language, habits, and religion. The union
was, therefore, only a mechanical one. There
was almost as little harmony between the
French and British representatives in the
Canadian Legislature as there is between
English and Irish in the Imperial Parliament.
Every cabinet included French as well as
English-speaking members ; and an attempt
was made to carry out an unwritten rule by
which a ministry could not hold office unless
supported by a majority of the legislators from
iP«H
146
THE STORY OF CANADA.
each province. Such a condition became more
and more difficult to fulfil as the people of
Upper Canada drew together in one party and
the people of Lower Canada in aaother. In
the joint parliament, as we remember, the two
colonies had equal representation. This was
all very well, from Upper Canada's point of
view, so long as she had a smaller population
than the lower colony ; but before the union
was ten years old the situation was reversed,
and by the year 1861 immigration had raised
the number of the Upper Canadians to one
million three hundred and ninety-six thousand.
This v/as two hundred and eighty-five thousand
more than the Lower Canadians could muster.
Upper Canada, therefore, was no longer
satisfied with equal numbers in Parliament,
and demanded " representation according to
population." Ministries which resisted such a
change were driven to rely practically on the
solid French - Canadian vote of the lower
province for their support. At last, in 1864,
the machinery of the constitution came to a
deadlock. The legislature was so evenly
divided that a Conservative government which
in April obtained a vote of confidence by a
majority of two was defeated by a majority of
two in June. As a Liberal government had
just been compelled to resign for a similar
reason, the situation seemed desperate.
1
UNITY THROUGH FEDERATION.
147
At this critical point one of the leading
advocates of ''representation by population,"
Mr. George Brown, of Toronto, went to Mr.
John A. Mardonald, who led the ministerial
forces in the Assembly, and offered to co-operate
with any cabinet that might be formed to settle
once for all the dispute between the two
Canadas. The offer was accepted. Mr. Brown,
with Mr. Oliver Mowat and a third reformer,
entered a coalition ministry which carried its
task to a triumphant end in the federation of
1867.
The idea of federation was an old one. The
experiment had been proposed, at one time for
the three Atlantic colonies, Nova Scotia, New
Brunswick and Prince Edward Island ; at
another time for Upper and Lower Canada. In
i860, Mr, George Brown had asked the Canadian
parliament to declare for " the formation of two
or more local governments, to which should be
committed all matters of a sectional character,
and the erection of some joint authority to
dispose of the affairs common to all." The
resolution was coniemptuously rejected ; but now,
only four years later, its principle was accepted
by both parties as the only remedy for
parliamentary impotence. In the autumn of
the same year, 1864, it fortunately happened
that delegates from the three Atlantic colonies
were to meet in Charlottetown, the capital
L 2
148
THE 3T0RY OF CANADA.
of Prince Edward Island, in order to discuss the
federal idea on their own account. The
Canadian government asked leave to send
delegates, and a joint conference of the five
colonies was held. Such a good understanding
was arrived at that a scheme for a grand
confederation of all British North America leapt
suddenly from the realm of dreams into the
forefront of practical politics. The conference
only dispersed to meet again a few weeks later
in Quebec ; and there, where a century before
France and England had fought their greaL
battle for supremacy, the sons of both now
agreed on a final scheme of union. The seventy-
two fundamental resolutions passed at Quebec
were accepted by the parliaments of four of the
colonies, and were then embodied in a Bill
which passed safely through the Imperial
Parliament and received the Queen's assent
on March 29th, 1867. At the stroke of mid-
night on June 30th, the old order vanished,
and the "Dominion of Canada" leapt into
being. Lower Canada took the name of
Quebec, and Upper Canada became Ontario,
Prince Edward Island at first held back,
fearing — as indeed all the maritime colonies
had feared — that their interests would be
ignored or overborne in a parliament chiefly
composed uf members from the two Canadas.
In 1873, however, the little island colony
UNITY THROUGH FEDERATION.
X49
resolved to join the federation. This change
of mind was prompted by the difficuUy of
obtaining money, on the credit of the island
alone, for the building of a railway. The
federal government advanced not only funds
for this purpose, but 800,000 dollars /about
;^i 60,000) to buy off the absentee proprietors
of the island; for in 1767 the land of this
little colony had been given away in payment
for services rendered to the Imperial Govern-
ment.
The Dominion of Canada, as we know it,
was now complete. The vast domain of the
north and north-west, including the present
province of Manitoba, had been bought from
the Hudson's Bay Company in 1869, and
British Columbia had joined the federadon
in 187 1. Newfoundland alone, of all the British
North American countries, remains outside the
confederation.
Under the new constitution there is a central
parliament sitting at Ottawa and representing
all the federated colonies — now called provinces
— and a local parliament or legislature in each
provincial capital. The federal parliament
consists of a Senate and a House of Commons.
The senators are appointed, for life, by the
Governor -General — that is to say, by the
ministry that happens to be in office when a
seat falls vacant; and lieutenant-governors for
^^^P»W^
150
THE STORY OF CANADA.
the various provinces are appointed in the
same way. The federal House of Commons
is elected practically by manhood suffrage,
for every British citizen can vote if he has
an income of 300 dollars, or ;^6o, a year,
and special provision is made for the en-
franchisement of young men living with their
fathers. A redistribution of seats has to be
made every ten years, to harmonize with the
distribution of population as revealed by each
decennial census.
As to the provincial parliaments, Quebec and
Nova Scotia Jtill keep to the two-chamber
system; but the most important of the colonies,
Ontario, has on.: house only, and the same
is true of New Brunswick, Prince Edward
Island, Manitoba, the North-West Territories,
and British Columbia. The provincial legis-
latures have large local powers, including the
right to levy direct taxes and licence fees, to
dispose of public lands, to incorporate com-
panies, to create railways and other public
works, to control education and municipal
institutions, to administer justice, to deal in
general with " all matters of a merely local
or private nature in the province," and even
to alter the provincial constitution. The
Dominion or federal parliament at Ottawa has
control of the Indians, of trade and commerce,
shipping, naval and military matters, tlie post
UNITY THROUGH FEDERATION.
151
the
office, banking and currency, patents and copy-
rights, marriage and divorce, criminal law, and
in general of all matters not assigned to the
provincial legislatures. The federal constitution
can only be altered by the power that framed
it, namely the Imperial Parliament. An
appeal against decisions of Canadian Courts
may be carried to the Judicial Committee of the
Privy Council in London; and thus a most
valuable method has been provided of settling
matters in dispute between the federal and pro-
vincial governments. The Governor-General,
who is appointed by tiiC Home Government to
preside over the federal administration, has to
act, as a rule, in accordance with the advice of
his ministers ; but he may refuse to sign any
Bill passed by the federal parliament, or may
submit the measure to the Imperial Government
at Westminster. Needless to say, imperial
interference with Canadian legislation is almost
unknown in practice. The federal government
has not been so chary of vetoing Bills passed
by tlie provincial legislatures ; but this power
is sparingly exercised.
The course of true love between the provinces
united in the bonds of federation has not always
run smooth. The local interests of a country
three thousand miles long, the local sentiments
of a population deeply divided by language and
race and religion, cannot easily be harmonized.
153
THE STORY OF CANADA.
Nevertheless, substantial harmony is already
established : a striking proof of the reasonable
temper in which Canadians as a whole are
working out their political destiny.
The chief causes of controversy in federated
Canada have been railways, religion, and the
tariff. The absolute necessity of a great rail-
way-building policy, if the confederation was to
be held together, will be clear to everyone who
looks at tlie map. When federation took place
the only British route from the Atlantic colonies
to Quebec and Ontario (leaving sleigh-roads
out of consideration) was the St. Lawrence
gulf and river, and that was closed for half the
year; but from the Atlantic colonies to the
New England cities of the United States was
only a step, so to speak, and the sea was open
all the time. In the same way, Ontario and
Quebec, while isolated from all the other
colonies, lay cheek-by-jowl with New York and
other frontier states of the American Union,
The Red River settlement, soon to become the
province of Manitoba, could only be reached
from the other British colonies after a long and
tedious voyage by lakes and rivers, though
divided from the growing communities of the
American west by a merely imaginary line.
Finally, the British Columbians, though in close
and easy communication with the American
cities of the Pacific coast, were cut off from all
UNITY THROUGH FEDERATION.
153
ul
-
ill
their British fellow-citizens by a labyrinth of
mountains and a practically endless stretch of
prairie. To leave these little western communi-
ties isolated from each other and from the rest of
the British brotherhood would have been unfair
alike to them and to the Empire. Exclusive
commercial and social relations with the United
States would assuredly have had their effect on
political sympathies. It was clearly advisable
to supplement the "silken tie" of instinctive
loyalty by a good strong line of iron rails.
Even the larger eastern colonies, joined to the
motherland by the ocean '^highway, felt the need
of better ways of commjinication among them-
selves in view of their c ./seness to the United
States. Military considerations undoubtedly
helped to bring confederation itself, as well as
the federal railway system, into existence. When
the colonies agreed to federate, it will be
remembered, the American Civil War was in
progress ; and, although forty or fifty thousand
Canadians fought on the side of the north, the
supposed sympathy of England for the southern
side created much ill-will against the British
colonies. When the war was over, indeed, a
large number of American Fenians invaded
Canada, by way of punishing the British Govern-
ment for the wrongs of Ireland.
The Atlantic colonies stipulated, when they
joined the federation, that a railway should at
■*■
154
THE STORY OF CANADA.
once be built from Nova Scotia to Quebec. This
was done, with the help of the Imperial Govern-
ment's guarantee on a loan of ;^'3, 000,000.
Britisli Cohimbia stipulated that a railway
across mountains and prairies to the eastern
provinces should be begun and finished within
ten years. This was a tremendous undertaking
for the young Dominion, which contained
in 1871 a population of only 3,635,000. There
was much delay in beginning the work, and
the indignation of the British Columbians drove
them into threats of secession. It is true that
in 1873 the federal government awarded a
charter to a company for the construction of
the line; but it was soon discovered that the
company had been paying large sums of
money to various cabinet ministers for election
expenses, and the government resigned. Sir
John Macdonald, who had been Premier since
the birth of the Dominion, was now succeeded
by Mr. Alexander Mackenzie. The railway
policy of the new administration was much too
slow and timid for the British Columbians; and
not all the eloc^uence of Lord Dufferin, who as
Governor-General visited the Pacific coast in
1876, could charm away the indignation of the
province. Two years later Sir John Macdonald
came back to power, and in 1880 he persuaded
parliament to vote twenty-five million dollars
(five millions sterling) and twenty-five million
UNITY THROUGH FEDERATION.
^55
fi
acres of land to a Scotch-Canadian company
which promised to have trains running across
the continent within ten years. The promise
was more than kept: five years proved enough.
Since the summer of 1 886 tlie British Cokimbians
and Nova Scotians have been within a week's
run of each other.
As for the tariff controversy, it is simply the
Canadian phase of the world-wide conflict,
Free Trade versus Protection. When the
various provinces agreed to federate, they
gave up to the new central government their
power to levy customs duties. The central
government, for its part, agreed to pay large
annual subsidies to the provincial treasuries,
and took over provincial debts and responsi-
bilities involving a heavy charge on the federal
revenues. These revenues, it was generally
agreed, should be raised by customs duties;
but there was, and is, the keenest controversy
between those who would levy a tariff for
revenue only and those who would raise the
duties high enough to keep out or keep down
foreign merchandise, and so give Canadian
producers something liki" a monopoly of the
Canadian market. The Liberal party of
Canada ccnitends for a low or '* revenue "
tariff, as the nearest approach to free trade
that the country can afford ; the Conservatives
claim that a high tariff is required, especially
156
THE STORY OF CANADA.
to protect the manufacturing interest. For
nearly a score of years, beginning with 1879,
a protective policy was in force, and all that
time the battle of opmion raged between those
who thought the country better off and those
who thought it worse. At last, in 1896, the
Conservatives were deposed by a general
election ; and their Liberal successors pro-
claimed a new tariff, or rather a pair of
tariffs — one for the countries that levy pro-
tective duties on Canadian produce, and a
lower set of duties for the mother country or
any other nation that treats Canada with
equal fairness.
Religious disputes, or rather irreligious
disputes between the adherents of different
religions, are naturally severe in a land where
both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are
strong and militant, especially when the different
creeds are held by men of difierent races.
A dispute of this kind, no matter how local
it seems at first, spreads with the speed of the
telegraph, and the whole population of the
Dominion finds itself in the arena on one side or
the other. A few years ago, for instance, the
people of Manitoba decided to devote all their
educational resources to a system of com.mon or
public schools. The French Roman Catholic
minority of the province had up to that
time received a share of the taxes for their
UNITY THROUGH FEOERATION.
15/
denominational schools, and narurally protested
against the change. Immediately the whole
weight of tlie Roman Catholic clergy throughout
the Dominion was thrown into an agitation to
recover the lost rights of their little Manitol)an
flock. Now, though the provincial authorities
have control over education under ordinary
circumstances, if the educational rights of a
Protestant or Roman Catholic minority in
any province are infringed the federal govern-
ment is authorized by the constitution to step in
and remedy the grievance. This the federal
ministers proposed to do, by direct legislation ;
and if they had remained in power we might
have seen an interesting experiment in the
coercion of one parliament by another. The
most remarkable point about the whole dispute,
however, was its termination. The federal
ministers were thrown out of office and their
place was taken by men whose programme was
negotiation instead of coercion. Strange to
say, the political champions of Roman Catholic
claims owed their defeat chiefly to the Roman
Catholic voters of Quebec, who in the secrecy of
the ballot defied the sternest warnings of their
clergy. After all, therefore, the principal lesson
of the conflict is that the French-Canadians
are prepared to use their own judgment even in
matters claimed by the Church as belonging to
her exclusive jurisdiction.
■^^
158
THE STORY OF CANADA.
It would be useless here to speak of the
multitudinous questions, big and little, that fill
the order sheets of the eight provincial parlia-
ments. Of Ontario it may be remarked that
although she has the largest population she has
had a more unruffled political history than any
other province. She has been governed all the
thirty years of her existence by a Liberal
majority, though when it comes to federal
politics she has generally sent a strong Con-
servative contingent to the Ottawa parliament.
She also enjoys the singular happiness of
absolute freedom from debt. The sister colony
of Quebec, on the other hand, can boast of a
princely debt, and her governments had been
almost uniformly Conservative until the success
of the Liberals in 1897. (Not that Conserva-
tives alone have the faculty of spending money.)
Once, in 1878, a Conservative government was
dismissed by the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec
for keeping him in ignorance of administrative
proceedings ; but the Liberal government then
appointed had to rely for its majority on the
Speakers casting vote, and disappeared after
a troubled career of eighteen months. The
Lieutenant-Governor was himself removed from
office by the federal government at Ottawa.
Mr. Mercier's ministry, which was dismiss'
by another Lieutenant-Governor in 1
a coalition. Mr. Mercier himself hau jen a
UNITY THROUGH FEDERATION.
159
Liberal, l)ut he rode into power on a wave of
passion in which for a moment party boundaries
were lost. The North-West Rebellion of 1885,
of which the story was told in the last chapter,
ended with the defeat and capture of its insti-
gator, Louis Riel. Now Kiel had French as
well as Indian blood m his veins, and although
his knavery was undoubted his execution was
resented by many as a blood-oflfering' to the
Orangemen (one of whom had been murdered
in Kiel's former insurrection) and an insult to
the French-Canadian race. Of course, the
federal ministry were responsible for the
execution, and the provincial government of
Quebec had nothing to do with it ; but they
belonged to the same party, and the vengeance
of French nadonalism in Quebec fell on the
government that was nearest to hand.
In the Rie' agitation the dispute was between
French and English rather than between Roman
Catholic and Protestant. It may be said,
indeed, as a general thing, that the French-
Canadian is more sensitive in his racial than
in his religious sympathies. He is under no
political disability whatever, on account of
either his race or his creed; his language is
officially recognized and used in the federal
parliament, as well as in that of French
Quebec. Still, there are forces which no
pohtical regulations can control; and the
"IP^PI
i6o
THE STORY OF CANADA.
unconscious encroachments of the English
language and customs upon tlie old French
ways of the minority excite a very natural
amount of suspicion and unrest. In the same
way, the English-speakin,!? minority in the
province of Quebec naturally think and speak
in an aggrieved tone of ;heir subjection to a
French legislature in provincial affairs. In each
case the minority has cause for dissatisfaction,
but little ground for complaint; and the two
races are becoming more and more awake to
the need of working harmoniously together
for the sake of their common country.
~<i^^-
CHAPTER XVI.
The Canadians and their Country.
THE story of Canada, as we have seen,
is not a simple one. It is indeed a
series of stories running on side by side>
and, even when finally intertwined, each pre-
serving an individual existence, like the str. jids
in a rope of many colours. Owing to the racial
differences between Ontario and Quebec these
sister colonies had very different social and
political histories even when they were nominally
united under one parliament; and now, with
separate legislatures, the two provinces continue
to work out their destinies on different lines,
though uniting in a federal parliament to make
the common history of the Dominion. In that
common history the three Atlantic provinces
also have a share ; but as a group they are
M
1 62
THE STORY OF CANADA.
divided by geographical position and economical
interests from Ontario and Quebec ; ana, ilr^lly,
each has had and still has an individual
history apart from the other two. The North-
West — including the Province of Manitoba, and
the four Territories which have a little joint
legislature of their own at Regina — and the
Far West, or British Columbia, once had a com-
mon history under the rule of the Hudson's Bay
Company ; and now again they have a common
history as members of the Canadian Confede-
ration. Nevertheless, distance and climate and
geographical contrasts keep the local histories
of British Columbia and the North-West
running in channels far from each other and
farther still from the course of affairs in the
eastern provinces. It must always be re-
membered, though it is often forgotten, that
Canada is not one country but several, though
happily joined so firmly in the bond of federation
that no local interest or idiosyncrasy is ever
likely to wrench them apart.
Another fact to be always borne in mind is
that the Canadians are divided by origin and
creed as well as by distance and provincial
boundaries. At the beginning we found a
couple of French colonies, planted hundreds ot
miles from each other, one on the Atlantic
coast and the other far up the river St. Lawrence, \
with English colonies soon springing up '
THE CANADIANS AND THEIR COUNTRY.
163
lomical
ui^Mly,
ivJdual
North-
ba, and
e joint
.nd the
acom-
n's Bay
Dmmon
onfede-
ite and
istories
h-West
er and
in the
be re-
1, that
though
oration
s ever
nind is
in and
vincial
und a
*eds ot
tlantic
^rence, <
'g up
in their neighbourhood and outgrowing them
both. The one, Acadia, exposed to attacks by
sea, suffered the more in the struggles between
France and England, and succumbed the
sooner ; the inland colony, Canada, grew up in
desperate conflict with Indians, and had scarcely
beaten them off when it, too, fell before the
English power. The French in Acadia sank to
the level of a minority. The story of Canada,
on the other hand, became that of practically a
whole population alien to its rulers, and only
reconciled in part by a policy of partial justice.
The collapse of England's power over her own
American colonies strengthened her hold on her
new subjects, by la}Ing the foundations of
English settlements beside the French. Owing
to those settlements, however, the inevitable
struggle for self-gc- ,'rnment in Canada was
complicated by the rivalry of two races, each as
eager to prevent the domination of the other as
they both were to break the yoke of their official
rulers. The struggle is over, the rivalry abated ;
but the triple line of race and language and
religion still divides the people of Canada. At
the time of the last census, in 1891, there were
nearly two million Roman Catholics in a total
population of 4,833,000, and a million and a half
must have been French-Canadians. The French,
though their marvellous rate of natural increase
is partly counteracted by emigration to the
M 2
mm
Z64
THE STORY OF CANADA.
factory town; of the United States, are fast
filling up those southern counties of Quebt:
which English loyalists first settled, and are even
overflowing into the eastern districts of Ontario.
The English retain and slightly increase their
majority in the Dominion by constant reinforce-
ments from the mother-land.
The other race question which used to trouble
Canada, that of the relations between white men
and red, can scarcely be called a (question
any more. There are still about 32,000
Indians in the five eastern provinces, but they
are a peaceable folk, and only don their war
gear now and then to amuse their visitors.
Most of them, though living on " Reserves," are
anything but barbarians, and large numbers
simply live the lives of white men. Of the
forty thousand Indians in the North- West, even
the tribes that were most devoted to war and
the chase a few years ago are now making
very fair progress in agriculture and other
arts of civilization. As to the 25,000 Indians
of British Columbia, or those of them who
come in contact with Europeans, compara-
tively few are civilized, but the others are at
least harmless hangers-on of civilization.
If racial and geographical divergencies have
constantly to be reckoned with in the domestic
aftairs of Can£"^a, the presence of the United
States all alon^ her land frontier is a no less
THE CANADI/NS AND THEIR COUNTRY. 165
powerful factor in her foreign politics. Prac-
tically the whole population of Canada lives
near the southern edge of the Dominion, and
therefore not far from the northern edge of
the United States. The social relations of
Americans and Canadians are intimate, as
might be expected ; and there is as yet no
tariff on friendship. The commercial relations
of the two countries have naturally suffered, as
they were intended to suffer, from the pro-
tectionist duties on both sides ; but the facts of
geography are inexorable. More than one-
third of Canada's exports last year were taken
by the United States, and more than half her
imports came from the same country. Clearly,
the influence that a nation of sixty millions
may exert on one of five millions under such
circumstances may be very great The United
States may be described as a powerful magnet.
But this magnet has a negative pole as well as
a positive, and the larger country has seriously
weakened her influence over the less by system-
atic boycotting. One of the avowed objects
of this policy is to force the Canadians out of
the brotherhood of British nations ; as though
a Methodist should try to convert a Presbyterian
by sending him to Coventry. It is only fair to
say that millions of Americans recognize the
injustice of interfering with Canada's right of
private judgment, and that millions more are
i66
THE STORY OF CANADA.
conscious of its utter futility. A time will
come when the better judgment of the
American people will prevail. It will then
be ungrudgingly admitted that Canada is no
worse a neighbour to the United States because
of her alliance with the United Kingdom, and
indeed that she has an important part to play
in healing the antiquated and ridiculous feud
between the two greatest English - speaking
nations.
In the meantime the Canadians pursue a
quiet course, friendly to all who will be friends
with them, and loyal to the Empire in which
their independence and individuality are secure.
Here and there a voice is raised for annexation,
and some who say litde harbour a fatalistic
belief that Canada was made to be swallowed up
by the United States. The most remarkable
feature of the situation, however, is the over-
whelming and enthusiastic nature of the majority
by which the British connection is upheld. On
the other hand, Canadian enthusiasm for the
British connection must not be misunderstood.
It does not mean a willingness to subordinate
the interests of Canada to those of the United
Kingdom for a moment. It means, in the
case of French-Canadians, a certain amount of
gratitude to the power that gave them freedom
and guarantees its permanence, and a very
emphatic belief that their distinctive language
THE CANADIANS AND THEIR COUNTRY. 167
and customs would be on the highroad to
extinction if the Province of Quebec were to
become a State of the Union. As for
Canadians of British race, though their in-
stinctive affection for the mother-country often
weakens as the generations pass, it seldom
quite dies out ; and a reasoned conviction that
the interests of Canada are best maintained by
keeping up the British connection is a very
effective substitute. Above all this, a new
instinct is springing up. The Canadian
colonist, though he does not love his particular
Province less than he did before confederation,
has widened his heart, and now takes a patriotic
pride in the whole Dominion. Again he is
widening his heart. Looking east and west and
south over the world, he recognizes brethren
wherever he sees the Flag. He feels the
ennobling thrill of an imperial patriotism ; and
he loves his Canada not less but more that she
holds her place, steadfast and uncompelled, in
such J company.
If there is variety in the story of the Canadian
people, still more is there in the country where
they live. In Nova Scotia, behind a rugged
and barren tract along the coast lie hidden
valleys of great fertility, with orchards innu-
merable; her northern mines supply a great
part of the Canadian people with their coal;
and her harbours send out more merchant
i68
THE STORY OF CANADA.
ships, in proportion to the population of the
Province, than any other country in the world.
The sea which sustains this traffic and the
great kindred industry of the fisheries lays the
Province under an additional obligation by
tempering the cold of winter and the heat of
summer. The neighbouring Province of Prince
Edward Island is almost English in appearance,
and contains scarce an acre of uncultivable
soil. In these and the third Atlantic Province,
New Brunswick, the descendants of French
Acadians, Scottish Highlanders and English
Loyalists live side by side and speak the three
languages of their forefathers.
Following Jacques Cartier's course up the river
St. Lawrence, we pass the old French capital,
Quebec, with its fort-crowned rock, and then
sail on between plains now tilled by a million
of Cartier's fellow-countrymen — plains stretch-
ing away on the left to the mountains of the
American frontier, and on the right to the
Laurentian hills and forests. Where Cartier
stopped to visit the Indian village of Hochelaga
we find the solid limestone city of Montreal,
with great ocean steamers loading at her quays
the produce of half a continent. If we wait a
few months we shall see the river, here a mile
and a half wide, yielding a plentiful crop of
thick, clear ice, a household article as necessary
in summer, when the thermometer registers
k'
THE CANADIANS AND THEIR COUNTRY. 169
.^ Jl I 1 N V 1 1/
THE DOMINION OF CANADA, AND NEWVOUNDLAND.
X70
THE STORY OF CANADA.
80 or 90 in the shade, as coal is in winter
with the mercury below zero. The snow,
which falls more thickly in Quebec than in
any other p trt of Canada, is one of the greatest
boons bestowed by nature on a happy land :
protecting the ground from extremity of frost,
bridging the streams, turning rough country
tracks into the best imaginable roads, and only
departing to nourish vegetation into magic
growth under the warm spring sun. Then
summer comes in at a bound, and crops that
England cannot raise are ripe before autumn
reaps the red and golden leaves from the
neighbouring wood.
Steaming on south-westward in the track of
Lasalle's canoe, and threading our way among
the Thousand Islands of th^ jreen St. Lawrence,
or following Dollard and his heroes up the
Ottawa, we reach Ontario. By the second
route, passing the federal capital, we pene-
trate the forest tracts of the north. By the
first, sailing out on the lakes that soften the
climate of the south, we arrive at the vineyards
and peach-orchards of the Niagara peninsula.
Between these two extremes agriculture and
manufactures of many kinds flourish under the
stimulus of British energy. This " premier
province," Ontario, stretches not only north-
ward to Hudson's Bay but westward to the
borders of Manitoba.
k
THE CANADIANS AND THEIR COUNTRY.
171
And here we find ourselves in a new world :
a flat and monotonous world as far as eye can
reach, and cold enough when the season for
cold comes round, but healthy in the extrtme
and marvellously fertile. Crossing the wheat-
fields of Manitoba and Eastern Assiniboia, we
go west to the ranching lands of South Alberta,
the kingdom of the warm west wind, where
great herds of cattle and horses roam the plains
and live on the strong bunch-grass in winter
and summer alike. Turning northward through
the park-like regions of Saskatchewan and
North Alberta, with their rich variety of pasture
and woodland, we come at length upon a vast
expanse of forest and lake and river where no
white settler cares to follow the huntsman and
the missionary. Again we turn our faces to
the west, and climb the mountain wall that
bounds the central plain. Suddenly we find
ourselves in an enchanted land ; a land of
constant surprises; a paradise of snowy peaks,
and tumbling torrents, and placid lakes, and
giant trees, and many-coloured rocks. Range
follows range, gorge runs into gorge, till,
surfeited with glories, we glide down to the
balmy coast and float among the isles of the
Pacific.
It is a country of contrasts, this Canada ; yet
the natural endowments essential to the heal'h
and prosperity of a people are distributed over
172
THE STORY OF CANADA.
the Dominion with surprisingly even hand.
In one part the soil is more fertile than in
Another ; yet every province is peculiarly fitted
for some form of farming. Even mountainous
British Columbia has her sheltered valleys and
lowland levels from which the grain-growing
iind catde-ranching plainsmen draw their
supplies of fruit and vegetables : not to speak
•of her salmon-swarming rivers whence England
and Canada alike are fed. The eastern provinces
cannot compete with the west in the raising ot
wheat; but they have captured the British
market with their dairy produce. Nature
herself, without the aid of man, carries on
farming operations on the largest scale.
Berries that only have to be picked are in
Canada an important article of commerce ; and
trees form one of the country's most valuable
£rops. As for the forests of the east, their fame
has spread over the globe with their timber;
nor is the wooden wealth of the Pacific province
quite unknown to the outer world; but it
is necessary to state that even the prairie
province of Manitoba, though comparatively
poor in timber, is far from being quite unwooded.
The coal mines of Nova Scotia on the one
side and British Columbia on the other have
already been mentioned ; but the Territory of
Alberta also has her coal fields, and among the
mountains on her western frontier exist immense
THE CANADIANS AND THEIP COUNTRY.
^7i
y of
the
ense
deposits of the same "black stone." Fuel, there-
fore, is plentiful as well as food. Apart from
coal, the mineral wealth of Canada is enormous.
The gold of Klondike, in the perilous solitude
of Yukon Provisional District, has made
a great stir in the world, and the British
Columbian mines have had their full share
of attention ; but it is not generally
known that gold exists in considerable quan-
tities in Nova Scotia, Ontario, and Quebec,
Iron, silver, nickel, lead, and other precious
minerals are also plendful in the Dominion.
Water, the prime necessity of life, abounds in
every district of Canada except a section of the
central plain, and even parts of that compara-
tively rainless section are capable of irrigation.
The prairies of Manitoba and eastern Assiniboia
have water enough ; and in the eastern pro-
vinces, as well as British Columbia, the rapid
rivers furnish not merely water, but water power
of incalculable value. Lastly, there is the
atmosphere, about which people who have
never breathed it frighten themselves. Leaving
the genial British Columbian coast out of the
question, it may be said that the Canadian
winter is decidedly cold, but also bright and
invigorating. The cold is most severe in the
central regions, but even there it is made bear-
able by the extreme dryness of the air. While
in less favoured lands the gloomy skies and
174
THE STORY OF CANADA.
chilling rain and spongy earth drive everyone
indoors who is not compelled to be out, the
brilliant sunny days and moonlit nights and
crisp white snow of Canada tempt everyone out
who is not compelled to stay in. As winter is
winter indeed, so summei is downright genuine
summer from one end of Canada to the other.
When it rains, it rains ; and there is an end of
it. "When the sun shines, as it generally does,
there is power in its rays.
The moral atmosphere of Canada, as a
whole, is also good, though the critic, and
especially the Canadian critic, might point to
a cloudy spot here and there. The people
are, as a rule, religious, sober, and law-abiding.
They are not content to develop the resources
of their country ; they are developing them-
selves. Though a very hard-working and
not over-rich population, they have built up
creditable systems of education in nearly every
province. Even literature and art, the last
refinements in which a young country indulges,
are making a place for themselves in the
national life.
In a word, an emphatic v/ord, Canada was
made fo"" man to thrive in, and man is thriving
there. Such severities as exiirt only harden his
frame and stimulate his faculties. Remembering
the rise of other northern races, Canadians may
well look forward to a future of gieatness. If
) THE CANADIANS AND THEIR COUNTRY. I75
their hopefulness is ever tinged with impatience,
it IS only because the millions of men and
women do not ilock in faster to seize the health
and prosperity which Canada ofiers with open
hand.
S^^
"^"VM^P
LONDON t
VEAI.E, CHIFFERIEL & CO., LTD.,
31-37, CURSITOR STREET, CHANCERY LANE,
Y LANE-