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"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