Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 720
“Among these Indians . . . came the Frenchmen, looking for the Western Sea.” — page 82
From his youth, Varennes de La Vérendrye was trained to 1704 the woods and to war. He took part in the Deerfield Raid in New England, went over to the war in Europe and was left for dead on the field of Malplaquet. On his return to Canada he 1709 resumed and followed for over twenty years the life of the woods and the pursuit of the fur trade. In the country north of Lake Superior he heard tales from the Indians of a great Western Sea of salt water. This fired his imagination, and to this search he dedicated the rest of his life. In it were associated his four sons.
La Vérendrye sought royal help in vain. The best he could obtain was the grant of liberal privileges in trade still to secure in territory still to find. On the strength of these pledges, with such fortune as he commanded and such aid as friends and associates could supply, La Vérendrye and his sons carried on their expeditions that spread over more than a decade. From Lake Superior they first struck north and west, opening up the route that later became the water and portage way to the Red River. They set up forts, so called, along the route — stockades with log blockhouses inside them. Fort St. Pierre on Rainy Lake, Fort St. Charles on the Lake of the Woods, Fort Bourbon on the east side of Lake Winnipeg marked a chain of communication from the lakes to the plains. A profitable fur trade was thus turned from the Hudson Bay to the Lakes. Other forts reached farther out — Fort Dauphin on Lake Manitoba, Fort Rouge, probably near-by the present Winnipeg. One of the sons set up a fort at the mouth of the Saskatchewan, and ascended that river to the Forks — the union of the north and south branches. The forts were not all continuously occupied. Lack of means forbade it.
Seven years were spent in these labours, these hardships and dangers. The eldest of La Vérendrye’s sons was killed, with 1736 twenty companions, in a hideous massacre by the Sioux on an island in the Lake of the Woods. Nor had any success attended La Vérendrye’s search for the Western Sea. It retreated as he pursued it. Indeed the Indians now told stories of tribes to the south, on the Missouri, who knew the way to the sea. Thither L. Burpee, “The Search for the Western Sea,” 1908 turned La Vérendrye. With two sons and twenty men he left Fort la Reine in October, 1738, to enter on the first of the series of journeys over the plains from the Assiniboine to the basin of the Missouri and of the Yellowstone, that ended in the claim to the discovery of the Rocky Mountains (1743).
One cannot but admire the extraordinary intrepidity of these French explorers of the great plains. Here was a new country beside whose emptiness, desolation and danger, New France seemed friendly and familiar. Here were no longer the bark canoe and the river in the forest. Here in a treeless landscape huge shallow streams ran in a devastating flood, or dried to rivulets among the stones. The prairie blossomed green and gay with flowers, or burned, arid and waterless, beneath the sultry sun; in winter the fierce blizzard drove its snow across the frozen plains, and cut to the heart of life unsheltered. Here were strange Indians, their speech unintelligible. They rode on horses, wild horses that had bred and multiplied on the plains since the Spaniards brought them to America. In place of the canoe of Canada were long poles dragged behind the horses, with tent skins strapped across them. The Indians, as in the east, were in perpetual war of ambush and butchery that never ended — the Sioux and the Snakes (the Shoshones) a terror even to their fellows. Thus did the Indians of the plains, like those of the woods, pursue their senseless intertribal slaughter that spelt the doom of their race. What they did with limited means on their small scale, Central Europe, with the accumulated resources of centuries, now does on a large.
Among these Indians, utterly in their power but fearless with the pride of race, came the Frenchmen, looking for the Western Sea.
These journeyings of the Vérendryes were the task of years — start “Journals and Letters of L’Vérendrye,” L. Burpee, Ed. 1926 and return and reconnaissance alternating with forward progress. La Vérendrye himself shared only in the earliest advance. Breaking health compelled him to return to Fort la Reine in 1739. His two sons carried on the work. At length in 1743 they came in sight of the outskirts of the mountains, a range of snow-capped peaks, beyond which — just beyond which, they thought — must be the Western Sea. Most probably they had reached, so it was generally estimated later, the Big Horn Range of Wyoming, an eastern outskirt of the Rockies, and, if so, the sea was still eight hundred miles away. But in any case they could not reach it. They had no means to go on. The Indians, circling on their path of war, were bent elsewhere.
The Vérendryes found their way back across the plains. On their homeward journey they buried on a hillside beside the Missouri, after a fashion already established in New France, a leaden tablet stamped on one side with the arms of France and an inscription prepared ahead, with the names of the King and the Governor (De Beauharnois), dated MDCCXXXXI. On the other, roughly scratched, was the name “Chevalyer de L VR” and those of two companions. It is uncertain which son now bore this title. Beside the names is the date “le 30 de mars 1743.” The tablet was discovered in 1913 by school children of South Dakota in a hill across the river from St. Pierre.
On the second of July of 1743 the Vérendryes joined their father at Fort la Reine. La Vérendrye now returned to New France. Success and honour came to him at last. He was given a command of troops. He received the Cross of the Order of St. Louis. He planned a new expedition to the West and sent out supplies from Montreal to his forts. The help of the Crown for a new attempt to discover the Western Sea seemed assured. Vérendrye planned this time to ascend the Saskatchewan. Fate intervened. On the eve of his approaching departure for the West, La Vérendrye died at Montreal (1749).
The sons of La Vérendrye tried in vain to obtain leave to take his place. At the end of their resources and overwhelmed with debt, they wrote a pathetic letter of appeal. This plea was denied. Another military leader, Legardeur de St. Pierre, was given the place and the profit. Leaving Montreal in 1750, he took the search for the Western Sea very easily, never getting farther than Manitoba. Not finding it there, he let it go at that and from Fort la Reine he sent out a young officer, Jean Baptiste Boucher, Sieur de Niverville, who made his way on foot in winter across Lake Winnipeg and up the Saskatchewan to Fort Paskoyac. In the spring of 1751 Niverville sent men up the Saskatchewan who built a stockade, Fort Jonquière, at the foot of the Rockies. Niverville followed them but seemed to lack the courage to cross the mountains. The fame he thus refused was left for Alexander Mackenzie to gather.
The brothers La Vérendrye died in poverty and oblivion. Nor had ill fate finished with them even in death. It remained for “South Dakota Historical Collections,” Vol VII modern geographical investigation to cast doubt — the unkindest cut of all — on whether they had really reached the Rockies or gone no farther west than the Dakota hills.
Meantime the search for the Western Sea was lost from sight in the advancing shadow of the final war that was to end New France.
The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 had proved as unstable as all others during the long struggle between France and England from Louis XIV to Napoleon. War broke out again in 1744 and raged with its usual accompaniment of raid and massacre till 1748. It was signalized by the spectacular capture of the great fort of Louisbourg, Cape Breton, by ships, levies and leaders from New England. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle restored to France 1748 Cape Breton and its fortress but it brought only a calm before the final storm.
Meantime the growth of the British Colonies in America was deciding the issue of the war before it had begun. New France “Censuses of Canada, 1665-1871,” being Vol. IV of Statistics of Canada, 1876 had grown, indeed, but rather in outline than in intensity. At the time of the Treaty of Utrecht New France (Canada) had a population of 18,974, which had increased to 21,424 in 1720 when the Jesuit Father Charlevoix visited and described the colony. The total was 42,701 in 1729 and on the eve of the conquest (1754) it had reached 55,000. After that the statistics falter, as we have no actual count and many wild conjectures. During the F.-X. de Charlevoix, “La Nouvelle France,” 1744 same time the Acadians in the ceded portion of Nova Scotia had reached 8,500, of whom, as will be seen, 6,000 were presently expelled. The Acadians on the ‘mainland,’ later to be called New Brunswick, numbered 4,300 before the expulsion from Nova Scotia and gained by it later on about 500 refugees. Ile Saint 1755 Jean (Prince Edward Island) had 3,000 French in 1755, and likewise gained about 500 refugee Acadians. The new establishment of Ile Royale (Cape Breton) had about 3,000 people in and hard-by its Louisbourg fortress. Thus the whole French population in what we now call Canada, which was about 16,500 at the opening of the century, had increased to 73,800 by 1754.
CHARLES W. JEFFERYS, R.C.A., TORONTO, ONT., 1941
“. . . no wanton cruelty . . . nothing in their fate of the concentration camp . . .” — page 94
The growth of New France itself represented further new settlements on the pattern of the old, river farms that made up the seigneuries of the Island of Orleans and of both sides of the St. Lawrence, those beside Three Rivers and up the Richelieu as well as on the Yamaska and the St. Francis. Population increased on Montreal Island, on Jesus Island and in the adjacent Terrebonne as well as across the river at Longueuil, Boucherville, Varennes and Verchères. Quebec with a population of 8,967 remained the commercial entrepôt as well as the military centre. Montreal alone approached it. This had grown to be a walled town beside the river, occupying what is now the financial district, with the rivulet and marsh that we call Craig Street below it. A mile or so south-west was the Seminary of the Sulpicians, the Seigneurs of the Island, whose two fort towers still stand beside their College of Montreal. The Chemin de la Côte des Neiges wound past the Seminary through the woods and over the hill to St. Laurent and to the villages of the Rivière des Prairies. Hochelaga still lay buried under its new forest beside its brook, undisturbed. Outside of Quebec and Montreal only a few towns (Charlesbourg, Varennes, St. Vincent de Paul, etc.) reached a population of a thousand souls. Three Rivers had less. Other places were mere villages or seigneuries with nearby tenants.
The seigneuries themselves kept being subdivided under the C. W. Colby, “Some Canadian Types of the old Régime,” 1908 law of equal inheritance till many were little more than farms. Indeed one must be careful to distinguish the status of these seigneurs from that of the noblesse of France — the real thing. Authorities agree that no nobles of the highest rank came to settle in New France. Even of the 218 seigneurs at the close of the régime, probably only a score or so were of what would be Cavendish Debates on the Quebec Bill, 1839 called noblesse in France. François Masères, Chief Justice after the conquest, gives twelve as the maximum. But Masères was a Huguenot and ill-disposed. But we British-Canadians need not worry over this lack of noble blood among the French. There is far less among us. Noble blood does not emigrate to a wilderness. A castle is good enough.
Under the peculiar conditions of settlement in New France manufacture and urban growth were impossible. Resources went unused. Iron was successfully smelted in forges at Three Rivers after 1737, and salt pans were operated at Kamouraska in the war time of 1744 but vanished with the peace. Shipbuilding, desired and encouraged by France, could and should have flourished. F. X. Garneau, “Histoire du Canada,” 1913 It started and failed. In 1732 ten vessels, from 40 to 100 tons, were built at Quebec. But inexperience with Canadian timber balked the opportunity. Agriculture, fishing and the fur trade were thus the sole economic basis of the colony and provided its exports. From France came all wines and liquors, pottery, ironware, clothing, as apart from homespun, and, of course, all luxuries. There was no commercial wealth.
Once and once only a queer commercial “boom” lighted up the horizon of the little colony, with a glimpse of things as yet 1716 two centuries away. The plant ginseng was discovered in the Canadian woods, a plant that the Chinese were seeking eagerly as a magic medicine. It was bought in Quebec for two francs a pound and sold in Canton for twenty-five. The Canadians rifling their woods for ginseng dreamed dreams that their descendants were to share in 1928. The ginseng sent to China in one year brought home 500,000 francs. Then these first dreams went the same way as the last. The Chinese found the Canadian root over-dried. The boom ended.
Charlevoix, indeed was painfully impressed with what he calls the “very general poverty” of New France. Yet he admires the agreeable society and the purity of the language, preserved by its very isolation. At least the colony was spared the curse of negro slavery (with the slave trade) — now over-spreading the colonial world, turning the West Indies black, and calling down Files of Quebec Gazette, 1762-83 time’s vengeance on America for its iniquity. Slavery was not illegal in French Canada, neither before nor after the conquest. Slaves were bought and sold and advertised for sale under the British rule. But the French government considered the climate Ida Greaves, “The Negro in Canada,” McGill Publication, 1930 too cold for negro slavery and prohibited any regular importation.
Communication from first to last was almost entirely by water, irregular and uncertain. There was a postal service, by monopoly, after 1721. Carriage and freight was so little organized that prices in Montreal might be fifty per cent above those of Quebec. Money and currency were from first to last in confusion. From the beginning French coins were rare. Settlers and traders used beaver-skins and other substitutes as currency. Colonial coins (stamped by the Company of 1670) failed to circulate. Colonial (official) paper money never bred confidence and quickly lost value. ‘Card money’ with royal arms and a signature was about as bad. The Intendant’s “promise to pay” was worse than either. The curtain of the conquest fell on this hopeless confusion. After the conquest came ‘business,’ and the Scots.
There is to the sympathetic mind something pathetic in this commercial failure of New France, on which military failure was now to set the seal — the lofty ambitions of empire as opposed to the “very general poverty”; the spacious feudality of a seigneurie that dwindled to a bush farm beside a creek; the agreeable manners of a people with little other hospitality to offer. Above all one thinks of the situation of the plain people, asking nothing but peace and obscurity on their river farms. The environment of Maria Chapdelaine, that has touched the universal sympathy of to-day, was there two hundred years ago. We who have fallen heirs to all that was best in New France should value its memory at its real worth.
Yet New France was not to pass without a spirited effort. A new basis of French power in America, was sought in the attempt to make Louisiana and Cape Breton replace, as two ends of the chain of defence, the losses of the Treaty of Utrecht. Louisiana, claimed by La Salle in 1682, occupied with a fort by Le Moyne d’Iberville at Biloxi in 1699, begins in earnest with New Orleans, founded by his brother in 1718. Its fortunes link with those of Canada till the conquest.
Cape Breton Island, separated from the Nova Scotia peninsula by the mile-wide Gut of Canso, had hitherto been disregarded. 1720 Fishermen alone used its coasts. It was now rechristened as Ile Royale. The huge fortress of Louisbourg rose on its coast, and Acadian settlers were invited in. In the closing days of the French régime it had a population of 4,300, doubled perhaps in the fishing season.
Beside it was the St. Jean, our Prince Edward, another desert island of France. This beautiful island — one-sixth of the area of Holland, which supports nine million people — lay long empty. Its mild climate, its fertile soil, its beautiful woods and D. C. Harvey, “The French Régime in Prince Edward Island,” 1926 meadows, have been the subject of praise from Cartier to Judge Haliburton. Cartier said it needed nothing but the nightingales of France, little realizing that it had its own. Haliburton, but this was later, threw in along with fertility, the fairy gift of longevity for its people.
But history passed it by. The Comte de St. Pierre obtained in 1719 a charter of colonization, but it led to nothing. A few Acadian French came over to settle. With the war their little settlement was overwhelmed and most of them expelled. The habitation, called Fort La Joie, lost its nightingale name in exchange for that of the wife of George III (Charlottetown) 1798 and the island presently exchanged the name of St. John, for that of Prince Edward, later the father of Queen Victoria, at that time in command of the British forces in Canada.
It is easily understood, therefore, that the growth of New France, apart from its ambitious outline, was as nothing compared with the overwhelming comparative advance of the English colonies in population, wealth, trade and command of the sea. The wiser of the French could see the reason. “The English,” wrote Raudot, the Intendant of 1706, “do not leave their homes F. X. Garneau, “Histoire du Canada,” 1913 as most of our people do. They till their ground, establish manufactories, open mines, build ships, etc.; and have never yet looked upon the fur trade as anything but a subordinate part of their commerce.” The mere statistics of the population show the case overwhelmingly. As compared with the figures above, the English colonies (‘British’ after the union of 1707) increased between 1650 and 1700 from a population of 100,000 to 250,000, and by 1750 had grown to 1,370,000. Boston alone had as many inhabitants as Quebec and Montreal together; the best of the seigneuries would hardly compare with the great manor houses of the wealthy Dutch on the Hudson, each with its train of white servants and black slaves.
Nor had British power in America grown only with this expansion of the existing Atlantic provinces. A new province was 1748 deliberately created after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle with the foundation of Halifax. It was obviously impossible to retain and develop Nova Scotia as a British province unless it was populated by British settlers. Two means were adopted to secure this, the one as laudable as the other was deplorable. The foundation of Halifax carries as its reverse side the expulsion of the Acadian French.
