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Original Canadians -- And Newcomers to 1663
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• Aboriginal Society and Culture
• The Native Canadian Heritage
• Atlantic Adventurers -- and Fish and Fur
• Colonization, Cultural Change and Indian Conflict

Aboriginal Society and Culture

Canada's native peoples may have begun as immigrants from Asia in the far-distant past. But their presence in North America over thousands of years certainly justifies considering their society and culture to be native or aboriginal. Ancient artifacts recovered by archaeology, tradition, legends and customs as traced by anthropology, can reveal a good deal about the evolution of these peoples throughout eons of prehistory. Still, our own concern is history. And so, while by no means disregarding the findings of archaeology and anthropology for either the prehistoric or historic periods, we will look at the first Canadians at about the time they were to enter into written historical record, with the arrival of newcomers from Europe. We will observe them on the eve, so to speak, in a broad survey of the main native cultural groupings across the territories of a Canada-to-be; once again taking our course from east to west and north.

In Newfoundland then there were the Beothuks, a small group of coastal dwellers who largely lived by fishing and seal-hunting. Yet all too little is known about them; driven inland or brutally slaughtered by invading European fishermen from about 1500 on, and brought to extinction before the 1830s. It is said that the Beothuks' liberal use of red ochre, a pigment made from hematite (iron ore) with which they stained their bodies, led to the name "Red" Indian that would be applied across North America: a sad sort of bequest from a vanished native people. On the Atlantic mainland, however, the more numerous Micmacs endured. Behind the Micmacs were the Malecites in what is now New Brunswick; both tribes being Algonquians in language.

In fact, Algonquian-speakers formed one of the largest linguistic families or groupings throughout aboriginal Canada, reaching from the eastern woodlands north to the Subarctic and west into the Great Plains. In this truly extended family, the Blackfoot of the Alberta prairies might have nothing much in common with the Micmac in Nova Scotia other than language forms. Still, the Algonquian peoples in general were migratory hunters, fishers and gatherers, though some of them might practice a little corn-growing and garden-tending in more southern areas. Outside the Atlantic region, the main Algonquian-speaking tribes included the Montanguais-Naskopi, north of the St. Lawrence in the Shield country of eastern Quebec; the Algonquins (the tribe name lacks the "a") located around the Ottawa, the Nipissings beyond them; the Odawas (Ottawas) of Lake Huron, and the Ojibwas (Chippewas) above Lake Superior. Still further, there were the Algonquian-speaking Cree, a farspread tribal family in itself, comprising the Swampy Cree along the shores of James and Hudson Bay, the Woods Cree northwest through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the Plains Cree from Saskatchewan across Alberta territory.

Algonquian tribes, however, were largely just units of common ancestry, beliefs and practices without commanding authority. The real working unit within them was the band: a much smaller community of families which ranged over its own recognized territory throughout the year, guided by shamans, its spiritual leaders, as well as by its chief, frequently a noted hunter at its head. During the winter, the band broke up into member-families, to carry on the hunt for very survival in the snowy wilds, tracking deer, elk, moose and other game. In warmer seasons the band came back together; to fish at well-established river or lake locations, to gather berries, wild rice and other plants, and to continue hunting, whether for birds or beaver, rabbits or bear. The canoe -- especially the elegant, efficient birch-bark canoe made where the white-skinned paper birch grew -- the snare, the bow-and-arrow, and the flint knife, woven, portable basketry or light, bark-covered wigwams; all were prime and necessary features of Algonquian migratory culture, in which free movement across rock and forest was an inherent part of life itself.

Much more limited in range of territory, yet far more concentrated and strongly organized, was the next linguistic family, the Iroquoians. They mainly occupied the St. Lawrence Lowlands-Lower Great Lakes region in Canada, a narrow southern confine compared to the vast areas beyond it known to Algonquians and other language groups; but a moderate and considerably favoured region, as we have seen, which could support a sizeable native population in itself. The Iroquoians, moreover, had basically taken to corn-culture, growing beans and squash as well; so that before the historic period began, hunting and fishing had become only supplementary for this largely-settled people, dwelling in substantial villages that might hold well over a thousand inhabitants each. Surrounding garden lands cleared from the forests provided a food supply that could be stored each year; so that, barring natural calamities, the Iroquoian gardeners were released from the winter shortages that continually threatened the roaming Algonquian hunters. This greater security and stability thus enabled the village-dwellers to develop far more effective tribal authority. Furthermore, organization and authority promoted power -- which might lead on to war. In any event, the Iroquoians could and did conduct purposeful inter-tribal warfare, in wars largely beyond any clashes of small Algonquian bands.

With the rise of power and fighting prowess among Iroquoian tribes, their villages came to be defended by encircling log palisades, sometimes in three rings, surmounted by platforms for bowmen and stone hurlers. Inside the palisades, the inhabitants lived in large bark-covered longhouses, each holding ten to thirty related families, while apartment quarters and fireplaces were allotted to every family. Relationships came through the female line; a married man moved into his wife's longhouse; and senior family-matrons elected the tribal chiefs, who were men, but who could be removed if these elder headwomen so required. Women, furthermore, planted the crops and tended the gardens, which freed the men for war as well as for hunting or trading, yet also gave the women a central economic role to add to their social and political importance. In a real sense, Iroquoian society and culture showed aspects of both democracy and feminism. How "primitive" was the heritage of people such as these in Canada?

The Iroquoians dwelt on both sides of the Lower Great Lakes, however; particularly in what would become the American state of New York, as well as north above those lakes in "Canadian" territory of the future. There was thus much interflow between tribes across a non-existent border, and many contacts, including hostile ones, between the Iroquoians north or south of Lake Ontario. The most powerfully organized tribes indeed were centred to the south in the area of modern up-state New York. These were the Five Nations of the Iroquois (as Europeans would come to know them), who stretched west from the Hudson River through the Finger Lake country to the Niagara Peninsula: from east to west consisting of the Mohawks on the upper Hudson, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas toward Niagara -- who at times located villages on the "Canadian" side of Lake Ontario as well. The Five Nations Iroquois formed a league or confederacy by the 1500s, which kept them at peace with one another under a grand council of fifty chosen federal chiefs, and united them against their outside enemies. The Iroquois League thus emerged as a military force to be reckoned with; not only by neighbouring Indian tribes, but by Europeans, too, when they arrived. In fact, this Iroquois Confederacy became the one native power to be feared (and rightly so) by incoming Europeans for a century and more after 1600. Still, Iroquois strength did not just stem from skill in the swift raids of forest warfare. It also came from skill in diplomacy and debate, and from the high, determined morale of a well-knit people who decided their own affairs.

North of the Five Nations, the main Iroquoian peoples dwelling in Canada were the St. Lawrence Iroquois, whose villages were there at the sites of Quebec and Montreal when the first French ship came up the river in 1535; the numerous Attiwandirons, who spread westward from the head of Lake Ontario towards the Detroit River; and the Hurons, centred on the fertile Georgian Bay shores south of Lake Huron but extending their sway down to the harbour of Toronto on Lake Ontario. The Hurons in many respects were the strongest rivals to the Five Nations Iroquois. They were flourishing and populous in their large villages set in parklike cornfields. They traded actively with Algonquian tribes east, west and north, exchanging garden products for skins, furs, fish and game. They also had their own Huron Confederacy of five tribes, formed in part as a defensive alliance against the weight of the Iroquois. But the Hurons' Confederacy would prove less well co-ordinated -- and perhaps the Europeans' early presence in their midst lessened their own resolve, as well as bringing white men's diseases that gravely weakened them. At any rate, the Hurons were to fail and disappear. But that is a story for the telling later.

Moving further west in Canada beyond the Iroquoians, we have already noted the Algonquian tribes that lived along the Upper Great Lakes or through the Precambrian Shield country on into Manitoba. But the Great Plains region which here opened out contained another distinct type of aboriginal society, even though there was a good deal of linguistic variety within it. It included Algonquian-speakers, of course, like the afore-mentioned Plains Cree or Blackfoot; but it also held the Assiniboine and the Sioux (or Dakota) of southern prairie areas, or the Stoneys of the foothills, all of whom belonged in language to a wider Siouan family that reached well down into the American Plains West. And there were the Sarcee in country around a future Calgary. They spoke the Athapascan tongue generally associated with vast areas northward into the Subarctic; but they evidently had moved south in prehistoric time and adopted Plains culture.

That culture was essentially dependent on the buffalo: the North American bison, whose great herds had roamed mid-continental grasslands since time immemorial. The buffalo amply fed the Plains Indians; provided them with warm clothing, and thick robes against sub-zero winters; furnished skins to cover their tepees, bones for their tools and sinews for their bowstrings and snares. In brief the buffalo supplied a whole vigorous Indian economy of the Plains. Yet the tribes who lived by it had had to hunt the buffalo on foot; since the horse, once native to America, had died out there thousands of years before; not to be re-introduced until the Spaniards brought it with them from Europe in the 1500s. Only the dog carried some share of family baggage, as the Plains tribes roamed across the prairies following the buffalo herds. Mass kills were made effectively at "buffalo jumps". Here a herd was stampeded over a steep prairie decline, funnelled to it by pre-placed stones and brushwood, and by Indians shouting from either flank, until the broken animals left lying at the bottom could readily be slain. But hunting down single beasts by foot, crawling in to kill with bow and spear, was a process of endless craft and patience -- until the horse arrived, to revolutionize Plains Indian life.

Horses that strayed from Spanish-held lands in Mexico in time led to wild herds that flourished freely on the grassy prairies of mid-America; and the native peoples of that world increasingly learned to catch, tame and ride them. Hence by 1730 or so, tribes in the Canadian Plains West were tending and riding their own stock of horses. The results appeared in vastly increased mobility and warlike power for Plains Indian society. Its members still lived by the buffalo; but they had far more ability to get it, far more security of food supply. Consequently, the native tribes of the region built up a distinctive horse-based culture and society, confident in peace or war, with their own strong sense of freedom on the open land, and led by chiefs approved by councils of their elders.

In the high Cordilleran ranges that climbed west of the plains, native life was understandably focused within mountain valleys, or on the upland Central plateau of British Columbia. Here in areas between the Rockies and the Pacific slopes, the Plateau language family contained the Kootenay Indians to the east, and the Interior Salish peoples to the west, while Athapascan-speaking tribes ranged on northward. Yet these were fairly small groupings in an often difficult terrain: non-agricultural and semi-nomadic hunters who also depended considerably on salmon taken from the mountain rivers, especially on towards the coast. Emphatically more numerous, organized and influential, however, were the aboriginal peoples further west, on Canada's Pacific Coast.

Given its mild climate and plentiful resources in both land and sea, it is none too surprising that the Pacific shore would produce the most thickly populated and complexly developed societies to emerge in native Canada. Their richness even appeared in language diversity, for here there was no one (or even a dominant) linguistic family. In the north, edging Yukon and Alaska, were Linglit speakers; the Haida tongue was found in the Queen Charlottes, the little-related Tsimshian language group on the adjacent mainland. Further south, there were the Nooka and Nitinat on Vancouver Island, along with other mainland elements of their own linguistic Wakeshan group. Below these again, on island and main, were Coast Salishan speakers. Altogether it added up to nineteen mutually unintelligible native languages spoken on the British Columbian coasts alone.

These early linguistic differences might scarcely seem to matter in the history of Canada -- yet for a country later to be split by language, they might suggest some enduring problems of heritage. More significant for us now, however, are the major tribes within this West Coast language diversity: since they lived much the same kind of lives in their Far West setting, although with some specialties of their own. The Haida of the Charlottes, the Tsimshians on the Skeena, the Bella Coola below them, or the Kwakiut, Comax, and other peoples down to the lower shores of Vancouver Island, all present a similar story of living in great wooden village-houses set beside a generous sea. Salmon, fresh or dried, taken in the annual salmon runs, formed a staple of diet; but shell fish and other fish were available in plenty. Seals, porpoises -- and whales harpooned by Haida or Nootka -- added to that plenty, as did berries and edible plants on land, or land animals from deer and elk to bear and mountain goat: all to provide for a securely stable and well-developed West Coast native society. The great trees of the rain forest, moreover, furnished them with excellent timber, which they split into long planks (using just stone tools with remarkable skill) to erect their big communal dwellings. The massive tree trunks that made the supporting house-posts were carved with the same skill to display clan crests or totems, from which developed the lofty totem pole, still more elaborately carved and painted with the symbols of the whole genealogical past of tribal clans.

The wood-working abilities of West Coast craftsmen were no less displayed in bowls, dishes or painted chests; but especially in their dugout canoes. These long, sea-going craft (from which whales were taken in open waters) were shaped from thick cedar trunks, yet were so carefully hewed and chiselled out that the heavy mass of wood was pared down to sturdy yet slim and graceful vessels that often carried sail. But if wood-working, or sand stone carving, was man's work, so weaving was the woman's: producing cloaks and blankets finely crafted from cedar bark and mountain-goat wool, large rush mats to line the houses for warmth, broad-trimmed bark hats closely woven to keep out the frequent rains, baskets of spruce-root, fish nets of spun twine, and still more. In view of this richly-productive society, it is not too surprising that it came to show class differentiation. While clan and kinfolk bonds joined the dwellers within each village house, the ownership of real property -- of house sites, berry patches, fishing and sealing places -- led to some elements amassing wealth. There hence were upper and lower levels within this tribal society, though each village itself stayed relatively independent. And at the very bottom level were slaves, captured in war or purchased, who did the most menial tasks. Furthermore, in a social confirmation of rank and power, wealthy, honoured persons held potlachs, great ceremonial feasts at which they liberally distributed gifts in testimony to their standing. Solid, self-assured and prosperous, the peoples of the Pacific Coast lived with potlaches and high ceremonies that did indeed display how well endowed they were.

Turning north and inland, we enter the harder, far less endowed native worlds of the Subarctic and Arctic. While Algonquians occupied the eastern Subarctic areas across the Shield, chiefly Montagnais and Cree, the western Subarctic was the province of another major language family, the Athapascan, whose members widely called themselves the Dene (de-nay), in that tongue meaning "the people". These western Athapascans covered an immense territory; but lived in small, scattered bands of hunters ranging through the northern forests. Like the Algonquians, whose life was not dissimilar, the band was much more the daily reality than the tribe. Yet there still were tribal differences and diversity, because the Subarctic expanses varied widely in themselves, from the mountain uplands in the Yukon to valley plains along the Mackenzie river system, or to the tundra country eastward on to Hudson Bay. Thus the Tutchone people in the Yukon, inhabiting the northern extension of British Columbia's Central Plateau, often depended on salmon fishing as well as on seeking moose or caribou. The Sekani hunted moose and mountain sheep on the Rockies' slopes, but were excluded by their enemies from the buffalo on the plains below. The Slaveys lived by lakes and streams from the Hay River and Slave River north to Great Bear Lake, taking fish, berries, small game and moose, in a culture of little winter groups and bigger summer bands, again considerably like the Algonquians. And the Chipewayans, most numerous of the northern Athapascan peoples, held the Subarctic forest fringe east to the Coppermine River and the tundra Barren Lands beyond, which they ranged in pursuit of caribou. For these Chipewayans, life was regularly built about following the annual migration of great caribou herds, from their winter shelter in the forest to summer pastures on the open barrens.

The final aboriginal Canadians to be surveyed are the Inuit, the people of the Arctic. Never large in numbers -- not surprising, considering the nature of their territory -- their very survival expresses their own high resourcefulness and adaptability. They formed but a single language group, one related to Siberian peoples but not to any Amerindian ones; which suggests that the Inuit migrated from Asia later than the Indians (who moved on southward) and instead adjusted to the Arctic as their own permanent home. There the earlier Dorset Inuit culture emerged around 500 B.C., and it produced the soapstone lamp, the igloo and the dog sled. Yet the later Thule culture, that came eastward from Alaska around 1000 A.D., brought more advanced sea-hunting techniques, including whale-catching. By about 1400, accordingly a Thule Inuit population had spread -- if thinly -- all around Arctic Canada north of the treeline, and from Alaska to the shores of Greenland.

These, then, were the Inuit by the opening of the historic age in Canada. They existed in tribal groups: the Ungava, Baffin Island, Netsilik (Seal), Caribou and the Mackenzie Inuit among them. For such nomadic hunter-gatherers, however, the band once more was the operative unit, consisting of a few interrelated families, though coming together in larger regional bands in winter, as at sealing camps. The leader of a family band was usually its oldest active huntsman; but despite the seeming looseness of authority, the family ties were strongly binding, while close co-operation and sharing among band households were hallmarks of the Inuits' society. In summer they lived in sealskin tents, as they hunted caribou, fished or gathered berries. In winter they built their igloos -- a brilliant instance of dome-construction with materials readily at hand -- and they used another first-rate technological invention, the skin kayak, to take seals and other sea-mammals amid the icefields themselves.

The keen ingenuity of the Inuit appeared in the use of their few (if ample) resources. Bones substituted for wood in construction, though driftwood might sometimes be employed. Tools and weapons were edged with native copper: the Inuit found metal, where any was available, far better than stone. Seal oil fed their lamps. Sealskin, left haired, made winter boots; hairless, waterproof summer ones; while caribou fur supplied warm winter parkas. Insulated also against cold by energy-rich animal foods -- particularly seal meat or whale blubber -- the Inuit in a wide variety of ways successfully responded to the fiercest challenges of the Canadian land. Yet they still had time for creative art, for delicately rendered carvings in whalebone or walrus ivory, or else for story-telling, singing, drumming, or string games of dexterity and memory. This tough, cheerful people of the Arctic really built up the most distinctive native heritage in Canada.

The Native Canadian Heritage

The legacies from all the original Canadian peoples certainly did not end when Europeans arrived. For one thing, it was the skills and lore of native inhabitants which virtually enabled the new arrivals to survive a daunting wild environment. The first Canadian provided them with knowledge of the canoe, that invaluable means of forest travel, the toboggan and the snowshoe for winter, the dog team for the Subarctic and Arctic. They also instructed early European venturers inland (the clumsiest, most ignorant of idiots in native eyes) how to live off the country and follow its paths -- through what was anything but a trackless wilderness to Indians. In fact, they taught the newcomers basic geography. The old Euro-centric idea of "discovery", of white explorers from Europe finding an unknown America, ignores the essential truth that the native peoples already knew where things were, and thus led their wide-eyed visitors (perhaps with either tolerance or some disdain) into expanses which the transatlantic tourists would later blatantly claim for themselves. But there were a host of further native bequests: from the Iroquoians' "Indian" corn and tobacco to the pemmican of Plains tribes: a nutritious mixture of dried buffalo meat pounded with berries and fat which became a basic staple for the western fur traders. Or there was Far West smoked salmon, eastern Algonquian maple syrup and wild rice. Furthermore, the wearing of moccasins or parkas on to today, the playing of lacrosse derived from St. Lawrence Valley tribes, or running kayaks down turbulent streams, demonstrate just a few other varied inheritances from the native past. But more noteworthy still, are the artistic endowments that have stemmed from the first Canadians.

Those that came from the Inuit have already been touched on; although not enough to express the continued widening and deepening of their arts right to the present; wherein carving in soapstone and other materials, work in printmaking and other graphic forms, have now brought them world regard. Similarly, the artistry of the West Coast tribes has been mentioned; yet not enough to indicate that it, too, would win world recognition -- in wood-carving from totem poles and masks to mythic statues; in works of argillite, a soft black slate, or bold, bright symbolic paintings done on wood. Moreover, Plains art set out its own symbolic paintings on the hides of prairie tepees, while the Iroquoians bequeathed a long tradition of handsomely decorated pottery and superbly carved tobacco pipes: as tobacco held a ritual significance when being smoked at native ceremonial or sacred occasions. And the Algonquians not only produced intricate embroidered designs in porcupine quills (or later, beads) to adorn their basket work or deerskin garments; but in modern years have also created outstanding paintings, by artists who combine contemporary techniques with images of their age-old legends and spiritual beliefs.

In truth, we must not omit the spiritual reach of native heritage in general. Christianity would enter and spread with the Europeans, but it never eliminated the aboriginal patterns of religious belief, some of which would revive and renew their inheritance among native Canadians within more recent time. It is difficult to generalize fairly. Still, it may broadly be said that aboriginal faiths held powerful creation myths, believed in supernatural beings to be honoured and supplicated with rituals and ceremonies, and had a sense of afterlife in a realm of the dead, which human agents might contact to re-unite with loved ones. Moreover spirits or souls resided in all living things, notably animals; and there was a senior great spirit-force of power and mystery, whether Orenda to Iroquoians, Kitchi Manitou to Algonquians, or Waken Tanka to Plains tribes. To reach and deal with spiritual forces, shamans (however named) were crucially present throughout native society from Algonquian to Inuit, West Coast to Iroquoian. They were medical healers as well as omen-diviners, teachers as well as masters of ritual. But such necessary oversimplifications as these can by no means cover the many manifestations of native spirituality: from the Shaking Tent prophecies among Algonquians, the Huron Feast of the Dead, the Iroquois False Face Society that effected healing, wearing masks, to the Guardian-Spirit Quests of West Coast tribes, great Sun Dance ceremonies on the Plains, or rituals for the sea-goddess Sedna among the Inuit. Religious culture was an integral part of native identity. Both thrived or weakened together.

Still, identity also needs numbers to keep it thriving. It is estimated that there were probably over one million native inhabitants across Canada when Europeans first arrived. And just some thousands of the latter entered, for long years thereafter. Yet by 1867, when a Canadian federal nation-state came into being, there were around three and a half million people in Canada -- of whom merely some 125,000 were of native blood. The aboriginal groups had not only failed to keep pace relative to total growth, but had most absolutely declined. What had happened? There were many reasons: repeated losses due to war, pillage and famine; the dispersal of whole tribes by victors, the European occupation of vital lands or resources, and a grim failure of confidence within native cultures that could not easily adjust to the strangeness -- and power -- of European ways. Moreover, there was alcohol, unknown to Indian or Inuit, yet peddled to them by the newcomers; a seeming escape from pain and loss which proved numbing, degrading and terribly destructive in its long-term results. Far more disastrous in their effects, however, were the great sicknesses that also came with the intruders from overseas.

In days before all knowledge of germs or viruses, the entering Europeans were unaware that they might be carrying diseases with which they had lived for centuries to native Americans who lacked any immunity to them. Thus in North America, smallpox, dysentery, diphtheria, influenza, could destroy in many thousands, and even measles became a wholesale killer. The fact is, that while the Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa had continually experienced but survived the recurrent epidemics that had moved across it along with people and trade, the New World of the Americas had been insulated by the surrounding oceans ever since the ancient land-bridge to Asia had sunk beneath the waves. That is, until venturers from Europe learned to cross the Atlantic -- and over time spread infections that could reduce populous aboriginal societies to near-demoralized remnants. It was not at all foreseen or understood. Yet in Canada the sweep of deaths due to disease, whether among seventeenth-century Hurons or nineteenth-century Inuit, added a terrible postscript to native heritage: one that appeared in the drastic decline of aboriginal populations down to 1867; and even till the 1920s, when at last it stopped, thanks largely to the growing effects of both natural and medical immunization.

Accordingly, disease amounts to a major factor in the obvious failure of the original Canadians to hold their territories across the continent against the transatlantic newcomers. But it is no less true that they faced great forces ranged against them in a Europe already closely populated and complexly developed, even when Christopher Columbus sailing from Spain made his first landings in America's West Indies during the 1490s. It neither demeans the native cultures as "savagery", nor overpraises "civilization" in western European countries of that day, to note that the latter proved unquestionably stronger (not better) in the long run: through being far more widely organized in powerful political states, through having achieved much fuller economic development, and through having built a cultural body of written knowledge, science and technical abilities quite unknown to native Canadians by the time of European entry. More specifically, too, the Europeans had produced a potent metal technology, whether for utensils, tools and implements, guns and cannon, or even iron nails; while native Americans had not discovered how to smelt metals from ores, though they might use natural outcrops of copper or gold. Hence they had remained essentially in the stone age.

Emphatically, however, "stone age" again does not imply merely primitive existence in pre-Columbian America. Not when Inca civilization in Peru could engineer huge works in stone composed of perfectly fitted giant blocks, or craft delicate designs in gold jewellery; not when the Mayas of Central America erected splendidly carved and painted temple-pyramids, and excelled in astronomy and mathematics. And not when the Aztecs of Mexico constructed a rich, urban-centred empire, until it was overthrown by Spanish conquerors. Moreover, the evidence is there that native societies in Canada were still growing along their own cultural paths -- certainly including the rising Iroquois and Huron confederacies -- until the intervention of European power changed those paths forever. But that in no way meant that the legacies of the first Canadians would lose their significance, down to the present or into the future. For there was a final, fundamental bequest they made: a keen awareness of environmental heritage, a ruling concern for the land and its offerings, which all later Canadians should take earnestly to heart.

The first Canadian peoples lived in keeping with nature and its balances, respecting the life-giving plants and animals it supplied; not treating it as something alien to be mastered and exploited as incoming Europeans would all too often do. The original inhabitants were not nobly super-human. It is little value to move from old stereotypes of heroic settlers and vicious redmen to new ones of vicious pioneers and heroic natives. Plainly the facts, like human beings, are mixed. Besides, the aboriginal tribes did alter pristine nature, whether by clearing cornfields or burning off prairies to run buffalo. They might well have wrought more changes, if they had had the technological capacities. Nonetheless, it remains true that through religious beliefs as well as cultural patterns, the original Canadians deeply revered the natural world and its creatures, and sought by deed and faith to sustain them. Their reasons of course were practical as well as spiritual. But all the same, their heritage first taught the conserving of Canada's environment -- a teaching far more urgent today, and one which we have only started to take into due account. So much, then, has stemmed from the country's native peoples. But now it is time to look at those who came after, bringing vast new consequences to the whole environment: the Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the wake of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to America in 1492.

Atlantic Adventurers -- and Fish and Fur

And yet, several centuries before Columbus first came upon America, the Norsemen had already reached Labrador and Newfoundland. Norsemen, viking sea-rovers and traders from Scandinavia, had been the leading mariners of early medieval Europe. Navigating without a compass, they sailed and rowed their open longships to Ireland and Normandy, or down into the Mediterranean. In northern waters, they voyaged west to colonize Iceland. From there in 985-6 A.D., Eric the Red pushed on further to plant settlements in Greenland. Leif Ericsson (i.e. Eric's son) then acted on a report of lands seen southward by a viking trader blown off course. In 1001 Leif sailed from Greenland past Baffin Island and down the Labrador coast to land at wooded "Vinland", an uncertain place, but probably in Newfoundland. At any rate, he wintered here, gathering grapes (berries?), vines used as fasteners in ship-building, and collecting timber needed in a treeless Greenland. Later Norse expeditions then tried to colonize Vinland; but armed clashes with native "skraelings" ("barbarians", probably Inuit, since they used skin boats) discouraged these attempts. While Norsemen still returned to trade for wood with the skraelings, they no longer tried to settle -- although their trading contacts with natives would evidently spread from Greenland west to Ellesmere and Baffin Islands, perhaps into Hudson Bay, as well.

Vinland itself disappeared into the mists of time, whether it lay in Newfoundland or around Cape Cod, or even further south, as some have held. What we do know of it comes from the great Norse sagas, poetic tales recited (and freely ornamented) for folk-audiences long before being written down. But that the Norsemen did enter the New World, and specifically came to Newfoundland, has been strikingly confirmed by archaeology: through the discovery in the 1960s of an actual Norse base of the mid-eleventh century at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island. This one generally-accepted Norse site in America -- now declared a United Nations world historic site -- has been carefully excavated to reveal eight sod-walled buildings and workshops. These in turn have disclosed traces of iron-working and carpentry along with a man's bronze cloak pin and a woman's spindle for making yarn. It all suggests that this oldest known European settlement in North America was an actual colonial community, although it was evidently not occupied for long.

But the Norse presence in America did not lead to lasting European penetration. It was too soon. Medieval Europe did not yet have the concern or capacity for transatlantic expansion. Moreover, Norse settlements in Greenland withered in the later Middle Ages, as a colder cycle of climate (sometimes termed the Little Ice Age) began to fill northern seaways with dangerous ice floes, and to chill the Greenland pastures themselves. Although the folk memory of lands across the ocean remained in Norse heritage, the mass of Europe paid no heed. It took other times, people and interests, to turn attention westward centuries later, when Christopher Columbus set sail.

By then, by the 1490s, the peoples of Western Europe had entered the vigorous new era of the Renaissance: an era of emerging nation-states and their powerful rulers, of burgeoning cities and commercial enterprise; of bold advances in learning, and eager, assertive desires to reach out and to know. Furthermore, there had been major improvements in ship design and navigation which brought sturdier, sea-keeping ships able to make some headway against a wind, the compass and other instruments, and ever improving charts. Then the development of gunpowder led both to shipboard cannon and individual fire-arms. Finally, there was the search for new trade routes by sea to India and China, since Turkish military power had been thrown across the old land routes from Asia into Europe. The interests and capacities, the times and the people, had all appeared -- to open Europe's Age of Discovery.

The Portuguese, sailing down past Africa, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope by 1488, as they sought a southeast passage to India. In 1492, Columbus in the royal service of Spain instead sailed westward into the Atlantic to reach the Orient. No one of any learning then doubted that the world was round. The real issue was, how large was it; and the critics of Christopher Columbus were not so wrong in holding that it was far bigger than he thought, making such a voyage impracticable. But through one of history's grandest human errors, Columbus ran into the unknown Americas halfway around -- although till his death he went on believing that he had reached Asia. In any event, this new and unexpected American land-mass, which would bring Spain a great overseas empire, inspired further attempts to get beyond it, and find a northwest passage onward to the spices, silks and riches of the East. Thus came the voyage of John Cabot in 1497, commanding an English ship from Bristol, authorized, if not financed, by King Henry VII of England.

Cabot, or Giovanni Caboto, was of Italian birth as was that other master navigator, Cristofero Colombo. But he sought to discover a shorter northern route to Asia by direct voyage west from England, not by Columbus's long swing south through warmer waters. Cabot, too, did not get to Asia. Instead he made the first recorded landfall on the northeastern coasts of North America since the days of the Norsemen. His actual landing-point remains debatable, whether on Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island or Labrador. Yet there is no question that he sailed along the shorelines, and on his return was awarded 10£ by a lavish King Henry for finding "the new Isle". Indeed, he gave England claim to this New Found Land. No less significant, in his voyaging Cabot also came upon the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, to carry back word that the sea here was so thick with fish they could even be taken up in baskets. And thus, he proclaimed to Europe the enormous fishing wealth available across the North Atlantic.

Nevertheless, it well may be that Cabot's ship was not the first European craft to discover the Newfoundland fisheries. Fish, mainly salted for keeping, had long been a basic foodstuff in western Europe, notably the big, fleshy cod. With mounting European population, especially in fast-growing towns, the demand for cod had steadily risen; so that vessels from Atlantic ports not only sailed north to fishing grounds off Iceland, but probed west as well in search of new grounds to harvest. And thanks to better ships and seamanship, they now might venture right to the Newfoundland banks. At any rate, it appears that seamen from Bristol, a leading West of England port, were already in those waters during the 1480s, while the Portuguese were also thrusting expeditions westward. Moreover, Cabot's own voyage was funded by Bristol merchants looking to Atlantic trade. But through his journey, what had been but a rumoured fishing area (why tell competitors?) now was officially reported across Europe as being so full of cod "they sumtymes stayed our shippes". And so, from about 1500, fishermen began crossing the open ocean to Newfoundland in ever-growing numbers; not just from England or Portugal, but from the Atlantic ports of France and Spain as well.

Over the next half century and more, visiting fishing ships came increasingly to know harbours on Newfoundland coasts, as they sought shelter for repairs, fresh water, or deer and other game to vary scant shipboard diet. Moreover, English ships in particular set up regular fishing stations on shore, because they practiced the "dry" fishery. The "green" fishery took back quickly gutted, heavily salted cod to Europe; and salt was readily available in warm southern European countries, where it was made by evaporating large pools of seawater on sunny beaches. But in cooler, damper lands like England, salt had to be imported and was expensive. Dry fishing, however -- in which split cod, only lightly salted, was dried on wooden racks or "flakes" on shore -- was not only salt-saving, but produced a good and lasting product, even for tropical markets, and was far more economical to transport, lacking any bulky water content. In fact, dry cod was one of the first, efficient, dehydrated mass-foods. Hence permanent English fishing stations came to flourish, concentrating strongly in the eastern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland -- to be called the English Shore -- while French stations scattered more thinly westward along the coasts, and Portuguese or Spanish, summer visitors in the green fishery, scarcely established themselves on land.

The results grew plain well before the sixteenth century had ended. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert came to the roomy, deeply sheltered harbour of St. Johns -- the chief Avalon place of arrival and departure for fishing ships from Europe -- and there with full ceremony proclaimed England's title in Newfoundland, before some thirty-six vessels in port, French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English. Five years later, England's defeat of the mighty Spanish Armada heralded a long decline in the sea power of Spain, which by then had taken over Portugal. By then, too, the French who had become increasingly active in both the dry and green fisheries had got to mainland shores beyond Newfoundland -- to shape a whole new age in Canada's history. But that really went back to the 1530s, and the voyages of Jacques Cartier, sea-captain from Saint-Malo on the Atlantic coast of France, who had been commissioned by King Francis I to seek riches of gold and silver such as Spain had found in America, and to unlock the long hoped-for Northwest Passage to Asia.

In 1534, Cartier had reached the Labrador approaches to the Strait of Belle Isle, an area already known to French fishermen. He sailed on through the Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coursing around its shorelines. And in the Gulf, at the Bay of Chaleur, something highly significant took place. Micmac Indians arrived on shore from a fleet of canoes, and with much shouting, held up furs on sticks, beckoning to Cartier's ship. He sent two men ashore, who in return for furs, offered knives, ironware and a "red cap" for the chief. This certainly was not the first fur-trading encounter. No doubt, the Indians had previously bartered with visiting fishermen, bringing them not just deer and game in exchange for white men's hatchets, kettles and trinkets, but glossy furs and beaver robes, which could be sold in Europe more profitably than fish. Nevertheless, this exchange recorded here by Cartier did mark a developing fur trade between Indians and Europeans. It was to mould Canadian history and heritage through ages yet to come. For beyond fish, which had brought the European newcomers across to Canada's coasts, fur would lead them right on into the continent.

On the Gaspé Peninsula, Cartier erected a tall, wooden cross, claiming the lands for France; but he did not enter the St. Lawrence River, that broad waterway thrusting into North America. He returned in 1535, however, with three ships, and sailed up the great river to the Iroquoian village of Stadacona, where the city of Quebec now stands. The Indians who welcomed him there referred to their village as "Kanata", an Iroquoian word meaning village or settlement. But Cartier took the term to apply to the surrounding country as well, calling that "Canada", and the St. Lawrence that flowed through it the "River of Canada". From Stadacona, the French then sailed on up-river to Hochelaga at the site of present Montreal, another large St. Lawrence Iroquoian village set in cornfields. But here tumbling rapids barred their ships from going further; and Cartier climbed Mont Royal, to see the river stretching on westward into distant forests.

After a harsh winter back at Stadacona -- terrible to the unprepared French -- Jacques Cartier returned to Saint-Malo in mid-1536: without real gold or silver, yet with knowledge of a mighty waterway that could be the key to French empire in America. Accordingly, it was decided to plant a colony in this new land of Canada, from which explorations to find gold and a Northwest Passage could continue. Various delays still held the project back till 1541, when 150 colonists came out with Cartier, to settle at Cape Rouge near Stadacona. Another killing winter followed. Cartier left with the survivors before the Sieur de Roberval, the official leader of the colony, finally arrived with still more settlers -- many of whom would also die at Cape Rouge, in disastrous French ignorance of the North American land environment. Consequently, Roberval and the remaining colonists would go back to France. There were no gold mines to support a colony, no passage to the Orient. And the rise of Catholic-Protestant civil warfare within France itself soon left little margin for more colonial adventures from the 1640s.

All the same, fishing and fur-trading persisted. By mid-century, the Basques, both Spanish and French, had built up whaling at points along the Labrador coasts. Whalers, fishermen, and increasingly venturers who came to trade, spread into the Lower St. Lawrence, where Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay particularly became a place of summer meetings between the trading ships and the Indians who gathered there with furs. The latter were mainly Montagnais, Algonquians from the St. Lawrence north shore; though in time other tribes up-river also sent pelts down to Tadoussac. Moreover, since beaver fur made excellent rain-resistant felt hats, and hats such as these grew widely fashionable in Europe during the later sixteenth century, the demand for plentiful Canadian beaver rose in consequence -- while the beaver hat, broad-brimmed or narrow, three-cornered hat or top hat, would reign through varying European styles for centuries ahead in female as well as male versions.

At the other end, the Indian demands for European goods were no less widening: for iron axes and edge-tools much better than stone, or iron traps to replace root-and-sinew snares; for fireproof metal kettles instead of woven baskets or breakable pottery; for cloth and blankets instead of animal skins, or glass beads instead of shell or quill-work. Furthermore, the Indians in direct contact with Europeans might pass some trade goods on to tribes behind them, for more furs to barter with the white man. These "middlemen" native groups could thus become important agents in the fur commerce, spreading awareness and desires for trade to inland peoples, even before they had actually seen a European. And so the fur trade developed as a crucial, mutual link between native societies and the newcomers. But in the process it would disrupt the former and emplace the latter firmly in Canadian lands.

Colonization, Cultural Change and Indian Conflict

As yet, however, in the years before 1600, no permanent European settlements had been made within the future bounds of Canada. True, in Newfoundland, especially along the English Avalon shore, there were fixed dry-fishing stations on land. But these were occupied by visiting transatlantic fishermen only over the summer months; although, in time, some "winterers" did stay on, to look after the docks, sheds and drying racks, and ready them for another season. Still, this was hardly effective colonization. Then around 1600, things rapidly began to change.

France recovered from its destructive period of religious wars under a strong, uniting monarch, Henry IV. Expansive business interests in the vigorous French nation-state now sought anew to build colonial holdings in America: through gaining royal charters that granted monopoly rights to trade, lands and government in French claims overseas. In the prosperous, sea-minded England of Queen Elizabeth, and then of James I, enterprising merchant-capitalists took up similar designs. The upshot was a mounting series of new colonial ventures; for example, the chartered colony of some forty English settlers established in 1610 by John Guy, Bristol merchant, on Conception Bay in Newfoundland, or the successful founding of English Virginia by the well-heeled London Company at Jamestown in 1607. And as well, there was the very substantial group formed by the Sieur de Monts in France in 1604, which held a chartered monopoly of trade and settlement for "Acadia, Canada and other places in New France" -- Acadia being the name which the French by now had given to the Atlantic mainland region beyond Newfoundland. DeMonts set out to plant a colonial base within this broad monopoly grant. With him went Samuel de Champlain, royal geographer to Henry IV, an experienced soldier and seaman who had already visited the St. Lawrence in 1603. New France was about to grow.

The first efforts came in Acadia, where in 1605 De Monts established the little settlement of Port Royal on the Nova Scotian shores of the Bay of Fundy. Wooden houses that held forty people were built, enclosing a small courtyard. Fields and gardens were cleared; Indians came to trade furs. Yet Port Royal's success was definitely qualified, for its returns did not meet the costs: above all, of unlawful trading by monopoly-breakers ("interlopers"), who drained off furs along an open seacoast impossible to control. Thus de Monts, advised by Champlain, resolved to move his enterprise to the St. Lawrence; a region much further from the ocean, but where the flow of furs down one great continental river would be both larger and easier to tend. Port Royal was abandoned, though later re-occupied and recurrently fought over. But the main thrust of French colonial ventures henceforth lay with the St. Lawrence -- and with Champlain, who went there in 1608, as the company's "lieutenant in the country of New France".

He moved well above Tadoussac to establish a new trading base at Quebec, where the Iroquoian village of Stadacona had stood. Here furs could be intercepted before they got down to Tadoussac; narrows in the river would make checking interlopers more feasible; and the rugged heights of Cape Diamond above the stream could back and secure a post set by the water's edge. And so Champlain built a habitation at Quebec in 1608 for himself and twenty-seven companions, again composed of wooden houses linked in a courtyard, but with a surrounding palisade, a moat, drawbridge and small cannon: a little fortress for any troubles ahead.

Stadacona and the other St. Lawrence Iroquoian villages once known to Cartier had gone. Why had they vanished? In part, it seems because of the disrupting changes brought to native cultures by the fur trade. The French had been trading with Micmacs, Montagnais and other Algonquian hunting peoples long before they got up to the St. Lawrence villages of Iroquoian corn-growers, who were not major fur-hunters in themselves. Consequently, the Montagnais and their neighbours had built up a telling superiority in white men's goods, in iron weapons and tools, enabling them to displace the Iroquoians from the vital St. Lawrence Valley trade route, and to make their deserted lands a hunting domain. No one can precisely give the details, but the spreading swirl of change would also affect the Five Nations Iroquois south and west of the St. Lawrence area, leading them to shape their own defensive League or Confederacy. In any case, the French became centrally tied in with tribal alliances, native raids and war, as they sought to advance their own fur-trade interests from a permanent base at Quebec. In 1609 Champlain and two other Frenchmen thus went with some sixty Indian allies, mainly Montagnais, south into the Iroquois country of the Mohawks, following the Richelieu River from the St. Lawrence to what would be named Lake Champlain. There they met and fought with a band of the formidable Mohawks; but shots from French guns killed three and scattered the rest of their opponents. It was a brief, unintended start to bloody cycles of French-Iroquois warfare -- arising primarily out of the fur trade.

In repeated efforts to enlarge that trade, Champlain also made other expeditions inland, to develop relations with still more distant tribes who could send furs to Quebec. In 1613 he travelled up the Ottawa River from the St. Lawrence through the country of his trading allies, the Algonquin tribe, thereby opening a great Ottawa highway westward to French use. Two years later, Champlain undertook a still longer journey to the Huron country, paddling up the Ottawa again, and continuing via Lake Nipissing and the French River to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. The "freshwater sea", he called it, as in July, 1615, the French first looked upon the Great Lakes. From here Champlain's party canoed to the foot of Georgian Bay, to the fertile, well-cultivated and populous lands of the Hurons: village-dwelling agriculturalists like their Iroquoian relatives -- but long-term rivals -- the Five Nations Iroquois south across Lake Ontario. The Huron Confederacy of four tribes was already sending furs down to Quebec, via the Ottawa and Algonquin allies along the way. And thanks to the Hurons' settled position at the heart of the Great Lakes Basin, their well-established trading ties with hunting peoples to north and west, plus their own considerable strength, they were eminently fitted to become the key middlemen in the French fur trade -- collecting furs from Great Lakes tribes to forward to Quebec.

Still, the Hurons wanted not only trade goods from a French alliance, but armed support against their Five Nations enemies. Hence Champlain was soon committed to lead them in an attack on the Iroquois below Lake Ontario. In October, 1615, his army of Hurons, and some Algonquins, came upon a strongly fortified Iroquois village at the eastern end of that lake. A hasty, premature Indian attack failed, and deliberate, European-style seige warfare did not suit impatient Hurons. They retreated carrying Champlain in a basket, since he had been wounded by an arrow in the knee. Back in Huronia, he recovered over the winter, and visited the Petuns and Ottawas in the western, inter-lake peninsula of future Southern Ontario before returning to Quebec in 1616. The flow of fur from Hurons to French successfully went forward. But the former had lost some of their trust in all-conquering Europeans, while the Five Nations Iroquois felt new confidence. Accordingly, to strengthen French political and cultural influences, Christian missionaries were sent into the Huron country.

It must be stressed that this did not mean some darkly cynical design behind the attempt to Christianize -- and "civilize" -- the Huron tribes. In the aftermath of great religious changes in Europe, where the Protestant Reformation had been followed by the Catholic Counter Reformation, a Catholic France (or a Protestant England) was full of zealous convictions which often identified the aims of the true faith with that nation's political and economic purposes. (What else is new?) Champlain, himself an ardent Catholic, wanted to send missionaries to the Hurons not just to Frenchify them or make them safe allies in the fur trade, but to lead them to Christian knowledge and salvation. He had already brought four Récollet friars out from France in 1615, one of whom, Father Le Caron, was in Huronia during Champlain's stay there. But the task was too great for the relatively small and weak Récollet community. They themselves proposed calling on the powerful Jesuit Order, highly trained and disciplined, and already serving the cause of Roman Catholicism in missions around the world. In 1625, three Jesuits arrived at Quebec, to begin a long Canadian heritage for their order -- of courage, suffering, faith and devoted service. Among them was the outstanding Father Jean de Brébeuf, who began his work in Huronia the next year.

Meanwhile, the French settlement at Quebec had grown slowly, but significantly. By 1628, twenty years after its founding, the original fur-trade post of twenty-eight men was a village and the capital of New France with around seventy inhabitants, including women and children; for some families now were settled there. Still, the bulk of Quebec's small French population were traders and storekeepers, workmen and dockhands, with soldiers, seamen and some clerics added. The first farmer, Louis Hébert (also an apothecary or pharmacist), had only arrived in 1617, to raise crops on the heights of Cape Diamond above Quebec. The settled colony could scarcely yet feed itself, being still dependent on the supply ships from France that took furs back overseas with them. As a result, when a minor war between England and France briefly erupted in Europe, an English fleet entered the St. Lawrence, captured a heavy-laden French convoy in 1628, and so compelled a starving Quebec to surrender by the next summer.

Champlain, its governor, was sent to England as a prisoner. But the fact that hostilities had already officially ended in Europe when Quebec was taken, led to its return to France in 1632. Thus its former governor resumed his post, under the Company of The Hundred Associates, now the holders of the Canadian fur-trade monopoly. Actually, there had been several changes in the monopoly holders since Sieur de Monts' initial grant. Indeed, the creation in 1627 of a much more powerful chartered body, the Hundred Associates, had promised well; until the English war and the seizure of the Associates' first major convoy. Though restored in control, once New France was handed back, the Company never fully recovered from this sizeable loss. Its later efforts to build the French colony were only limited. Nevertheless, more colonists, including farmers, did arrive. Trois Rivières was established as a settlement up-river; and by Champlain's death in 1635, there were about two hundred French in the vastness of the St. Lawrence holdings: remarkably few, yet an enduring base for a monumental French-Canadian heritage.

But new problems were looming far in the wilderness interior. Here, Jesuit missions spread in Huronia over the 1630s. By 1639, in fact, Father Jerome Lalement was erecting a self-sufficient mission headquarters at Ste. Marie on the Georgian Bay shore near present-day Midland, the first European-built community in inland North America: with farm fields, stone bastions for defending soldiers, a canal system of drainage, log chapel, hospital and workshop, together with a palisaded Indian village to house converts. Nevertheless the Hurons, like other native peoples, seemed to be more interested in immediate material benefits from trade goods than in future Christian salvation; while their own spiritual leaders, the shamans, were implacably hostile to the black-robed Jesuit "sorcerers". And so the efforts of the missionaries were not just discouraging, but hazardous. Then came the mounting impacts of European diseases in crowded Huron longhouses. The death rate was appalling: a Huron population of around 25 000 was nearly cut in half. The French, unknowing carriers, were hotly accused of evil magic. But the natives also came to feel that their own ancestral culture had failed them. Conversions mounted, as a sorely weakened, demoralized Huron people sought both help and hope: even as their Five Nations enemies moved to a decisive phase of conflict.

The Iroquois had faced cultural change themselves, again associated with the fur trade, that crucial yet destabilizing bond between native and newcomer. They equally desired trade goods; but the French at Quebec were distant and allied with foes of the Iroquois Five Nations -- as the fight of 1609 on Lake Champlain had made sharply clear. Still, in the same year the Dutch arrived on the Hudson, and by 1624 had established New Amsterdam (later New York) at that river's mouth. The Iroquois hence gained access to Dutch trade supplies, including muskets. In time, moreover, the rise of New England, where the strong English Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay was founded in 1629, could offer another, if farther, source of valuable goods. In time, as well, the Five Nations grew thoroughly dependent on the traps, hatchets and guns of the European. But like the Hurons, not being primarily hunters themselves, the Iroquois also became middlemen, trading furs from other tribes. They sought to block the flow of pelts to the St. Lawrence, to swing it down to their own villages and the Dutch on the Hudson. The Huron-Algonquin-French trade system proved too firmly entrenched, however. Consequently, traditional native rivalries of Huron and Iroquois swelled to a far more deadly struggle between committed fur-trade middlemen -- in which, for very economic survival, one side had to demolish the other. And the Iroquois had escaped the terrible Huron losses from disease; most likely because they did not have white men regularly living in their midst. They were politically well organized; their own morale was high; while by the later 1640s they held a massive lead in guns. All this spelled ruin for the Hurons, whom they sweepingly attacked; while the few and far-off French could do little.

In 1648 Iroquois raiders fell on the mission village of St. Joseph in Huronia, slaying the Jesuit Father Daniel and bearing away hundreds of prisoners. In 1648 St. Ignace and St. Louis were destroyed by an Iroquois army of 1,200, and Fathers Brébeuf and Lalement taken off to slow deaths by torture. The broken Hurons could make no effective stand. To prevent more bloodshed, the Jesuits themselves abandoned and burned their prized showpiece, the big central mission of Ste. Marie. The next year saw the survivors of the grand Jesuit cultural experiment reach Quebec: only some sixty French, including soldiers who had come too late, and around 300 Christian Hurons, whose descendants would live on in settlements outside Quebec. The Hurons as a people had disappeared; though they had not actually been wiped out. Native warfare was seldom as ruthless as European conflicts could be. The defeated elements had been shattered and dispersed, some to flee east to shelter with the French, others west across the Great Lakes to tribes there, while still others would be incorporated in the Iroquois nations, as was the custom among the native peoples, especially in regard to women and children.

Nonetheless, Huronia was extinct. Then the victorious Iroquois drove on to clear the land of any other rivals. The Petuns, Attiwandirons and Nipissings were scattered, leaving Southern Ontario virtually an empty hunting ground. Meanwhile, the Five Nations had blocked the routes to the French, then directly struck at them. In 1650 Iroquois war parties came within a few miles of Quebec. And Montreal, the advanced post first set up in 1642 as a French mission and hospital base for Indians, was particularly embattled on the front line. But by 1653 the Five Nations were ready to cease fighting. In part, they had achieved their purpose of removing fur competitors; in part, they were worn down themselves, yet had not really cracked New France; and in part, they were under heavy attack from the Eries on their west. Accordingly, a breathing-space rather than a peace ensued. But during it, the fur trade -- that be-all of New France -- was able to revive after famine years of blockade. Moreover, since the former native trading system had been virtually erased, the French themselves had to travel inland to the western tribes for furs. And so the coureurs-de-bois took over.

These roamers of the woods had had their beginnings in Champlain's "young men" sent out to live with native peoples and learn their languages and customs -- taking cultural change the other way. Among them was Etienne Brulé, who in 1615 had gone with Hurons south from Georgian Bay to Toronto harbour on Lake Ontario, thus evidently becoming the first European to travel the Toronto Passage between the Upper and Lower Great Lakes, as well as, later, the first to enter Lake Superior. And by the 1650s, Brulé and others like him had found their heirs in French traders and trappers who knew the wilds about as well as the Indians: daring individualists, often self-seeking and fiercely unrestrained, who gloried in freedom and adventure. This new breed of wilderness French included men like Pierre Radisson and Médard Chouart des Grossielliers, who traced northern routes above areas of Iroquois domination to reach new fur sources along the Upper Great Lakes. Radisson and Grosseilliers visited the country around Lake Superior in 1659; and the next year returned to Quebec with a large fur cargo. Still, such temporary successes could not basically alter the problems of a weak, beleaguered French colony facing real prospects of economic collapse. In fact, the Iroquois had returned to war again in 1658, cutting off trade and harrying French settlements afresh.

In these circumstances, the failing French monopoly company, The Hundred Associates, could do little; even though its trading operations had now been transferred to a select business group within Canada itself. But amid conflict and sharp doubt, the Jesuits stood out as vital patrons and supporters of the colony: wealthy and powerful in Europe and especially influential in New France, where the Jesuit Superior now stood second only to the governor in authority at Quebec. The staunch Jesuit presence there, through these hard-pressed times, would leave lasting heritage impressions on French Canada.

But by 1661 things were changing dramatically once more. The young monarch, Louis XIV, had taken full control of a rich and formidable French state, free now from wars at home, and able to pursue grand designs abroad, under its ambitious and absolute new ruler, Louis, to be called the "Sun King". Through the invaluable services of his colonial minister, Jean Colbert, the king worked diligently to remake and extend the French empire. Thus in 1663, an impotent company rule in New France was replaced by strong royal government, operating directly under the crown and its officials, while effective military action against the Iroquois was soon to follow. A new era for the French in Canada was under way, to last for virtually a century ahead. And as for the native Canadians themselves, they now faced not just passing Norse contacts or uncertain English and French venturings from overseas, but large, steadily-growing European communities on Canadian soil -- as the newcomers increasingly became settled, rooted colonists.

Copyright © 1999 Canadian Heritage Gallery