Canada Part 6

The Church was first, the State second. After the service the new governor entered the fort of St. Louis, only a few steps from the sacred building, received the keys amid salutes of cannon and musketry, and was officially installed as head of the civil and military government of Canada, at this time controlled by the Company of the Hundred a.s.sociates. Then he was called upon to act as G.o.d-father for a dying Indian who desired baptism. In the smoky cabin packed with Indians Montmagny stood by the earnest Jesuit and named the Algonquin Joseph. "I leave you to think," says Father Le Jeune, "how greatly astonished were these people to see so much crimson, so many handsomely dressed persons beneath their bark roofs."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Marie Guyard (Mere Marie de l'Incarnation).]

During the period of which I am now writing we see the beginnings of the most famous educational and religious inst.i.tutions of the country.

The Hotel Dieu was founded in 1639, by the Soeurs Hospitalieres from the convent of St. Augustine, in Dieppe, through the benefactions of the d.u.c.h.ess d'Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu. Rich, fascinating, and beautiful women contributed not only their fortunes but their lives to the service of the Church. Marie Madeleine de Chauvigny, who belonged to a n.o.ble family in Normandy, married at a very early age a M. de la Peltrie, who left her a young widow of twenty-two years of age, without {132} any children. Deeply attached to her religion from her youth, she decided to devote her life and her wealth to the establishment of an inst.i.tution for the instruction of girls in Canada. Her father and friends threw all possible obstacles in the way of what they believed was utter folly for a gentle cultured woman, but she succeeded by female wiles and strategy in carrying out her plans. On the first of August, 1639, she arrived at Quebec, in company with Marie Guyard, the daughter of a silk manufacturer of Tours, best known to Canadians as Mere de l'Incarnation, the mother superior of the Ursulines, whose s.p.a.cious convent and grounds now cover seven acres of land on Garden Street in the ancient capital. She had a vision of a companion who was to accompany her to a land of mists and mountains, to which the Virgin beckoned as the country of her future life-work. Canada was the land and Madame de la Peltrie the companion foreshadowed in that dream which gave Marie Guyard a vocation which she filled for thirty years with remarkable fidelity and ability.

Madame de la Peltrie and Marie Guyard were accompanied by Mdlle. de Savonniere de la Troche, who belonged to a distinguished family of Anjou, and was afterwards known in Canada as Mere de St. Joseph, and also by another nun, called Mere Cecile de Sainte-Croix. A Jesuit, Father Vimont, afterwards superior, and author of one of the _Relations_, and the three Hospital sisters, arrived in the same s.h.i.+p.

The company landed and "threw themselves on their knees, blessed the G.o.d of Heaven, and kissed {133} the earth of their near country, as they now called it." A _Te Deum_ followed in the Jesuits' church which was now completed on the heights near their college, commenced as early as 1635--one year before the building of Harvard College--through the generosity of Rene Rohault, eldest son of the Marquis de Gamache. The first visit of the nuns was to Sillery, four miles to the west of Quebec, on the north bank of the river, where an inst.i.tution had been established for the instruction of the Algonquin and other Indians, through the liberality of Noel Brulart de Sillery, a Knight of Malta, and a member of an influential French family, who had taken a deep interest in the settlement of Canada and proved it by his bounty.

Madame de la Peltrie and her companions, the Jesuit historian tells us navely, embraced the little Indian girls "without taking heed whether they were clean or not."

It was during Montmagny's term of office that the city of Montreal was founded by a number of religious enthusiasts. Jerome le Royer de la Dauversiere, receiver of taxes at La Fleche in Anjou, a n.o.ble and devotee, consulted with Jean Jacques Olier, then a priest of St.

Sulpice in Paris, as to the best means of establis.h.i.+ng a mission in Canada. Both declared they had visions which pointed to the island of Mont Royal as the future scene of their labours. They formed a company with large powers as seigniors as soon as they had obtained from M. de Lauzon, one of the members of the Company of Hundred a.s.sociates, a t.i.tle to the island. They interested in the project Paul de Chomedey, Sieur {134} de Maisonneuve, a devout and brave soldier, an honest and chivalric gentleman, who was appointed the first governor by the new company. Mdlle. Jeanne Mance, daughter of the attorney-general of Nogent-le-Roi, among the vine-clad hills of Champagne, who had bound herself to perpetual chast.i.ty from a remarkably early age, gladly joined in this religious undertaking. The company had in view the establishment of communities of secular priests, and of nuns to nurse the sick, and teach the children--the French as well as the savages.

Madame de Bullion, the rich widow of a superintendent of finance, contributed largely towards the enterprise, and may be justly considered the founder of Hotel Dieu of Montreal.

Maisonneuve and Mdlle. Mance, accompanied by forty men and four women, arrived at Quebec in August, 1641, when it was far too late to attempt an establishment on the island. Governor de Montmagny and others at Quebec disapproved of the undertaking which had certainly elements of danger. The governor might well think it wisest to strengthen the colony by an establishment on the island of Orleans or in the immediate vicinity of Quebec, instead of laying the foundations of a new town in the most exposed part of Canada. However, all these objections availed nothing against the enthusiasm of devotees. In the spring of 1642, Maisonneuve and his company left Quebec. He was accompanied by Governor de Montmagny, Father Vimont, superior of the Jesuits, and Madame de la Peltrie, who left the Ursulines very abruptly and inconsiderately {135} under the conviction that she had a mission to fill at Mont Royal.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Portrait of Maisonneuve.]

On the 17th May, Maisonneuve and his companions landed on the little triangle of land, the Place Royale of Champlain, formed by the junction of a stream with the St. Lawrence. They fell immediately on their knees and gave their thanks to the {136} Most High. After singing some hymns, they raised an altar which was decorated by Madame de la Peltrie and Mdlle. Mance, and celebrated the first great ma.s.s on the island.

Father Vimont, as he performed this holy rite of his Church, addressed the new colonists with words which foreshadowed the success of the Roman Catholic Church in the greatest Canadian city, which was first named Ville-Marie.

A picket enclosure, mounted with cannon, protected the humble buildings erected for the use of the first settlers on what is now the Custom-house Square. The little stream--not much more than a rivulet except in spring--which for many years rippled between green, mossy banks, now struggles beneath the paved street.

An obelisk of gray Canadian granite now stands on this historic ground.

Madame de la Peltrie did not remain more than two years in Ville-Marie, but returned to the convent at Quebec which she had left in a moment of caprice. Mdlle. Mance, who was Madame de Bullion's friend, remained at the head of the Hotel Dieu. The Sulpicians eventually obtained control of the spiritual welfare, and in fact of the whole island, though from necessity and policy the Jesuits were at first in charge. It was not until 1653 that one of the most admirable figures in the religious and educational history of Canada, Margaret Bourgeoys, a maiden of Troyes, came to Ville-Marie, and established the parent house in Canada of the Congregation de Notre-Dame, whose schools have extended in the progress of centuries from Sydney, on the island of Cape Breton, to the Pacific coast.

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Yet during these years, while convents and hospitals were founded, while brave gentlemen and cultured women gave up their lives to their country and their faith, while the bells were ever calling their congregations to ma.s.s and vespers, the country was defended by a mere handful of inhabitants, huddled together at Quebec, at Three Rivers, and at the little settlement of Ville-Marie. The canoes of the Iroquois were constantly pa.s.sing on the lakes and rivers of Canada, from Georgian Bay to the Richelieu, and bands of those terrible foes of the French and their Indian allies were ever lurking in the woods that came so dangerously close to the white settlements and the Indian villages.

In 1642, Father Isaac Jogues was returning from the missions on Lake Huron, with Couture, an interpreter, and Goupil, a young medical attendant--both donnes or lay followers of the Jesuits. They were in the company of a number of Hurons who were bringing furs to the traders on the St. Lawrence, when the Iroquois surprised them at the western end of Lake St. Peter's. The prisoners were taken by the Richelieu to the Mohawk country and Father Jogues was the first Frenchman to pa.s.s through Lake George[1]--with its picturesque hills and islets--which in a subsequent journey he named Lac du Saint-Sacrament, because he reached it on the eve of Corpus Christi. The Frenchmen were carried from village to village of the Iroquois, and {138} tortured with all the cruel ingenuity usual in such cases. Goupil's thumb was cut off with a clam sh.e.l.l, as one way of prolonging pain. At night the prisoners were stretched on their backs with their ankles and wrists bound to stakes. Couture was adopted into the tribe, and was found useful in later years as an intermediary between the French and Mohawks. Goupil was murdered and his body tossed into a stream rus.h.i.+ng down a steep ravine. Despite his sufferings Father Jogues never desisted from his efforts to baptise children and administer the rites of his Church to the tortured prisoners. On one occasion he performed the sacred office for a dying Huron with some rain or dewdrops which were still clinging to an ear of green corn which had been thrown to him for food. After indescribable misery, he was taken to Fort Orange, where the Dutch helped him to escape to France, but he returned to Canada in the following year.

Bands of Iroquois continued to wage war with relentless fury on all the Algonquin tribes from the Chaudiere Falls of the Ottawa to the upper waters of the Saguenay. Bressani, a highly cultured Italian priest, was taken prisoner on the St. Lawrence, while on his way to the Huron missions, and carried to the Mohawk villages, where he went through the customary ordeal of torture. He was eventually given to an old woman who had lost a member of her family, but when she saw his maimed hands--one split between the little finger and the ring-finger--she sent him to the Dutch, who ransomed and sent him to France, whence he came back like Jogues, a year later.

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In 1645 the Mohawks made peace with the French, but the other members of the Five Nations refused to be bound by the treaty. Father Isaac Jogues ventured into their country in 1646, and after a successful negotiation returned to consult the governor at Quebec; but unhappily for him he left behind a small box, filled with some necessaries of his simple life, with which he did not wish to enc.u.mber himself on this flying visit. The medicine-men or sorcerers, who always hated the missionaries as the enemies of their vile superst.i.tious practices, made the Indians believe that this box contained an evil spirit which was the origin of disease, misfortune, and death. When Father Jogues came back, he found the village divided into two parties--one wis.h.i.+ng his death, the other inclined to show him mercy, and after infinite wrangling between the factions, he was suddenly killed by a blow from a tomahawk as he was entering a long-house, to attend a feast to which he had been invited. His body was treated with contumely, and his head affixed to a post of the palisades of the village. He was the first martyr who suffered death at the hands of the Iroquois.

The "black robe" was now to be seen in every Indian community of Canada; among the Hurons and Algonquins as far as Lake Huron, among the White Fish tribe at the head-waters of the Saguenay, and even among the Abenakis of the Kennebec. Father Gabriel Druilletes, who had served an apprentices.h.i.+p among the Montagnais, was in charge of this Abenaki mission, and in the course of years {140} visited Boston, Plymouth, and Salem, in the interests of the Canadian French, who wished to enter into commercial relations with New England, and also induce its governments to enter into an alliance against the Iroquois. The authorities of the New England confederacy eventually refused to evoke the hostility of the dangerous Five Nations. Father Druilletes, however, won for Canada the enduring friends.h.i.+p of the Abenakis, as Acadian history shows.

It is impossible within the limited s.p.a.ce of this chapter to give any accurate idea of the spirit of patience, zeal, and self-sacrifice which the Jesuit Fathers exhibited in their missions among the hapless Hurons. For years they found these Indians very suspicious of their efforts to teach the lessons of their faith. It was only with difficulty the missionaries could baptise little children. They would give sugared water to a child, and, apparently by accident, drop some on its head, and at the same time p.r.o.nounce the sacramental words.

Some Indians believed for a long time that the books and strings of beads were the embodiment of witchcraft. But the persistency of the priests was at last rewarded by the conversion, or at all events the semblance of conversion, of large numbers of Hurons. It would seem, according as their fears of the Iroquois increased, the Hurons gave greater confidence to the French, and became more dependent on their counsel. In fact, in some respects, they lost their spirit of self-reliance. In some villages the converts at last exceeded the number of unbelievers. By {141} 1647 there were eighteen priests engaged in the work of eleven missions, chiefly in the Huron country, but also among the Algonquin tribes on the east and northeast of Lake Huron or at the outlet of Lake Superior. Each mission had its little chapel, and a bell, generally hanging on a tree. One central mission house had been built at Ste. Marie close to a little river, now known as the Wye, which falls into Thunder Bay, an inlet of Matchedash Bay.

This was a fortified station in the form of a parallelogram, constructed partly of masonry, and partly of wooden palisades, strengthened by two bastions containing magazines. The chapel and its pictures attracted the special admiration of the Indians, whose imagination was at last reached by the embellished ceremonies of the Jesuits' church. The priests, thoroughly understanding the superst.i.tious character of the Indians, made a lavish use of pictorial representations of pain and sufferings and rewards, allotted to bad and good. Father Le Jeune tells us that "such holy pictures are most useful object-lessons for the Indians." On one occasion he made a special request for "three, four, or five devils, tormenting a soul with a variety of punishments--one using fire, another serpents, and another pincers." The mission house was also constantly full of Indians, not simply enjoying these pictures, but partic.i.p.ating also in the generous hospitality of the Fathers.

It was in 1648 that the first blow descended on this unhappy people who were in three years' time to be blotted out as a warlike, united nation in {142} America. In that year the Iroquois attacked the mission of St. Joseph (Teanaustaye), fifteen miles from Ste. Marie, where in 1638 a famous Iroquois, Ononkwaya, had been tortured. All the people had been ma.s.sacred or taken prisoners in the absence of the warriors who were mostly in pursuit of a band of Iroquois. Father Daniel, arrayed in the vestments of his vocation, was among the first to fall a victim to the furious savages, who instantly cast his body into the flames of his burning chapel,--a fitting pyre for the brave soldier of the Cross.

St. Ignace, St. Louis, and other missions were attacked early in the following year. Fathers Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant were tortured and murdered at St. Ignace. From village after village the shrieks of helpless women and men and children, tied to stakes in burning houses, ascended to a seemingly pitiless Heaven. Many persons were tortured on the spot, but as many or more reserved for the sport of the Iroquois villages. Father Brebeuf was bound to a stake, and around his neck was thrown a necklace of red-hot tomahawks. They cut off his lower lip, and thrust a heated iron rod down his throat. It was doubtless their delight to force a groan or complaint from this stalwart priest, whose towering and n.o.ble figure had always been the admiration of the Canadian Indians, but both he and Lalemant, a relatively feeble man, showed themselves as brave as the most courageous Indian warriors under similar conditions.

When a party from Ste. Marie came a few days later to the ruins of St.

Ignace, they found the {143} tortured bodies of the dead missionaries on the ground, and carried them to the mission house, where they were buried in sacred earth. The skull of the generous, whole-souled Brebeuf is still to be seen within a silver bust in the Hotel Dieu of Quebec. Father Gamier was killed at the mission of St. Jean (Etarita), in the raids which the Iroquois made at a later time on the Tobacco Nation, the kindred of the Hurons. Father Chabanel, who was on his way from St. Jean to Ste. Marie, was never heard of, and it is generally believed that he was treacherously killed and robbed by a Huron.

The Hurons were still numerous despite the losses they had suffered--counting even then more families than the Five Nations--but as they looked on the smoking ruins of their villages and thought of the undying hatred which had followed them for so many years they lost all courage and decided to scatter and seek new homes elsewhere.

Father Ragueneau, the superior of the Jesuits, after consultation with the Fathers and Frenchmen at Ste. Marie, some fifty persons altogether, felt they could no longer safely remain in their isolated position when the Hurons had left the country. They removed all their goods to the Isle of St. Joseph, now one of the Christian Islands, near the entrance of Matchedash Bay, where they erected a fortified post for the protection of several thousand Hurons who had sought refuge here.

Before many months pa.s.sed, the Hurons believed that their position would be untenable when the Iroquois renewed their attacks, and determined to leave the island. Some ventured {144} even among the Iroquois and were formally received into the Senecas and other tribes.

A remnant remained a few months longer on the island, but they soon left for Quebec after killing some thirty of the bravest Iroquois warriors, who had attempted to obtain possession of the fort by a base act of treachery. A number belonging to the Tobacco Nation eventually reached the upper waters of the Mississippi where they met the Sioux, or Dacotahs, a fierce nation belonging to a family quite distinct from the Algonquins and Iroquois, and generally found wandering between the head-waters of Lake Superior and the Falls of St. Anthony. After various vicissitudes these Hurons scattered, but some found their rest by the side of the Detroit River, where they have been always known as Wyandots. Some three hundred Hurons, old and young, left St. Joseph for Quebec, where they were most kindly received and given homes on the western end of the Isle of Orleans, where the Jesuits built a fort for their security; but even here, as we shall see, the Iroquois followed them, and they were eventually forced to hide themselves under the guns of Quebec. War and disease soon thinned them out, while not a few cast in their lot with the Iroquois who were at last themselves seeking recruits. The Huron remnant finally found a resting-place at Lorette on the banks of the St. Charles, a few miles from the heights of the Capital.

The only memorials now in Canada of a once powerful people, that numbered at least twenty thousand souls before the time of their ruin and {145} dispersion, are a remnant still retaining the language of their tribe on the banks of the Detroit; a larger settlement on the banks of the St. Charles, but without the distinguis.h.i.+ng characteristics of their ancestors who came there from Isle St. Joseph; the foundations of the old mission house of Ste. Marie, and the remarkable graves and ossuaries which interest the student and antiquary as they wander in the summer-time through the picturesque country where the nation was once supreme.

[1] It was so called in 1753, after the reigning sovereign of England by an ambitions and politic Irishman, Sir William Johnson, whose name is constantly occurring in the history of the wars between England and France.

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X.

YEARS OF GLOOM--THE KING COMES TO THE RESCUE OF CANADA--THE IROQUOIS HUMBLED.

(1652-1667.)

It was noon on the 20th May, 1656, when the residents of Quebec were startled by the remarkable spectacle of a long line of bark canoes drawn up on the river immediately in front of the town. They could hear the shouts of the Mohawk warriors making boast of the murder and capture of unhappy Hurons, whom they had surprised on the Isle of Orleans close by. The voices of Huron girls--"the very flower of the tribe," says the Jesuit narrator--were raised in plaintive chants at the rude command of their savage captors, who even forced them to dance in sight of the French, on whose protection they had relied. The governor, M. de Lauzon, a weak, incapable man, only noted for his greed, was perfectly paralysed at a scene without example, even in those days of terror, when the Iroquois were virtually masters of the St. Lawrence valley from Huron to Gaspe.

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At this very time a number of Frenchmen--probably fifty in all--were in the power of the Iroquois, and the governor had no nerve to make even an effort to save the Hurons from their fate. To understand the situation of affairs, it is necessary to go back for a few years.

After the dispersion of the Hurons, the Iroquois, princ.i.p.ally the Mohawks, became bolder than ever on the St. Lawrence. M. du Plessis-Bochat, the governor of Three Rivers, lost his life in a courageous but ill-advised attempt to chastise a band of warriors that were in ambush not far from the fort. Father Buteux was killed on his way to his mission of the Attikamegs or White Fish tribe, at the headwaters of the St. Maurice. In 1653, Father Poucet was carried off to a Mohawk village, where he was tortured in the usual fas.h.i.+on, and then sent back to Canada with offers of peace. The Senecas and Cayugas were then busily engaged in exterminating the Eries, who had burned one of their most famous chiefs, whose last words at the stake were prophetic: "Eries, you burn in me an entire nation!"

A peace, or rather a truce, was declared formally in the fall of 1653.

Then, at the request of the Onondagas, Father Simon le Moyne, a missionary of great tact and courage, who was the first Frenchman to ascend the St. Lawrence as far as the Thousand Isles, ventured into the Iroquois country, where he soon became a favourite. As a result of the negotiations which followed this mission, Governor de Lauzon was persuaded to send a colony to the villages of the Onondagas. This colony was composed {148} of Captain Dupuy, an officer of the garrison, ten soldiers, and between thirty and forty volunteers. Father Dablon, who had previously gone with Father Chaumonot among the Onondagas, and had brought back the request for a colony, accompanied the expedition, which left Quebec in the month of June, 1656. On the way up the river the Onondagas were attacked by a band of Mohawks, when the boats carrying the French had gone ahead and were not within sight. Some of the Onondagas were killed and wounded, and then the Mohawks found out that they had surprised and injured warriors belonging to a tribe of their own confederacy. They endeavoured to explain this very serious act of hostility against their own friends and allies by the excuse that they had mistaken them for Hurons, whom they were on the way to attack. There is little doubt that they well understood the character of the expedition, and attacked it through envy of the success of the Onondagas in obtaining the settlement of Frenchmen in their villages.

When the Mohawks had made their explanations, they allowed the angry Onondagas to proceed on their journey, while they themselves went on to Quebec where, as we have already seen, they showed their contempt of the French by a.s.sailing the Hurons under the very guns of the fort of St. Louis. As soon as the French colony arrived at the Onondaga villages, they took possession of the country in the name of Jesus. On an eminence overlooking the lake they erected the mission of St. Mary of Gannentaha, the correct Iroquois name for Onondaga, {149} in the vicinity of the present city of Syracuse. The Onondagas generally appeared delighted at the presence of the French, though at this very time the Mohawks continued to paddle up and down the St. Lawrence to the consternation of the French and Canadian Indians alike. The Jesuit priest Garreau was killed in one of these excursions while accompanying a party of Ottawas to Lake Superior.

The colonists at Gannentaha at last found that their own lives were threatened by a conspiracy to destroy them, but they succeeded in deceiving the Indians and in escaping to Canada in the month of March, after living only two years among the Onondagas. Whilst the Indians were sleeping away the effects of one of those mystic feasts, at which they invariably stuffed themselves to repletion, the Frenchmen escaped at night and reached the Oswego River, which they successfully descended by the aid of flat-boats which they had secretly constructed after the discovery of the plot. The party reached the French settlement with the loss of three men, drowned in the descent of the rapids of the St. Lawrence, probably the Cedars. The enterprise was most hazardous at this season when the ice had to be broken on the rivers before the boats could be used. But this very fact had its advantage, since the bark canoes of the Indians would have been useless had they followed the party. This exploit is one of the most remarkable ever performed by the French in those early days, and shows of what excellent material those pioneers of French colonisation were made.

In the spring of 1660 it was discovered that an {150} organised attack was to be made on all the settlements by a large force of over a thousand Iroquois, who were to a.s.semble at the junction of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. It is stated on credible authority that Montreal--Canada in fact--was saved at this critical juncture by the heroism of a few devoted Frenchmen. Among the officers of the little garrison that then protected Montreal, was Adam Daulac or Dollard, Sieur des Ormeaux, who obtained leave from Maisonneuve, the governor, to lead a party of volunteers against the Iroquois, who were wintering in large numbers on the upper Ottawa. Sixteen brave fellows, whose names are all recorded in the early records of Montreal, took a solemn oath to accept and give no quarter, and after settling their private affairs and receiving the sacrament, they set out on their mission of inevitable death. Dollard and his band soon reached the impetuous rapids of the Long Sault of the Ottawa, destined to be their Thermopylae. There, among the woods, they found an old circular inclosure of logs, which had been built by some Indians for defensive purposes. This was only a wretched bulwark, but the Frenchmen were in a state of exalted enthusiasm, and proceeded to strengthen it. Only two or three days after their arrival, they heard that the Iroquois were descending the river. The first attacks of the Iroquois were repulsed, and then they sent out scouts to bring up a large force of five hundred warriors who were at the mouth of the Richelieu. In the meantime they continued hara.s.sing the inmates of the fort, who were suffering for food and {151} water. A band of Hurons who had joined the French just before the arrival of the Iroquois, now deserted them, with the exception of their chief, who as well as four Algonquins, remained faithful to the end. The forests soon resounded with the yells of the Iroquois, when reinforced. Still Dollard and his brave companions never faltered, but day after day beat back the astonished a.s.sailants, who knew the weakness of the defenders, and had antic.i.p.ated an easy victory. At last a general a.s.sault was made, and in the struggle Dollard was killed. Even then the survivors kept up the fight, and when the Iroquois stood within the inclosure there was no one to meet them. Four Frenchmen, still alive, were picked up from the pile of corpses. Three of these were instantly burned, while the fourth was reserved for continuous torture a day or so later. The faithless Hurons gained nothing by their desertion, for they were put to death, with the exception of five who eluded their captors, and took an account of this remarkable episode to the French at Montreal. The Iroquois were obviously amazed at the courage of a few Frenchmen, and decided to give up, for the present, their project of attacking settlements defended by men so dauntless.

Even the forces of nature seemed at this time to conspire against the unfortunate colony. A remarkable earthquake, the effects of which can still be seen on the St. Lawrence,--at picturesque Les Eboulements, which means "earth slips," for instance,--commenced in the month of February, 1663, and did not cease entirely until the following summer.

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Fervent appeals for a.s.sistance were made to the King by Pierre Boucher, the governor of Three Rivers, by Monseigneur Laval, the first bishop, by the Jesuit Fathers, and by the governors of New France, especially by M. d'Avaugour, who recommended that three thousand soldiers be sent to the colony, and allowed to become settlers after a certain term of service. By 1663, the total population of Canada did not exceed two thousand souls, the large majority of whom were at Quebec, Montreal, and Three Rivers. It was at the risk of their lives that men ventured beyond the guns of Montreal. The fur-trade was in the hands of monopolists. The people could not raise enough food to feed themselves, but had to depend on the French s.h.i.+ps to a large extent.

The Company of the Hundred a.s.sociates had been found quite unequal to the work of settling and developing the country, or providing adequate means of defence. Under the advice of the great Colbert, the King, young Louis Quatorze, decided to a.s.sume the control of New France and make it a royal province. The immediate result of the new policy was the coming of the Marquis de Tracy, a veteran soldier, as lieutenant-general, with full powers to inquire into the state of Canada. He arrived at Quebec on the 30th June, 1665, attended by a brilliant retinue. The Carignan-Salieres Regiment, which had distinguished itself against the Turks, was also sent as a proof of the intention of the King to defend his long-neglected colony. In a few weeks, more than two thousand persons, soldiers and settlers, had come to Canada. Among {153} the number were M. de Courcelles, the first governor, and M. Talon, the first intendant, under the new regime.

Both were fond of state and ceremony, and the French taste of the Canadians was now gratified by a plentiful display of gold lace, ribbons, wigs, ornamented swords, and slouched hats. Probably the most interesting feature of the immigration was the number of young women as wives for the bachelors--as the future mothers of a Canadian people.

The new authorities went energetically to work. The fortifications at Quebec, Three Rivers, and Montreal were strengthened, and four new forts erected from the mouth of the Richelieu to Isle La Mothe on Lake Champlain. The Iroquois saw the significance of this new condition of things. The Onondagas, led by Garacontie, a friend of the Jesuits, made overtures of peace, which were favourably heard by "Onontio," as the governor of Canada had been called ever since the days of Montmagny, whose name, "Great Mountain," the Iroquois so translated.