Pre-Confederation Canadian History

Karl Marx, the German philosopher and historian, wrote that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”[footnote]Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (London: Penguin, 1983), 287.[/footnote] We encounter the world not as we would like it to be, not “under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” Aboriginal peoples in North America were not simply acted upon, they were actors. They made their history by making their own choices, but they did so in the context of early globalization and all the while carrying the burden of their own histories. In some historical accounts of the era, Aboriginal people confront the technological and organizational advantages of Europeans and generally come off badly. Consider that Aboriginal people were engaged in the very human business of confronting and wrestling with their own history on a stage where Europeans suddenly had a role. This complicated relationship was most often expressed in the language of trade and warfare.

Commerce

The measure of the extent and intensity of Aboriginal commercial networks is made clear by looking at the proto-contact era. We know when Europeans officially arrived in the Americas and when official voyages took place from Spain, France, England, and other countries. And we know that unofficial and irregular contact involved the fishing and whaling fleets of the north Atlantic and that some of those arrived before the chartered explorers did. We can deduce from the official reports some aspects of the contact experience in those instances. What is more difficult to know is the extent of first contact. How far inland and upriver did the ripples of contact spread?

By 1535, Aboriginal peoples of the Maritimes and the Gaspé had identified the trading opportunities represented by European sailing ships. The peoples of the Gulf of St. Lawrence were integrating European iron and copper products into their hunting and domestic toolkits. These products had value in and of themselves, but they also had commercial value in the existing indigenous marketplace. Long before Europeans established trading posts, Aboriginal merchants were meeting at places at or near Tadoussac to exchange exotic goods for furs. By 1580, European goods were showing up in Wendat villages — a full quarter century before Champlain met with Outchetaguin, the first Wendat representative to come calling on the French at Quebec.

Figure 5.6 Algonquian couple, 18th century (artist unknown).

Aboriginal peoples from the Mi’kmaq through the Gaspé Iroquois to the Laurentian Iroquois were eager to trade with Cartier when he arrived. Twenty fur-laden Mi’kmaq canoes paddled out to meet Cartier’s boats — they weren’t afraid and they knew that the Europeans were open to trading. As a means of attracting the attention of the French, the “Gaspesians” (as they’ve come down to us) waved long poles bedecked in furs. Clearly they knew what caught the visitors’ fancy, in more ways than one: Cartier noted that the locals were careful to have their womenfolk retreat to safety away from the foreshore as French ships approached, from which Cartier deduced that there had been incidents of sexual assault of some kind. Aboriginal management of these encounters took several forms during Cartier’s visits. On his second voyage, Donnacona (the headman at Stadacona) tried to prevent Cartier from leaving so that his village, through control of Cartier, could by extension control and dominate the French-Aboriginal trade.

The fur trade even at this early stage allowed Aboriginal people access to metal tools that would make their lives easier. Steel knives, copper pots, and kettles replaced stone tools and ceramic pots and woven baskets. Iron axes replaced stone axes. These changes advanced the ability of Aboriginal people to kill their food and/or their enemies; they facilitated food preparation; and nets, firearms, and hatchets made hunting easier and more productive. These labour-saving technologies helped them acquire more and better food, increased mobility (a copper pot is the epitome of portability), and allowed them to clear forests faster to plant more crops. In the arms race between Aboriginal peoples, a metal-tipped arrow was an important advantage in its own right. Riflery — which came later and was often dangerously unreliable but very dramatic — might further tip the scales. Aboriginal women in particular benefited from metal cooking utensils, iron scraping tools, and sewing needles, all of which revolutionized their lives. In exchange, the indigenous traders had to provide the Europeans with something they had in abundance — beaver pelts — and did not particularly need.

An important feature of the trade in beaver pelts was that they were most highly valued after they had been treated with natural oils and the long and rough guard-hairs had been removed. The most effective way to do this in pre-industrial society was to wear the pelts or to sleep in them. In short, what the Europeans wanted most of all was used pelts: those that had become a shiny black by being slept on or draped across a sweaty human body. Small wonder that the Aboriginal traders thought they were on to a good thing: from their perspective this was new money for old rope, as the saying goes.

There were, to be sure, drawbacks to the fur trade for the Aboriginal people, liabilities that would have been noticed even in the early stages. Their everyday lives were easier, but this change hampered their original way of life and some modification of culture occurred. The Aboriginal people began to depend on European goods in particular and some individuals and communities lost sight of their original ways of life before the arrival of metal goods. The location of flint or obsidian quarries for arrowheads became less important; the ability to chip a rock into a usable projectile point also disappeared. As Maritime peoples sacrificed more and more of their time on the seashore in order to pursue fur-bearing animals or trade partners farther inland, they came to rely on the French for foodstuffs. Increasingly, too, alcohol entered the trade equation and elicited a highly disruptive change.

Figure 5.7 The Nisga’a people developed a sculptural form that was significantly different from that of their coastal neighbours and every bit as engaging. A stone mask, made ca. 1800.

It is hardly surprising to find that some Aboriginal groups became competitive and jealous of one another’s accomplishments in the trade. Once again, keeping in mind the smallness of the French settlements — only a few hundred people at best during most of the 17th century — Aboriginal traders saw them more as travelling merchants showing up with goods to sell, rather than as competition for resources. The goods that Aboriginal partners received, then, fit within the context of indigenous relations.

Champlain’s participation in the attack on Ticonderoga in 1609 and his continued support for trade with the Wendat excluded the Haudenosaunee from access to European goods, though not for long. The arrival of the Dutch in 1615 at the mouth of the Hudson River provided the Five Nations a strong commercial monopoly of their own. Their lands, however, lacked the fur resources open to Wendat traders’ partners farther north. Diverting that trade into their own hands was clearly a consideration when the Haudenosaunee launched raids against Wendat traders, travellers, and villages in the 1630s and 1640s. They were also recovering from the 1630s smallpox epidemic, which meant they were on the lookout for hostages who could be absorbed into Haudenosaunee society to replenish their numbers. These two strategies of aggression were to shape the Five Nations’ relations with the French. Having scattered the Wendat Confederacy in 1649, the League turned its attention to the destruction of Canada. The eradication of the French trading presence would force the fur trade from the north into Haudenosaunee hands and they would hold a monopoly as middlemen to the Dutch.

For some Aboriginal peoples, there was no going back. For others, there was no reason to do so. So long as trade survived so did the new technological paradigm.

Miscegnation

Colonial societies often exhibit a badly tilted imbalance between the number of men and women. This was the case in early New France, on the western fur trade frontier, and in British Columbia from the 1840s through the 1930s. Under these circumstances it was inevitable that newcomer males — though not Catholic priests — would look to the Aboriginal population for sexual and marriage partners.

Interracial sexual relations (or miscegnation) between Europeans and Aboriginal peoples occurred from the earliest days of New France and Newfoundland. The record suggests, not surprisingly, that these weren’t always consensual. More permanent heterosexual alliances, however, did not take long to appear. These were enabled by Aboriginal cultural practices that included polygyny. As well, Aboriginal men were, in some settings, comfortable with the idea of sharing their wife with newcomers, a practice that can be situated within the context of gift-giving diplomacy and the building of alliances. Aboriginal women, too, were not without power in building these relationships and recognized the value of both sex and the adoption of an outsider into the family through marriage. Divorce, in Aboriginal societies, was generally widely accepted and an easy thing to conclude. This gave women some ability to walk away (in some instances, literally) from a bad pairing.

As indicated above, demographic conditions among the Europeans abetted miscegnation. This was also sometimes the case among Aboriginal populations, as occurred in and around Montreal and in the outlying mission settlements of Mohawks in the late 17th and 18th centuries where there were more women than men. Conditions in some of the early mixed communities of Europeans and Aboriginals were generally poor. Disease continued to beat down Aboriginal numbers, which had psychological as well as physiological impacts. Cultural change was also underway: the Catholic priests were not necessarily receptive to the needs or motivations of women and, according to their creed, promoted a patriarchal model of relationships that robbed Aboriginal women of their traditional rights to divorce. As one historian has put it, “Women, still responsible for the heavy labour and often mistreated by husbands they could no longer divorce, began to despair. The need to love and procreate languished, along with the will to live, in these first generations torn between two worlds. ‘We rarely see the natives age,’ one governor remarked.”[footnote]Louise Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth Century Montreal, trans. Liana Vardi (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 7.[/footnote] Fertility and longevity, as this evidence suggests, suffered as did the women whose roles were being refashioned by others.

Farther inland, away from the intense oversight of the clergy in the St. Lawrence, Aboriginal-European relationships rapidly developed. Aboriginal communities treated these arrangements as confirmation of commercial and military alliances; Europeans, too, understood that they were more than convenient sexual liaisons. No Catholic priest would assent to a marriage in which one party was not Catholic, so these “marriages” were confirmed á là façon du pays (according to the custom of the country). And that façon or style was, of course, Aboriginal and, as one historian has said, it “converted trader strangers into relatives.”[footnote]Jennifer S. H. Brown, “Children of the Early Fur Trades,” in Childhood and Family in Canadian History, ed. Joy Parr (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982), 45.[/footnote] These were Aboriginal protocols and expectations with which the Europeans would necessarily comply. If and when it came time for the French fur trader to return to Canada and/or France, this was taken in stride by Aboriginal cultures that were permissive of divorce and the end of relationships. Moreover, the matrilineal tendencies of Aboriginal cultures meant that any children arising from the relationship would be raised by their Aboriginal kin, so there was no question of childhood abandonment through divorce.

Figure 5.8 Michilimackinac emerged as a leading centre of trade and cultural melding in the 18th century.

The challenge for Aboriginal peoples who viewed miscegnation as a means to secure resources, cooperation, and stability in their relationships with New France was the clergy. Missionaries were adamantly opposed to miscegnation and, of course, to any coupling outside of wedlock. They fulminated against Michilimackinac in particular, a hub of fur trade activity that they regarded as “a den of sin.”[footnote]Ibid., 46.[/footnote] In 1709 intermarriage was forbidden in the new fur trade centre of Fort Pontchartain du Détroit by order of the governor. These prohibitions were aimed first at the Euro-Canadian fur traders, but they had an impact on the Aboriginal partner community as well. Some Aboriginal women at Détroit and at the more Europeanized trading centres responded by accepting baptism from the clergy as a first step toward legitimizing the union. Their motivation was the rising fertility among Aboriginal women connected with fur trade society. Traditionally, the time between births was three or four years, but in mixed marriages the intervals were much shorter, no doubt due to both the expectations of the European partner and changes in diet and routine in fur trade post/fort society. The difference in birth rate was drastic; if a woman married at 18 in Aboriginal society, she might have four children by the time she turned 30; if she married a European, she might have as many as seven. Under the circumstances, a strategy of inclusion that involved accepting the sacraments from a missionary might serve to both protect the woman and preserve the status of her children within an increasingly blended fur trade society. (The experience of the children of these relationships is considered further in Chapters 8, 12, and 13.)

The effects of cultural adjustment were felt across most of North America by the early 18th century: wherever Aboriginal trading communities gathered in proximity to fur trade posts of the French (and, later, the Hudson’s Bay and North West Companies), the risks increased of exposure to disease and alcohol. The latter was heavily regulated and its sale was essentially illegal under the French regime, but it made its way into the trade equation anyhow. In every instance we see Aboriginal societies attempting to process the array of changes through well-established and largely effective cultural filters. Too many of the adjustments, however, came with a high cost. What appeared at first as opportunities consistent with familiar principles and goals too often became complicated and intractable.

Attributions

Figure 5.6 
Algonquin Couple by Poisend-Ivy is in the public domain.

Figure 5.7
Nisgaa mask by Jastrow is in the public domain.

Figure 5.8 
A plan of the Straits of St. Mary, and Michilimakinac by File Upload Bot (Magnus Manske) is used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

In 1519, the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés entered the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan, awed by its splendour. It was, he reported, “so big and so remarkable [as to be]…almost unbelievable, for the city is much larger than Granada and very much stronger…with many more people than Granada had when it was taken…[It] is as large as Seville or Cordova.” [footnote]Quoted in Ray Hutchison, Mark Gottdiener, Michael T. Ryan, The New Urban Sociology, 5th ed. (Toronto: Westview Press, 2014), 38. [/footnote] Cortés, however, was not an indifferent tourist eager to see the sights and then be on his way.

The Fall of Mexico

Despite their advantages, the Spanish did not defeat the Aztec coalition outright; rather they experienced a resounding defeat at the hands of the Aztecs in 1520 and were forced to flee the capital city. Those Spaniards who were captured were sacrificed at the pyramid of Huitzilopochtli; this occurred on the night of June 30-July 1, 1520, called La Noche Triste (the Sad Night) by the Spaniards. But this defeat was only a temporary setback for the Europeans, who received aid from two sources. The first of these was a massive Aboriginal army raised among the dissatisfied tribute-paying nations whose territories lay along the road from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan. The second was much more subtle.

In 1521, smallpox struck Tenochtitlan. The disease had been introduced into the city by a Spanish slave, left behind when the Europeans retreated. An Aztec account of events (compiled 30 to 40 years later in the Florentine Codex) portrays the magnitude of what followed:

After the Spaniards had left the city of Mexico, and before they had made any preparations to attack us again, there came amongst us a great sickness, a general plague. It began in the month of Tepeilhuitl. It raged amongst us, killing vast numbers of people. It covered many all over with sores: on the face, on the head, on the chest, everywhere. […] Nobody could move himself, nor turn his head, nor flex any part of his body. The sores were so terrible that the victims could not lie face down, nor on their backs, nor move from one side to the other. […] Many died of the disease, and many others died merely of hunger. They starved to death because there was no one left alive to care for them. […] The worst phase of this pestilence lasted sixty days, sixty days of horror … then it diminished, but it never stopped entirely…. And when this had happened, the Spanish returned.[footnote]Quoted in Ronald Wright, Stolen Continents: The “New World” Through Indian Eyes Since 1492 (Toronto: Viking, 1992), 45.[/footnote]

Those struck by the disease were too weak to move, and even if they survived, were in no condition to cultivate food. The inhabitants of the city were literally starving to death.

On August 21, 1521, the Spanish re-entered the city, overwhelmed its last defences, declared victory, and accepted the surrender of the remaining Aztec military. The conditions they encountered were horrifying. Bernal Díaz del Castillo (ca.1492-1584), a conquistadore and eyewitness, wrote some years later that the Spaniards “found the houses full of corpses, and some poor Mexicans still in [the houses] who could not move away…The city looked as though it had been ploughed up. The roots of any edible greenery had been dug out, boiled and eaten, and they had even cooked the bark of some of the trees.”[footnote]Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. John M. Cohen (London: Penguin, 1963), 407.[/footnote]

Smallpox was the real conquistadore in Mexico; Cortés and his small army simply mopped up. The collapse of the most powerful indigenous empire in North America in this manner was a foretaste of events that would follow in the territories that eventually became Canada and the United States.

Exotic Diseases

The Americas gave the rest of the world the basis of life: easily grown carbohydrates complemented with beans, squash and, of course, chocolate. The rest of the world gave the Americas death. Unchecked by extant immunities, diseases like smallpox, typhus, measles, bubonic plague, cholera, malaria, mumps, yellow fever, pertussis (whooping cough), and influenza were responsible for the destruction of large segments of the Caribs, Arawaks, Beothuks, and Meso-American empires. These diseases worked their way across the whole of the continent. The last of the great smallpox epidemics in Canada took place on the West Coast as recently as 1862-63, claiming around 20,000 lives. That sad episode is considered in Chapter 13, but it is a number worth pondering for a moment here: 20,000 dead in the space of less than a year represents a lot of communities utterly destroyed and huge numbers of corpses with no one to bury them. Generally, attacks of exotic diseases were worst for island-based societies like the Beothuk of Newfoundland and perhaps the Pentlatch of Vancouver Island insofar as their ability to retreat was limited by geography and the ocean.

These “new” diseases that Europeans brought to the Americas were dangerous both at home and abroad, but they were devastating in the New World, where they killed thousands. Europeans had built up varying levels of immunities over generations, which the people in the Americas had not. Europeans had had the advantage of being exposed to domestic animals, which put them at constant risk of some trans-species epidemic. (Even today we worry about “swine flu” or “bird flu,” both of which may be transmuted by contact with living animals or by eating improperly prepared meat.) More importantly, millennia of exposure to these illnesses produced physical immune responses, either through first exposure to the virus, by being passed across generations via mothers’ milk, or through “chance inoculation,” as was the case with milk maids who were constantly in contact with cowpox (a close relative of smallpox), which gave them a greater degree of immunity to the smallpox virus.

People in the Americas had none of these advantages. Because they had few domesticated animals they had little exposure to cross-species viruses, and large urban settlements like Tenochtitlan or crowded islands like those in the Caribbean were perfect environments for smallpox to thrive. Historians do not agree on the magnitude of the devastation — there is no way to know with absolute accuracy how many people were here before the virgin soil epidemics and no way to know how many perished — but there is consensus that the mortality rates were astonishingly high with no parallels in the history of humanity.

Scholars currently generally agree that there were approximately 50 million people living in the Western Hemisphere in 1492. Of that number, some 6 million were living in the Aztec Empire, another 8 million in the Mayan States, 11 million in what is now Brazil, and 12 million in the Inca Empire. What is now Canada is reckoned to have had a pre-contact population of about 500,000, although high estimates run to as many as 2 million. The impact of exotic epidemics on Meso-America and the Caribbean provides a benchmark for the effects on the population as a whole because the Spanish were in a position to observe some Aboriginal communities as they passed through the catastrophe: the lowest estimates are of an astonishing 90% death toll by the end of the 17th century. Warfare between the European invaders and the locals claimed many lives as well. Island populations fared especially badly, some disappearing entirely. On the mainland, however, it was not much better: the last three decades of the 16th century saw the population of present-day Mexico drop from 6 million to about 1 million people. According to some estimates, it has taken nearly 500 years for the Maya population to rebound to its late 15th century level. In what is now Brazil, the indigenous population declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 4 to 8 million to some 300,000. These three areas alone lost more than all of Europe during the Black Death.[footnote]The field of contact-era demography changed dramatically in the 1960s with the publication of Henry Dobyns’ 1966 study, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques With a New Hemispheric Estimate” in Current Anthropology 7 (1966): 395-416. Previous estimates of one million people north of the Rio Grande were suddenly increased to 9.8 – 12.25 million. Scholars have since revised this number upward and, sometimes, downward. Some of the key and relevant studies are: Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, NC: Greewood Press, 1972); William M Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); and Douglas H. Ubelaker, “North American Indian Population Size: Changing Perspectives,” in Disease and Demography in the Americas, eds. John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 1992). [/footnote]

Some scholars estimate that between 50% and 90% of the North American population died in the wake of the Spanish voyages. Spanish explorers like Ponce de León raced back and forth across the Florida peninsula with a small herd of pigs to feed his troops: his principal legacy was a massive die-off of indigenous humans. In 1618-1619, smallpox killed 90% of the Native Americans in the area of the Massachusetts Bay. Historians believe many Mohawk in present-day New York became infected after contact with children of Dutch traders at Fort Orange (Albany, New York) in 1634. Disease swept through Mohawk villages, reaching the Onondaga at Lake Ontario by 1636.

Many of these epidemics occurred in the proto-contact period, after contact but ahead of sustained relationships. In some cases, the viruses were passed along inland to people and communities who would, in essence, never see a European with their own eyes. In other words, there are no European eyewitness accounts. One can easily imagine this situation from the perspective of New France in the 1640s: no one from that colony had ventured farther west than Georgian Bay, and therefore they couldn’t know what was happening beyond Lake Huron. It is also possible that European fishing fleets introduced exotic diseases before Cartier, perhaps before Cabot. [footnote]Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe: Aspects of French-Amerindian Cultural Contact in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 1976), 98-99.[/footnote] If that is the case, one may speculate on how much of the natural landscape of North America was, indeed, already a land widowed for a century before resettlement began. Perhaps  bison herds grew to their enormous numbers because the number of humans preying on them had fallen. Perhaps the lushness of the eastern hardwood forests was due to human neglect.[footnote]On the topic of environmental changes coupled to population crises, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1983).[/footnote]

Smallpox in Canada

Smallpox may have been the chief culprit behind the disappearance of the St. Lawrence Iroquois. From 1535 to 1542, Cartier was an occasional guest in two significant centres: Stadacona and Hochelaga. By 1600 both were gone, as were the many smaller, related settlements that lined the north shore of the river. Historians thought, for many years, that  their Algonquin and/or Montagnais neighbours sent them packing or that the Five Nations League assimilated them. Archaeologists have traced St. Lawrence Iroquois women to Wendake (Huronia) after 1615 on the strength of their distinctive pottery; the absence of St. Lawrence Iroquoian men’s artifacts — specifically clay pipes — is taken as evidence that the Wendat killed the men and took the women  as captives.[footnote]Marcel Moussette, “A Universe under Strain: Amerindian Nations in North-Eastern North America in the 16th Century,” Post-Medieval Archaeology 43, issue 1 (2009): 39.[/footnote] It is possible, too, that climate change in the late 15th century affected the St. Lawrence peoples. On balance of evidence, however, the likelihood is greater that they were raided out of existence. Keep in mind that Hochelaga was surrounded by a triple palisade, which the Hochelagans certainly did not build for its looks. No explanation for the disappearing Iroquoians, however, is as convincing as the prospect of an epidemic, which would have scoured the valley clean (leaving it conveniently available for resettlement by the French).

Historians know this is a possibility because of what happened in Wendake (Huronia)  from 1634 to 1639. In those years smallpox laid waste to the towns of the Wendat Confederacy, claiming half the Wendat population. It is not known if the route taken by smallpox passed through Mohawk lands to Wendat fortress villages or whether it came via the early settlements at New France. Regardless, the high rate of fatalities caused breakdowns in Aboriginal societies and disrupted generational exchanges of culture. For the Wendat this meant that a rising cohort of young warriors were lost and so too were the elders whose knowledge of the culture and diplomacy were never more needed. A decade later Wendake (Huronia) was no more. It is entirely possible that a similar scenario befell the Stadaconans, the Hochelagans, and their neighbours a century earlier.

For Aboriginal communities, the disease epidemics caused, at the very least, confusion. The unfamiliar symptoms of smallpox and measles — fever, severe weakness, rashes, pustules — would have been frightening. Aboriginal healers responded to the exotic diseases as they did to any other injury or indigenous ailment (like poisoning, parasites, gallstones, or tumours): they understood them as the work of an aggrieved or malicious spirit and would convene a healing ceremony in the victim’s longhouse with relatives nearby for support. Of course, this response was akin to setting up a campfire in a gunpowder mill. Smallpox spreads principally through droplets expelled by breathing and coughing; offering an infected person spiritual support at close quarters was a fatal error.

The Wendat tried to determine what had changed in their world to cause the disease, and the answer was the French. In particular, many blamed the Jesuit missionaries they had hosted at the villages since the early 1630s (and on whose records we rely heavily for this information). The Wendat were partly right in determining that the epidemic came from the Europeans, although which ones we cannot say for sure in most cases. Despite the mistrust, some of the Wendat nevertheless turned to the Jesuits for spiritual answers, which resulted in villages fractured between traditionalists and converts.

The one response to the smallpox epidemic that could have helped stem the spread was quarantine, but the Wendat never attempted that. In their culture, illness was something through which people were marshalled by their shamans and their kin; leaving someone to die alone in fear and isolation would have been unforgivable. However, this laudable ethos resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying.

The Haudenosaunee response to the 1630s smallpox epidemic was to attack Wendake (Huronia), which made sense in the light of  the Mourning Wars that continued during these years. There was ample opportunity for attack as the Wendat were weakened by disease (and divided over the presence of the Jesuit missionaries). The Iroquois had economic goals in mind, too, as they hoped to improve their position in the fur trade economies of both the French and the Dutch colonies or at least act as spoilers who could undermine the success enjoyed by their rivals. Perhaps most importantly, it was common practice among the Iroquois (and many other peoples) to adopt into their communities captives taken in military campaigns, especially when a loss of population at home had left them low in numbers. Attacking the Wendat presented the opportunity for revenge, victory, profit, and adoptees to replace those Mohawk lost in the epidemic of 1634.

All of these factors would continue to play a role in Haudenosaunee military campaigns across the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes for the rest of the century. Epidemics had the effect of clearing important pieces from the chessboard. With the Wendat Confederacy out of the way by 1649, there was little to stop Haudenosaunee influence from spreading west. Within 30 years the Iroquois were on the (abandoned) doorstep of Cahokia; a generation later they were in control of the whole Ohio Valley. The so-called Beaver Wars were partly about controlling the flow of goods to the Europeans, but they were also driven by a separate Iroquoian agenda.

Figure 5.5 Expansion of Five Nations Territory during the Beaver Wars.

Epidemics continued to work their way across the continent. There is simply no way to know how far and how fast they spread. At least once a century there was another pandemic that shellacked Aboriginal populations. An epidemic in 1702 covered most of the Great Lakes region and another in 1736-38 arrived on the Plains, in what is now southern Manitoba. Disease, as is often the case, followed troops into the field during the Seven Years’ War: from the 1750s through the 1780s smallpox turned up like a fire that could not be fully extinguished. In 1781-82 smallpox appeared on the northern Plains, in this case originating in New Spain and carried north along the horse-trading network. In remarkably well-documented accounts from York Factory and Cumberland House in what is now northeast Saskatchewan, the HBC traders applied what little they knew of quarantine practices to isolate their Aboriginal partner populations from the infected. The Cumberland House Journal, written by William Tomison, indicates that inherited immunities protected the European population entirely while every single infected Aboriginal person died.

In the midst of the grim and tragic conditions that prevailed, there were a few acts of genuine compassion: “In their primitive and already crowded quarters at Cumberland House, Tomison’s Caucasian HBC servants, under his direction, took in the dying Indians, provided them with food, shelter and 24 h care (nearly a century in advance of the arrival of Grey Nuns in the northwest), and then, in most instances, dug their graves in deeply frozen ground in midwinter.” Some of the horrors are recorded in the Cumberland House Journal:

15th Tuesday. Late in the Evening a Distressed Woman and her Child came here, these are all that is alive out of one Tent, and has not yet been ailing. The News she brings is still more and more alarming … the small pox rageing amongst them with its greatest fury, and carrying all before it, they chiefly Die within the third or fourth Night, and those that survive after that time are left to be devoured by the wild beasts.[footnote]C. Stuart Houston and Stan Houston, “The First Smallpox Epidemic on the Canadian Plains: In the Fur-Traders’ Words,” Canadian Journal of Infectious Diseases 11, no.2 (March/April 2000): 112-115.[/footnote]

Aboriginal peoples on the Plains in particular were caught in the crosshairs of disease vectors. Ships from Britain entering Hudson Bay ensured that there was a regular supply of measles and influenza outbreaks heading west along the Saskatchewan River system; the York/Columbia Express (see Chapters 8 and 13) made it possible for infected Europeans to reach deep into the country and pass along their illnesses; likewise infectious diseases worked their way west from Montreal along trading corridors, with the two lines meeting in the north-central Plains. And then there were epidemics from New Spain that rushed north on horseback. Having acquired British or Canadian products for trade into the Aboriginal economy, the Cree, Assiniboine, and Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) were moving within a vector of death in which there was no question of “if,” only “when.”

Similarly, the 1780s Prairie epidemic may have collided in what is now British Columbia with smallpox introduced from the Pacific coast. Some historians and archaeologists believe that Pacific Northwest populations crumbled by as much as 90%. The numbers are uncertain because there are only abandoned village sites and conflicting oral accounts to rely on. More reliable is the evidence of the impact of smallpox in the 1830s on the Plains and its destruction of the Mandan-Hidatsa farm villages and trademarts on which the Iron Confederacy (Cree, Assiniboine, Anishinaabe) largely depended. Measles likely first came ashore on Haida Gwaii at about the same time, taking 30% or more of the population.[footnote]Roderic Beaujot and Don Kerr, Population Change in Canada, 2nd edition (Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2004), 22-3.[/footnote]

The mechanics of demographic change are important to this story. Like all societies, Aboriginal nations depend on growth by having more births and immigrants than deaths. Historical demographers believe that pre-contact mortality rates in Native societies were no better than they were for pre-contact Europeans: life expectancies were not especially high and infant mortality rates may well have been crippling. The difference between the two cultures, however, was that the fertility rate among Aboriginal people appears to have been lower than it was in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The lack of domesticated dairy animals meant that Aboriginal women likely nursed their children for two or more years, effectively dampening their fertility. Any sudden acceleration in mortality levels, then, could only be smoothed out over a longer period of time. And in the years of contact and increased conflict with neighbours, time was a commodity in short supply. Immigration from neighbouring or related First Nations — voluntary or involuntary — drew in new populations to some Aboriginal communities but it did so at the price of other societies, a zero-sum proposition for the aggregate indigenous population.

Once again, the Columbian Exchange seems to have been uneven. The only affliction that Europe suffered after contact and that is thought to have its origins in the Americas is syphilis. At its worst, syphilis is a dreadful, disfiguring, and miserable illness, not something to be taken lightly. Although the origin of syphilis has been widely debated and its exact origin is unknown, Europeans like Bartolomé de las Casas wrote that the disease was well known among the Amerindians of the Caribbean in the early 1500s. Skeletal remains of Native Americans from this period and earlier suggest that here, in contrast to other regions of the world, the disease had a congenital form. Lesions on the skull and other parts of the skeleton are a feature associated with the late stages of the disease. A second theory that has received a good deal of support in the 21st century is that syphilis existed in Europe prior to the voyages of Columbus, but that it was unrecognized until it became common and widely spread in the Italian Wars that followed the discovery of the New World. Certainly the timing is suspicious: the Americas are encountered in 1492 and syphilis spiralled out of Italy and across France in 1494. The conquistadore Cortés, the man whose expedition introduced smallpox into the heart of Mexico, was himself a victim of syphilis, which he contracted in Haiti.

Attributions

Figure 5.5
Iroquois Settlement on the north shore of Lake Ontario 1665-1701 by Junction416 is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

The diversity of languages along the Pacific Northwest coast presented a barrier to trade and diplomacy. These weren’t mere dialectal variants; the enormous gulf between languages was both difficult to cross and proudly guarded. Consequently, there arose a “trade jargon” — a dialect that exists only where there is trade to conduct — to use as a working language over an extensive region. How old it is remains unknown, but linguists have concluded that Chinook, or chinuk wawa, existed before Europeans arrived in the late 18th century. In what is now central and northern Ontario, the language traders adopted was Wendat, because it was in the Wendat villages that most of the trademarts were held.

Figure 5.2 The Chinook jargon combined elements of several northwest coast languages and grafted on English, French, Spanish, and even Russian elements as well. A trade dialect, some words are still used regularly in British Columbia. (Chinook Jargon handbook, 19th century.)

The use of either a hybrid trade jargon or the language of a dominant player in trade arose precisely because trade and alliances were critical parts of Aboriginal life. When Europeans showed up, Aboriginal people understood them principally in this context: as a source of goods and as possible allies or adversaries. Almost immediately, Aboriginal people threw themselves into the business of acquiring exotic trade goods from the “foreigners with hairy faces.” The consequences for societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were enormous.

For better or worse, there was no turning back from the connection forged between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the late 15th century. Goods, crops, mineral wealth, words, and medicines flowed east into Europe while livestock, humans, plants, ideas, and much more travelled west into the Americas. This flow and counterflow is known as the Columbian Exchange.[footnote]For a survey of this subject, see Jack Weatherford, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (NY: Fawcett, 1988).[/footnote]

Crops and Animals

Agricultural and horticultural civilizations in the Americas were capable of building up surpluses for local trade. Having baskets full of grain or root crops ready to exchange for flint or copper was simply part of everyday business. The lands from the Caribbean north offered products such as squash, beans, maize, tobacco, potatoes, chocolate, corn, and tomatoes, all of which were quickly taken up by Europeans. Peppers and vanilla were also soon embraced. Necessity explains European interest in some of these foods: early voyagers had typically eaten their way through their onboard stocks and were hungry, and hospitable locals fed them local specialities.

Figure 5.3 Maize was only one of many plants that would transform global diets and enable a massive increase in human and food-animal populations.

The short- and long-term consequences of introducing these exotic crops to the European diet cannot be understated. Early exploration missions into the western Atlantic were ostensibly interested in finding a passage to Asia to acquire spices and silks; instead they acquired foods that became staples in daily living. More than that, these plants revolutionized life in the Old World: potatoes replaced grains in many parts of Europe; manioc (or cassava), while not having a huge impact on European diets, underwrote a population explosion in Africa and thus contributed to the rise and longevity of the slave trade; maize and sweet potatoes spread to China; other crops from South America contributed to the change in diet as well. For Europe, Asia, and Africa these crops — especially the starchy plants — turbo-charged population growth. The diet of the poor improved, as did birth rates.

These new crops required new land use techniques, which meant that agricultural practices and land ownership patterns changed dramatically. The quantities of food that could be produced during this “Americanized” agricultural era increased at such a rate that Old World societies were able to escape the limits of subsistence agriculture and build more and larger cities on the strength of agricultural surpluses. As well, famines occurred less frequently.

The export of animals from the Americas to Europe was less notable.[footnote]Victoria Dickenson, “Cartier, Champlain, and the Fruits of the New World: Botanical Exchange in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” Scienta Canadensis: Canadian Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine 31, no.1-2 (2008): 27-47. [/footnote] The main export was the turkey; by 1524 the turkey reached the British Isles, and by 1558 it had become popular at banquets in England and in other parts of Europe. English settlers subsequently brought the domesticated turkey back to North America and interbred it with native wild turkeys in the 1600s.

The exported animal that had the greatest symbolic and visual impact on both Europe and the Americas was the lowly cochineal, a small insect that lives on cactus plants throughout the American southwest and Meso-America. Harvested in the thousands, the female conchineal’s remains yield a variety of bright red dyes. The red uniforms that became the trademark of British troops owe their colour to the cochineal.

Figure 5.4 Harvesting cochineal beetles with a deer tail. Attributed to José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, ca. 1777.

Food crops travelling the other way — from Europe — were of minimal interest to Aboriginal peoples, as they had all the food they needed. Indeed, many of the European foods that arrived in the Americas were used to sustain settler communities, not to trade with the Natives. Reassuringly familiar items like Old World grains (oats, wheat, barley), soft and hard tree fruits (peaches, plums, pears), wine grapes, and onions all made the move west, as did olives and tea in warmer locations.

However, plantation crops had significant impact on the Aboriginal population as they forced a change in diet by competing with other food crops. The cultivation of new crops also contributed to the enslavement of native people and the trade in Africans. These introduced crops included coffee, sugar, bananas, rice, and indigo — all suitable for large-scale production. None of these crops significantly improved Aboriginal diets. Indeed, the plantation crops were grown almost exclusively for consumption and further refinement in Europe.

The arrival of livestock, especially horses, in the Americas had very different implications. About 4,500 years after an early, Pleistocene-era horse went extinct, Spanish conquistadores brought their horses to North America to facilitate rapid movement across the land and lead cavalry charges. For the Aboriginal peoples at the time, the very idea of a human riding another animal was so fantastic that they could barely comprehend what they were seeing. But the awe in which horses were initially held did not last long. The rulers of New Spain had to prohibit Aboriginal people from riding horses, a sure sign that they wanted to do so.

Horses spread north from Mexico into what is now the American southwest, and by 1606 the Navajo were stealing them from Spanish settlements. Those horses that managed to escape from corrals found themselves in an almost ideal environment of grasslands extending from Texas to the Yukon. They went feral and multiplied rapidly.

For southwestern peoples, the horse became a commodity in their existing trade network. Horses were passed along in conservative numbers for generations until they reached the northern Plains in the 1730s. Around 1750, HBC traders observed Cree-Assiniboine riders with horses sporting Spanish brands.[footnote]Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 270.[/footnote] By that time the Andalusian Mustang breed imported by the Spanish — noteworthy for its short legs and barrel chest — was being bred into something more hardy by the Liksiyu of the Columbia Plateau in what is now northern Oregon. Despite having no experience with domestic animals, the Liksiyu were able to geld their animals and selectively breed them. The animals they produced were known by the name given the Liksiyu by the French: cayuse. By the early 19th century, horses had reached the British Columbian plateau; the local variant name for these horses, cayoosh, refers to a pony similar to the cayuse but bred by Aboriginal people to have stronger hindquarters suitable for the mountains.[footnote]Wikipedia: Cayuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cayuse_(horse)[/footnote]

The horse had a profound impact on Plains culture. People who had depended on dogs (sometimes in the hundreds) to haul their belongings, infants, and foodstuffs in travois could move much more easily on horseback.  A well-packed horse could carry more material goods than dogs could, and careful and stealthy herding of bison to jump sites like Head-Smashed-In was made redundant by death-defying charges on horseback. The Cree, Assiniboine, and other Plains communities expanded significantly, from fewer than 50 to more than 200 hundred per band, simply because the horse gave them the ability to move more goods and more people and to hunt bison over a wider range. Commerce benefited, too, from the ability of horses to carry trade farther, faster and in larger quantities. The horse also changed dramatically the nature of Plains warfare and raiding (often for more horses). In every respect, the horse was a transformational force in Plains cultures.

Aboriginal peoples deployed and valued horses in other ways as well. The Five Nations early identified the hauling capacity of horses and, according to historian Denys Delâge, the Mohawks and the Onondagas both asked the Dutch for horses to drag logs. He notes, too, that there was no mention of using the horses to haul ploughs, just to move stumps and other potentially useful obstacles closer to their refortified villages.[footnote]Denys Delâge, Bitter Feast: Amerindians and Europeans in Northeastern North America, 1600-64 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1993), 160.[/footnote] Horses in battle may have been effective in the grasslands of the Plains or the Columbia Basin but they would have been a liability in the hardwood forests and hill country of the Haudenosaunee.

The horse also revolutionized Aboriginal life in less obvious ways. Aboriginal people had to learn — from more experienced neighbours and from direct experience — how to care for their herds. The newly learned practices of animal husbandry were passed down from adults to children, and skills to manage horses were  mastered, including how best to use them as pack animals and how to ride them into battle or into a bison herd. Diets changed as a result of the horse revolution as well. Becoming more efficient bison hunters meant that some Plains nations threw themselves into that economy and, as one scholar puts it, “abandoned their ‘ecological safety nets’ … what they lost in diversity they made up for by increased trade with those peoples who had not abandoned the old ways.”[footnote]Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 309-12.[/footnote] The availability of horses also provided young men with more time to engage in warfare and “counting coup.”

More warfare — now augmented by guns — meant more fatalities among the men and, thus, more widows. It became possible and in some regards necessary for men to take multiple wives and for widows to seek security in polygynous relationships. Under these circumstances women’s condition changed radically: they went from living and being heavily overworked in a pedestrian culture in which they carried significant burdens long distances to one marked by greater chance of widowhood but, more generally, relative prosperity, less likelihood of famine, time to develop more artistic skills, and the opportunity to ride rather than walk [footnote]Ibid., 273.[/footnote]

Other livestock also were part of the Columbian Exchange, including cows and pigs. Cattle were unknown in the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans. Evidence suggests that the Vikings brought European cattle to Newfoundland, but when their colony disappeared, so did their cattle. The Portuguese attempted to introduce cattle to Sable Island in 1518 but that colonial effort flickered out quickly. Cartier’s settlement at Cap Rouge had its own little herd of two dozen, and the newcomer community ate them up within the year. The Acadiens enjoyed more success because their drained salt marshes provided cattle with the grazing and salt they required, and the farmers didn’t need to clear tracts of forest land.

On the whole, cattle in subsequent centuries fared little better. Without natural grazing patches in abundance, Canadien farmers viewed their Gascony and Breton cattle as something of an expensive luxury in the mid-17th century and their numbers never grew greatly in the age of New France. Better results would follow on the West Coast. Descendants of a herd brought to Central America in 1519 by Cortés were shipped north from Alto California to Yuquot (Friendly Cove) in 1790, in the very heart of Nuu-chah-nulth territory. In the early 19th century, fur traders drove Californian cattle along the Brigade Trails into the Interior where herds thrived on bunchgrass. By 1848 there were said to be 5,000 head at Fort Kamloops alone and, with the help of horses, they made short work of the bunchgrass environment in a matter of decades.[footnote]Ian MacLachlan, “The Historical Development of Cattle in Canada” (unpublished manuscript, 1996, minor edits 2006), 2-5. https://www.uleth.ca/dspace/bitstream/handle/10133/303/Historical_cattle_Canada.pdf?sequence=3 .[/footnote]

Aboriginal people had few opportunities and few incentives to experiment in cattle-raising, but there are a few notable exceptions. The herds introduced to the Nicola, Thompson, and Okanagan Valleys in the 19th century were typically tended by Aboriginal cowboys. Also, the Acadien-Mi’kmaq community raised dairy cattle, as did Loyalist Mohawk settlements in what is now southern Ontario. In the late 19th century, the disappearance of bison herds made cattle ranching more appealing. Overall, this introduced species neither displaced Aboriginal peoples in Canada, nor did it especially excite them.

Pigs were another new species in the Americas. The Spanish explorer Hernándo de Soto brought 13 pigs to the Florida mainland. As well, Sable Island was, once more, a testing ground and it hosted the first piggeries in what became Canada. In 1598 Marquis de La Roche-Mesgouez introduced a small herd whose fate is unknown.

Pigs are an almost indestructible species and their numbers grew wherever they were introduced. Settlers liked them because their meat could be preserved in several different ways and they could eat almost every part of them. Aboriginal peoples, however, were less enthused about the introduction of pigs because they easily invaded crops. Fences offer little protection against pigs, and they regularly found their way into horticultural areas. On Vancouver Island, for example, pigs destroyed camas pastures and thus threatened Aboriginal survival.

Other animals that were imported from Europe to Canada included sheep, chickens, cats, rats and, evidently, honey bees. Evidence that any of these were especially sought after by Aboriginal peoples in the North is difficult to find. On the whole, introduced foodstuffs did far less for Aboriginal peoples than the exported plants did for the rest of the world. Native peoples found that their wild meats and plants, the products of their own gardens, and the protein that could be harvested from lakes, rivers, and oceans were infinitely preferable to the new foods brought in.

Food, however, is one of the most subtle elements in the language of imperialism. Historian Beverly Soloway has explored the ways in which the arrival of the Hudson’s Bay Company in the far north in the 17th century and the introduction of a British planted-food model disrupted (and, in many cases, eradicated) indigenous plant foodways of the Cree (Mushkegowuck) in the Canadian subarctic. The consequence of this horticultural imperialism, Soloway argues, continues into the present day in the form of poorer diets and food insecurity, an indication that the Columbian Exchange is far from finished.[footnote]The subject of “Transforming Indigenous Foodways” is investigated at ActiveHistory.ca where you can listen to Beverly Soloway’s lecture on “‘mus co shee’: Indigenous Plant Foods and Horticultural Imperialism in the Canadian Sub-Arctic.[/footnote]

Attributions

Figure 5.2 
Gill’s Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon by Joe Mabel is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Figure 5.3
Maize by Editor at Large is in the public domain.

Figure 5.4 
Indian Collecting Cochineal with a Deer Tail by Xocoyotzin is in the public domain.

Figure 4.9 Iroquoian villages, including those in Wendake (a.k.a Huronia), were complex communities including large populations, longhouses, and defensive palisades, as well as farming operations. This is the interior of a reconstructed Huron-Wendat longhouse.

One of the distinguishing features of Aboriginal cultures in much of what is now Canada is egalitarianism. This is a broad generalization but one that applies as much to hunter-gatherer societies as it does to sedentary agricultural societies. It was rare for a nominal leader in Aboriginal communities to be able to dictate direction or policy. Even when councils, which dominated the longhouse societies, reached decisions, these were not always binding on all parties. In Iroquoian societies in particular, efforts were made to develop consensus arising from discussion, but the record of the Five Nations, for example, shows many instances where one or more member nations went their own way. Individuals had similar options. In hunter-gatherer societies, leadership was as much a recognition of proven success in the field as it was of personality or birth. These cultural traits were not always understood or appreciated by Europeans. What might appear to outsiders as a political union was very often an arrangement subject to regular renewal and rejuvenation. The newcomers were accustomed to hierarchical societies headed by nobles and high clergy; not surprisingly they looked for parallels in Aboriginal communities and often mistook very different arrangements for “chiefdoms,” if not kingdoms. Errors such as these led the Europeans to assume, in some instances, that they could make treaties and pacts once and for all. Aboriginal peoples, however, put an emphasis on renewal and reaffirmation: they expected gifts and declarations of loyalty from one another in commerce and diplomacy and expected no less from their European trading partners.

Europeans in an Aboriginal Marketplace

Some of these features were immediately obvious to sharp-eyed French leaders like Champlain, but not to others. Certainly European traders needed to take pains to conduct themselves according to local standards of commerce and not those of France, Holland, or England. Making that adjustment was often the surest course to success and profits, so there was a powerful incentive for the Europeans to get it right. And sometimes they did.

In many tellings of the history of New France, Champlain appears to engage the largest Iroquoian-speaking nation north of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes in a trade and military alliance. In point of fact, the Wendat approached the French. The first few years of fur trading along the St. Lawrence involved the Algonquin and the Innu in particular. Both were acting as middlemen in their own right, trading goods that had been procured first by their neighbours, generally farther north. That middleman role was taken over by the more powerful Wendat.

The French placed a premium on furs that had seen some use. Contact and wear removes the guard hairs from the pelt and leaves the fur glossier and richer looking — something that the French market preferred. This single fact gave shape to the fur trade. If the French had been interested only in freshly harvested furs, their influence would have spread much more slowly. One region would be denuded of animals, then another and another, sequentially. But the demand for used furs extended the trade out in search of stockpiles already held by Aboriginal families, bands, and communities. It created a series of funnels of trade that passed pelts out of one village or camp and into another and then another, coalescing finally in the hands of the ultimate middleman. From 1610 to 1649, that role was filled by the Wendat Confederacy.

The Wendat

Wendat commerce has to be understood within its cultural context. The accumulation of goods was important and the Wendat were canny traders capable of manipulating supply and demand as needed so as to inflate prices from one season to the next. But wealth was acquired so that it could be given away: acquisitiveness and hoarding for personal use were frowned upon. Generosity and lavish gift-giving was a route to status in many Aboriginal societies and the Wendat were, in this respect, no exception. Although they traded for functional goods — materials that could be used on a day-to-day basis — they also sought luxury items and exotic goods that carried special weight as gifts. So long as the material needs of the Wendat household were met, trade would focus on goods that had the potential to elevate the standing of individuals or their families.

This quality, too, was an asset as far as trade with the French was concerned. The novelty value of French goods could instantly be applied to the social competition that went on in Wendat longhouses. What was of still greater benefit to the French in their quest for large quantities of furs was the simple fact that the Wendat were sedentary. Their longhouses functioned as warehouses, too. Unlike the much more mobile and nomadic northern peoples, the Wendat could stockpile great amounts of furs and other goods in a way that no one else north of Lake Ontario could.

The 1609 Wendat visit to Champlain’s habitation had two purposes. First, it was meant to engage the Innu (Montagnais) in a trade relationship that was already in place between the Wendat and the Algonquin nations. Second, the Wendat wanted to scout out the newcomers whose trade goods were already finding their way into Wendake (a.k.a. Huronia). To confirm the new partnership that now included not only the Innu but the French, the Aboriginal allies proposed a raid on the Mohawk village of Ticonderoga. Champlain agreed to participate, an important step toward a long-term alliance with the Wendat-Algonquin-Innu but also the initiation of a long history of enmity between the Haudenosaunee and the French.

The Haudenosaunee (as discussed in Chapter 5) were engaged in an effectively endless series of raids and counter raids called the “Mourning Wars.” In Iroquoian societies the murder of a member was to be avenged by family; likewise, the murderer was to be protected by their family. Hostages were regularly taken, some of whom might be adopted into their host community as replacements for those who had died or had themselves been captured by the opposition. Captives in warfare typically faced highly structured public torture rituals aimed at testing their courage and endurance. In the absence of a police force and/or penal system these structures gave expression to Iroquoian understandings of justice and personal responsibility. Having committed to the northern alliance, Champlain had — probably unwittingly — inserted the French into generations of revenge killings and assaults.

That was not his goal, of course. His purpose was to gain access to a lucrative supply of furs and in this he was successful. Wendake (Huronia) was 700 km of river route away from Montreal but it produced approximately half of all the furs traded in the 1620s and a substantial share even after the smallpox epidemics of the 1630s and the intensification of war with the Haudenosaunee in the 1640s. For reasons discussed in Chapter 5, Wendake (Huronia) failed to recover from the epidemics and was increasingly unable to defend itself from Haudenosaunee raids. The Confederacy was dispersed in 1649.

By that time the French had established direct contact with many of the northern peoples and had trained dozens of men — coureur de bois — for the task of long-distance canoeing and North American commercial protocols. The loss of Wendake (Huronia) was, however, a significant blow to their Aboriginal neighbours who depended on Wendat corn in particular. The French, as an agricultural society, were able to absorb some of the demand for agricultural produce, a fact that would enhance their position in the fur trade after 1663.

A final note on this phase of the colonial fur trade underlines the very important fact that the fur trade was utterly dependent on the engagement of Aboriginal partners. As the 1620s opened, there were fewer than 70 French residents in Canada. Until the 1670s this would not change greatly. Canada at this stage produced little of its own food, contained a handful of biological families, and the fur trade was its entire raison d’être.

Attributions

Figure 4.9
Reconstructed Huron Wendat long house by Neufast is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

The first 50 or 60 years of French colonial activity in Acadia and the St. Lawrence were challenging but also quite lucrative. There was a degree of independence from the Crown that allowed colonial leaders, entrepreneurs, and even common settler/traders a significant amount of latitude, for good or ill. This was, too, a period in which Aboriginal neighbours and hosts were trying to decide whether they were better off with or without the Europeans. The Five Nations decided early on that the French were unwelcome, and this made the colonial enterprise all the more tenuous.

It is a reflection of these conditions that the colonial phase from around 1600 to 1663 has long been described as the “heroic age of New France.” In terms of building a patriotic myth around the French presence, this has been a useful storyline. It overlooks the fact that French heroism would have counted for little had it not been for the aligned interests of Aboriginal neighbours and hosts. Historians in a post-colonial era tend to eschew the idea that there was much “heroic” to an invading band of merchants whose presence resulted mainly in cultural and demographic losses among the Aborginal peoples.  Chapter 5 accordingly looks at aspects of the Aboriginal history of this period. It is, however, worth considering the circumstances facing the French interlopers in this period and how they met the challenge. No one more represents the pre-royal phase than Champlain.

Samuel de Champlain

Samuel de Champlain (1574-1635) deservedly attracts attention. His early years remain shrouded in mystery — although he was almost certainly born a Huguenot at the end of the Wars of Religion. He may have travelled with Spanish ships to Brazil and Mexico, but the evidence is uncertain. By the time he was in his 30s he was regarded as an accomplished geographer and draughtsman and was receiving a royal pension which, along with an inheritance, allowed him to pursue his interests. It was as a cartographer, it seems, that he was first sent across the North Atlantic by France. There, he quickly acquired additional responsibilities. The first winters spent by the French in Acadia and Quebec were very hard. The weather was cold beyond the expectations and experiences of the French and, 70 years after Cartier’s ordeal, scurvy continued to plague them. Champlain, however, proved to be indefatigably curious, talented, and resourceful.

Faced with another long and depressing winter in Acadia in 1606, Champlain established l’Ordre de Bon Temps (the Order of Good Cheer), the principal objective of which was defeating the mid-winter blues with regular feasts, performances of plays, and other entertainment. In his late 30s, if not his early 40s, he joined in on regional wars as a leader and a combatant. On separate occasions he took an arrow in the neck and two in the knee. Around the same time he sought to impress his Wendat and Algonquin friends by shooting the rapids at Lachine in a canoe, which he accomplished successfully. He travelled wherever and whenever the opportunity presented itself and he drew beautiful maps of the lands he visited. He listened well to Aboriginal companions and noted that his informants claimed that Hudson Bay was not the Pacific Ocean but a gulf coming off the Atlantic — many years before the British proved to the satisfaction of Europe that this was the case.

His goals were materialistic and his moral code was flexible when it came to finding wealth in Canada. Indeed, he married a 12-year-old, Hélène Boullé, in Paris not for love or even for companionship, but for the dowry she brought with her. Their marriage was not consummated until Hélène was 14 (if it ever was). She never bore any children, so Champlain adopted three daughters from the Algonquin nation in the late 1620s.

Champlain died in Quebec in 1635 at the age of 59 or 60 years, a devout convert to Catholicism who spent a lifetime skillfully walking the tightrope between sectarian division in his native France. After 30 years off and on in the colonies, Champlain had done much to shape the expectations of France and relations with Aboriginal peoples, both of which had enormous implications and a very long legacy.[footnote]An excellent source on Samuel de Champlain can be found in: Marcel Trudel, “Samuel de Champlain,” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/champlain_samuel_de_1E.html .[/footnote]

Figure 4.10  An example of Champlain’s cartographic skills, 1612.

Attributions

Figure 4.10
Samuel de Champlain Carte geographique de la Nouvelle France by David.Monniaux is in the public domain.

From the outset, France (like the Netherlands) wanted commercial outposts, not permanent settlement. Agricultural efforts in Acadia and the St. Lawrence would take decades of effort and setbacks to take root, and this model of colonization never spread much west or south of Montreal.

The Canadien heartland of farms was itself made possible by the disappearance of the Laurentian Iroquois some time between Cartier and the arrival of Samuel de Champlain in 1608. Without firing a single arquebus the French inherited “widowed lands” from the indigenous peoples. They were able to fit into the economic niche of food producers that had previously been filled by the Stadaconans, Hochelagans, and — after 1649 — the Wendat. Elsewhere, the French simply lacked the wherewithal to push anyone around, let alone off their land, although they might do so with the assistance of Aboriginal force (which always brought its own agenda).

Large-scale immigration was also held back by the peculiar economic conditions of northern New France. Fur trading was the biggest earner in Canada, so adult males regularly left their farms around ploughing and planting time to voyage west and north in search of trading partners. This slowed the progress of a farming frontier, even in regions where the French did not have to compete for land. (By contrast, in the English colonies to the south, especially in the plantation colonies, there was almost immediate and long-running competition with Aboriginal neighbours over land for farming.) Early Canadiens were not so land-hungry — not because they were more restrained or enlightened in their respect for Aboriginal property; their numbers were limited and they needed Aboriginal peoples as trade partners. This relationship almost immediately embroiled the French in local conflicts in which they were obliged to participate or risk losing trade.

In sum, the French colonial model created dangers that were not helpful in attracting settlers. The long battle with the Haudenosaunee Five Nations that ran almost uninterrupted from 1609 to 1701 is the best example of this limitation. Due to their small population, their reliance on trade, and their half-hearted commitment to agriculture (and thus land), French colonists needed to develop strong ties to Aboriginal communities. In part due to the assiduous cultivation of those ties for trade and security purposes, the French were eventually able to exert influence over a large territory within North America.

Spanish colonies might have enjoyed powerful local authority and so might the English (as we’ll see in Chapters 6 and 7) but France remained very much in charge of New France. This was driven by the economic priorities of mercantilism, which was an economic doctrine stating that a nation’s power depended on the value of its exports. Under mercantilism (as will be explored in Chapter 7), nations sought to establish colonies to produce goods for use in the home country as a chief means of acquiring economic strength. Essentially, mercantilists believed that colonies existed not for the benefit of settlers, but for the benefit of the home country. For France and Britain, the ultimate goal of mercantilism was to run trade surpluses — to haul in valuable materials from North America and use them to increase export trade in Europe — so that gold and silver would pour into Paris and London. The government took its share through duties and taxes; the remainder went to merchants. In France in particular, the Crown got much richer, as did the traders based in the coastal port cities (of which both Cartier and Champlain were representative). The Crown and the regional bourgeoisie became unlikely allies. The French regime spent a fortune on naval supplies and shipping — as did the British government — and these navies served not only to protect the colonial investments but to threaten the colonies of the other empires as well. They also played a role in relations with the Aboriginal host communities, as Chapter 5 shows.

 Suggested Readings

1. Donovan, Kenneth. “Slaves and their Owners in Île Royale, 1713-1760.” Acadiensis XXV, no.1 (Autumn 1995): 3-32.
2. Hynes, Gisa. “Some Aspects of the Demography of Port Royal, 1650-1755.” Acadiensis III, no.1 (Autumn 1973): 3-17.
3. Lachance, André and Sylvie Savoie. “Violence, Marriage, and Family Honour: Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Marriage in New France.” Essays in the History of Canadian Law, Volume V: Crime and Criminal Justice. Edited by Jim Phillips, Tina Loo, and Susan Lewthwaite, 143-173. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.

Figure 4.15 Vincenzo Coronelli’s 1688 map of the Pays d’en Haut.

The Wendat Confederacy collapsed in 1649 following tragic defeats by both smallpox and the Haudenosaunee. The loss of their favoured middlemen in the fur trade, however, enabled French voyageurs to push beyond the boundaries of Wendake (Huronia) and into the upper Great Lakes. In 1659, Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, who would go on to lead the British charge into Hudson Bay, were the first French traders to reach the western shore of Lake Superior. The 1670s and 1680s saw missionary and exploratory activity expand in the region — known as the Pays d’en Haut. Still searching for a route to the Pacific, voyageurs were initially hopeful about the Mississippi system. They soon realized that they were to be disappointed. Nevertheless, in 1699 French territorial claims in North America expanded dramatically when Louisiana was founded in the basin of the Mississippi. Until 1713, the French laid claim to a trading network that extended from Plaisance through Acadia and Canada, as far north as Hudson Bay, all around the Great Lakes and down to the Gulf of Mexico. This network was maintained through a vast system of fortifications.

Figure 4.16 The French established posts along the Mississippi like this one, Arkansas Post (ca. 1689).

Louisiana and the Ohio

Louisiana was the southernmost administrative district of New France and was under French control from 1682 to 1763 and 1800 to 1803. It originally covered a far-reaching territory that included most of the drainage basin of the Mississippi River and stretched from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Appalachian Mountains to the Rocky Mountains. The relative success of the New France project rested in the ability of the French to hem in their competition and, in this respect, Lousiana and the Ohio were as integral to the success of Canada, as Canada was to that of the Pays d’en Haut and the Mississippi. By means of careful diplomacy among the Aboriginal nations of the Ohio Valley and the lands on either side of the Mississippi, the French were able to contain the British settlements to the east of the Appalachian Mountains until the mid-18th century. As well, they were able to exploit Aboriginal dissatisfaction with British colonists even within the English colonies. This was the case in South Carolina in the early 1700s when Aboriginal frustration with English trade partners and colonists made Louisiana an attractive alternative source of goods. In this way the French were able to work through third parties to hinder the survival of their English foes. The French pursued a virtually identical strategy in the south where they competed effectively against the Spanish. French rifles and other goods spread out across east Texas and as far west as New Mexico, undermining what loyalty and/or deference the Spanish were able to command among their own Aboriginal allies.

The bridges between Louisiana and Canada were the Ohio and Illinois Valleys. Inaccessible to the French until the 1700s, the territory had changed hands between Aboriginal groups during the period called the “Beaver Wars.” For reasons that go well beyond an interest in gaining dominance in the beaver-pelt trade, the Five Nations League expanded westward, raiding for personnel and subduing potentially dangerous neighbours. In the process, they drove off much of the indigenous population of the Ohio Valley, unintentionally making it more attractive to two groups: Aboriginal peoples being squeezed out of the region east of Appalachia (across which British-American settlement was spilling) and Euro-North Americans who saw opportunities and dangers in a vacuum. French efforts were the most substantial once peace had been won with the Haudenosaunee.

Figure 4.17 A map of New France, ca. 1713.

By means of gift diplomacy the French hoped to guarantee Aboriginal support in the region and use it to keep the British out of the Ohio. From the Ottawa Valley south to Louisiana, New France had a small population. It relied heavily on friendly contacts with local Aboriginal communities. Because the French settlers lacked the appetite for land that characterized English settlement, and because they relied exclusively on Aboriginal peoples to supply them with fur at trading posts, the French built a complex series of military, commercial, personal, and diplomatic connections. These became the most enduring alliances between the French and the Aboriginal American community.

Figure 4.18 Fort de Chartres in what is now southwestern Illinois. The fort was originally built in 1720 and then rebuilt in stone in the 1750s. It fell into ruins and was restored as a heritage site in the 20th century. This bastion gives a sense of the investment made by Canadien and Louisianan authorities.

In 1682, the French explorer de La Salle named the region Louisiana to honour France’s King Louis XIV. The first permanent settlement, Fort Maurepas, was founded in 1699 near the mouth of the Mississippi by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, a French military officer from Canada. An inland trading post followed in 1714 in the territories of the Natchitoches, which served as an interface between French, Aboriginal, and Spanish/Mexican commercial interests in Texas. Soon cotton plantations began to appear.

The South and West in New France

For historians of Canada, Louisiana is an opportunity to test certain assumptions. Individuals like d’Iberville connect the histories of the two regions, so they were not entirely isolates. News of practices in one could reach the other, while at the same time, distinctive and seemingly contradictory trends could be found. The seigneurial system never took root in Louisiana (nor was it applied to Île Royale or with any rigour to Acadia); instead, individual land title was made available. Social relations were different as well. Colbert introduced the Code Noir in 1685 to regulate slavery and establish racialized boundaries in the French sugar colonies; its tenets were subsequently transferred to Louisiana to support slavery in the cotton plantation economy after about 1717. Slavery was, to be sure, found in Canada although it was more likely to involve Aboriginal slaves than Africans and more likely to be domestic in character than forced agricultural labour. But what is perhaps more noteworthy is that while interracial marriage and miscegnation occurred everywhere else in New France, in Louisiana’s plantation districts it was officially prohibited. Spread thinly everywhere but the St. Lawrence, Acadia, and New Orleans, the French coureur de bois readily married into local Aboriginal communities. This was, of course, a diplomatic strategy as well as a biological/sentimental one: working in such small numbers, the French outside of the main population centres had to make an effort to be on good terms with their hosts. To turn this comparison on its head, why was slavery not the norm in Canada? The Canadien economy was simply not one that could benefit from or sustain an army of forced labour.

In some respects there were peculiar similarities between the colonies. Where Canada and its hinterland had a trade in beaver pelts and moose hides, Louisiana’s chief export for many years was deer skins. The Choctaw nation was the main supplier, and they were as closely aligned with Louisiana as the Wendat had been with Canada. Another parallel was the rivalry between the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, the latter being allies and trading partners of the English in South Carolina. Both Aboriginal groups found themselves trading their captive enemies to their respective European allies as slaves.[footnote]Allan Greer, The People of New France (Toronto: U of T Press, 2000), 105-108.[/footnote] As the French discovered, to their chagrin, accepting a slave-gift from one allied nation meant that the slave’s nation of origin was ruled out as another ally. In this way, Aboriginal slave exchanges purposefully set limits on whom the French could engage with diplomatically.[footnote]Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 222.[/footnote] This was particularly the case in the Pays d’en Haut.

Distances between the colonies within New France were so great that each region enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy. Although New France as a whole was governed out of Quebec City and, later, Montreal, Louisiana was administered principally from Mobile, then Biloxi, and finally from New Orleans. Upper Louisiana extended into the Illinois territory and was a zone in which New Orleans’ authority competed with Montreal’s. Throughout much of Louisiana and the Pays d’en Haut, administrative control was more theoretical than practical; French settlers and farmers soon found themselves integrated less into a European system and more into an Aboriginal world.

Attributions

Figure 4.15
Vincenzo Coronelli Partie occidentale du Canada 1688 by Jeangagnon is in the public domain.

Figure 4.16
ArkansasPost1689 by Samuel Peoples  is in the public domain.

Figure 4.17
Nouvelle-France map-en by Pinpin is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Figure 4.18
Ft de Chartres-bastion-1 by Kbh3rd is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

Spain was clearly the force with which to contend when it came to the European race across the Atlantic, although perspective is important in making this statement. Western Europe and especially northwestern Europe constituted the outermost fringe of what its people regarded as the “civilized world.” The Holy Lands, the Italian States, Constantinople, India, and even China were far more advanced technologically and economically. While the Europeans were keen to access the spice and silk stores of Asia, Asia was in no special hurry to build trade links with England, the Netherlands, or Portugal. Put simply, there was not much that western Europe had that Asia or even the eastern Mediterranean wanted. Relatively poor, often pummelled by wars, and riven by religious differences, western Europe was both highly motivated by the prospect of potential riches in the Americas and, at the same time, accustomed to competing bitterly with rivals from other polities.

The earliest expeditions from Spain inched their way out of the lower Gulf of Mexico into the Mississippi basin and across Florida before refocusing on the western flank of South America and the building of New Spain. Portugal’s focus remained on South America and the west coast of Africa. The lands north of Florida were largely open for probes sent out from England, the Low Countries, France, and even Scandinavia.

The model of imperialism that the Iberians introduced took advantage of existing populations and grafted onto it the absolutist, heavily militarized, and severely Catholic features of the European homelands. Many of the Aboriginal societies they encountered were hierarchical and some were strongly influenced by priesthoods of their own. These coincidences played to Iberian strengths and the early colonies did not require large numbers of emigrants from Europe to create working societies anew. In this respect, in most of Iberian America the Spanish and Portuguese were not “colonists” in the biological sense so much as they were managers and rulers.

This model influenced the northwestern Europeans but it was one that they could not follow utterly. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the English relied on emigration to (re)populate the territories they claimed. France was reluctant to do the same and it lacked the resources and the will to build much more than a replacement society along the St. Lawrence and a few outposts in Acadia and Louisiana.  Certainly there are echoes of the Iberian experience in the alliance between the French and the Wendat, but there were no singular Aboriginal civilizations of the stature of Mexico, which the French might dominate, let alone enslave.  In short, “colonization” played out differently across the Western Hemisphere: it had different qualities and moved at varying speeds toward distinctive goals.

Set side by side, the French and the English colonies present substantial contrasts. They were, of course, heavily influenced by geography. For the French, the great river and the lakes at its head were a pathway into the interior of the continent. Within slightly more than a century the French had stitched together a chain of alliances and micro-settlements all the way from Placentia to New Orleans. The story of New France is the subject of the next chapter.

 Suggested Readings

1. Axtell, James. “Trading at the Water’s Edge.” In After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America, edited by James Axtell, 145-181. New York: OUP, 1988.
2. Havard, Gilles and Cécile Vidal. “Making New France New Again.” Common-Place 7, no.4 (July 2007). http://www.common-place.org/vol-07/no-04/harvard/
3. Loewen, Brad and Vincent Delmas. “The Basques in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Adjacent Shores.” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 36, issue 2 (2012): 213-66.
4. McGhee, Robert. “Vikings and Arctic Farmers: The Norse Atlantic Saga.” In The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
5. Vigneras, L-A. “The Cape Breton landfall in North America: 1494 or 1497? Note on a letter from John Day.” Canadian Historical Review 38, no.3 (1957): 219-28.

Attributions

This chapter contains material taken from History in the Making: A History of the People of the United States of America to 1877  by Catherine Locks, Sarah K. Mergel, Pamela Thomas Roseman, and Tamara Spike. It is used under a CC-BY-SA-3.0 US licence.

This chapter contains material taken from the Wikibooks page, “US History/European History,” and is used under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license.

The Spanish literally struck gold in the Caribbean and in the Aztec Empire. The torrent of gold and silver plunder flowing into western Europe changed the continent overnight. Until the 16th century, Iceland, the British Isles, and northwestern France were perceived by the commercial and political leaders of the great Eurasian capitals as the farthest reaches of trade networks, backwaters of economic stagnation with little to offer the rest of the world. In terms of wealth measured in spices or precious metals, northwestern Europe was regarded as impoverished and wanting. Stories of Spanish coups (both political and economic, not to mention territorial) in the Americas did two things: they invigorated the economies of Europe and fuelled interest in further imperial ventures. What if similar riches existed in the northern continent?

French Expeditions

French imperial activity in the New World got off to a poor start. The earliest official French expeditions to North America, and particularly to Canada, were largely forgettable ventures. The first voyages, led by Jacques Cartier between 1534 and 1542, made contact with local peoples, including the Mi’kmaq, Montagnais, Algonquin, and the St. Lawrence Iroquois. Cartier’s mission followed Pizarro’s by only two years. Significantly, Cartier was instructed to “discover certain islands and lands where it is said that a great quantity of gold and other precious things are to be found.” [footnote]Quoted in Thomas McIlwraith and Edward Muller, North America: The Historical Geography of a Changing Continent (Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 67.[/footnote] Clearly the French Crown would have liked nothing better than to copy the success of the Spanish. These early voyages, however, established that the area contained no bounty of natural or human resources that was valuable to the French at the time. There was, simply put, no gold.

What Cartier came across instead was a region in economic transition. French fishermen had already scouted out North America at least as far as the Gaspé Peninsula, the south shore of the St. Lawrence River at its entrance to the Gulf. When Cartier’s first expedition rounded the northern tip of Newfoundland and arrived in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, he found the local people eager to trade with him and clearly aware of a French interest in obtaining furs. This was a sure sign that there had already been contact between Aboriginal peoples and European fishing/whaling fleets, and that some of the contact relationship involved commerce. The Algonquin people Cartier encountered indicated that they preferred some European goods over others, a sign that they were becoming knowledgable about the newcomers.

Cartier made contact with St. Lawrence Iroquois on the Gaspé, where he offended his hosts by erecting a large cross bearing the words, “Long Live the King of France.” A year later he returned, venturing into the St. Lawrence River and moving westward. At this time many small villages dotted the north shore of the river in particular, especially near Île d’Orléans. Cartier’s team visited the largest village, which he regarded as the “capital” of the St. Lawrence Iroquois, near the site of present-day Quebec City. This was Stadacona and its chief was Donnacona.

Figure 3.8 Postage stamps became an effective way of transmitting images and understandings of the past, starting in the late 19th century. Critics complained that this 1934 stamp made Cartier look surprised to find land.

Cartier’s relationship with the St. Lawrence Iroquois, and especially with Donnacona, was not especially civil. On his first visit, Cartier attempted to abduct several of the Stadaconans, believing that they would make excellent proof of the success of his voyage. He even tried to abduct Donnacona himself, but settled for his two sons, Taignoagny and Domagaya. They travelled back to France where they spent the winter before returning to Stadacona in the summer of 1535 as part of Cartier’s second voyage.

It was during this second tour that Cartier travelled farther upriver to another large settlement, Hochelaga. Unlike Stadacona, Hochelaga was fortified with a triple palisade of wood. The town contained about 3,000 people and was surrounded by cornfields. Its location remains a source of debate, but there is general agreement that it was near the foot of what Cartier called Mount Royal (that is, Montreal), though on which side is uncertain. A drawing made subsequently of Hochelaga by a European artist working from Cartier’s descriptions suggests an Italianate order, which most likely was the artist’s invention. Nevertheless, its 50 longhouses (each perhaps 30 metres deep) are represented. Hochelaga would have been an important meeting place at the confluence of the Ottawa/Outaouais River, the Rivière des Prairies, and the St. Lawrence, abutting Algonquin territory to the north, Mohawk lands to the south, and Stadaconan territory to the east. Those three palisades, however, strongly suggest a community living in the shadow of violence and warfare.

Figure 3.9 Hochelaga village, ca. 1535.

Cartier’s expedition returned downriver to Stadacona, where they spent an especially cold and difficult winter. Most of the crew died from cold and scurvy. The good news was a cure provided by the Stadaconans that mitigated the vitamin C deficiency that causes scurvy and without which the whole of the French expedition would have been doomed. Despite Cartier’s erratic and consistently ungrateful behaviour toward the St. Lawrence Iroquois, and despite losing about 50 of his own men — evidently to ailments introduced by the Europeans — Donnaconna supported the foreigners through the winter. The Iroquoian leader made the mistake of telling Cartier about metal sources upriver (likely copper around Lake Superior) and this set off Cartier’s gold fever. The reduced French party would have to be reinforced and in order to do that Cartier would have to first return to France and sell the court of Francis I on the idea of further investment. To that end, and with an eye to supporting a local coup, Cartier abducted Donnaconna, his sons (again), and seven other Stadaconans and took them all to France. Nine of the 10 perished, and the 10th never returned to Canada.

Although Cartier received a warm welcome in Stadacona when he returned for the last time in 1541, that feeling did not last long. In that year the French made the last attempt of the century at establishing a colonial foothold in Canada. Cartier led a settlement cohort of 300 French to Charlesbourg-Royal, a site now identified as at Cap Rouge near Stadacona, but the settlement lasted barely a year, beset as it was by bad weather and hostility from the Stadaconans whose hospitality and generosity Cartier had repeatedly scorned. [footnote] Arthur J. Ray, I Have Lived Here Since the World Began: An Illustrated History of Canada’s Native People (Toronto: Key Porter, 1996), 51-53.[/footnote]

Cartier’s account of his 1541 voyage is silent on Hochelaga, from which scholars conclude that the town was gone by then. It may have been destroyed by enemies or disease, but as it was also the practice of Iroquoian farmers to move their villages every few years to find locations with better soil and to escape the accumulation of waste and vermin that beset older settlements, so it may have been dismantled and rebuilt elsewhere. At the present time — and perhaps forever — the fate of Hochelaga remains unknown.

The lacklustre interest on the part of the French in setting up a trading post in the St. Lawrence can be explained by a number of factors. First, Spain had a head start in the Americas and was vigorously protecting its foreign monopoly. This was evident even in the Gulf of St. Lawrence where, after 1543, the Basque whaling fleet — made up of very large, well-armed and generally intimidating ships — “fulfilled [Spain’s] geopolitical aim of controlling the gateway to the gulf at [a] time of transatlantic rivalry….” The rise of New France in the next century allows us to lose sight of this Spanish initiative and its strength in the second half of the 15th century: “For the next 35 years, while the French shelved their explorations, the Strait was the scene of a whaling industry of unprecedented scope and intensity, centred at Red Bay” on the Strait of Belle Isle.[footnote]Brad Loewen and Vincent Delmas, “The Basques in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Adjacent Shores,” Canadian Journal of Archaeology 36, issue 2 (2012): 223.[/footnote] It was fortunate for French interests that the Spanish, Basques, and Portuguese overwhelmingly pursued their maritime interests in the offshore fisheries. They had enough salt at their disposal to process their catch without making landfall and, under those conditions, had no real reason to establish even a toehold. Second, Cartier disappointed his sponsors with samples of quartz and iron pyrites from Canada, which he very optimistically claimed were, respectively, diamonds and gold. (Hence the origin of the French saying, “as false as a diamond from Canada.”) He never found the mythological Kingdom of the Saguenay, which his St. Lawrence Iroquoian hosts painted as a city of gold to rival the Incan capital at Cuzco. Finally, in the latter part of the 16th century, the Wars of Religion distracted the French from further overseas efforts in Canada. Anyone reflecting on the French experience in North America to 1600 would be safe in concluding that it had been a failure and perhaps was over.

Florida

As a result of Cartier’s unpromising expeditions, the French retreated from the North and spent much of the next 50 years trying to establish themselves elsewhere in the Americas. In an effort to emulate the success of the combative Dutch, the French turned their attention to Portuguese-claimed territory in Brazil. They established a position at Rio de Janeiro (“France Antarctique”) in 1555 and another much later in 1612 at São Luís (“France Équinoxiale”). Nothing came of either effort.

There was slightly more promise in the prospect of a colony in Florida, which was then controlled by Spain. The ambitious goal in this instance was to weaken the Spanish political hold on the Americas as a whole. In 1564, René Goulaine de Laudonnière led an expedition to Florida, establishing Fort Caroline at the mouth of the St. Johns River in Timucuan territory near modern-day Jacksonville. Florida’s proximity to the rich Spanish Caribbean made it a strategically important position from which relatively easy wealth could be won. The French hoped to establish a successful settlement there, and thus a stepping-off point to contest Spanish power in the Caribbean. A foothold in Florida could also provide the opportunity to weaken the Spanish Crown through piracy; the prevailing currents and winds of the Caribbean and Atlantic ensured that the treasure fleets travelled up along the Florida coast before venturing out across the Atlantic. The settlement at Fort Caroline also reflected French concerns at home. Rising religious tensions between Catholics and Huguenots (Protestants) made it attractive to send Protestants to Fort Caroline where they could have refuge while, at the same time, serving France.

Figure 3.10 A sketch of Fort Caroline under construction. It is regarded as the oldest fortified European settlement in what is now the United States.

The Spanish, hearing of the French incursion into Spanish territory, established their own colony just south of Fort Caroline at San Agustín (St. Augustine). A September 1565 expedition against the French settlement quickly overwhelmed their defences and the Spanish killed many of the men, sparing most of the women and children. Twenty-five of the Frenchmen escaped, making their way along the Florida coast. The Spanish caught up to them about 15 miles outside of St. Augustine, where Pedro Menéndez de Avilés offered the Protestant Huguenots the chance to renounce their “apostate” faith and embrace Catholicism; their refusal was part of what sealed their fate. The men were executed and Spanish dominance in Florida was secured. The massacre of the French settlers and soldiers marked the end of the French experiment in Florida and their attempts to undermine Spanish political control in the area.

Failure in Florida would cause the French to revisit the possibility of colonies in Canada, although a generation would pass before a new French effort in the north came to pass. In the interim, French fishing boats were still making the voyage to the Grand Banks fisheries, and they continued to encounter Aboriginal people who wished to trade. French merchants soon realized the St. Lawrence region was a reliable and rich source of valuable fur-bearing animals, especially the beaver, which were becoming rare in Europe at a time when it was fashionable to wear fur hats. Encouraged by the merchants of its Atlantic ports, the French Crown decided to colonize the territory to secure and expand its influence in America.

Attributions

Figure 3.8
Timbre-poste du Canada 3 cents Jacques Cartier 1934 by Jean Fex is in the public domain.

Figure 3.9
Viruses move inland along with French traders by the U.S. National Library of Medicine is in the public domain.

Figure 3.10
Founding of Fort Caroline by Rama is in the public domain.