CHAPTER XIII
FROM 1763 TO 1812
English law and Quebec—French rights guarded—Pontiac's war—Siege of Detroit—Fight at Bloody Run—Michilimackinac falls—How Bouquet wins victory—Return of captives—The peddlers—Methods of Nor'westers—Traders invade the Up Country—Disaffection in Canada—Canada invaded—Quebec invested—Montgomery's fight—"Rats in a trap"—Relief at last—Tricks of ringsters—Coming of Loyalists—Life in the backwoods
Quebec has fallen. As jackals gather to feast on the carcass of the dead lion, so rallies a rabble of adventurers on the trail of the victorious army. Sutlers, traders, teamsters, riffraff,—soldiers of fortune,—stampede to Montreal and Quebec as to a new gold field. When Major Robert Rogers, the English forest ranger, proceeds up the lakes to take over the western fur posts,—Presqu' Isle, Detroit, Michilimackinac,—he is followed by hosts of adventurers looking for swift way to fortune by either the fur trade or by picking the bones of the dead lion. Major Rogers, beating up Lake Ontario and Lake Erie with two hundred bushwhackers, pausing in camp near modern Sandusky, meets the renowned Ottawa warrior, Pontiac, who had fought with the French against Braddock and now wants to know in voice of thunder what all this talk about the French being conquered means; how dare the French, because they have proved paltroons, deed away the Indian lands of Canada? How dare Rogers, the white chief of the English rangers, come here with his pale-faced warriors to Pontiac's land? How Rogers answered the veteran red-skinned warrior is not told. All that is known is—the French gave up their western furs with bad grace, and the English commandants forgot to appease the wound to the Indians' pride by the customary gifts over solemn powwow. At Detroit and Michilimackinac the French quietly withdraw from the palisades and build their white-washed cottages outside the limits of the fort—2500 French habitants there are at Detroit.
If the four or five hundred English adventurers who swarmed to Canada on the heels of the English army thought to batten on the sixty thousand defeated French inhabitants, far otherwise thought and decreed the English generals, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, and Murray, who succeeded him. "You will observe that the French are British subjects as much as we are, and treat them accordingly," ruled Amherst; and General Murray, who practically became the first governor of Canada on Amherst's withdrawal, at once set himself to establish justice.
MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS
No more forced labor! No more carrion birds of the official classes, like Bigot, fattening on the poor habitants! British government in Canada for the next few years is known as the period of military rule. At Quebec, at Three Rivers, at Montreal, the commanding officers established martial law with biweekly courts; and in the parishes the local French officers, or seigneurs, are authorized to hear civil cases. By the terms of surrender the people have been guaranteed their religious liberty; and the Treaty of Paris, which cedes all Canada to England in 1763, repeats this guarantee, though it leaves a thorn of trouble in the flesh of England by reserving to France for the benefit of the Grand Banks fishermen the Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, as well as shore rights of fishing on the west coast of Newfoundland. Also, the proprietary rights of Jesuits, Sulpicians, Franciscans, are to remain in abeyance for the pleasure of the English crown. The rights of the sisterhoods are at once confirmed.