Afraid of the Iroquois raiders, the tribes of the Up-Country now flocked to Montreal instead of Quebec, where the traders met them annually at the great Fur Fairs.
No more picturesque scene exists in Canada's past than these Fur Fairs. Down the rapids of the Ottawa and the St. Lawrence bounded the canoes of the Indian hunters, Hurons and Pottawatomies from Lake Michigan, Crees and Ojibways from Lake Superior, Iroquois and Eries and Neutrals from what is now the Province of Ontario, the northern Indians in long birch canoes light as paper, the Indians of Ontario in dugouts of oak and walnut. The Fur Fair usually took place between June and August; and the Viceroy, magnificent in red cloak faced with velvet and ornamented with gold braid, came up from Quebec for the occasion and occupied a chair of state under a marquee erected near the Indian tents. Wigwams then went up like mushrooms, the Huron and Iroquois tents of sewed bark hung in the shape of a square from four poles, the tepees of the Upper Indians made of birch and buffalo hides, hung on poles crisscrossed at the top to a peak, spreading in wide circle to the ground. Usually the Fur Fair occupied a great common between St. Paul Street and the river. Furs unpacked, there stalked among the tents great sachems glorious in robes of painted buckskin garnished with wampum, Indian children stark naked, young braves flaunting and boastful, wearing headdresses with strings of eagle quills reaching to the ground, each quill signifying an enemy taken. Then came "the peddlers,"—the fur merchants,—unpacking their goods to tempt the Indians, men of the colonial noblesse famous in history, the Fôrests and Le Chesnays and Le Bers. Here, too, gorgeous in finery, bristling with firearms, were the bushrovers, the interpreters, the French voyageurs, who had to come out of the wilds once every two years to renew their licenses to trade. There was Charles Le Moyne, son of an innkeeper of Dieppe, who had come to Montreal as interpreter and won such wealth as trader that his family became members of the French aristocracy. Two of his descendants became governors of Canada; and the history of his sons is the history of Canada's most heroic age. There was Louis Jolliet, who had studied for the Jesuit priesthood but turned fur trader among the tribes of Lake Michigan. There was Daniel Greysolon Duluth, a man of good birth, ample means, and with the finest house in Montreal, who had turned bushrover, gathered round him a band of three or four hundred lawless, dare-devil French hunters, and now roamed the woods from Detroit halfway to Hudson Bay, swaying the Indians in favor of France and ruling the wilds, sole lord of the wilderness. There were Groseillers and Radisson and a shy young man of twenty-five who had obtained a seigniory from the Sulpicians at Lachine—Robert Cavelier de La Salle. Sometimes, too, Father Marquette came down with his Indians from the missions on Lake Superior. Maisonneuve, too, was there, grieving, no doubt, to see this Kingdom of Heaven, which he had set up on earth, becoming more and more a kingdom of this world. Later, when the Hundred Associates lost their charter and Canada became a Royal Province governed directly by the Crown, Maisonneuve was deprived of the government of Montreal and retired to die in obscurity in Paris. Louis d'Ailleboust, Governor of Montreal when Maisonneuve is absent, Governor at Quebec when state necessities drag him from religious devotion, moves also in the gay throng of the Fur Fair. In later days is a famous character at the Fur Fairs—La Motte Cadillac of Detroit, bushrover and gentleman like Duluth, but prone to break heads when he comes to town where the wine is good.
PLAN OF MONTREAL IN 1672
Trade was regulated by royal license. Only twenty-five canoes a year were allowed to go to the woods with three men in each, and a license was good for only two years. Fines, branding, the galleys for life, death, were the penalties for those who traded without license; but that did not prevent more than one thousand young Frenchmen running off to the woods to live like Indians. In fact, there was no other way for the youth of New France to earn a living. Penniless young noblemen, criminals escaping the law, the sons of the poorest, all were on the same footing in the woods. He who could persuade a merchant to outfit him for trade disappeared in the wilds; and if he came back at all, came back with wealth of furs and bought off punishment, "wearing sword and lace and swaggering as if he were a gentleman," the annals of the day complain; and a long session in the confessional box relieved the prodigal's conscience from the sins of a life in the woods. If my young gentleman were rich enough, the past was forgotten, and he was now on the highroad to distinguished service and perhaps a title.
LA SALLE'S HOUSE NEAR MONTREAL
In the early days a beaver skin could be bought for a needle or a bell or a tin mirror; and in spite of all the priests could do to prevent it, brandy played a shameful part in the trade. In vain the priests preached against it, and the bishop thundered anathemas. The evils of the brandy traffic were apparent to all—the Fur Fairs became a bedlam of crime; but when the Governor called in all the traders to confer on the subject, it was plain that if the Indians did not obtain liquor from the French, they would go on down with their furs to the English of New York, and the French Governor was afraid to forbid the evil.