was placed in the hands of a company formed of the chief inhabitants of Canada. Some of them hesitated to take the risk; but the government was not to be trifled with, and the minister, Ponchartrain, wrote in terms so peremptory, and so menacing to the recusants, that, in the words of a writer of the time, he “shut everybody’s mouth.” About a hundred and fifty merchants accordingly subscribed to the stock of the new company, and immediately petitioned the king for a ship and a loan of seven hundred thousand francs. They were required to take off the hands of the farmers of the revenue an accumulation of more than six hundred thousand pounds of beaver, for which, however, they were to pay but half its usual price. The market of France absolutely refused it, and the directors of the new company saw no better course than to burn three-fourths of the troublesome and perishable commodity; nor was this the first resort to this strange expedient. One cannot repress a feeling of indignation at the fate of the interesting and unfortunate animals uselessly sacrificed to a false economic system. In order to rid themselves of what remained, the directors begged the king to issue a decree, requiring all hatters to put at least three ounces of genuine beaver-fur into each hat.
All was in vain. The affairs of the company fell into a confusion which was aggravated by the bad faith of some of its chief members. In 1707, it was succeeded by another company, to whose magazines every habitant or merchant was ordered to bring every beaver-skin in his possession within forty-eight hours; and the company, like its predecessors, was required to receive it, and pay for it in written promises. Again the market was overwhelmed with a surfeit of beaver. Again the bills of exchange were unpaid, and all was confusion and distress. Among the memorials and petitions to which this state of things gave birth, there is one conspicuous by the presence of good sense and the absence of self-interest. The writer proposes that there should be no more monopoly, but that everybody should be free to buy beaver-skins and send them to France, subject only to a moderate duty of entry. The proposal was not accepted. In 1721, the monopoly of exporting beaver-skins was given to the new West India Company; but this time it was provided that the government should direct from time to time, according to the capacities of the market, the quantity of furs which the company should be forced to receive. *
Out of the beaver trade rose a huge evil, baneful to the growth and the morals of Canada. All that was most active and vigorous in the colony took to the woods, and escaped from the control of intendants, councils, and priests, to the savage freedom
* On the fur trade the documents consulted are very
numerous. The following are the most important: Mémoire sur
ce qui concerne le Commerce du Castor et ses dépendances,
1715; Mémoire concernant le Commerce le Traite entre les
François et les Sauvages, 1691; Mémoire sur le Canada
addressé au Régent, 1715; Mémoire sur les Affaires de Canada
dans leur Estât présent, 1696; Mémoire des Négotiants de la
Rochelle qui font Commerce en Canada sur la Proposition de
ne plus recevoir les Castors et d'engager les Habitants a la
Culture des Terres et Pesche de la Molue, 1696; Mémoire du
Sr. Riverin sur la Traite et la Ferme du Castor, 1696;
Mémoire touchant le Commerce du Canada, 1687, etc.
of the wilderness. Not only were the possible profits great; but, in the pursuit of them, there was a fascinating element of adventure and danger. The bush-rangers or coureurs de bois were to the king an object of horror. They defeated his plans for the increase of the population, and shocked his native instinct of discipline and order. Edict after edict was directed against them; and more than once the colony presented the extraordinary spectacle of the greater part of its young men turned into forest outlaws. But severity was dangerous. The offenders might be driven over to the English, or converted into a lawless banditti, renegades of civilization and the faith. Therefore, clemency alternated with rigor, and declarations of amnesty with edicts of proscription. Neither threats nor blandishments were of much avail. We hear of seigniories abandoned; farms turning again into forests; wives and children left in destitution. The exodus of the coureurs de bois would take, at times, the character of an organized movement. The famous Du Lhut is said to have made a general combination of the young men of Canada to follow him into the woods. Their plan was to be absent four years, in order that the edicts against them might have time to relent. The intendant Duchesneau reported that eight hundred men out of a population of less than ten thousand souls had vanished from sight in the immensity of a boundless wilderness. Whereupon the king ordered that any person going into the woods without a license should be whipped and branded for the first offence, and sent lor life to the galleys for the second. * The order was more easily given than enforced. “I must not conceal from you, monseigneur,” again writes Duchesneau, “that the disobedience of the coureurs de bois has reached such a point that everybody boldly contravenes the king’s interdictions; that there is no longer any concealment; and that parties are collected with astonishing insolence to go and trade in the Indian country. I have done all in my power to prevent this evil, which may cause the ruin of the colony. I have enacted ordinances against the coureurs de bois; against the merchants who furnish them with goods; against the gentlemen and others who harbor them, and even against those who have any knowledge of them, and will not inform the local judges. All has been in vain; inasmuch as some of the most considerable families are interested with them, and the governor lets them go on and even shares their profits.” ** “You are aware, monseigneur,” writes Denonville, some years later, “that the coureurs de bois are a great evil, but you are not aware how great this evil is. It deprives the country of its effective men; makes them indocile, debauched, and incapable of discipline, and turns them into pretended nobles, wearing the sword and decked out with lace, both they and their relations, who all affect to be gentlemen and ladies. As for cultivating the soil, they will not hear of it.
* Le Roy a Frontenac, 30 Avril, 1681. On another occasion,
it was ordered that any person thus offending should suffer
death.
** N. Y. Colonial Docs., IX. 131.
This, along with the scattered condition of the settlements, causes their children to be as unruly as Indians, being brought up in the same manner. Not that there are not some very good people here, but they are in a minority.” * In another despatch he enlarges on their vagabond and lawless ways, their indifference to marriage, and the mischief caused by their example; describes how, on their return from the woods, they swagger like lords, spend all their gains in dress and drunken revelry, and despise the peasants, whose daughters they will not deign to marry, though they are peasants themselves.
It was a curious scene when a party of coureurs de bois returned from their rovings. Montreal was their harboring place, and they conducted themselves much like the crew of a man-of-war paid off after a long voyage. As long as their beaver-skins lasted, they set no bounds to their riot. Every house in the place, we are told, was turned into a drinking shop. The new-comers were bedizened with a strange mixture of French and Indian finery; while some of them, with instincts more thoroughly savage, stalked about the streets as naked as a Pottawattamie or a Sioux. The clamor of tongues was prodigious, and gambling and drinking filled the day and the night. When at last they were sober again, they sought absolution for their sins; nor could the priests venture to bear too hard on their unruly penitents,
* Denonville, Mémoire sur l’Estât des Affaires de le
Nouvelle France.
lest they should break wholly with the church and dispense thenceforth with her sacraments.