had granted lands from the king. He also laid out at the royal cost three villages in the immediate neighborhood, planning them with great care, and peopling them partly with families newly arrived, partly with soldiers, and partly with old settlers, in order that the new-comers might take lessons from the experience of these veterans. That each village might be complete in itself, he furnished it as well as he could with the needful carpenter, mason, blacksmith, and shoemaker. These inland villages, called respectively Bourg Royal, Bourg la Reine, and Bourg Talon, did not prove very thrifty. * Wherever the settlers were allowed to choose for themselves, they ranged their dwellings along the watercourses. With the exception of Talon’s villages, one could have seen nearly every house in Canada, by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence and the Richelieu. The settlements formed long thin lines on the edges of the rivers; a convenient arrangement, but one very unfavorable to defence, to ecclesiastical control, and to strong government. The king soon discovered this; and repeated orders were sent to concentrate the inhabitants and form Canada into villages, instead of côtes. To do so would have involved a general revocation of grants and abandonment of houses and clearings, a measure too arbitrary and too wasteful, even for Louis XIV., and one extremely difficult to enforce. Canada persisted in attenuating herself, and the royal will was foiled.
* In 1672, the king, as a mark of honor, attached these
villages to Talon’s seigniory. Documents on Seigniorial
Tenure.
As you ascended the St. Lawrence, the first harboring place of civilization was Tadoussao, at the mouth of the Saguenay, where the company had its trading station, where its agents ruled supreme, and where, in early summer, all was alive with canoes and wigwams, and troops of Montagnais savages, bringing their furs to market. Leave Tadoussac behind, and, embarked in a sailboat or a canoe, follow the northern coast. Far on the left, twenty miles away, the southern shore lies pale and dim, and mountain ranges wave their faint outline along the sky. You pass the beetling rocks of Mai Bay, a solitude but for the bark hut of some wandering Indian beneath the cliff; the Eboulements with their wild romantic gorge, and foaming waterfalls; and the Bay of St. Paul with its broad valley and its woody mountains, rich with hidden stores of iron. Vast piles of savage verdure border the mighty stream, till at length the mountain of Cape Tourmente upheaves its huge bulk from the bosom of the water, shadowed by lowering clouds, and dark with forests. Just beyond, begin the settlements of Laval’s vast seigniory of Beaupré, which had not been forgotten in the distribution of emigrants, and which, in 1667, contained more inhabitants than Quebec itself. * The ribbon of rich meadow land that borders that beautiful shore, was yellow with wheat
* The census of 1667 gives to Quebec only 448 souls; Côte
de Beaupré, 656; Beauport, 123; Island of Orleans, 529;
other settlements included under the government of Quebec,
1,011; Côte de Lauzon (south shore), 113; Trois Rivières and
its dependencies, 666; Montreal, 766. Both Beaupré and Isle
d’Orleans belonged at this time to the bishop.
in harvest time, and on the woody slopes behind, the frequent clearings and the solid little dwellings of logs continued for a long distance to relieve the sameness of the forest. After passing the cataract af Montmorenci, there was another settlement, much smaller, at Beauport, the seigniory of the ex-physician Giffard, one of the earliest proprietors in Canada. The neighboring shores of the island of Orleans were also edged with houses and clearings. The promontory of Quebec now towered full in sight, crowned with church, fort, chateau, convents, and seminary. There was little else on the rock. Priests, nuns, government officials, and soldiers, were the denizens of the Upper Town; while commerce and the trades were cabined along the strand beneath. * From the gallery of the chateau, you might toss a pebble far down on their shingled roofs. In the midst of them was the magazine of the company, with its two round towers and two projecting wings. It was here that all the beaver-skins of the colony were collected, assorted, and shipped for France. The so-called chateau St. Louis was an indifferent wooden structure planted on a site truly superb; above the Lower Town, above the river, above the ships, gazing abroad on a majestic panorama of waters, forests, and mountains. ** Behind it was the area of the fort, of which it formed one side. The
* According to Juchereau, there were seventy houses at
Quebec about the time of Tracy’s arrival.
** In 1660, an exact inventory was taken of the contents of
the fort and chateau; a beggarly account of rubbish. The
chateau was then a long low building roofed with shingles.
governor lived in the chateau, and soldiers were on guard night and day in the fort. At some little distance was the convent of the Ursulines, ugly but substantial, * where Mother Mary of the Incarnation ruled her pupils and her nuns; and a little further on, towards the right, was the Hôtel Dieu. Between them were the massive buildings of the Jesuits, then as now facing the principal square. At one side was their church, newly finished; and opposite, across the square, stood and still stands the great church of Notre Dame. Behind the church was Laval’s seminary, with the extensive enclosures belonging to it. The sénéchaussée or court-house, the tavern of one Jacques Boisdon on the square near the church, and a few houses along the line of what is now St. Louis Street, comprised nearly all the civil part of the Upper Town. The ecclesiastical buildings were of stone, and the church of Notre Dame and the Jesuit College were marvels of size and solidity in view of the poverty and weakness of the colony. **
Proceeding upward along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, one found a cluster of houses at Cap Rouge, and, further on, the frequent rude beginnings of a seigniory. The settlements thickened on
* There is an engraving of it in Abbé Casgrain’s
interesting Vie de Marie de l'Incarnation. It was burned in
1686.
** The first stone of Notre Dame de Quebec was laid in
September, 1647, and the first mass was said in it on the
24th of December, 1650. The side walls still remain as part
of the present structure. The Jesuit college was also begun
in 1647. The walls and roof were finished in 1649. The
church connected with it, since destroyed, was begun in
1666. Journal des Jésuites.
approaching Three Rivers, a fur-trading hamlet enclosed with a square palisade. Above this place, a line of incipient seigniories bordered the river, most of them granted to officers: Laubia, a captain; Labadie, a sergeant; Moras, an ensign; Berthier, a captain; Raudin, an ensign; La Valterie, a lieutenant. * Under their auspices, settlers, military and civilian, were ranging themselves along the shore, and ugly gaps in the forest thickly set with stumps bore witness to their toils. These settlements rapidly extended, till in a few years a chain of houses and clearings reached with little interruption from Quebec to Montreal. Such was the fruit of Tracy’s chastisement of the Mohawks, and the influx of immigrants that followed.