The Conquest of New France; A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars

by George McKinnon Wrong

In days before the railway had made possible a bulky commerce by overland routes, rivers furnished the chief means of access to inland regions. The fame of the Ganges, the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Danube shows the part which great rivers have played in history. Of North America’s four greatest river systems, the two in the far north have become known in times so recent that their place in history is not yet determined. One of them, the Mackenzie, a mighty stream some two thousand miles long, flows into the Arctic Ocean through what remains chiefly a wilderness. The waters of the other, the Saskatchewan, discharge into Hudson Bay more than a thousand miles from their source, flowing through rich prairie land which is still but scantily peopled. On the Saskatchewan, as on the remaining two systems, the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi, the French were the pioneers. Though today the regions drained by these four rivers are dominated by the rival race, the story which we now follow is one of romantic enterprise in which the honors are with France.

More perhaps by accident than by design had the French been the first to settle on the St. Lawrence. Fishing vessels had hovered round the entrance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence for years before, in 1535, the French sailor, Jacques Cartier, advanced up the river as far as the foot of the torrential rapids where now stands the city of Montreal. Cartier was seeking a route to the Far East. He half believed that this impressive waterway drained the plains of China and that around the next bend he might find the busy life of an oriental city. The time came when it was known that a great sea lay between America and Asia and the mystery of the pathway to this sea long fascinated the pioneers of the St. Lawrence. Canada was a colony, a trading-post, a mission, the favorite field of Jesuit activity, but it was also the land which offered by way of the St. Lawrence a route leading illimitably westward to the Far East.

One other route rivaled the St. Lawrence in promise, and that was the Mississippi. The two rivers are essentially different in their approaches and in type. The mouth of the St. Lawrence opens directly towards Europe and of all American rivers lies nearest to the seafaring peoples of Europe. Since it flows chiefly in a rocky bed, its course changes little; its waters are clear, and they become icy cold as they approach the sea and mingle with the tide which flows into the great Gulf of St. Lawrence from the Arctic regions. The Mississippi, on the other hand, is a turbid, warm stream, flowing through soft lands. Its shifting channel is divided at its mouth by deltas created from the vast quantity of soil which the river carries in its current. On the low-lying, forest-clad, northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico it was not easy to find the mouth of the Mississippi by approaching it from the sea. The voyage there from France was long and difficult; and, moreover, Spain claimed the lands bordering on the Gulf of Mexico and declared herself ready to drive out all intruders.

Nature, it is clear, dictated that, if France was to build up her power in the interior of the New World, it was the valley of the St. Lawrence which she should first occupy. Time has shown the riches of the lands drained by the St. Lawrence. On no other river system in the world is there now such a multitude of great cities. The modern traveler who advances by this route to the sources of the river beyond the Great Lakes surveys wonders ever more impressive. Before his view appear in succession Quebec, Montreal, Toronto, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Duluth, and many other cities and towns, with millions in population and an aggregate of wealth so vast as to stagger the imagination. Step by step had the French advanced from Quebec to the interior. Champlain was on Lake Huron in 1615, and there the Jesuits soon had a flourishing mission to the Huron Indians. They had only to follow the shore of Lake Huron to come to the St. Mary’s River bearing towards the sea the chilly waters of Lake Superior. On this river, a much frequented fishing ground of the natives, they founded the mission of Sainte Marie du Saut. Farther to the south, on the narrow opening connecting Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, grew up the post known as Michilimackinac. It was then inevitable that explorers and missionaries should press on into both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. By the time that Frontenac came first to Canada in 1672 the French had a post called St. Esprit on the south shore of Lake Superior near its western end and they had also passed westward from Lake Michigan and founded posts on both the Illinois and the Wisconsin Rivers which flow into the Mississippi.

France had placed on record her claim to the whole of the Great West. On a June morning in 1671 there had been a striking scene at Sainte Marie du Saut. The French had summoned a great throng of Indians to the spot. There, with impressive ceremony, Saint-Lusson, an officer from Canada, had set up a cedar post on which was a plate engraved with the royal arms, and proclaimed Louis XIV lord of all the Indian tribes and of all the lands, rivers, and lakes, discovered and to be discovered in the region stretching from the Atlantic to that other mysterious sea beyond the spreading lands of the West. Henceforth at their peril would the natives disobey the French King, or other states encroach upon these his lands. A Jesuit priest followed Saint-Lusson with a description to the savages of their new lord, the King of France. He was master of all the other rulers of the world. At his word the earth trembled. He could set earth and sea on fire by the blaze of his cannon. The priest knew the temper of his savage audience and told of the King’s warriors covered with the blood of his enemies, of the rivers of blood which flowed from their wounds, of the King’s countless prisoners, of his riches and his power, so great that all the world obeyed him. The savages gave delighted shouts at the strange ceremony, but of its real meaning they knew nothing. What they understood was that the French seemed to be good friends who brought them muskets, hatchets, cloth, and especially the loved but destructive firewater which the savage palate ever craved.

The mystery of the Great Lakes once solved, there still remained that of the Western Sea. The St. Lawrence flowed eastward. Another river must therefore be found flowing westward. The French were eager listeners when the savages talked of a mighty river in the west flowing to the sea. They meant, as we now suppose, the Mississippi. There are vague stories of Frenchmen on the Mississippi at an earlier date; but, however this may be, it is certain that in the summer of 1673 Louis Joliet, the son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest, reached and descended the great river from the mouth of the Wisconsin to a point far past the mouth of the Ohio.

France thus planted herself on the Mississippi, though there her occupation was less complete and thorough than it was on the St. Lawrence. Distance was an obstacle; it was a far cry from Quebec by land, and from France the voyage by sea through the Gulf of Mexico was hardly less difficult. The explorer La Salle tried both routes. In 1681-1682 he set out from Montreal, reached the Mississippi overland, and descended to its mouth. Two years later he sailed from France with four ships bound for the mouth of the river, there to establish a colony; but before achieving his aim he was murdered in a treacherous attack led by his own countrymen.

It was Pierre Le Moyne, Sieur d’Iberville, who first made good France’s claim to the Mississippi. He reached the river by sea in 1699 and ascended to a point some eighty miles beyond the present city of New Orleans. Farther east, on Biloxi Bay, he built Fort Maurepas and planted his first colony. Spain disliked this intrusion; but Spain—soon to be herself ruled, as France then was, by a Bourbon king—did not prove irreconcilable and slowly France built up a colony in the south. It was in 1718 that Iberville’s brother, Jean Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, founded New Orleans, destined to become in time one of the great cities of North America. Its beginnings were not propitious. The historian Charlevoix describes it as being in 1721 a low-lying, malarious place, infested by snakes and alligators, and consisting of a hundred wretched hovels.

In spite of this dreary outlook, it was still true that France, planted at the mouth of the Mississippi, controlled the greatest waterway in the world. Soon she had scattered settlements stretching northward to the Ohio and the Missouri, the one river reaching eastward almost to the waters of the St. Lawrence system, the other flowing out of the western plains from its source in the Rocky Mountains. The old mystery, however, remained, for the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico, into Atlantic waters already well known. The route to the Western Sea was still to be found.

It was easy enough for France to record a sweeping claim to the West, but to make good this claim she needed a chain of posts, which should also be forts, linking the Mississippi with the St. Lawrence and strong enough to impress the Indians whose country she had invaded. At first she had reached the interior by way of the Ottawa River and Lake Huron, and in that northern country her position was secure enough through her posts on the upper lakes. The route farther south by Lake Ontario and Lake Erie was more difficult. The Iroquois menaced Niagara and long refused to let France have a footing there to protect her pathway to Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley. It was not until 1720, a period comparatively late, that the French managed to have a fort at the mouth of the Niagara. On the Detroit River, the next strategic point on the way westward, they were established earlier. Just after Frontenac died in 1698, La Mothe Cadillac urged that there should be built on this river a fort and town which might be made the center of all the trading interests west of Lake Erie. End the folly, he urged, of going still farther afield among the Indians and teaching them the French language and French modes of thought. Leave the Indians to live their own type of life, to hunt and to fish. They need European trade and they have valuable furs to exchange. Encourage them to come to the French at Detroit and see that they go nowhere else by not allowing any other posts in the western country. Cadillac was himself a keen if secret participant in the profits of the fur trade and hoped to be placed in command at Detroit and there to become independent of control from Quebec. Detroit was founded in 1701; and though for a long time it did not thrive, the fact that on the site has grown up one of the great industrial cities of modern times shows that Cadillac had read aright the meaning of the geography of North America.