Shortly after the above event La Salle left Montreal, doubtless with a good supply of "eau de vie," for his fief, Mount Cataracqui, and in the second week of November he started thence to make his way to the Mississippi, returning at intervals to Montreal for supplies. At last after thrilling and hazardous adventures La Salle and his men reached the mouth of the Mississippi, where he declared the basin of the river to be the territory of Louis the Great and named it Louisiana. All honour to Montreal, the fruitful home of discoverers!
David Greysolon du Luth left Montreal on the 1st of September, 1678, with seven Frenchmen on a similar adventure. It was he who built the fort at the entrance of the Kaministiquia, Lake Superior, known under Hudson Bay rule as Fort William, and who strove persistently to foil the rival English traders of this company. He was a man equally at home in camp, in society, or in the Indian wigwams—a type of the many roving adventurers, fighters, traders and explorers, whom Canada was then alluring and who were little removed from the coureurs de bois, at whom so many ordinances were leveled, but whose number was steadily increasing. [129]
Meanwhile relations had become more and more strained between Frontenac and Duchesneau. As early as 1676 the troubles began with the questions of precedence and of the degrees of courtesy that should be paid to the governor and the intendant. On May 1, 1677, Colbert wrote to the intendant warning him not to take sides against the governor and on May 18th he wrote to the governor exhorting him to live amicably with the intendant. On April 30, 1681, the king wrote to Frontenac complaining of his arbitrary conduct and threatening to recall him unless he mended his ways. He was accused of being too lenient with the coureurs de bois and in consequence the king ordered that whoever went to the woods without a license should be branded and whipped for the first offence, and sent to the galleys for life, for the second.
Every ship to France carried complaints from Duchesneau and Frontenac against one another. The rivalry was intense. The last official act of Frontenac in the Registre du Conseil Supérieur is a formal declaration that his rank in that body is superior to the intendant's. Finally the untenable position was relieved by the king, who recalled them by an act of May 1st. Before leaving and early in the August of this year Frontenac was at Montreal to meet the Ottawas and the Hurons on their yearly descent from the lakes and there he met the famous Huron Iroquois chief, the Rat, and at a solemn council succeeded in averting, for the time, the war then brewing about Michillimackinac, when the Illinois and some of the tribes of the lakes were in likely danger of speedy and complete destruction at the hands of the Iroquois. This would have been fatal to the trade of Canada.
Shortly afterwards, Frontenac sailed for France, leaving Canada when he was most needed. When he sailed, "it was a day of rejoicing to more than half of the merchants of Canada" (who were not in his ring), says Parkman ("Frontenac," p. 71), "and excepting the Recollects, to all the priests; but he left behind him an impression, very general among the people, that if danger threatened the colony, Count Frontenac was the man for the hour."
Montreal was no little concerned with this division between the disputants, for whereas the merchants, traders and habitants over the country took sides with either party, those of Montreal, such as Le Moyne and his sons, Jacques LeBer, and left many more of the leading men sided with Duchesneau, while Perrot, the local governor, seems to have come to a mutual understanding with Frontenac and carried on illicit trade as before. "Frontenac had," as the intendant wrote to the minister on November 16, 1679, "gradually made himself master of the trade of Montreal; as soon as the Indians arrived, he sets guard in his camp, which would be very well, if these soldiers did their duty and protected the savages from being annoyed and plundered by the French, instead of being employed to discover how many furs they have brought with a view to future operations. Monsieur, the governor, then compels the Indians to pay his guards for protecting them; and he has never allowed them to trade with the inhabitants till they have first given him a certain number of packs of beaver skins, which he calls his presents. His guards trade with them openly at the fair, with their bandoliers on their shoulders." Moreover, Duchesneau in the same communication accused Frontenac of sending up goods to Montreal to be traded in his behalf, so that with the presents exacted and his trading, only little ever reached the people of the colony of what the Indians brought to market. It is only fair to add that Frontenac made similar charges against the intendant for engaging in trade. Meanwhile partisan spirit ran high and the streets of Quebec and Montreal witnessed brawls such as those between the Capulets and Montagues of Romeo and Juliet. "A plague on both your houses!" The Count de Frontenac and the Intendant Duchesneau were respectively replaced on May 1, 1680, by M. de La Barre and M. de Meulles, although they did not enter upon their functions until Friday, October 9th, of the same year.
NOTE
A writer who visited Quebec in 1683 in his "Memoirs of North America" tells us that the merchant who had carried on the greatest trade in Canada was the Sieur Samuel Bernon of Rochel, who had great warehouses at Quebec, from which the inhabitants of the other towns were supplied with such commodities as they wanted.
"There is no difference," he says, "between the pirates that scour the seas and the Canada merchants, unless it be this, that the former sometimes enrich themselves all of a sudden by a good prize; and the latter cannot make their fortune without trading for five or six years, and that, without running the hazard of their lives. I have known twenty little peddlers that had not above a thousand crowns stock when I arrived at Quebec in the year 1683, and when I left that place, had got to the tune of 12,000 crowns. It is an unquestioned truth that they get 50 per cent upon all goods they deal in, whether they buy them up, upon the arrival of the ships at Quebec, or have them from France by way of commissions: but over and above that, there are some gaudy trinkets, such as ribbands, laces, embroideries, tobacco-boxes, watches, and an infinity of other baubles of iron ware, upon which they get 150 per cent, all costs clear.
"As soon as the French ships arrive at Quebec the merchants of that city, who have their factors in other towns, load their barks with goods in order to transport them to these other towns. Such merchants as act for themselves at Trois Rivières, or Montreal, come down in person to Quebec to market for themselves, and then put their effects on board of barks to be conveyed home. If they pay for their goods in skins, they buy cheaper than if they made their payments in money or letters of exchange; by reason that the seller gets considerably by the skins, when he returns to France. Now you must take notice, that all these skins are bought up from the inhabitants, or from the savages, upon which the merchants are considerable gainers. To give you an instance of this matter, a person that lives in the neighbourhood of Quebec, carries a dozen of marten skins, five or six fox skins, and as many skins of wild cats, to a merchant's house, in order to sell them for woolen cloth, linen, arms, ammunition, etc. In the trade of those skins, the merchant draws a double profit, one upon the score of his paying no more for these skins than one-half of what he afterwards sells them for, in the lump, to the factors, for the Rochel ships; and the other, by the exorbitant rate he puts upon the goods which the poor planter takes in exchange for his skins. If this be duly weighed, we will not think it strange that these merchants have a more beneficial trade than a great many tradesmen in the world."—Canadian Antiquarian and Numismatic Journal, 1872, p. 130.