An ordonnance with respect to the care of the foundlings of Montreal was issued by Intendant Hocquart on March 12, 1748. It allows us to see how the government undertook the preliminary cost of child rearing by providing nurses for the first eighteen months; after that the children should be "hired out" to good habitants of town or country until the age of eighteen to twenty years. Hocquart notices with surprise that of the bastards, who survived the first eighteen months, there were four born in 1743, six in 1744, ten in 1745, who are still being cared for in 1748 at the expense of the King; they were to be soon "hired;" and the Sieur Foucher, then procureur du roi, who seems to have been responsible for the great delay, is informed that if the like occurs again he will have to pay out of his own purse the expense incurred during the long time intervening.
Students following the story of explorations from Montreal will find that in September, 1748, a Sulpician, M. l'Abbé Picquet, began a fort at La Présentation (Ogdensburg). He is to be found early in the summer of 1751 with six Canadians and five Indians, beginning the circuit of Lake Ontario. On June 26th he reached Toronto, where he found a band of Messessagas. On June 28th he reached Niagara and on July 12th the mouth of the Genessee, where he visited the falls.
Two of Intendant Bigot's [180] earliest ordonnances are of interest in that the first, issued on December 24, 1748, evidently in view of the Christmas and New Year season, forbids sliding or skating on the streets, which, "it has come to our knowledge," is practiced by children and even grown-ups; the reason alleged being danger to the passers by, who are not able to get out of the way quick enough; children who are caught will be put into prison until their parents or guardians have paid the fine of 10 livres. The second is leveled against fast drivers, who are to be fined 20 livres for galloping their horses in the street. This is dated December 28th. These, however, mostly concerned Quebec, as far as we know, but probably similar regulations were needed at Montreal.
NOTE I
THE DISCOVERIES OF LA VERENDRYE
Sieur Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye was born in Three Rivers, the home of Radisson, in 1686. He was the son of René Gaultier de Varennes and Marie Boucher, daughter of the governor of Three Rivers, who was married as a young girl of twelve years on September 12, 1667. At the age of fourteen he, too, determined to be a discoverer. At eighteen he was fighting in New England, at nineteen in Newfoundland and at twenty-three in Europe at the battle of Malplaquet, where he was carried off the field with nine wounds. In his twenty-ninth year he returned to Canada and was relegated to the obscure fur posts in the north, eating his heart out till between 1728-1730 at Nepigon, a lonely post north of Michilimackinac. He heard of a "great river flowing west." Perhaps this was the great western sea which Russia and France both wished to secure. Accordingly he descended to Quebec and in the winter of 1730-1731 he placed his dreams of discovery before the Governor, the Marquis Charles de Beauharnois. He obtained the government prestige and patronage and a monopoly of the fur trade in the countries he might discover.
He turned to Montreal traders for the goods to trade and a company was formed. On June 8, 1731, he left Montreal with his three sons, Jean Pierre, François and Louis, the eldest only being eighteen years of age, among the band of fifty adventurers, coureurs de bois, voyageurs and Indian interpreters, to discover the fabled western sea and so acquire great glory and probably wealth. He reached familiar ground at Michilimackinac and then after seventy-eight days from Montreal he touched Kaministiquia after a month's coasting from the Straits of Mackinaw. As he went onward he established fur posts and sent east cargoes of furs but not enough for his partners so that in the winter of 1734-35 Vérendrye was back in Montreal, leaving his party up-country. He managed to get credit and back he went with the Jesuit Aulneau to his search. Little fur could he send to redeem his debts. Instead he was to meet misfortune in the loss of his eldest son, Jean, the Jesuit Aulneau, and a party of voyageurs who were treacherously slaughtered by the Sioux on Massacre Island on the night of June 8, 1736, five years after most of the party had left Montreal. In September, 1738, Vérendrye entered, the first white man, the Red River for the forks of the Assiniboine. But he found not the western sea but the great western Canadian prairie lands. On December 3, 1738, he entered the village of the Indians. There he learned vaguely of a people in the west who lived on the shores of water bitter for drinking. After that his sons went on courageously for the western sea, while he went back to Montreal for supplies and to contest the lawsuits of his partners who had seized all his posts and properties to meet his creditors. But his sons found only a sea of prairie, a sea of mountains and two great rivers, the Saskatchewan and the Missouri, and reached the foothills of the northern Rockies on New Year's Day, in 1743. At the end of July they were back again at the Assiniboine River.
