Old Times in the Colonies by Charles Carleton Coffin

Author:Charles Carleton Coffin [Coffin, Charles Carleton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Expeditions & Discoveries
ISBN: 9788027305001
Google: HKXoDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: e-artnow
Published: 2019-06-09T00:56:43+00:00

Chapter XIX

Louis Frontenac in Canada

Table of Contents

On a summer day in 1672 Louis Frontenac, fifty-two years of age, just arrived from France, stepped on shore at Quebec — the first governor-general of Canada. Sixty years had rolled away since Champlain erected the first house in Canada, and so slow had been the emigration that there were not more than three or four thousand Frenchmen in the New World.

There had been civil war in France, but peace had come. Louis XIV. was king. Colbert was his prime-minister. He saw that the English were settling along the Atlantic coast, that the Dutch were driving a profitable trade on the Hudson with the Indians; that Spain had colonized the West Indies and Mexico, were masters of South America, and had a foothold in Florida; while France had done very little toward developing the vast empire, extending from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Mexico, and westward to the Pacific Ocean.

The energetic prime-minister selected Count Frontenac to manage matters in New France. We may think of Frontenac as turning over in his mind the work before him, the helps and hinderances. As he spreads out the map which the geographers have made, he sees the St. Lawrence and the lakes, the Ohio, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers, and their tributaries, forming natural highways, by which the coureurs de bois — the rangers of the woods, as they are called, half Indian and half French — reach every section of the vast domain.

He sees that the English have no such great natural routes for travel, that all the rivers emptying into the Atlantic have their sources in the great mountain range, extending from the White Mountains, in New Hampshire, to Alabama. The mountain range is a barrier which nature has established between the Atlantic slope and the Mississippi Valley. In the valley of that river, on the banks of the Ohio, and upon the broad prairies of Illinois, the peasants of New France could rear their homes.

The king — who came to the throne when he was but four years old — Louis XIV., whose armies had won great victories, would give men and money. The Church of Rome would aid. The priests of St. Francis and the Jesuits had been among the Indians of the Great West, enlisting them on the side of France, and against the Dutch and English. The Dutch traders had never been beyond Niagara, while the French every year were chaffering with the Indians at Mackinac and on the Mississippi.

All the Indians had been won to the side of France except the Iroquois, who had never forgotten that their fathers had been driven from the St. Lawrence, nor that Champlain fought against them many moons before. Jean de Lamberville, a Jesuit missionary, was living with the Onondagas, trying to convert them to Christianity, and to call Louis XIV. their great father; but the warriors, who had carried their victorious arms to Tennessee, who had compelled the Illinois to pay them tribute, would call him brother only; never father.

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