Canada: the Empire of the North

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> Canada: the Empire of the North

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When Nicholson returned to Boston all New England went mad with
delight. Thanksgiving services were held, joy bells rang day and night
for a week, and bonfires blazed on village commons to the gleeful
shoutings of rustic soldiers returned to the home settlements glorified
heroes.

{201}

[Illustration: PAUL MASCARENE]

At Annapolis (Port Royal) Paul Mascarene, a French Huguenot of Boston,
has mounted guard with two hundred and fifty New England volunteers.
Colonel Vetch is nominally the English governor; but Vetch is in Boston
the most of the time, and it is on Mascarene the burden of governing
falls. His duties are not light. Palisades have been broken down and
must be repaired. Bombs have torn holes in the fort roofs, and all
that winter the rain leaks in as through a sieve. The soldier
volunteers grumble and mope and sicken. And these are not the least of
Paul Mascarene's troubles. French priests minister to the Acadian
farmers outside the fort, to the sinister Indians ever lying in ambush,
to the French bushrovers under young St. Castin across Fundy Bay on St.
John River. Not for love or money can Mascarene buy provisions from
the Acadians. Not by threats can he compel them to help mend the
breaches in the palisades. The young commandant was only twenty-seven
years of age, but he must have guessed whence came the unspoken
hostility. The first miserable winter wears slowly past and the winter
of 1711 is setting in, with the English garrison even more poverty
stricken than the year before, when there drifts into Annapolis Basin,
in a birch canoe paddled by a New Brunswick Indian, a white woman with
her little son. She has come, she says, from the north side of Fundy
Bay, because the French {202} on St. John River are starving. Whether
the story be true or false matters little. It was the Widow Freneuse,
the snake woman of mischief-making witchery, who had woven her spells
round the officers in the days of the French at Port Royal. True or
false, her story, added to her smile, excited sympathy, and she was
welcomed to the shelter of the fort. It had been almost impossible for
the English to obtain trees to repair the walls of the fort, and
seventy English soldiers were sent out secretly by night to paddle up
the river in a whaleboat for timber. Who conveyed secret warning of
this expedition to the French bushraiders outside? No doubt the fair
spy, Widow Freneuse, could have told if she would; but five miles from
Port Royal, where the river narrowed to a place ever since known as
Bloody Brook, a crash of musket shots flared from the woods on each
side. Painted Indians, and Frenchmen dressed as Indians, among whom
was a son of Widow Freneuse, dashed out. Sixteen English were killed,
nine wounded, the rest to a man captured, to be held for ransoms
ranging from 10 pounds to 50 pounds. Oddly enough, the very night
after the attack, before news of it had come to Annapolis, the Widow
Freneuse disappears from the fort. Henceforth Paul Mascarene's men
kept guard night and day, and slept in their boots. Ever like a
sinister shadow of evil moved St. Castin and his raiders through the
Acadian wildwoods.

Only one thing prevented the French recapturing Port Royal at this
time. All troops were required to defend Quebec itself from invasion.

Nicholson's success at Port Royal spurred England and her American
colonies to a more ambitious project,--to capture Quebec and subjugate
Canada. This time Nicholson was to head twenty-five hundred provincial
troops by way of Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence, while a British
army of twelve thousand, half soldiers, half marines, on fifteen
frigates and forty-six transports, was to sail from Boston for Quebec.
The navy was under command of Sir Hovender Walker; the army, of General
Jack Hill, a court favorite of Queen Anne's, more noted for {203} his
graces than his prowess. The whole expedition is one of the most
disgraceful in the annals of English war. The fleet left Boston on
July 30, 1711, Nicholson meanwhile waiting encamped on Lake Champlain.
Early in August the immense fleet had rounded Sable Island and was off
the shores of Anticosti. Though there was no good pilot on board, the
two commanders nightly went to bed and slept the sleep of the just.
Off Egg Islands, on the night of August 22, there was fog and a strong
east wind. Walker evidently thought he was near the south shore,
ignorant of the strong undertow of the tide here, which had carried his
ships thirty miles off the course. The water was rolling in the lumpy
masses of a choppy cross sea when a young captain of the regulars
dashed breathlessly into Walker's stateroom and begged him "for the
Lord's sake to come on deck, for there are reefs ahead and we shall all
be lost!"

With a seaman's laugh at a landsman's fears, the Admiral donned
dressing gown and slippers and shuffled up to the decks. A pale moon
had broken through the ragged fog wrack, and through the white light
they plainly saw mountainous breakers straight ahead. Walker shouted
to let the anchor go and drive to the wind. Above the roar of breakers
and trample of panic-stricken seamen over decks could be heard the
minute guns of the other ships firing for help. Then pitch darkness
fell with slant rains in a deluge. The storm abated, but all night
long, above the boom of an angry sea, could be heard shrieks and
shoutings for help; and by the light of the Admiral's ship could be
seen the faces of the dead cast up by the moil of the sea. Before dawn
eight transports had suffered shipwreck and one thousand lives were
lost.

It was a night to put fear in the hearts of all but very brave men, and
neither Walker nor Hill proved man enough to stand firm to the shock.
Walker ascribed the loss to the storm and the storm to Providence; and
when war council was held three days later Jack Hill, the court dandy,
was only too glad of excuse to turn tail and flee to England without
firing a gun. Poor old Nicholson, waiting with his provincials up on
Lake Champlain, {204} goes into apoplexy with tempests of rage and
chagrin, when he hears the news, stamping the ground, tearing off his
wig, and shouting, "Rogues! rogues!" He burns his fort and disbands
his men.

The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 for the time closed the war. France had
been hopelessly defeated in Europe, and the terms were favorable to
England.

All of Hudson Bay was to be restored to the English; but--note well--it
was not specified where the boundaries were to be between Hudson Bay
and Quebec. That boundary dispute came down as a heritage to modern
days--thanks to the incompetency and ignorance of the statesmen who
arranged the treaty.

Acadia was given to England, but Cape Breton was retained by the
French, and--note well--it was not stated whether Acadia included New
Brunswick and Maine, as the French formerly contended, or included only
the peninsula south of the Bay of Fundy. That boundary dispute, too,
came down.

Newfoundland was acknowledged as an English possession, but the French
retained the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, with fishing
privileges on the shores of Newfoundland. That concession, too, has
come down to trouble modern days,--thanks to the same defenders of
colonial interests.

The Iroquois were acknowledged to be subjects of England, but it was
not stated whether that concession included the lands of the Ohio
raided and subjugated by the Iroquois; and that vagueness was destined
to cost both New France and New England some of its best blood.

It has been stated, and stated many times without dispute, that when
England sacrificed the interests of her colonies in boundary
settlements, she did so because she was in honor bound to observe the
terms of treaties. One is constrained to ask whose ignorance was
responsible for the terms of those treaties.

Looking back on the record so far,--both of France and England,--which
has spent the more both of substance and of life for defense; the
mother countries or the colonies?

{205}

CHAPTER XI

FROM 1713 TO 1755

La Verendrye's adventuring to the West--Adventurers reach Lake
Winnipeg--From Assiniboine to Missouri--Intrigue with Indians--The
building of Louisburg--The siege of the great fort--Jokes bandied by
fighters--Quarrels left unsettled--Beyond the Alleghenies--Washington
and Jumonville--Braddock's march--Defeat of Braddock--Abbe Le
Loutre--The Acadians--Deportation of French--At Lake Champlain--Dieskau
defeated

What with clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the
little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of
its youth. While the population of the English colonies was nearing
the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet
what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec,
accomplished? Look at the map! Her bushrovers had gone overland to
Hudson Bay far north as Nelson. Before 1700 Duluth had forts at
Kaministiquia (near modern Fort Williams) on Lake Superior. Radisson,
Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle had blazed a trail to the Mississippi
from what is now Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. By 1701 La Motte
Cadillac had built what is now Detroit in order to stop the progress of
the English traders up the lakes to Michilimackinac; and by 1727 the
Company of the Sioux had forts far west as Lake Pepin. With Quebec as
the hub of the wheel, draw spokes across the map of North America.
Where do they reach? From Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico, to the
Missouri, to the Upper Mississippi, to Lake Superior, to Hudson Bay.
Who blazed the way through these far pathless wilds? Nameless
wanderers dressed in rags and tatters,--outcasts of society, forest
rovers lured by the Unknown as by a siren, soldiers of fortune,
penniless, in debt, heartbroken, slandered, persecuted, driven by the
demon of their own genius to earth's ends,--and to ruin!

Spite of clandestine raids and open wars, New France was now setting
herself to stretch the lines of her discoveries farther westward.

It will be remembered it was at Three Rivers that the Indians of the Up
Country paused on their way down the St. Lawrence. {206} From the days
of Radisson in 1660 the passion for discovery had been in the very air
of Three Rivers. In this little fort was born in 1686 Pierre Gaultier
Varennes de La Verendrye, son of a French officer. From childhood the
boy's ear must have been accustomed to the uncouth babblings of the
half-naked Indians, whose canoes came swarming down the river soon as
ice broke up in spring. One can guess that in his play the boy many a
time simulated Indian voyageur, bushrover, coming home clad in furs,
the envy of the villagers. At fourteen young Pierre had decided that
he would be a great explorer, but destiny for the time ruled otherwise.
At eighteen he was among the bushraiders of New England. Nineteen
found him fighting the English in Newfoundland. Then came the honor
coveted by all Canadian boys,--an appointment to the King's army in
Europe. Young La Verendrye was among the French forces defeated by the
great Marlborough; but the Peace of Utrecht sent him back to Canada,
aged twenty-seven, to serve in the far northern fur post of Nepigon,
eating his heart out with ambition.

It was here the dreams of his childhood emerged like a commanding
destiny. Old Indian chief Ochagach drew maps on birch bark of a trail
to the Western Sea. La Verendrye took canoe for Quebec, and, with
heart beating to the passion of a secret ambition, laid the drawings
before Governor Beauharnois. He came just in the nick of time.
English traders were pressing westward. New France lent ready ear for
schemes of wider empire. The court could grant no money for
discoveries, but it gave La Verendrye permission for a voyage and
monopoly in furs over the lands he might discover; but the lands must
be found before there would be furs, and here began the mundane worries
of La Verendrye's glory.

Montreal merchants outfitted him, but that meant debt; and his little
party of fifty grizzled woodrovers set out with their ninety-foot birch
canoes from Montreal on June 8, 1731. Three sons were in his party and
a nephew, Jemmeraie, from the Sioux country of the west. Every foot
westward had been consecrated by heroism to set the pulse of
red-blooded men jumping. There {207} was the seigniory of La Chine,
named in derision of La Salle's project to find a path to China. There
was the Long Sault, where Dollard had fought the Iroquois. There were
the pink granite islands of Georgian Bay, where the Jesuits had led
their harried Hurons. There was Michilimackinac, with the brawl of its
vice and brandy and lawless traders from the woods, where La Motte
Cadillac ruled before going to found Detroit. Seventy-eight days from
Montreal, there were the pictured rocks of Lake Superior, purple and
silent and deep as ocean, which Radisson had coasted on his way to the
Mississippi. Then La Verendrye came to Duluth's old stamping
ground--Kaministiquia.

[Illustration: LA VERENDRYE'S FORTS AND THE RIVER OF THE WEST (After
Jeffery's map, 1762)]

The home-bound boats were just leaving the fur posts for the St.
Lawrence. Frosts had already stripped the trees of foliage, and winter
would presently lock all avenues of retreat in six months' ice. La
Verendrye's men began to doubt the wisdom of chasing a will-o'-the-wisp
to an unknown Western Sea. The explorer sent half the party forward
with his nephew Jemmeraie and his son Jean, while he himself remained
at Kaministiquia with the mutineers to forage for provisions. {208}
Winter found Jemmeraie's men on the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake, where
they built Fort Pierre and drove a rich trade in furs with the encamped
Crees. In summer of 1732 came La Verendrye, his men in gayest apparel
marching before the awe-struck Crees with bugle blowing and flags
flying. Then white men and Crees advanced in canoes to the Lake of the
Woods, coasting from island to island through the shadowy defiles of
the sylvan rocks along the Minnesota shore to the northwest angle.
Here a second winter witnessed the building of a second post, Fort St.
Charles, with four rows of fifteen-foot palisades and thatched-roofed
log cabins. The Western Sea seemed far as ever,--like the rainbow of
the child, ever fleeing as pursued,--and La Verendrye's merchant
partners were beginning to curse him for a rainbow chaser. He had been
away three years, and there were no profits. Suspicious that he might
be defrauding them by private trade or sacrificing their interests to
his own ambitions, they failed to send forward provisions for this
year. La Verendrye was in debt to his men for three years' wages, in
debt to his partners for three years' provisions. To fail now he dared
not. Go forward he could not, so he hurried down to Montreal, where he
prevailed on the merchants to continue supplies by the simple argument
that, if they stopped now, there would be total loss.

Young Jean La Verendrye and Jemmeraie have meanwhile descended Winnipeg
River's white fret of waterfalls to Winnipeg Lake, where they build
Fort Maurepas, near modern Alexander,--and wait. Fishing failed. The
hunt failed. The winter of 1735-1736 proved of such terrible severity
that famine stalked through the western woods. La Verendrye's three
forts were reduced to diet of skins, moccasin soup, and dog meat. In
desperation Jemmeraie set out with a few voyageurs to meet the
returning commander, but privation had undermined his strength. He
died on the way and was buried in his hunter's blanket beside an
unknown stream between Lake Winnipeg and the Lake of the Woods.
Accompanied by the priest Aulneau, young Jean de La Verendrye decided
to rush canoes down from the Lake of the Woods to Michilimackinac for
food and powder. A furious pace was {209} to be kept all the way to
Lake Superior. The voyageurs had risen early one morning in June, and
after paddling some miles through the mist had landed to breakfast when
a band of marauding Sioux fell on them with a shout. The priest
Aulneau fell pierced in the head by a stone-pointed arrow. Young Jean
La Verendrye was literally hacked to pieces. Not a man of the
seventeen French escaped, and Massacre Island became a place of ill
omen to the French from that day. At last came the belated supplies,
and by February of 1737 La Verendrye had moved his main forces west to
Lake Winnipeg. This was no Western Sea, though the wind whipped the
lake like a tide,--which explained the Indian legend of an inland
ocean. Though it was no Western Sea, it was a new empire for France.
The bourne of the Unknown still fled like the rainbow, and La Verendrye
still pursued.

[Illustration: MAP PUBLISHED IN PARIS IN 1752 SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA
OF THE WEST]

Down to Quebec for more supplies with tales of a vast Beyond Land!
Back to Lake Winnipeg by September of 1738 with canoes gliding up the
muddy current of Red River for the Unknown Land of the Assiniboines;
past Nettley Creek, then known as Massacre Creek or Murderers' River,
from the Sioux having slain the encamped wives and children of the Cree
who had gone to Hudson Bay with their furs; between the wooded banks of
what are now East and West Selkirk, flat to left, high to right;
tracking up the Rapids of St. Andrews, thick oak woods to east, {210}
rippling prairie russet in the autumn rolling to the west,--La
Verendrye and his voyageurs came to the forks of Red River and the
Assiniboine, or what is now known as the city of Winnipeg. Where the
two rivers met on the flats to the west were the high scaffoldings of
an ancient Cree graveyard, bizarre and eerie and ghostlike between the
voyageurs and the setting sun. On the high river bank of what is now
known as Assiniboine Avenue gleamed the white skin of ten Cree tepees,
where two war chiefs waited to meet La Verendrye. Drawing up their
canoes near where the bridge now spans between St. Boniface and
Winnipeg, the voyageurs came ashore.

It was a fair scene that greeted them, such a scene as any westerner
may witness to-day of a warm September night when the sun hangs low
like a blood-red shield, and the evening breeze touches the rustling
grasses of the prairie beyond the city to the waves of an ocean. It
was not the Western Sea, but it was a Sea of Prairie. It was a New
World, unbounded by hill or forest, spacious as the very airs of
heaven, fenced only by the blue dip of a shimmering horizon. It was a
world, though La Verendrye knew it not, five times larger than New
France, half as big as all Europe. He had discovered the Canadian
Northwest.

One can guess how the tired wanderers at rest beneath the uptilted
canoes that night wondered whither their quest would lead them over the
fire-dyed horizon where the sun was sinking as over a sea. The Cree
chiefs told them of other lands and other peoples to the south, "who
trade with a people who dwelt on the great waters beyond the mountains
of the setting sun,"--the Spaniards.

Leaving men to knock up a trading post near the suburb now known as
Fort Rouge, La Verendrye, on September 26, steers his canoes up the
shallow Assiniboine far as what is now known as Portage La Prairie,
where a trail leads overland to the Saskatchewan and so down to the
English traders of Hudson Bay. But this is not the trail to the
Western Sea; La Verendrye's quest is set towards those people "who live
on the great waters to the south."

{211}

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED SEA OF THE WEST, WITH
APPROACHES TO THE MISSISSIPPI AND GREAT LAKES, PARIS, 1755]

Fort de La Reine is built at the Portage of the Prairie, and October
18, to beat of drum, with flag flying, La Verendrye marches forth with
fifty-two men towards Souris River for the land of the Mandanes on the
Missouri. December 3 he is welcomed to the Mandane villages; but here
is no Western Sea, only the broad current of the Missouri rolling
turbulent and muddy southward towards the Mississippi; but the Mandanes
tell of a people to the far west, "who live on the great waters bitter
for drinking, who dress in armor and dwell in stone houses." These
must be the Spaniards. La Verendrye's quest has become a receding
phantom. Leaving men to learn the Missouri dialects, La Verendrye
marched in the teeth of mid-winter storms back to the Portage of the
Prairie on the Assiniboine. Of that march, space forbids to tell. A
blizzard raged, driving the fine snows into eyes and skin like hot
salt. When the marchers camped at night they had to bury themselves in
snow to keep from freezing. Drifts covered all landmarks. The men
lost their bearings, doubled back on their own tracks, were
frost-bitten, buffeted by the storm, and short of food. Christmas
{212} was passed in the camps of wandering Assiniboines, and February
10, 1739, the fifty men staggered, weak and starving, back to the
Portage of the Prairie.

The wanderings of La Verendrye and his sons for the next few years led
southwestward far as the Rockies in the region of Montana,
northwestward far as the Bow River branch of the Saskatchewan.
Meanwhile, all La Verendrye's property had been seized by his
creditors. Jealous rivals were clamoring for possession of his fur
posts. The King had conferred on him the Order of the Cross of St.
Louis, but eighteen years of exposure and worry had broken the
explorer's health. On the eve of setting out again for the west he
died suddenly on the 6th of December, 1749, at Montreal.

Look again at the map! The spokes of the wheel running out from Quebec
extend to the Gulf of Mexico on the south, to the Rockies on the west,
to Hudson Bay on the north. And the population of New France does not
yet number 60,000 people. Is it any wonder French Canadians look back
on these days as the Golden Age?

And while the bushrovers of Canada are pushing their way through the
wilderness westward, there come slashing, tramping, swearing, stamping
through the mountainous wilds of West and East Siberia the Cossack
soldiers of Peter the Great, led by the Dane, Vitus Bering, bound on
discovery to the west coast of America. La Verendrye's men have
crossed only half a continent. Bering's Russians cross the width of
two continents, seven thousand miles, then launch their crazily planked
ships over unknown northern seas for America. From 1729 to August of
1742 toil the Russian sea voyagers. Their story is not part of
Canada's history. Suffice to say, December of 1741 finds the Russian
crews cast away on two desert islands of Bering Sea west of Alaska, now
known as the Commander Islands. Half the crew of seventy-seven perish
of starvation and scurvy. Bering himself lies dying in a sandpit, with
the earth spread over him for warmth. Outside the sand holes, {213}
where the Russians crouch, scream hurricane gales and white billows and
myriad sea birds. The ships have been wrecked. The Russians are on an
unknown island. Day dawn, December 8, lying half buried in the sand,
Bering breathes his last. On rafts made of wreckage the remnant of his
crew find way back to Asia, but they have discovered a trail across the
sea to a new land. Fur hunters are moving from the east, westward.
Fur hunters are moving from the west, eastward. These two tides will
meet and clash at a later era.

The Treaty of Utrecht had stopped open war, but that did not prevent
the bushrovers from raiding the border lands of Maine, of
Massachusetts, of New York. The story of one raid is the story of all,
and several have already been related. Now comes a half century of
petty war that raged on the border lands from Saratoga and Northfield
to Maine and New Brunswick. The story of these "little wars," as the
French called them, belongs more to the history of the United States
than Canada.

Nor did the Peace of Utrecht stop the double dealing and intrigue by
which European rulers sought to use bigoted missionaries and ignorant
Indians as pawns in the game of statecraft.

"Sentiments of opposition to the English in Acadia must be secretly
fostered," commanded the King of France in 1715, two years after Acadia
had been deeded over to England. "The King is pleased with the efforts
of Pere Rasle to induce the Indians not to allow the English to settle
on their lands," runs the royal dispatch of 1721 regarding the border
massacres of Maine. "Advise the missionaries in Acadia to do nothing
that may serve as a pretext for sending them out of the country, but
have them induce the Indians to organize enterprises against the
English," command the royal instructions of 1744. "The Indians,"
writes the Canadian Governor, "can be depended on to bring in the
scalps of the English as long as we furnish ammunition. This is the
opinion of the missionary, M. Le Loutre." Again, from the Governor of
New France: "If the settlers of {214} Acadia hesitate to rise against
their English masters, we can employ threats of the Indians and force.
It is inconceivable that the English would try to remove these people.
Letters from M. Le Loutre report that his Indians have intercepted
dispatches of the English officers. M. Le Loutre will keep us informed
of everything in Acadia. We have furnished him with secret signals to
our ships, which will tell us of every movement on the part of the
enemy."

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