Canada: the Empire of the North

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

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"This is a serious business," said Montcalm hurriedly to his aide.
Then, spurs to his big black horse, he was galloping furiously along
the Beauport road, over the resounding bridge across the St. Charles,
up the steep cobblestone streets that lead from Lower to Upper Town,
and out by the St. Louis road to the Plains of Abraham. In Quebec all
was confusion. _Who_ had given the order for the troops to move out
against the English without waiting for Bougainville to come from Cape
Rouge? But there they were, huddling, disorderly columns that crowded
on each other, filing out of the St. Louis and St. John Gates, with a
long string of battalions following Montcalm up from the St. Charles.
And Ramezay, who was commandant of the city, refused to send out part
of his troops; and Vaudreuil, who was at Beauport, delayed to come; and
though Montcalm waited till ten o'clock, Bougainville did not come up
from Cape Rouge with his three thousand men. Easy to criticise and say
Montcalm should have waited till Bougainville and Vaudreuil came. He
could _not_ wait, for Wolfe's position cut his forces in two, and the
army was without supplies. With his four thousand five hundred men he
accepted fate's challenge.

Bagpipes shrilling, English flags waving to the wind, the French
soldiers shouting riotously, the two armies moved towards each other.
Then the English halted, silent, motionless {272} statues. The men
were refreshed, for during the four hours' wait from daylight, Wolfe
had permitted them to rest on the grassed plain. The French came
bounding forward, firing as they ran, and bending down to reload. The
English waited till the French were but forty yards away. "They were
not to throw away their fire," Wolfe had ordered. Now forty yards, if
you measure it off in your mind's eye, is short space between hostile
armies. It is not as wide as the average garden front in a suburban
city. Then suddenly the thin red line of the English spoke in a crash
of fire. The shots were so simultaneous that they sounded like one
terrific crash of ear-splitting thunder. The French had no time to
halt before a second volley rent the air. Then a clattering fire
rocketed from the British like echoes from a precipice. With wild
halloo the British were charging, . . . charging, . . . charging, the
Highlanders leading with their broadswords flashing overhead and their
mountain blood on fire, Wolfe to the fore of the grenadiers till a shot
broke his wrist! Wrapping his handkerchief about the wound as he ran,
the victorious young general was dashing forward when a second shot hit
him and a third pierced his breast. He staggered a step, reeled, fell
to the ground. Three soldiers and an officer ran to his aid and
carried him in their arms to the rear. He would have no surgeon. It
was useless, he said. "But the day is ours, and see that you keep it,"
he muttered, sinking back unconscious. A moment later he was roused by
wild, hilarious, jubilant, heart-shattering shouts.

"Gad! they run! See how they run!" said an English voice.

"_Who_--run?" demanded Wolfe, roused as if from the sleep of death.

"The enemy, sir. They give way . . . everywhere."

"Go, one of you," commanded the dying general; "tell Colonel Burton to
march Webb's regiment down Charles River to cut off retreat by the
bridge. Now God be praised!" he added, sinking back; "I die in peace!"
And the spirit of Wolfe had departed, leaving as a heritage a New
Empire of the North, and an immortal fame.

[Illustration: DEATH OF WOLFE (From the painting by Benjamin West)]

{273}

Fate had gone hard against the gallant Montcalm. The first volley from
the English line had mowed his soldiers down like ripe wheat. At the
second volley the ranks broke and the ground was thick strewn with the
dead. When the English charged, the French fled in wildest panic
downhill for the St. Charles. Wounded and faint, Montcalm on his black
charger was swept swiftly along St. Louis road in the blind stampede of
retreat. Near the walls a ball passed through his groins. Two
soldiers caught him from falling, and steadied him on either side of
his horse through St. Louis gate, where women, waiting in mad anxiety,
saw the blood dripping over his horse.

"My God! My God! Our marquis is slain!" they screamed.

"It is nothing,--nothing,--good friends; don't trouble about me,"
answered the wounded general as he passed for the last time under the
arched gateway of St. Louis road.

"How long have I to live?" he asked the surgeon into whose house he had
been carried.

"Few hours, my lord."

"So much the better," answered Montcalm. "I shall not live to see
Quebec surrendered."

Before daylight, he was dead. Wrapped in his soldier's cloak, laid in
a rough box, the body was carried that night to the Ursuline Convent,
where a bursting bomb had scooped a great hole in the floor. Sad-eyed
nuns and priests crowded the chapel. By torchlight, amid tears and
sobs, the body was laid to rest.

Both generals had died as they had lived,--gallantly. To-day both are
regarded as heroes and commemorated by monuments; but how did their
governments treat them? Of course there were wild huzzas in London and
solemn memorial services over Wolfe; but when his aged mother
petitioned the government that her dead son's salary might be computed
at 10 pounds a day,--the salary of a commander in chief,--instead of 2
pounds a day, she was refused in as curtly uncivil a note as was ever
penned. Montcalm had died in debt, and when his family petitioned the
French government to pay these debts, the King thought it should be
done, but he did not take the trouble to see that his {274} good
intention was carried out. It was easy and cheaper for orators to talk
of heroes giving their lives for their country. There are no better
examples in history of the truth that glory and honor and true service
must be their own reward, independent of any compensation, any
suffering, any sacrifice.

Though the panic retreat continued for hours and Quebec was not
surrendered for some days, the battle was practically decided in ten
minutes. The campaign of the next year was gallant but fruitless. In
April, before the fleet has come back to the English, De Levis throws
himself with the remnants of the French army against the rear wall of
Quebec; and as Montcalm had come out to fight Wolfe, so Murray marches
out to fight De Levis. Both sides claimed the battle of Ste. Foye as
victory, but another such victory would have exterminated the English.
Levis outside the walls, Murray glad to be inside the walls, each side
waited for the spring fleet. If France had come to Canada's aid, even
yet the country might have been won, for sickness had reduced Murray's
army to less than three thousand able men; but the flag that flaunted
from the ship that sailed into the harbor of Quebec on the 9th of May
was British. That decided Canada's fate. De Levis retreated swiftly
for Montreal, but by September the slow-moving General Amherst has
closed in on Montreal from the west, and up the St. Lawrence from the
east proceeds General Murray. De Levis and Vaudreuil had less than two
thousand fighting men at Montreal. September 8th they capitulated, and
three years later, by the Treaty of Paris, Canada passed under the
dominion of England. Officers, many of the nobility, Bigot and his
crew, sailed for France, where the Intendant's ring were put on trial
and punished for their corruption and misrule. Bigot suffered
banishment and the confiscation of property. The other members of his
clique received like sentences.

Spite of the hopes of her devoted founders,--like Champlain and
Maisonneuve,--spite of the blood of her martyrs and the prayers of her
missionaries, spite of all the pathfinding of her {275} explorers,
spite of the dauntless warfare of her soldier knights,--like Frontenac
and Iberville and Montcalm,--New France had fallen.

Why?

For two reasons: because of England's sea power; because of the
unblushing, shameless, gilded corruption of the French court, which
cared less for the fate of Canada than the leer of a painted fool
behind her fan. But be this remembered,--and here was the hand of
overruling Destiny or Providence,--the fall of New France, like the
fall of the seed to the ready soil, was the rebirth of a new nation.
Henceforth it is not New France, the appendage of an Old World nation.
It is Canada,--a New Dominion.

To-day wander round Quebec. Tablets and monuments consecrate many of
the old hero days. Though the British government rebuilt a line of
walls in the early eighteen hundreds, you will find it hard to trace
even a vestige of the old French walls. Mounds tell you where there
were bastions. A magnificent boulevard tops the most of the old
ramparts. An imposing hotel stands where Castle St. Louis once frowned
over the St. Lawrence. Of the palace where the Intendant held his
revels there are not even ruins. If you drive out past Beauport, you
will find at the end of a nine-mile forest path the crumbling brick
walls of Chateau Bigot, the Hermitage, half buried, in the days when I
visited it, with rose vines and orchard trees gone wild. That is all
you will find of the court clique whose folly brought Canada's doom;
but as you drive back from Beauport there towers the city from the
rocky heights above the St. Lawrence,--chapel spire and cross and domed
cathedral roofs aglint in the sunlight like a city of gold. The
church, baptized by the blood of its martyrs, is there in pristine
power; and the fruitful meadows bear witness to the prosperity of the
habitant on whom the burden fell in the days of the ancient regime.
Who shall say that habitant and church do not deserve the place of
power they hold in the government of the Dominion?

{276}

CHAPTER XIII

FROM 1763 TO 1812

English law and Quebec--French rights guarded--Pontiac's war--Siege of
Detroit--Fight at Bloody Run--Michilimackinac falls--How Bouquet wins
victory--Return of captives--The peddlers--Methods of
Nor'westers--Traders invade the Up Country--Disaffection in
Canada--Canada invaded--Quebec invested--Montgomery's fight--"Rats in a
trap"--Relief at last--Tricks of ringsters--Coming of Loyalists--Life
in the backwoods

Quebec has fallen. As jackals gather to feast on the carcass of the
dead lion, so rallies a rabble of adventurers on the trail of the
victorious army. Sutlers, traders, teamsters, riffraff,--soldiers of
fortune,--stampede to Montreal and Quebec as to a new gold field. When
Major Robert Rogers, the English forest ranger, proceeds up the lakes
to take over the western fur posts,--Presqu' Isle, Detroit,
Michilimackinac,--he is followed by hosts of adventurers looking for
swift way to fortune by either the fur trade or by picking the bones of
the dead lion. Major Rogers, beating up Lake Ontario and Lake Erie
with two hundred bushwhackers, pausing in camp near modern Sandusky,
meets the renowned Ottawa warrior, Pontiac, who had fought with the
French against Braddock and now wants to know in voice of thunder what
all this talk about the French being conquered means; how _dare_ the
French, because _they_ have proved paltroons, deed away the Indian
lands of Canada? How dare Rogers, the white chief of the English
rangers, come here with his pale-faced warriors to Pontiac's land? How
Rogers answered the veteran red-skinned warrior is not told. All that
is known is--the French gave up their western furs with bad grace, and
the English commandants forgot to appease the wound to the Indians'
pride by the customary gifts over solemn powwow. At Detroit and
Michilimackinac the French quietly withdraw from the palisades and
build their white-washed cottages outside the limits of the fort--2500
French habitants there are at Detroit.

If the four or five hundred English adventurers who swarmed to Canada
on the heels of the English army thought to batten on the sixty
thousand defeated French inhabitants, far otherwise thought and decreed
the English generals, Sir Jeffrey {277} Amherst, and Murray, who
succeeded him. "You will observe that the French are British subjects
as much as we are, and treat them accordingly," ruled Amherst; and
General Murray, who practically became the first governor of Canada on
Amherst's withdrawal, at once set himself to establish justice.

[Illustration: MAJOR ROBERT ROGERS]

No more forced labor! No more carrion birds of the official classes,
like Bigot, fattening on the poor habitants! British government in
Canada for the next few years is known as the period of military rule.
At Quebec, at Three Rivers, at Montreal, the commanding officers
established martial law with biweekly courts; and in the parishes the
local French officers, or seigneurs, are authorized to hear civil
cases. By the terms of surrender the people have been guaranteed their
religious liberty; and the Treaty of Paris, which cedes all Canada to
England in 1763, repeats this guarantee, though it leaves a thorn of
trouble in the flesh of England by reserving to France for the benefit
of the Grand Banks fishermen the Islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, as
well as shore rights of fishing on the west coast of Newfoundland.
Also, the proprietary rights of Jesuits, Sulpicians, Franciscans, are
to remain in abeyance for the pleasure of the English crown. The
rights of the sisterhoods are at once confirmed.

{278} One of General Murray's first acts as governor is to convey
gentle hint to the Abbe Le Loutre, now released from prison and come
back to Canada, that his absence will be appreciated by the government.
Within a few years there are five hundred English residents in Montreal
and Quebec; and now trouble begins for the government,--that wrangle
between English and French, between Protestant and Catholic, which is
to go on for a hundred years and retard Canada's progress by a century.

[Illustration: NORTH AMERICA AT THE CLOSE OF THE FRENCH WARS, 1763]

Being British-born subjects, the few hundred demand that the Governor
call an assembly,--an elective assembly; but by the laws of England,
Roman Catholics must abjure their religion before they can take office,
and by the Treaty of Paris the Catholics of Canada have been guaranteed
the freedom of their religion. To grant an elective assembly now would
mean that the representatives of the five hundred English traders would
rule over 70,000 French. When accusing the French Catholics of Quebec
of remaining a solidarity so that they may wield the balance of power,
it is well to remember how and when the quarrel began. Murray sides
with the French and stands like a rock for their right. He will have
no elective assembly under present conditions; and he puts summary stop
to the business English magistrates and English bailiffs have hatched
against the rights of the habitant,--of seizing lands for debt at a
time when money is scarce, summoning the debtor simultaneously to two
different courts, then charging such outrageous fees that the debtor's
land is sold for the fees, to be bought in by the rascal ring who have
arranged the plot. Ordinances are still proclaimed in primitive
fashion by the crier going through the streets shouting the laws to
beat of drum; but as the crier {279} shouts in English, the habitants
know no more of the laws than if he shouted in Greek.

As Murray opposes the clamor of the English minority, the English
petition the home government for Murray's recall. In the light of the
fact that there were no schools at all in Canada except the Catholic
seminaries, and that of the five hundred English residents only two
hundred had permanent homes in Montreal and Quebec, it is rather
instructive to read as one of the grievances of the English minority
"_that the only teachers in Canada were Catholics_."

The governor-generalship is offered to Chatham, the great statesman, at
5000 pounds a year. Chatham refusing the position, there comes in 1768
as governor, at 1200 pounds a year, Sir Guy Carleton, fellow-soldier
and friend of Wolfe in the great war, who follows in Murray's
footsteps, stands like a rock for the rights of the French, orders
debtors released from jail, fees reduced, and a stoppage of forced land
sales. Bitter is the disappointment to the land jobbers, who had
looked for a partisan in Carleton; doubly bitter, for Carleton goes one
better than Murray. For years the French government had issued paper
money in Quebec. After the conquest seventeen millions of these
worthless government promissory notes were outstanding in the hands of
the habitants. Knowing that the paper money is to be redeemed by the
English government, English jobbers are now busy buying up the paper
among the poor French at fifteen cents on the dollar. Carleton sends
the town crier from parish to parish, warning the habitants to hold
their money and register the amounts with the magistrates till the
whole matter can be arranged between England and France.

The first newspaper is established now in Quebec, _The Quebec Gazette_,
printed in both English and French. Also the first trouble now arises
from having ceded France the two tiny islands south of Newfoundland,
St. Pierre and Miquelon. By English navigation laws, all trade must
be in English ships. Good! The smugglers slip into St. Pierre with a
cargo. By night a ship with a white sail slips out of St. Pierre with
that {280} cargo. At Gaspe the sail of that ship is red; at Saguenay
it is yellow; at Quebec it is perhaps brown. Ostensibly the ship is a
fishing smack, but it leaves other cargo than fish at the habitant
hamlets of the St. Lawrence; and the smuggling from St. Pierre that
began in Carleton's time is continued to-day in the very same way.

[Illustration: GENERAL MURRAY, FIRST GOVERNOR OF QUEBEC]

And Guy Carleton, though he is an Englishman and owes his appointment
to the complaints of the English minority against Murray, remains
absolutely impartial. Good reason for the wisdom of his policy. There
are rumblings from the New England colonies that forewarn the coming
earthquake. For years friction has been growing between the mother
country and the colonies. The story of the Revolution does not belong
to the story of Canada. For years far-sighted statesmen had predicted
that the minute New England ceased to fear New France, ceased to need
England's protection, that minute the growing friction would flame in
open war. Carleton foresaw that to pander to the English minority
would sacrifice the loyalty of the French. Thus he reported to the
home government, and the Quebec Act of 1774 came to the relief of the
French. By it Canada's boundaries were extended across the region of
the Ohio to the Mississippi. French laws were restored {281} in all
civil actions. English law was to rule in criminal cases, which meant
trial by jury. The French are relieved from oaths of office and
enabled to serve on the jury. Also, the Catholic clergy is entitled to
collect its usual tithe of one twenty-sixth from the Catholics. An
elective assembly is refused for reasons that are plain, but a
legislative council is granted, to be appointed by the crown. For the
expense of government a slight tax is levied on liquor; but as the St.
Pierre smuggling is now flourishing, the tax docs not begin to meet the
cost of government, and the difference is paid from the imperial
treasury. However badly the imperial government blundered with the New
England colonies, her treatment of Quebec was an object lesson in
colonizing to the world. Had she treated her New England colonies half
as justly as she treated Quebec, British America might to-day extend to
Mexico. Had she treated Quebec half as unjustly as she treated her own
offspring of New England, the United States might to-day extend to the
Arctic Circle. The man who saved Canada to England, in the first place
by wisdom, in the second place by war, was Sir Guy Carleton.

While the English and French, Protestant and Catholic, wrangle for
power in Quebec there rages on the frontier one of the most devastating
Indian wars known to American history. Not for nothing had Pontiac
drawn himself to his full height and defied Major Rogers down on Lake
Erie. From tribe to tribe the lithe coureurs ran, naked but for the
breechcloth, painted as for war, carrying in one hand the tomahawk
dipped in blood, in the other the wampum belt of purple, typifying war.
The French had deeded away the Indian lands to the English! The news
ran like wildfire, ran by moccasin telegram from Montreal up Ottawa
River to Michilimackinac, from Niagara westward to Detroit, and
southward to Presqu' Isle and all that chain of forts leading
southwestward to the Mississippi. Was it a "Conspiracy of Pontiac," as
it has been called? Hardly. It was more one of those general
movements of unrest, of discontent, of misunderstanding, that but
awaits the appearance of {282} a brave leader to become a torrent of
destruction. Pontiac, the Ottawa chief, was such a leader, and to his
standard rallied Indians from Virginia, from the Mississippi, from Lake
Superior. Of the universal unrest among the Indians the English were
not ignorant, but they failed to realize its significance; failed, too,
to realize that the French fur traders, cast out of the western forts
and now roaming the wilds, fanned the flame, gave presents of gunpowder
and firearms to the savages, and egged the hostiles on against the new
possessors of Canada, in order to divert the fur trade to French
traders still in Louisiana. Down at Miami, southwest of Lake Erie,
Ensign Holmes hears in March of 1763 that the war belt has been carried
to the Illinois. Up at Detroit, in May, Pontiac is camped on the east
side of the river with eight hundred hunters. Daily the French
farmers, who supply the fort with provisions, carry word to Major
Gladwin that the Indians are acting strangely, holding long and secret
powwow, borrowing files to saw off the barrels of their muskets short.
A French woman, who has visited the Indians across the river for a
supply of maple sugar, comes to Gladwin on May 5 with the same story.
From eight hundred, the Indians increase to two thousand. Old
Catherine, a toothless squaw, comes shaking as with the palsy to the
fort, and with mumbling words warns Gladwin to "Beware, beware!" So
does a young girl whose fine eyes have caught the fancy of Gladwin
himself. Breaking out with bitter weeping, she covers her head with
her shawl and bids her white lover have a care how he meets Pontiac in
council. Gladwin himself was a seasoned campaigner, who had escaped
the hurricane of death with Braddock and had also served under Amherst
at Montreal. In his fort are one hundred and twenty soldiers and forty
traders. At the wharf lie the two armed schooners, _Beaver_ and
_Gladwin_. When Pontiac comes with his sixty warriors Gladwin is ready
for him. In the council house the warriors seat themselves, weapons
concealed under blankets; but when Pontiac raises the wampum belt that
was to be the signal for the massacre to begin, Major Gladwin, never
moving his light blue eyes from {283} the snaky gleam of the Indian,
waves his hand, and at the motion there is a roll of drums, a grounding
of the sentry's arms, a trampling of soldiers outside, a rush as of
white men marching. Pontiac is dumfounded and departs without giving
the signal. Back in his cabin of rushes across the river he rages like
a maniac and buries a tomahawk in the skull of the old squaw Catherine.
Monday, May 9, at ten o'clock he comes again, followed by a rabble of
hunters. The gates are shut in his face. He shouts for admittance.
The sentry opens the wicket and in traders' vernacular bids him go
about his business. There is a wild war yell. The siege of Detroit
begins.

[Illustration: SETTLEMENTS ON THE DETROIT RIVER]

The story of that siege would fill volumes. For fifteen months it
lasted, the French remaining neutral, selling provisions to both sides,
Gladwin defiant inside his palisades, the Indians persistent as enraged
hornets. Two English officers who have been out hunting are waylaid,
murdered, skinned, the skin sewed into powder pouches, the bloody
carcasses sent drifting down on the flood of waters past the fort
walls. Desperately in need of provisions from the French, Gladwin
consents to temporary truce while Captain Campbell and others go out to
parley with the Indians. {284} Gladwin obtains cart loads of
provisions during the parley, but Pontiac violates the honor of war by
holding the messengers captive. Burning arrows are shot at the fort
walls. Gladwin's men sally out by night, hack down the orchards that
conceal the enemy, burn all outbuildings, and come back without losing
a man. Nightly, too, lapping the canoe noiselessly across water with
the palm of the hand, one of the French farmers comes with fresh
provisions. Gladwin has sent a secret messenger, with letter in his
powder pouch, through the lines of the besiegers to Niagara for aid.
May 30, moving slowly, all sails out, the English flag flying from the
prow, comes a convoy of sailboats up the river. Cheer on cheer rent
the air. The soldiers at watch in the galleries inside the palisades
tossed their caps overhead, but as the ships came nearer the whites
were paralyzed with horror. Silence froze the cheer on the parted
lips. Indian warriors manned the boats. The convoy of ninety-six men
had been cut to pieces, only a few soldiers escaping back to Niagara, a
few coming on, compelled by the Indians to act as rowers. As the boats
passed the fort, whoops of derision, wild war chants, eldritch screams,
rose from the Indians. One desperate white captive rose like a flash
from his place at the rowlocks, caught his Indian captor by the scuff
of the neck and threw him into the river; but the redskin grappled the
other in a grip of death. Turning over and over, locked in each
other's arms, the hate of the inferno in their faces, soldier and
Indian swept down to watery death in the river tide. Taking advantage
of the confusion, and under protection of the fort guns, one of the
other captives sprang into the river and succeeded in swimming safely
to the fort. Terrible was the news he brought. All the other forts
south of Niagara, with the exception of Fort Pitt,--Miami, St. Joseph,
Presqu' Isle,--lay in ashes. From some not a man had escaped to tell
the story.

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