Читать книгу Montreal: Seaport and City - Стивен Ликок - Страница 16

The Priests' Farm. The New Royal Government. The Sulpicians as Feudal Seigneurs of Montreal. Growth of the Town. Arrival of De Tracy and Defeat of the Iroquois. Feudal Life around Montreal. The Outside Seigneurie. Lachine. Longueuil. Frontenac and the Indian and English Wars. Treaty of Utrecht.

In the heart of the English residential district of Montreal there is, or was till yesterday, a beautiful open space of trees and meadows, some three quarters of a mile across, like an oasis of verdure in a desert of brick and stone. It was called by the attractive old-time name of the Priests' Farm. Through the gateways of the tall stone wall which hemmed a large part of its circuit one caught a glimpse of old gray stone buildings, of wide orchards, gardens neat as Normandy, and pleasant avenues of trees where reverend Fathers might walk in quiet meditation. From this beautiful open space of verdure the surrounding city breathed in fresh air and health, as the pious order of those who founded, owned, and occupied it breathed in the inspiration of their high calling. For this was, and still is, a part of the property of the Sulpician Order (Les Messieurs de St. Sulpice), whose seminary still stands in the heart of Montreal. To them was committed, when the original missionary Association of Montreal came to an end, the seignorial control of all Montreal Island.

Much of the Priests' Farm is gone now. Its outward glory is departed. Necessity compelled the commercial sale of ground coveted as real estate. Apartment houses sprawl upon its higher slopes and cover the "sites" that once were meadows framed in old willow trees. Its bygone silence is lost in the traffic of new streets and driveways that pierce its very heart. Commodious villas rise, neat with new grass and nodding tulips, to blend a strange novelty with what still remains antique. Their beauty is all too new—the rich inheritance of broken fortune.

Yet not all is gone. There still stands at the foot of the slope in the angle of Sherbrooke Street and the Côte des Neiges Road, the widespread school and dormitory buildings of the famous Grand Séminaire, the Collège de Montréal, where generations of Canadian youth have had their training. One sees through the main gate two old stone towers, built in 1694, that stand well inside the present wall. These are said to be among the oldest, if not actually the very oldest, surviving buildings in Montreal. They are in reality two adjacent towers remaining out of the four that marked the corners of the great wall that surrounded the original building that stood here. This was the fort, a sort of outlying protection for Ville Marie de Montreal, called Le Fort des Messieurs. Inside stood a stone château built out of his own personal fortune by a priest of St. Sulpice. The towers were for protection but were used also as schoolrooms where the children of the converted Indians were taught by the saintly Marguerite Bourgeoys, who was attached as an externe to the Sisters of the Congregation of Troyes and whose name is second only to that of Jeanne Mance in the record of good works at Ville Marie.

Higher up the slope of the Priests' Farm stands the more modern building of the Seminary of Philosophy, the training college of the priests. About it are still many of the old trees, the quiet walks, the gardens, and the long pond of years gone by. Yet midway between the Seminary of Philosophy and the College of Montreal below, on land sold to save them, the handsome premises of the Badminton Club mock with the merriment of battledore and shuttlecock antiquity on the right and philosophy on the left. But for the land that is left the title deeds are still the grant in the name of Louis XIV to the Messieurs de St. Sulpice, whose history at the period we now reach becomes the history of Montreal itself.

We cannot, however, understand the position of the Sulpician Order and their control of the town and land of Montreal without explaining the general change now made in the administration of the whole colony of New France. The government was dissatisfied with the slow progress made by the One Hundred Associates. The company was wound up and replaced by government under the Crown. There was henceforth at Quebec a Governor General of New France, a Superior (presently a bishop),[9] and a Council appointed for life, subject to the King's continued pleasure. With these there was a new official, the Intendant, who acted as representing the King's "business interest," his steward, so to speak. In case of conflict these authorities must wrangle it out—and did. There was also created a new "Company of the West Indies" to manage all North American colonial trade, but it proved ineffective and was terminated in ten years.

Thus the government of New France was henceforth carried on under peculiar conditions. During the whole winter there came no word—there could be none—from France. There was no such thing as the overland mail, which in later days reached British Canada from the Atlantic colonies and after that from the United States. "When the river freezes," said the great Frontenac, "I am King." This meant for a strong man a sort of sovereignty, for a weak man confusion. A further consequence of this was the peculiar situation of Montreal under the superior authority of the Governor General of New France. It is true that a royal decree of 1647 had associated with the Governor of New France a Governor of Montreal along with a Superior at Quebec as the Supreme Council of Police, Commerce, and War. But as the Governor of Montreal was normally absent from Quebec and the Superior, by reason of his duties, frequently so, this made the situation worse instead of better. On the other hand the grant to the Governor of Montreal, by this same decree, of 10,000 livres a year and free transport (yearly from France) of 30 tons of freight, with the obligation to maintain a garrison of 30 men, helped to make his position financially independent of Quebec, where the Governor General received 25,000 livres with 70 tons of free transport.

This position became more and more anomalous as between two centers, each of which overtopped all other settlements, one being the center of government but the other rapidly becoming the chief emporium of trade and a rival center of population. The friction between the two authorities began with Maisonneuve's first winter in Quebec before Ville Marie de Montreal was even founded. It never ceased till the conquest.

The population of New France was still, in 1663, only about 2500. Royal government brought in immigrants, and the population in the twelve years, 1663-75, more than trebled (2500-7800). Among the immigrants Normans predominated (about one fifth); those from Poitou were nearly as many; those from Paris about one seventh, Brittany much fewer, the rest scattered. There is no lack of statistics. Little colonies love to count themselves as youth loves a mirror. A census of 1667 showed the French population of New France as 4312; Quebec and the settlements hard by, 1011; Beauport, 123; and Côte de Lauson (south shore), 113. At Three Rivers the settlement that grew up to meet the fur trade from the interior had 666 people. Montreal had 766. Beyond these was nothing. The settlements clung for their life to the river. Yet around these central points agriculture was struggling into existence. There were 11,448 arpents (9000 acres) of grainland, 3000 cattle, and 85 sheep—counted, apparently, to the last one.

At Montreal settlement had been slow and precarious. The population was estimated to have reached 525 in 1665; 766 in 1667, as just said; and 830 in 1672. An old plan of Montreal in 1672 shows a considerable addition of houses. There is a windmill beside the river a little way upstream from the fort. The original bush track parallel to the bank now appears as a regular road that was later to become St. Paul Street. There are houses on both sides, and in this same year Notre Dame Street was laid out by survey.

Royal government, after a brief period of rule by the incompetent M. de Mézy, sent out as Governor, began in earnest with the arrival of M. de Courcelles and with him, as the first Intendant of New France, the famous Jean Talon, the first in the long line of the commercial statesmen of Canada. Although only six years in the colony (1665-71), "his power of organization and creative genius," says Sir Charles Lucas, "left a lasting mark on New France." With them, and set over both them, arrived a veteran general of France, the Marquis de Tracy, whose commission of 1663 made him lieutenant general of South and North America (L'Amérique Méridionale et Septentrionale).

It was known that De Tracy's business was to exterminate the Iroquois. From the ships that reached Quebec just before him there landed four companies of the famous Carignan-Salières Regiment. Others followed later in the summer, in all about twelve hundred men. These were veterans of the war of Louis XIV against the Turks. Some of them afterward returned to France to be reconstructed and to remain till the Revolution as the Regiment of Lorraine. But most of them remained in Canada after their service in the Indian war and settled on land grants along the Richelieu near Montreal. Many families of today trace from them their descent.

There came also with M. de Tracy to Quebec a glittering troop of young nobles and of gentlemen of fortune attracted by adventurous prospect of the approaching campaign in the wilderness. Their coming made a great stir, and the arrival of the soldiers sent a thrill of joy through the settlements. For by this time the audacity of the Iroquois was surpassing all bounds. On April 25 of this very year (1665) they had made a surprise attack at Montreal on the Hotel Dieu itself. Before they could be beaten off they had killed one guard, wounded another, and dragged off two unhappy victims for death in the flames. Early in the same summer they had succeeded in capturing, while he was hunting on Ile Ste. Thérèse, one of the most notable of all the Montreal colonists, Charles le Moyne. This man was to give eleven sons to the service of New France. The eldest of them, Charles le Moyne, was Governor of Montreal (1724-33) and Administrating Governor of Canada (1725-26). He was created Baron de Longueuil by the French Crown (1700), a title recognized by the British government after the conquest and still existing. His son Charles, the second baron, held the same offices: Montreal, 1749-55, and Canada, 1752-55. Another son of the founder of the family was Pierre le Moyne, Sieur d'Iberville (1661-1706), a sailor from the age of fourteen, who made history by fighting the English on Hudson Bay, both overland and by sea. With his brother, the Sieur de Bienville, he founded Louisiana. The family seigneury of Longueuil, across the river from Montreal, once seemed almost to rival the island seigneury itself. Fate passed it by, a suburb with little left but the pride of history.

This first Charles le Moyne, undaunted by his capture, carried it off with a high hand, threatened the Indians with the coming of the French soldiers to burn their lodges. The Indians were so impressed that they brought Charles le Moyne down to Quebec and gave him up unharmed, as a sort of token for peace. But the situation had gone too far. The French knew that they must make war first.

Meantime in Montreal the rejoicing over the new sense of security was tempered by the news that Maisonneuve was to go. The Marquis de Tracy, with that peculiar politeness known only to a Marquis, wrote that "he had permitted M. de Maisonneuve, Governor of Montreal, to make a journey to France for his own private affairs." A successor was appointed for his absence, and "this as long as we shall judge convenient." Marguerite Bourgeoys, the famous teaching sister already mentioned, wrote that Maisonneuve "took the order as the will of God and went over to France not to make complaint of the bad treatment he had received but to live simply and humbly an unrecognized man."

This intent he carried out. He reached France in 1665, twenty-three years after his first coming to Canada. For his remaining eleven years he occupied the second floor of an apartment in the Fosse St. Victor, where a single servant ministered to his old age. He died on September 9, 1676. This temporary oblivion of his name and fame was to be redeemed later on, after his contemporaries had gone long since to graves mostly forgotten. The monument of Maisonneuve in the center of Place d'Armes at Montreal is beautiful as art and sculpture, but still more beautiful in what it commemorates.

After the arrival of the New French troops under the Marquis de Tracy, the departure of Maisonneuve, and the opening of the campaign against the Iroquois, New France entered on the half century of conflict, now with the Iroquois, now with the English, now with both, which only ended with the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. During this period Montreal gradually lost its aspect as a mission settlement. In a certain sense the good work was carried on and has lasted until today, as witness the Seminary of St. Sulpice still existing in the heart of the city, and the work of Marguerite Bourgeoys still carried on in the vast and beautiful building of the Sisters of the Congregation, built in 1908 on Sherbrooke Street West. But from this time on Montreal appears less as a mission than as the organizing center of war, of western exploration, and more and more the emporium of the fur trade, the economic basis of the life of the colony. There are few national annals that so stir with danger, adventure, and heroism as this half century of history; few if any that offer so wide, so picturesque a scene of conflict in the wilderness of forest and lake and stream. This history has been turned into a part of the world's literature by the genius and industry of Francis Parkman. His detailed pages quicken the past into new life. In them we seem to hear the whisper of the forests and the murmur of the waters and to see the morning mists of the lakes rising to reveal the war canoes of the savages. From such volumes alone can we get a real picture of our Canadian past. But these annals are rather those of Canada as a whole than of the city of Montreal by itself. For our present purpose we can venture nothing beyond a summary.

As the most striking part of this moving panorama, as the lurid colors of the foreground, we see the march of war. The fierce war with the Indians (1657-66) only dies down to be renewed as a struggle against England and its Iroquois allies (1683-1701). War itself brings extension of territory by the building of forts and the wider hold on the country. In the pauses of war in the twenty years of something like Indian peace (1666-83) trade multiplies, especially the trade in furs which spreads farther and farther into the interior. The coureur des bois is added to the missionary priest. With this goes exploration, wider and wider, in part as an adjunct of trade or mission, in part as an end in itself, by an instinct as old as humanity and as young as everybody's childhood. The period ends with the desperate struggle that opened the eighteenth century, Queen Anne's War, and that ended in the disastrous Treaty of Utrecht, foreshadowing the fall of France in America.

War came first. A chain of forts was at once built to protect New France and to facilitate attack on the Indian country; a fort was built at Sorel at the mouth of the Richelieu, one higher up at the rapids at Chambly, one at Ste. Thérèse, and one at the north end, the foot, of Lake Champlain. The French struck at once, in the heart of that very winter. The expedition under Courcelles passed up Lakes Champlain and George and so to the valley of the Hudson and the Mohawk, ground of which every mile is now connected with the memories and the monuments of war. But this first war "failed to connect." The French found to their surprise that the Hudson Valley had now become English. The Dutch, after their war with England, had ceded New Netherland. In its place was now New York, a proprietary colony under Charles II's exiled brother, James, Duke of York.

The French, not being at war with England, wisely retired and went home. But the next autumn they came again under De Tracy himself, this time to the Mohawk Valley, and laid it waste with fire and sword, burning the lodges and destroying the winter corn. The Mohawks fled. They had learned a lesson. New France was free from them for nearly twenty years.

The interval of relative peace and security which now ensued and lasted for nearly twenty years gave to Montreal its first real opportunity for growth, expansion, and trade. Immigrants now began to come in larger numbers and to include many women, either married or looking for marriage, so that the number of established households grew apace. The vertebrate structure of the old town can still be seen in the financial district of the present Montreal. The original surveyor selected the highest land which lay in the area between the St. Lawrence and St. Martin Brook (Craig Street) and which was already built over here and there. About in the center of this were the grounds and buildings around the Hotel Dieu, already nearly twenty years old. Just behind these grounds, that is, farther from the river, was the highest line of ground, and here at that time a new church, the Parish Church of Notre Dame, was already being built. Hence a long, straight street, christened the Rue Notre Dame, formed the basis of the survey by which the town, after 1672, was laid out into definite streets. The work was done by Bérigne Basset, the first surveyor of the colony, acting under the direction of the famous Dollier de Casson, the Superior of the Sulpicians and the first historian of Montreal. This notable man, who came out to Montreal at the time of De Tracy's expedition of 1666, in which he served, played a large part in the history of Montreal until his death in 1701. He represents the type of the soldier-priest that comes down from the Middle Ages with the Crusades, that appears in homelier form in the Friar Tuck of Robin Hood, and finds a later reincarnation in the Confederate general, Bishop Leonidas Polk,[10] who fell fighting in the American Civil War. Dollier de Casson was a man of gigantic stature and of a physical strength maintained by strenuous activity. He had been a captain in the French army under Marshal Turenne, had become a Sulpician priest, a member and presently the Superior of the order at Montreal. Many legends run of his vast strength, his ability to hold up a man seated on each hand or to handle a couple of Iroquois like Indian clubs. He became the historian of Montreal, extolling all brave deeds but his own.

The Rue Notre Dame was drawn past the church, parallel to the river, from end to end of the settlement. The direction, as already explained, splits the cardinal points of the compass, being much nearer to a north and south line than to an east and west. Then and long after Notre Dame Street and the ones made parallel to it were spoken of as running north and south, nowadays as east and west. At its upstream end (south) Notre Dame ended in the cross street of St. Pierre, laid out in 1673 and still there; at the north end was Bonsecours Street. Just beyond Bonsecours the town ended at the Citadel Hill already mentioned, for which a fortified windmill had been built in 1656. The Notre Dame Church, the Séminaire, and the Place d'Armes were all laid out as now existing, but the buildings have since been replaced. The rough road already in use since 1645 on the riverside of the Hotel Dieu now became St. Paul Street, not lying quite in a straight line but beginning at a point on the little River St. Pierre (Lachine Canal) farther upstream than Maisonneuve's fort, running at first straightaway from the little river, and then north, shifting its course a little as it went and edging always nearer to high ground, so that Notre Dame Street, when drawn out to its north end, is just about to meet St. Paul when it stops. Somebody once wrote some clever verses to show that the original street of every great city was once a cow track and still carries curves in its course where the original cow stepped aside to graze. The deviating course of St. Paul Street still shows where the cows of Ville Marie once wandered along the old track or paused a moment to graze beside the Board of Trade. The little paths among the settlers' houses became the earliest cross streets, the oldest, older than the survey, St. Joseph (later St. Sulpice), passing through the center, with the Hotel Dieu on one side and the new church on the other. Maisonneuve's house, afterward the first seminary, has already been described. The streets St. Pierre and Bonsecours, as said, were at the ends of the town. Between St. Joseph and St. Pierre was St. François Xavier (1678), between St. Joseph and Bonsecours were St. Gabriel (1680) and, north of it, St. Charles (1677).

In 1678 there was laid out another street quite close to Notre Dame, running parallel to Notre Dame from St. Gabriel to St. Pierre, so that it bounded the Place d'Armes on the inland side. This street, Rue St. Jacques, of small significance in its early days, was to come into its own in the British Regime as the main street of Montreal and later to rise to all the pomp and majesty of high finance as St. James Street. Our later city has drawn away, as cities do, from its moneyed quarter. It works there by day, but it prays still down below on Notre Dame Street, and lives, sleeps, and makes merry upslope round Hochelaga, and its last sleep is farther away still, with the mountain hollow as its pillow. Here lies, in this old plan of 1673, the venerable origin of some of the familiar jokes upon our city: of the one about the Scotchman and the Irishman who both took off their hats in our Place d'Armes, the one to the Notre Dame Church and the other to the Bank of Montreal; and the one about the old French-Canadian woman from a country parish, come up to worship in La Grande Paroisse, and was found kneeling beside the teller's wicket in the bank.

Not only was the city laid out in streets along which a great many new houses appear between 1673 and 1687, but it was now fortified all round. A royal engineer, Daniel du Luth, commissioned under the governorship of M. de Callières, encompassed the town with strong palisades thirteen feet high, with curtains and bastions. The original fort on the St. Peter River was now demolished, and the St. Lawrence protected the town on the south. A canal let the water from St. Martin Brook and the St. Pierre River down to a flour mill.

During this period the government of Montreal was a very simple matter. In military matters the command lay with the Governor as head of the garrison, with power, definitely expressed in a royal ordinance of 1669, to call out as militia all the able-bodied men of the town and the outlying settlements. Indeed necessity called them; it was do or die. For the very simple functions of civil government the Seminary of St. Sulpice named the officers. There was a civil judge for the whole island and a procureur fiscal, or crown attorney, who brought cases to him as a jackal to a lion. A recorder (greffier) kept the record. There was in addition, for the daily care of the town, a sort of town manager, called a syndic, who was chosen for a three-year term in a general meeting of the townsmen. He represented the only touch of democracy, as yet pure and primitive, for he got no pay. Even at that, the office of syndic proved in a colonial environment too democratic for the royal government at home, and its powers were reduced presently to practically nothing.

The administration of property, and especially of property in land, was much more interesting. This too is not only as a matter of history but of current concern. For it may well be that our community settlement of the future may borrow a few pages from this old feudal record. The occupation of the land in Montreal and in all the country round rested on the old feudal system of seignorial tenure, which lasted unchanged till the British conquest, continued with modifications till its abolition in 1854, even then left certain traces in land taxes, etc., not finally obliterated till 1940. This system, like everything else, worked admirably in its proper place. It would have been as needless as unpopular in the peaceful pioneer settlement of Ontario, household by household and farm by farm, or in the vast homestead settlement of men and machinery in the West, with neither man nor forest to fight. But in old French Canada, a forest country with savages in the woods, the feudal system came into its own as at its first establishment in the devastated France that was remade out of the wreck of the Roman Empire. As in old France, a thousand years before, each seigneurie in New France became, as it were, a point of strength, a redoubt in the wilderness. With its houses of stone, its enclosed farm buildings, its protecting walls, its forge, its mill, it combined the community of a little village with the security of a fort.

The earliest concessions of land in and close to Ville Marie were made by Maisonneuve himself. But the extension and order of the feudal regime show the master hand of Talon. The system was organized as follows. The Sulpician Order (Les Messieurs du Séminaire de St. Sulpice) were the feudal lords of the Seigneurie of the island of Montreal as they were later of various holdings elsewhere. Their holdings by the end of the French Regime amounted to a quarter of a million arpents (200,000 acres). In this capacity as feudal seigneurs they granted in the town itself plots for building and land for gardens and orchards. Each holder of such a plot paid ten sous, ten cents, a year. The present city taxes on many of these lots would be about fifty thousand times as much; it seems almost worth being scalped for. Outside the town the Seigneurie granted larger pieces of land, thirty to forty arpents, to be cleaned and cultivated, with an annual tax of half a cent an acre. These little grants were held en roture, simple direct tenancy under the seignorial lords. A higher stage of holding was seen in grants of land on Montreal Island, in the quality of subfiefs, arrière-fiefs, the feudal tenant here becoming the "boss" of smaller people settled on his fief. The concessions were made without any purchase price, but the tenant was under obligation to clear land and settle people on it. He must pay also half a cent a year per acre as his feudal tax and as a mark of homage must give to the seminary every year a bushel of wheat and two fowl for every hundred acres.

More serious taxes, called lods et ventes, were levied on any sale of feudal property, though not on its inheritance, amounting to one twelfth of the price received. From the modern point of view such a tax would cripple all movement of real estate. But that was exactly what it was meant to do. In any case it appears that if the transaction was approved the tax was omitted. That distinguished scholar, M. Camille Bertrand, the archivist, tells us that as a consequence of this there are a great many French-Canadian families still living "on the land of the first ancestor." Higher up still were larger grants of land on Montreal Island which became, by joint consent, fiefs nobles, that is to say, made practically independent of the feudal control of the Messieurs de St. Sulpice, though still rendering homage. The advantage to the seminary and to Montreal was that the new seignorial houses, well built and well defended, acted as a protection to the whole island and were so located and spaced as to do so. The first of these grants was one made on December 20, 1665, to Philippe-Vincent de Hausmenil, of land beyond the St. Pierre River to the southeast. With the next one is associated the name Lachine, which echoes down our Canadian history as undying as the sound of its many waters. This was 420 acres granted on January 11, 1669, to the famous explorer of the Mississippi, Robert Cavelier de la Salle. As is well known, La Salle's Seigneurie acquired the name of La Chine by way of a joke (on exploration), one of those cherished by fond repetition, too good to lose. Later history mistook it for earnest. It passed from a nickname to a legality, and in the older English translations of French books, such as La Rochefoucauld's Travels in North America, it appears quaintly enough as "China." But the original Seigneurie, which was called the Fief St. Sulpice, was not on the site of our present Lachine. It lay on Montreal island above the rapids, close to the present Canadian Pacific Railway Bridge. The remains of an old mill still mark the spot. Part of the town of La Salle is built on what was the site of the Lachine, on which was to fall the massacre of 1689. The rapids are two miles below; the present Lachine, at the junction of canal and river, is two miles above. Another three hundred acres, granted in 1671 to Zachary du Puys, the major of the garrison, correspond to the present Verdun.

Beyond these the chain of semi-independent holdings (fiefs nobles) extended over Montreal Island. At the lower end of the island was (1671) the Fief of Picotte de Bellestre, which is represented by our Pointe aux Trembles. Two others were on the "Back River" (Rivière des Prairies). But the upper end of the island was the real bulwark against the descending war parties. Most notable of all, perhaps, was the Fief of Boisbriant, on the Lake of the Two Mountains, more fully discussed in a later chapter. Near by and at the extreme upper end at the conflux of the rivers, at the very point of danger, was the Fief of Bellevue, our Ste. Anne de Bellevue. History records its name in Indian ravages and near-by massacres. Its chapel was long the outpost of prayer in the wilderness. Tom Moore's ear was later on to catch its faintly tolling evening chimes warning the rowers of the falling night. Today all around and beside Ste. Anne's breathes the soft atmosphere of the orchards, meadows, and gardens of the Macdonald Agricultural College, where the gentle voices of the female classes of teachers in training echo back the murmurs of the river.

Even more imposing in location and in history are the great outside seigneuries granted by the Crown, independent of Montreal but forming a part of the same general scheme of regional colonization. The chief ones are those in Longueuil, the seigneury of the celebrated family of Le Moyne already mentioned. With it are the historic seigneuries of Boucherville, Varennes, and Verchères on the south shore of the St. Lawrence; Chambly and Sorel on the Richelieu; and Châteauguay above Lachine, all names famous in our history. Others later extended inland.

We can realize how admirably this seignorial system could work for the mobilization of the infant colony in time of war and a guarantee of ample sustenance in peace. The only difficulty was to keep the settlers, especially the younger men, on their allotted holdings. The temptation of life in the woods, the profits of the illicit fur trade, carried on without license or permission, were too much for them. These wandering coureurs des bois became a standing perplexity of New France. Even the penalty of death for a second offense, as authorized by King Louis XIV and announced by Frontenac, mattered little to men who didn't propose to be caught for a first.

But during this period the town shows not merely an increase of population but a change in its character. Here begin to appear the arts and professions of peace. The first Montreal notary seems to have hatched out from the scriveners (tabellions), the recorders, and the secretaries of the seigneurs. The mass of the people in the colony being entirely unable to read and write, and there being no printing press in Montreal till Benjamin Franklin brought one in 1776, the ability to write things down for other people became of itself a sort of learned profession. The medical profession was likewise born from the casual chirurgeons (surgeons), whose task of necessity follows the ravages of war, and some of whom now find a permanent place as doctors, intermixed, we are told, with quacks. Painting and sculpture are represented by a few odd people who had brought their talent and its preoccupation with them from France, a pursuit at least free from all taint of commercial profit. History, the muse for which a wilderness is paradise enough, never fails. One thinks of Lescarbot in Acadia and Dollier de Casson in Montreal.

Not only the expansion of the fur trade but the expansion of exploration itself centered upon Montreal in this interval of peace and even during the war period that followed. From Montreal went out the expeditions (1673) of Joliet and Marquette, discoverers of the upper Mississippi; of Father Hennepin, who reached the Falls of St. Anthony; of Greysolon du Lhut, who himself lived many years in Montreal, the site of his house beside the Place d'Armes now marked with a tablet. Most notable of all is the expedition of La Salle (1670-80) from his seigneury at Lachine in that search for the Western Sea that gave it its nickname and led to his discoveries on the Mississippi. All this, however, belongs to the general history of North America rather than to the annals of Montreal.

Such was the situation and such the growth of New France during the period, all too short, before the renewal of Indian war. M. de Tracy and M. de Courcelles and Talon the Intendant were all back in France in 1671. In their stead ruled as Governor (1672-82) Louis de Buade, Comte de Frontenac, commonly regarded as the most impressive figure in the history of French Canada. Under Frontenac as Governor of Montreal, and later of Canada, was his able lieutenant, Louis Hector de Callières, whose regime witnessed the progress described above. But we are now to turn again from the annals of peace to those of war.

Frontenac was a truly great man, born to rule, aggressive and overbearing, looking and dressing the part. The savages knew him by instinct; they came to heel like whipped dogs. So great a historian as Sir Charles Lucas has defamed Frontenac's memory by speaking of "his barbarous methods." "At Montreal itself by his orders," he writes, "the French compelled wavering Indians to burn Iroquois prisoners to death." This is not true. They permitted their allied Indians, on at least two occasions, the hideous treat of burning Iroquois. We may take here the testimony of the young officer, the Baron la Hontan.[11] He tells us that Frontenac sent word to the Iroquois that they must stop burning Frenchmen alive or he would burn their people if he got them. The savages disregarded the warning. Frontenac received two Indian prisoners at Quebec. He gave them to his own Indians to burn, as one throws a bone to dogs. The ladies of his little court protested: "Monsieur de Frontenac, you cannot do this." Frontenac could and did. The Indians went to the flames, one singing, one collapsed with fear. Some people might judge it among the best things Frontenac did. It is said also that four Indians were burned in Montreal in 1696 by whites and Indians, with six hours of cruel tortures. But these retaliations did more to check Indian cruelty than a century of preaching. This is the only way to meet the barbarity of a sunken nation. We know that now.

Frontenac understood Indian war. The time to stop it was before it started. So he at once built Fort Frontenac at Cataraqui at the lower end of Lake Ontario, our present Kingston. This covered Montreal and put fear into the hearts of the Senecas, at the inside end of the Iroquois chain. Frontenac did great things for New France, encouraged the fur trade and restrained the unlicensed trade of the coureurs des bois. It has been often claimed that he took a toll out of trade for himself to help repair his own damaged estate; if so, it was part of the morality of the time, a system of baksheesh, known long after in Egypt and Turkey and not quite lost anywhere. Frontenac was like Admiral "Jacky" Fisher of our own day, he thought there was nothing like "favoritism," meaning the power to push a good man ahead, especially if he is your friend. Hence he made enemies, and particularly with the Jesuits, since there is no room for two despotic authorities at a time. Yet by an odd contradiction of character Frontenac planned a sort of representative government in Canada, something like the meeting of estates in France and the old parliaments (courts of registration) of the French provinces. This may have been sheer conservatism and not a democratic leaning, the desire to put the old country into the new. Extremes meet. We see such things again and again in the history of Canada, the "seigneurs" of New France, the "titles" (never given) of Simcoe's Upper Canada, even our royal societies and our Usher of the Black Rod and such. It's a sort of nostalgia, a longing for things of the old home.

Frontenac's parliament scheme of "estates" fell through. King Louis XIV struck it out. Frontenac was only King when the ice was there. With the spring ships, the rule of Louis XIV came back. Nor was ever any king more industrious or more watchful. He read all the dispatches from Canada. He made little notes on the side: "The King thinks this. . . . The King wishes that." And what he wished was done. Our English history, as full of the odor of prejudice as an old cask, presents us a Louis XIV as a butterfly among ladies all in silk, slowly turning to a crooked old man among ladies all in wigs. In reality Louis was industry itself, sagacity. He knew men like Colbert and Frontenac when he saw them. But with peace established, complaints from New France reached the King right and left, and Frontenac had to go.

But Frontenac's successors were men of no account, and the Indians knew it. The Iroquois had been playing back and forward with the French and English. Some had sided with the French, turned Christian, and became in time the "praying Indians," those who founded our Caughnawaga beside Lachine. But now they all joined in a great council (1684) at Albany and allied themselves with the English. This time there was no Frontenac to oppose them, nor even Fort Frontenac to cover Montreal, for it had been abandoned. The Governor, De La Barre, moved soldiers and Indians to occupy it again; illness broke up his camp; he moved across Lake Ontario, threatened the Indians, like a schoolmaster who calls angrily for order, and then retired to France, glad to be gone. After him came Denonville, who took an army into the Seneca country, burning crops and wigwams. But this was like knocking down a wasps' nest. They all came back.

With that the Iroquois prepared to wipe out French Canada. All the old danger was back again. In the middle summer of 1689 the first wave broke on the settlements around Montreal. Montreal itself they could not now so easily reach. For the plan of fortification carried out under a French royal engineer had put a wall of palisades and ditches all around it. But the outlying places were open. In the dead of night of August 5, 1689, amid the roar and glare of a Canadian summer thunderstorm, the Iroquois fell upon the settlement at Lachine. The massacre that followed is one of the terrible pages of our annals. Eighty soldiers, there on guard as an outpost, and with them two hundred inhabitants, men, women, and children, were butchered without mercy on the spot. One hundred and twenty were carried off, some to be burned forthwith at the stake, others to die by torture in the Indian lodges.

Frontenac came back to Canada that autumn, and a people wild with distress turned to him with joy as to salvation. He brought it. He chose strong men. He had with him De Callières, who was made Governor of Montreal, and such men as Greysolon du Lhut and Nicolas Perrot, coureurs des bois who knew the Indian country. By New Year's he was among the Mohawks, giving them back their own. He rebuilt Fort Frontenac and carried war into the Indian country above. But the French power had sunk so low, the Indian danger had spread so wide, that not even Frontenac could at once restore safety. To protect one place was to invite an attack upon another. Witness, for instance, as a part of the history of the Montreal vicinity, the sudden attack on the fort at the seigneurie of Verchères, twenty miles down the river from Montreal on the south shore, in that meadowland which Champlain had so much admired. The garrison had been drawn off along with the seigneur himself, needed elsewhere. The defense of the fort by the girl Madeleine de Verchères, in command of three and a half men (one man was over eighty), is part of our schoolbook history. The motor tourist and the passenger on the passing ocean liner still gaze with awe and inspiration at this consecrated spot.

Hence it took Frontenac four years to beat the Indians down. But he did it. By 1696 he was able to set out from Montreal up the St. Lawrence with an army of two thousand men. They went by Fort Frontenac and Lake Ontario and laid waste all the country of the Onondagas and the Oneidas. When peace with England came, the Peace of Ryswick, in 1698, the Five Nations were glad enough to be, as our present slang has it, "included out" from both sides as neutral. Frontenac's work was done. He died at Quebec on November 28, 1698. There he lies buried as Champlain before him and Montcalm to come.

But Frontenac, before he died, had broken the power of the Iroquois forever as far as wiping out French Canada was concerned. Henceforth they were just the devil allies of the British, the French having their own attendant devils too but not so good.

When Callières succeeded Frontenac as Governor of Canada a great peace was made between the French and the Iroquois (1701). When war broke out again with England, the War of the Spanish Succession, North America had to pay the price of ravage for the question as to which prince should inherit the throne of Spain.

But this time, fortunately for Montreal, the tide of war turned to the Atlantic coast and the St. Lawrence. The great military episodes of the war belong to the general history of Canada rather than to the present survey. The war ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, which gave to Great Britain the possession of Hudson Bay, Newfoundland, and Nova Scotia, but left to France its mainland Acadia (New Brunswick), its islands, Cape Breton and St. John, together with New France and the vast inland empire which it might include.