Read attached book, from page 1 – 525

45 min quiz next Monday 

20 multiple + 1 paragraph answer

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1

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,

and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade-mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries.

Published in Canada by
Oxford University Pres

s

8 Sampson Mews, Suite 204,
Don Mills, Ontario M3C 0H5

Canad

a

www.oupcanada.com

Copyright © Oxford University Press Canada 201

6

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker

)

First Edition published in 1998
Second Edition published in 2003
Third Edition published in 2007

Fourth Edition published in 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the

prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics

rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Permissions Department at the address above

or through the following url: www.oupcanada.com/permission/permission_request.php

Every effort has been made to determine and contact copyright holders.
In the case of any omissions, the publisher will be pleased to make

suitable acknowledgement in future editions.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publicatio

n

Bumsted, J. M., 1938-, author
A history of the Canadian peoples / J.M. Bumsted,

Michael C. Bumsted. – Fifth edition.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-901491-0 (paperback)

1. Canada–History–Textbooks. 2. Canada–Biography–
Textbooks. I. Bumsted, Michael C., author II. Title.

FC164.B862 2016 971 C2015-906397-

3

Background map image: © iStock/duncan1890; Biography box image: © iStock/duncan1890;
Backrounder box image: © iStock/Nic_Taylor; Document box image: © iStock/Linda Steward;

Histiography box image: © iStock/duncan1890; Material Culture box image: © iStock/juliedeshaies;
Contemporary Views box image: © iStock/Pillon

Oxford University Press is committed to our environment.
Wherever possible, our books are printed on paper which comes from

responsible sources.

Printed and bound in the United States of Ameri

ca

1 2 3 4 — 19 18 17 16

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Table of Contents
List of Maps vi

Preface vii

Introduction: Understanding History xii

1 The Beginnings

2

2 Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France 38

3 Struggling for a Continent, 1627–1763 78

4 Becoming and Remaining British, 1759–1815 11

0

5 Relying on Resources, 1815–1840 150

6 Becoming a Nation, 1840–1885 196

7 Becoming Modern, 1885–1915 266

8 Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945 322

9 Prospering Together, 1945–1960 378

10 Edging towards the Abyss, 1958–1972 428

11 Coming Apart, 1972–1992 480

12 Freefalling into the Twenty-First Century, 1992–2001 526

13 Into the New Millennium 566

Epilogue: The Speed and Balance of Canadian History 597

References 601

Index 606

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List of Maps
Beringia: the “land bridge” at its greatest extent 7

L’Anse aux Meadows 1

5

Cartier’s first and second voyages 20

Map of the North Pole, 1595, by Gerardus Mercator 21

Distribution of Aboriginal peoples and language areas
in the sixteenth century 29

Historic sites: exploration and early European
settlement 33

Acadia and environs to 1670 4

4

Champlain’s map of New France, 1632 51

New France in 1688 69

The Île d’Orléans and north and south shores of the St
Lawrence, 1709 73

Early untitled map showing rivers flowing into marine
waters north of Churchill Fort 82

European possessions in North America after the peace
of Utrecht (1713) 89

Louisbourg in 1734 91

“A Map of the South Part of Nova Scotia and its Fishing
Banks,” by Thomas Jefferys, 1750 99

A map by Thomas Jefferys showing the British claims
to Acadia 100

The war in 1755 101

The environs of Quebec, a 1760 map by Thomas
Jefferys 106

“A Map of the Country which was the scene of
operations of the Northern Army; including
the Wilderness through which General Arnold
marched to attack Quebec” 121

“The country of the Five Nations” 124

Upper Canada and the War of 1812 140

British America in 1825 153

The Oregon Territory 156

British America in 1849 172

Southwestern Lower Canada in 1837 190

Historic sites: the 1837–8 rebellions 191

Canada West, railways and urban centres, 1861 204

Canada in 1873 239

The numbered treaties, 1871–1921 253

Canada in 1882 256

Battle of Batoche 259

Canada in 1898 and 1905 295

Canada in 1949 401

The DEW Line and Mid-Canada Line 411

Map of the Asbestos area east of Montreal 414

Canada in 1999 554

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• Balanced, accessible coverage. The wide-ranging stories of Canada’s social, political, cultural, economic, and
military past are carefully integrated into a well-structured, compelling narrative, prefaced by a unique essay on
the importance of studying history today.

During World War II, thousands of women worked in Canadian industrial plants manufacturing war materials. Taken in December
of 1943, this picture shows Cecilia Butler working in a munitions plant in Toronto, Ontario. Obviously staged, the photograph presents
war-time Canada as a racially tolerant, multi-ethnic society. National Film Board of Canada. Photothèque, LAC, e000761869.

Two Wars and a
Depression, 1914–19458

58

6 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Canadian Society
and Culture in the
Meltdown Era
Given the volatility and complexity of developments in
the new millennium, it was hardly surprising that social
and cultural signals in Canada often were difficult to
interpret. Only a few examples of the difficulties can be
explored here.

Boomers, Sandwiches,
and Boomerangs

The constraints of a static economy in the twenty-first
century have led to an increased visibility of certain
social phenomena relating to households and families:
sandwiched parents and boomerang kids. Sandwiched
parents, all members of the baby-boom generation, are
those caring simultaneously for aging parents on the
one hand and adult children on the other. According
to the 2011 census, 42.3 per cent of young adults aged
20–29 were still living with their parents, a figure up

mean that women are not supposed to have the

same basic needs and that they are not thought of

in the same way that men are? I still think our polit-

ical system is absorbing the shock of having women

in it. After all, things don’t integrate that quickly, and

it has only been eighty years since women were

declared persons.

Many students of the psyche tell us that the

best-developed personality contains elements of the

masculine and feminine, but Jung talks about the soul

in each of us, the anima in the man and the animus in

the woman. It is only when you are aware of where

your soul is located, and how to properly express it,

that you are able to become fully developed.

What I have seen in political life has made me real-

ize that the anima in male politicians may be there but

is

quite often described as a killer anima—that is, a mon-

strous feminine streak that attempts to kill their human-

ity, strangle it at birth as it were. The same thing can

happen to a woman with a killer animus. But politics is

the place where you see men behaving this way with

the most blatant freedom. The system of competition,

of winning, of annihilating, encourages this behaviour.

When this is all there is, the direction of a country

is lost. We know that people develop disgust or dis-

taste for what they can see is a dehumanizing attempt

to use power, which, after all, is given only temporar-

ily to those who are elected.

Source: Adrienne Clarkson, Heart Matters (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2007), 215–16.

Table 13.3 Public Approval Rates (%) on
Hot-Button Social Issues in Canada, the

United

States, and United Kingdom, 2013

Issue Cana

da

United

States

United

Kingdom

Contraception 91 79 91

Sexual relations

between

unmarried

partners

83 59 82

Divorce 80 65 70

Having children

outside of

marriag

e

78 53

74

Gambling 70 63 60

Stem cell

researc

h

65 52 56

Doctor assisted

suicide

65 35 61

Same-sex

sexual relatio

ns

64 40 55

Abortion 60 36 54

Death penalty 53 58 50

Source: The Economist, 13 September 2004, 42.

Preface
From the Publishe

r

Oxford University Press is delighted to present the fifth edition of A History of the Canadian Peoples by J.M. Bumsted
and Michael C. Bumsted. For nearly two decades, the textbook has offered students of Canadian history a rich and
nuanced picture of Canada from pre-contact times to the present, through a balanced selection of historical perspec-
tives and primary-source documents brought together into an articulate overarching narrative. The new edition has
been thoroughly revised and updated with the addition of new pedagogical features; new full-colour images and
corresponding captions; expanded coverage of Aboriginal peoples, women, and children; greater emphasis of the
pre-Confederation period; and up-to-date treatment of the twenty-first-century events that have shaped the cultural
and political landscape of this country.

Outstanding Features of the Fifth Edition

901491_00_FM.indd 7 05/01/16 10:19 PM

viii Preface

• NEW! Material Culture
boxes. A newly created
set of boxes, highlighting
the relationship between
people and their things,
explores items of
historical significance
and how they impact the
story of Canada’s past.

• Biographical portraits.
A wealth of boxes profile
the women and men,
both famous and lesser
known, who played
a role in the story of
Canada’s past.

• Primary-source material. A
vast selection of excerpted
historical documents—from
maps and journal entries
to white papers and Royal
Commission reports—gives
students the chance to work
with the raw materials of
Canadian history.

• NEW! Historiographical
essays. Written by a
selection of historians from
across the country and the
authors, new end-of-chapter
historiographical essays
help students conceptualize
how historians “do” history,
highlight ongoing research,
and reveal the value of
studying history.

3658 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

Radio Programming, 1939

Documen

t

Network Highlights
cbc

7:00 Songs of the World
7:30 Percy Faith’s Music
8:00 Sunset Symphony
8:30 Nature Talk
9:15 Sunset Symphony
10:00 Everyman Theatre

Nbc—bLUE
7:30 Idea Mart
8:00 Kay Kyser’s Quiz
8:30 Fred Waring Orch.
10:30 Lights Out

cb

S

9:00 Amos ’n’ Andy
9:30 Paul Whiteman orch.

Station Programs
5:00 The Lone Ranger, sketch—cKy
5:00 Dinner concert—cbc-cjRc, cbK
5:00 Fred Waring Orch.—KFyR
5:30 crackerjacks, songs—cbc-cjRc, cbK
5:30 jimmy Allen, sketch—cKy
5:45 Howie Wing, sketch—cjRc
5:45 Waltz Time—cKy
5:45 canadian Outdoor Days, Ozark Ripley—

cbc-cbK . . .
7:00 Songs of the World, mixed choir, Montreal—

cbc-cKy

7:00 Reports—cjRc

7:00 Horse and buggy Days, songs of the 90s—
KFyR

7:00 Percy Faith’s Music; George Murray, Dorothy
Alt, soloists, Toronto—cbc-cKy, cbK

7:30 Modern Music Maestros—cjRc
7:30 Idea Mart—KFyR
8:00 Interview from London, from bbc—cbc-

cKy, cbK
8:00 Reports, blaine Edwards, organ—cjRc
8:00 Kay Kyser’s college, musical quiz—Nbc—

KFy until 9.
8:15 Teller of curious Tales—cjRc
8:30 Dan McMurray’s Nature Talk, bank cbc-

cKy, cbK
8:30 Five Esquires—cjRc
8:45 Lieder Recital—cbc-cKy, cbK
9:00 canadian Press News—cbc-cKy, cbK
9:00 Reports; Piano Moods—cjRc
9:00 Amos ’n’ Andy, sketch—cbS-WjR, WccO,

KMOx, KbL
9:00 Fred Waring Orch.—Nbc-KFTR, WHO, WL

W

9:15 Summer Symphony, G. Waddington con-

ducting from Walker Theatre, Winnipeg—
cbc-cKy, cbK, cjRc, until 10.

9:30 Milt North Trio, WKNR
9:30 Tommy Dorsey Orch.—Nbc-KOR
9:30 Horace Heidt Orch.—Nbc-KFyR
9:30 Paul Whiteman Orch., guests—cbS-WccO,

KMOx, KSL
9:45 Reports—cjRc

Wednesday 2 August

Source: Winnipeg Tribune, 2 August 1939, 2.

3738 | Two Wars and a Depression, 1914–1945

Studying Canada’s Military Effort in World War I

Roger Sarty, Wilfrid Laurier University

Personal favourites, among many short, introductory
accounts, are D.J. Goodspeed, The Road Past Vimy: The
Canadian Corps 1914–1918 (Toronto, 1969) and Terry
Copp, Matt Symes, and Nick Lachance, Canadian
Battlefields 1915–1918 (Waterloo, Ont., 2011).

Books about Canada’s role began to appear dur-
ing the conflict1 and continued to pour forth in the
following decades. These included memoirs, popular
works, and regimental histories. Many are still very
useful. The regimental histories, for example, present
detailed accounts of operations and sketches of person-
alities available nowhere else.2 Among the most distin-
guished memoirs are those of the wartime leader, Prime
Minister Robert Borden, assembled by his nephew, who
drew heavily on Borden’s papers.3

The project initiated by the Department of National
Defence for an eight-volume official history, however,
produced only the first volume and a supporting vol-
ume of documents. These appeared in 1938 and cover
the initial year of the war. Immensely detailed, they
are still an essential resource.4 A full official account of
Canadian participation in land warfare—nearly 500,000
Canadian troops served overseas—appeared in a single
volume in 1962.5 Colonel G.W.L. Nicholson, a senior
member of the professional Army Historical Section,
and the noted academic C.P. Stacey led the team that
was organized during and after World War II to work on
this history. They drew on the vast archives organized
by the original historical section and the book is still the
best starting place.

Nicholson produced two other thoroughly refer-
enced, foundational volumes. The Fighting Newfound­
lander: A History of The Royal Newfoundland Regiment
(St John’s: Government of Newfoundland, 1964) is the
first comprehensive account of the extraordinary sac-
rifice by this British Dominion, separate from Canada,
that did not join Confederation until 1949. Nicholson’s

The Gunners of Canada: The History of the Royal Regiment
of Canadian Artillery, vol.1, 1534–1919 (Toronto and
Montreal, 1967) details the organization and oper-
ations of the immensely powerful artillery arm of the
Canadian Corps, which was a key element in its formid-
able striking power.

Canada’s large contribution to the air war—the
provision of some 20,000 personnel to the British fly-
ing services—was the least well recorded part of the
military effort. This was belatedly corrected when
the Army Historical Section became the tri-service
Directorate of History in 1965 and focused on aviation
history. S.F. Wise, Canadian Airmen in the First World
War, The Official History of the Royal Canadian Air
Force, vol. 1 ([Toronto], 1980)is still a foremost author-
ity on not just the Canadian role, but on aviation more
generally during World War I.

At the leading edge of scholarly work that started in
the 1960s with the opening of government archives was
Robert Craig Brown’s biography, Robert Laird Borden: A
Biography, 2 vols (Toronto, 1975–80). Another bench-
mark in superbly researched biography is Michael
Bliss’s volume on Sir Joseph Flavelle,6 who headed
munitions production in Canada from 1916 to 1918.
This is the fullest published account of Canada’s indus-
trial effort. Strong in its research on both the home front
and the overseas effort is Ronald G. Haycock’s life of
Sir Sam Hughes, Minister of Militia and Defence from
1911 until 1916, when Prime Minister Borden finally
lost patience with Hughes’s erratic, scandal-prone
administration.7 General Sir Arthur Currie, the militia
officer who succeeded brilliantly on the battlefield and
commanded the Canadian Corps in 1917–18, has had
three major biographies written about him, all well
worth consulting.8

Robert Craig Brown joined Ramsay Cook to pro-
duce a survey of signal importance, Canada 1896–1921:

Historiography

1595 | Relying on Resources, 1815–1840

The holds of timber ships like that pictured here car-

ried thousands of immigrants to Canada on their voy-

age (usually 10 to 12weeks in duration) from the British

Isles in the nineteenth century. Although the British

government continually passed legislation improving

provisioning of food and water and controlling num-

bers, it never really altered the primitiveness of the

space itself. At first glance, the timber trade seemed

a perfect fit for developing colonies. Timbering

removed a major impediment to agricultural settle-

ment: trees. From the standpoint of the incoming

settler trees were the enemy, for fields could not be

plowed and seeded until the trees were gone. The

need for removal was so urgent that settlers would

often burn forests in vast fires if no other way existed

to clear them. Fortunately, entrepreneurs could often

be found to cut the timber and ship the wood to mar-

ket in the mother country. In the eighteenth century,

the principal demand in Britain was for timber for

shipbuilding, especially the tall pines that would be

turned into the masts for sailing ships. By the nine-

teenth century, the British demand changed from tall

timber to square (the trees were trimmed with an axe

from their rounded shape to a square one) and deals

(the square timber cut into planks at least three inches

thick). During the first half of the nineteenth century,

Britain encouraged the shipment of square timber

and deals from British America by the judicious use of

duties levied on wood originating elsewhere, includ-

ing the Baltic region. The vessels carrying the wood

frequently were unable to find a return cargo, often

solving the problem by converting the space below

decks to accommodate human passengers. This

practice provided inexpensive—if uncomfortable—

passage for many immigrants, especially the Irish,

driven from their homes by famine. This seemingly

ideal arrangement, removing unwanted wood and

returning much wanted population had some hid-

den drawbacks, however. One was that the trade was

extremely wasteful. Much of the tree was left behind

on the forest floor to rot. The timberers, moreover,

merely removed and never replaced trees, so that

large tracts of land were systematically denuded of

cover with no thought of sustainability. Worse still,

the mentality of those cutting the trees was one of

sheer exploitation, totally lacking in any concern for

reinvestment in the country they were looting. As

for the human return cargo, conditions on the tim-

ber ships encouraged disease and were singularly

unpleasant at best.

As with many forms of material culture, timber

ships provided a dual purpose for Canada. The tim-

ber that the country supplied was a critical resource

to the British Empire, as well as beyond, and the

ships that transported people in that exchange sim-

ply were part of a larger commodity chain that saw

Material Culture

Interior of a lumber ship in Quebec, 1872. While politicians and
settlers in central Canada concerned themselves with territorial
expansion during the mid-nineteenth century, those living in the
Atlantic region were constrained to the older transatlantic way of
life, of which shipping was integral. © McCord Museum.

Timber Ships

Continued…

306 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Born in Chatsworth, Ontario, Nellie McClung (née
Mooney) (1873–1951) moved with her family to

Manitoba

in 1880. After attending normal school in Winnipeg, she
taught in rural Manitoba for many years. She was active
in temperance work and in suffrage agitation. In 1896 she
married Robert Wesley McClung, a druggist, who prom-
ised, Nellie later reported, that “I would not have to lay
aside my ambitions if I married him.” Her emergence to
prominence began when she entered an American short
story competition in 1902 and was encouraged by an
American publisher to expand the story into the novel
that became Sowing Seeds in Danny, a lighthearted look at
village life on the prairies published in 1908. The book sold
over 100,000 copies, was in its seventeenth edition at the
time her death, and brought her both fame and fortune.

She and her husband moved to Winnipeg with their
four children in 1911, where she helped organize the
Political Equality League in 1912. Frustrated with the
difficulty of arousing male politicians to suffrage reform,
after some humiliating experiences she turned herself
into a first-rate platform speaker. In 1914 she organized
the Mock Parliament of Women, in which women played
all the political roles. McClung herself was Manitoba
Premier Rodmond Roblin, one of the major opponents of
women’s right to vote. McClung and her associates, sup-
porting the Liberal Party, were unable to defeat Roblin’s
government in the 1914 election, but it soon fell under
the weight of a construction scandal. The Liberal govern-
ment of Tobias Crawford soon made Manitoba the first
province in Canada to grant women the right to vote.

Meanwhile, the McClungs had moved to Edmonton,
where Nellie again led the fight for female suffrage. She
was also a strong supporter of the war effort and the Red
Cross. In 1921 she was elected to the Alberta legislature,
where she championed a host of radical measures of
the time, ranging from mothers’ allowances and dower
rights for women to sterilization of the mentally unfit.
She was defeated in 1926 when her temperance stance
became unpopular. Nellie subsequently helped in the
successful fight for Canadian woman senators. The
McClungs moved to Victoria in 1933. In her west coast
years, she became a CBC governor (1936–42), a delegate
to the League of Nations (1938), and an advocate of
divorce reform.

Throughout her life she was an active Methodist
and subsequently a member of the United Church, and
was prominent at the national and international levels
in her church work. Apart from her first novel, none of
her subsequent fiction has withstood the test of time
very well. McClung did better with her autobiograph-
ical memoirs, all of which were highly regarded and
reprinted. Like many early feminists, she was clearly
a figure of her own time. She supported the Great War
with almost bloodthirsty enthusiasm and was an active
advocate of eugenics.

Nellie McClung. Cp photo.

Nellie Letitia McClung

Biography

901491_00_FM.indd 8 05/01/16 10:19 PM

ixPreface

• Chapter-opening
timelines. Each chapter
begins with a timeline
of the events and
themes that marked the
historical period covered,
providing a framework
for the discussion and an
excellent revision tool for
students.

• End-of-chapter learning
tools. Study questions
challenge students to
engage critically with
what they have read in
the chapter, while short
annotated bibliographies
provide reliable starting
points for further study.

• Outstanding art program.
A dynamic array of over 200
full-colour maps, photos,
paintings, and figures helps to
bring history to life.

• Expanded coverage of
the pre-Confederation
period. New material on the
pre-Confederation period,
including an analysis of
life in New France and an
exploration of the American
interior, helps to round out
students’ understanding of
Canada’s past.

256
A

H
isto

ry
o

f

th

e

C
a

n
a

d
ia

n
P

e
o

p
le

s

C
anada in 1882.

Quebec

United States of America

Greenland Alaska
(USA)

Ontario

Manitoba

District of
Alberta

1882

District of
Athabasca

1882

District of
Saskatchewan

1882

District of
Assiniboia

1882

British
Columbia

District of
Keewatin

1876

North-West Territories

N

ew

foundland

Nova
Scotia

New
Brunswick

PEI

Area Claimed
by Ontario

and Manitoba
Montreal

Ottawa

Toronto

Vancouver Victoria

Quebec

St
L

aw
re

nc
e

R.

A t l a n t i c
O c e a n

A rc t i c O c e a n

P a c i f i c
O c e a n

H u d s o n
B a y

N

S

E W

0 500

kilometres

1,000

A r
c t

i c
C

i r

c l

e

Provinces

North-West Territories:
Districts

North-West Territories:
Unorganized

Newfoundland

Disputed Area

1841 Union of Upper Canada and Lower Canada
proclaimed.

1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty resolves the New
Brunswick border. Great Britain experiments

with partially elected, partially appointed

legislature for

Newfoundland.

1843 Fort Victoria established on Vancouver Island.

1846 Oregon Boundary Treaty settles western
boundary. Corn Laws and Timber duties are

repealed by British Parliament. St John’s,

Newfoundland, is destroyed by fire.

1848 Nova Scotia gets responsible government. Lord
Elgin concedes responsible government to

Canada. Newfoundland reverts to an elected

assembly.

1849 Vancouver Island is leased by the British to the
Hudson’s Bay Company and becomes a Crown

colony. Rebellion Losses Bill is enacted, leading

to riots in Montreal. Annexation movement

flourishes.

1851 James Douglas becomes governor of
Vancouver Island. Cable is laid from

New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island.

Prince Edward Island receives responsible

government. Colonial government takes over

post offices.

1852 Grand Trunk Railway is incorporated.

1854 Reciprocity Treaty with United States is signed,
to last 10 years.

1855 Petroleum is discovered in southwestern
Ontario. Newfoundland receives responsible

government.

1856 The first legislature meets on Vancouver Island.

1858 British Columbia becomes a colony.

1859 The first steamer is launched on the Red River.
First newspaper is established in Red River.

1860 Cariboo Gold Rush begins in British Columbia.
Prince Edward Island Land Commission

convenes. Royal Tour of Prince Albert suggests

that what would become Canada is already, in

some senses, a political entity.

1861 American Civil War begins. Montreal and
Toronto introduce horse-drawn cars for public

transportation.

1862 Cariboo Road is begun in British Columbia.

1863 First non-Native salmon fishery on the Fraser
River established.

1864 Reciprocity Treaty is terminated by a vote of
the American Senate, to take effect in 1866.

Charlottetown and Quebec Conferences are

held to discuss union of British North America.

1866 Transatlantic cable laid from Newfoundland
to Europe. Union of British Columbia and

Vancouver Island implemented, with Victoria as

capital.

1867 The British North America Act is passed by
British Parliament to take effect 1 July 1867.

Emily Howard Stowe obtains a medical degree

in the United States, the first woman to do so.

British Columbia’s legislative council resolves to

request that the province be allowed eventual

admission into Canada, which officially comes

into existence on 1 July under an all-party

government headed by Sir John A. Macdonald.

Resolutions for territorial expansion are passed

by the Canadian Parliament in December. The

Americans purchase Alaska from Russia.

Timeli

ne

3

20 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Troper, Harold Martin. Only Farmers Need Apply: Official
Canadian Government Encouragement of Immigration
from the United States, 1896–1911. Toronto, 1972. The
standard work on the topic.

Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral
Reform in English Canada, 1885–1925. Toronto, 1991.
One of the few overall syntheses of the reform move-
ment, focusing particularly on its moral dimensions.

Voisey, Paul. Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community.
Toronto, 1988. Probably the best historical commun-
ity study ever executed in Canada.

Walden, Keith. Becoming Modern in Toronto: The
Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late
Victorian Culture. Toronto, 1997. A work in cultural
studies that deconstructs the Toronto Industrial
Exhibition.

Study Questions
1. What role did the patronage system play in Canadian political parties in the years before the Great War?

2. How did the industrialization of the period 1885–1914 differ from that of the 1850s and 1860s?

3. Compare the major problems of urban and rural life in Canada in the early years of the twentieth century.

4. Are the differences between child labour in factories and on farms significant?

5. What does the poem “Town Directory” tell us about Treherne, Manitoba, in 1895?

6. How was Canada selling the western region to newcomers in 1907?

7. Discuss the relationship between the small town and the development of Canadian fiction, 1890–1914.

8. What were the linkages among imperialism, reform, and racism before the Great War?

9. Was Canada a country truly open to immigrants in this period? What were the limitations?

Visit the companion website for A History of the Canadian Peoples, fifth edition for further resources.

www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e

3

4 A History of the Canadian Peoples

possessed none of the worst traits of European capital-
istic society, such as covetousness and rapaciousness;
and they revered freedom, while eschewing private
property. What relationship the “noble savage” bore to
the realities of existence in North America is another
matter entirely.

Europeans would blunder on for centuries in their
attempts to come to terms with the Indigenous peoples
of North America. The First Nations would prove ten-
acious in maintaining their own identity and culture in
the face of much effort to Europeanize them, but they
lacked the physical power to prevent either constant
encroachment on their territory, or the continual under-
mining of the basic physical and spiritual substance of
their way of life. The cultural contact between Native
and newcomer truly was a tragedy. Reconciliation of the
two cultures proved quite impossible, and the failure of
reconciliation resounds still today.

Conclusion

By the mid-1620s the first period of European intru-
sion into what is now Canada had been completed.
Exploration of the new continent’s eastern seaboard
was done, and Europe could construct a fairly decent
map of its coastline. What lay beyond was beginning
to be investigated. Europe was on the verge of decid-
ing that major transplantations of people were going
to be necessary if this new northern land were to be
exploited. As for the Indigenous population, they had
been buffeted by epidemic disease, the causes of which
were beyond their comprehension, but they had not yet
been marginalized. The First Nations could still meet
the newcomers on something approximating equal
terms. In retrospect, we can see how ephemeral this
equality really was.

The Changing History of Paleo-Indian Migration to the New World

Emőke J.E. Szathmáry, University of Manitoba

The prevailing archaeological paradigm since 1950
stated that “Paleo-Indians,” the putative ancestors of
all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas excepting
“Eskimos” and Aleuts, entered North America from Asia
by crossing the Bering land bridge during the Wisconsin
glaciation. From Alaska they moved south through
an ice-free corridor on the eastern side of the Rocky
Mountains into the central Great Plains. Their earliest
cultural remains, called “Clovis,” date to 11,500–11,000
radiocarbon years ago (RCYBP). Clovis sites exist across
the United States, indicating that the ancestors spread
rapidly once they were clear of glaciers.

Challenges to this paradigm accumulated after the
1970s. Though several sites in the Americas appear to
be pre-Clovis in age, it was only in 1997, after eminent
archaeologists had examined remains at Monte Verde

in southern Chile, that it was generally accepted that
people had entered the western hemisphere before
12,500 RCYBP (Meltzer et al., 1997). By then, the rest of
the paradigm was also unravelling. The Cordilleran and
Laurentide glaciers were shown to have merged east of
the Rockies in Alberta, blocking the corridor for some
6,000 years, and north of 60o N the corridor had been
covered by Laurentide ice even longer (Jackson and
Duk-Rodkin, 1996). With the corridor impassable, what
route did the ancestors take south? When did they enter
North America to have reached southern Chile so early?
Did they come from other places than Asia?

These questions are not new, and evidence con-
tinues to show that the roots of the ancestors lie in Asia.
Today, many archaeologists reason that people must
have travelled south along the northwest coast of North

Historiography

901491_00_FM.indd 9 05/01/16 10:19 PM

x Preface

• Extensive coverage of
women, children, and
Aboriginal peoples
throughout the history
of Canada. New insights
into these groups, the
roles they played, the
contributions they made,
and the challenges they
faced provide a rich,
balanced account of
Canada’s past.

• Updated coverage of
twentieth- and twenty-
first-century events.
Enlightening discussions of
topics including international
conflict and the role of
Canada’s military; the Arctic;
health, health care, and
elderly Canadians; and the
Internet and popular culture
help students understand
Canada’s present-day
political, economic, and
socio-cultural identities.

3

40 A History of the Canadian Peoples

equitable freight rates with a series of particular prov-
incial demands. The result was a widespread, if brief,
public agitation. Eschewing the third-party route of
the Progressives, the Maritime Rights leaders decided
in 1923 to appeal to the remainder of the country
over the head of Ottawa. Although a major national
advertising and public relations campaign on behalf
of Maritime concerns had some success, it was not
enough. When Maritimers started voting Conservative

in 1923 by-elections, this merely annoyed the King
government. After a Royal Commission investigated
Maritime grievances, the Liberals bought off the region
with concessions on freight rates, subsidies, and port
development. None of these concessions touched fun-
damental economic problems. In the end, working
through the two-party system achieved no more than
the creation of a third party. The inability of regional
protest in the Maritimes and the West to find common

In 1916, feminist activist and author Emily Murphy

(1868–1933), who wrote under the name “Janey

Canuck,”was appointed a police magistrate in Alberta,

thus becoming the first female judge in the British

Empire. Her appointment was challenged on the

grounds that only males were persons as stated in

the British North America Act of 1867. A year later

the Alberta Supreme Court found that women were

persons in a ruling that applied only within the prov-

ince. Murphy was subsequently ruled ineligible by

Prime Minister Robert Borden to be appointed to the

Canadian Senate, and in 1927 she gathered a consor-

tium of four other Alberta women to sign a petition

to the Supreme Court of Canada, which asked the

question: “Does the word ‘persons’ in section 24 of the

British North America Act, 1867, include female per-

sons?” Murphy’s four collaborators were: Irene Parlby

(1868–1965), a former president of the United Farm

Women of Alberta and an Alberta cabinet minister

in 1921; Nellie McClung (1873–1951), author, female

suffrage advocate, and Alberta MLA (1921); Louise

McKinney (1868–1931), the first woman elected to a

legislature in the British Empire in 1917 and a temper-

ance supporter; and Henrietta Edwards (1849–1931), a

founding member of the Victorian Order of Nurses and

a leading member of the National Council of Women.

The Supreme Court brought down its decision

on 24 April 1928. The Court’s answer to the ques-

tion was that women were not persons, because

at the time of the drafting of the BNA Act, women

could not vote or hold political office. Moreover, it

pointed out, the Act used male pronouns through-

out. The five women appealed this decision to the

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England,

which declared on 18 October 1929 that women

were indeed persons eligible to become Canadian

senators. The Privy Council argued that “the exclu-

sion of women from all public offices is a relic of days

more barbarous than ours,” adding: “to those who

would ask why the word ‘persons’ should include

females, the obvious answer is, why should it not?”

This decision was not only important for women’s

rights, but also because it enunciated the princi-

ple that the BNA Act was “a living tree capable of

growth and expansion within its natural limits.” The

Constitution thus required progressive interpretation

that was different from that applied to ordinary stat-

utes. This principle remains an important compon-

ent of modern Canadian constitutional law. Prime

Minister Mackenzie King responded to the decision

a few months later by appointing Cairine Wilson

(1885–1962) to the Senate.

BACKg ROUNDER
The Famous Five and the “Persons” Case

A military cortège transports the body of Corporal Nathan Cirillo from Ottawa to Hamilton, Ontario. Cirillo was on honour guard at
the National War Memorial in Ottawa when he was shot and killed by Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, who was subsequently killed during his
failed raid on Parliament Hill’s Centre Block. Cirillo’s death, along with the murder of Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent in a parking
lot days earlier, outraged many Canadians, and both attacks were identified as terrorism by the Prime Minister. The Canadian Press/
Patrick Doyle.

Into the New
Millennium13

The village of Château-Richer (on the north shore of the St Lawrence northeast of Quebec City), 1787, watercolour by Thomas Davies.
Included in this pastoral scene are whitewashed stone farmhouses, wooden barns, and eel traps in the river. © National Gallery of
Canada, 6275.

2
Europe Settles In:
Newfoundland, Acadia,
New France

164 A History of the Canadian Peoples

late 1820s the British government rejected a proposal for
a major government resettlement scheme to be financed
by local authorities as an alternative to poor relief. It
was brought forward by the parliamentary undersecre-
tary at the Colonial Office, Robert John Wilmot-Horton.
Thereafter, government policy abandoned public assist-
ance for emigration.

The other three patterns were not mutually exclu-
sive. Some emigrants could even combine all three.
The second pattern emphasized settlement on the land.
It involved private proprietors of land, usually large
land companies. These occasionally offered financial
assistance, but most frequently they made land on
affordable terms available to emigrants who had man-
aged to make their way to North America. This process
was intended to appeal to emigrants with some finan-
cial resources. There were three large land compan-
ies: the Canada Company, the British American Land
Company (in the Eastern Townships of Quebec), and

the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia Land Company. In
1826 the Canada Company had purchased most of the
Crown reserves and half of the clergy reserves of Upper
Canada, thus providing revenue for the colony. It settled
large numbers of emigrants on its lands.

A third pattern emphasized transport to North
America but not settlement on the land. Private emi-
grant contractors would offer passage to North America
in sailing vessels. The ships involved were usually in the
timber trade, temporarily converted to provide accom-
modation on the outward passage. The contractor pro-
vided low rates of passage but as few services as possible.
His passengers were frequently deposited at seaports in
British America and left to their own devices. The lucky
ones managed to make their way to some destination
where they could find employment.

The vast majority of emigrants, whatever their
transport and settlement arrangements, fitted into the
fourth pattern. They had arranged their own passage,

Irish emigrants awaiting departure on the quay at Cork, as depicted in the Illustrated London News, 10 May 1851. How would you
interpret this scene? What is the artist trying to depict? LAC, C-3904.

901491_00_FM.indd 10 05/01/16 10:19 PM

xiPreface

Supplements
Instructors and students alike will benefit from the rich suite of ancillary materials available on the textbook’s
companion website: www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e.

For the Instructor
• An Instructor’s Manual features chapter summaries, suggestions for lectures and further readings, discussion

questions, and annotated lists of key figures, places, terms, research topics, and recommended resources.
• A Test Generator provides a comprehensive selection of multiple-choice, true–false, short-answer, and essay

questions.
• PowerPoint® slides, fully updated to reflect the content of this edition, summarize key points from the text and

provide a framework for course lectures.
• An Online Image Bank provides instructors with access to all photos, maps, and tables found in the text so that

these materials may be incorporated into lectures and discussions.

For the Student
• A Student Study Guide offers a variety of useful learning tools, including chapter summaries, learning object-

ives, self-grading quizzes, recommended print and online resources, study and research tips, sample exams, and
interviews with historians.

• An Online Primary-Source Library features over 60 canonical and lesser-known primary sources from both
pre- and post-Confederation history. Each source is accompanied by an introduction offering students a con-
textual and social perspective that will enrich their study of Canadian history.

• Visual History Online is a dynamic resource comprising captioned images grouped into units that correspond
to each chapter of the textbook. Images are accompanied by provocative questions that encourage students to
consider the importance of visual history and stimulate discussion.

901491_00_FM.indd 11 05/01/16 10:19 PM

Introduction
Understanding History
Every experienced historian has at some point encoun-
tered someone from a totally different background who
assumes that “anyone can do history.” In the sense that
anyone can research, write, and even publish historical
work without specialized training, that assumption is
correct. History is one of those fields—creative writing
is another—where the standards of achievement can
be flexible and intuitive, and where much of the meth-
odology is based on plain common sense. History’s
accessibility to almost all of us, not simply as readers
but as actual researchers, is one of its great charms and
greater merits. And many people do engage in histor-
ical research without calling it by that name. Everyone
who tries to trace her ancestry through the labyrinth of
historical records (often called “genealogy”) is involved
in a form of historical research. Everyone who tries to
research the background to a business project as part of
a report on its present status, or to explain how a sports
team achieved a championship season, is in a sense
“doing history.” Every criminal trial (and almost every
civil one) is at some level a historical reconstruction. The
historical mode is one of the most common ways through
which we attempt to understand the world we live in.

To say that nearly all of us engage in some form of
historical reconstruction, often unconsciously, is not to
say that there are no fundamental rules to such activ-
ity. Most of us know instinctively that witnesses can be
biased or mistaken, that human motivation is complex,
and that in the chronological sequence of events—the
establishment of which many non-professional histor-
ians regard as the centre of the enterprise—the cause
must precede the effect. But history is not a laboratory

science. Even the simplest rules of evidence and argu-
ment can be difficult to apply in specific situations,
particularly if the researcher is operating intuitively.
Understanding what causes these difficulties is import-
ant, and becoming sensitive to the problems of history is
one of the chief benefits of formal historical study.

A good many Canadians (probably nearly as many
as commonly read fiction or poetry) read history, for
recreation and for information. Unfortunately, general
readers often approach historical writing in much the
same way they approach fiction, judging a work’s value
by its success in telling “a good story.” But of course story-
telling is only one of numerous ways in which history can
be written. Although, as with fiction, there is great pleas-
ure to be had from reading history simply at the level of
entertainment, to remain at that level would be to miss
much of the best modern historical writing. It is possible
without training or formal critical tools to recognize that
a Harlequin romance offers a far less complex view of
the world than a Margaret Atwood novel; it is somewhat
more difficult to appreciate a parallel difference in his-
tory. Readers who expect writers of fiction to have dis-
tinctive voices and world views still often assume that all
historians participate equally in the effort to recover the
truth of the past through application of some unspecified
“scientific” method: if history is about truth, then all his-
torical writing must be more or less equally true, at least
if the historian has “the facts” right. The ordinary reader
is frequently unable to distinguish between “facts” and
“truth,” failing to appreciate on one level that factual
accuracy is in itself a complex issue and on another level
that it has limited value as a critical test.

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xiiiIntroduction

In addition, many readers fail to distinguish be –
tween history as everything that has happened before
the present moment (also commonly known as “the
past”) and history as the record (usually written) of the
unfolding of some event(s) in that past. Yet that past can
never be recovered, for reasons I shall discuss. All we can
do is attempt to recreate and analyze discrete parts of
that past, refracted through the historian’s prism. Only
this history can be studied and investigated. As a fur-
ther confusion, history can mean not only the historian’s
account of the past, but the systematic study of the past
as a discipline or a craft. The study of either the work
of individual historians or the discipline itself is often
known as historiography. Just as filmmakers make a
surprising number of movies about the process of mak-
ing movies, so historians devote more of their energy to
examining the making of history than they do to any
other single project.

The processes of both reading and researching his-
tory can obviously be greatly enhanced by some under-
standing of the problems that engage historians as they
pursue their craft. Before we turn to some of those prob-
lems, however, it might be well to consider the question
of the value of history.

The Value of History
Once upon a time, especially in the nineteenth and ear-
lier twentieth centuries, most people did not question the
value of historical study or wonder how it was relevant
to their lives. They did not doubt the value of the liberal
arts or the humanities, much less debate the benefits of
studying languages like Greek or Latin. There are really
two separate but related issues inherent in the “value of
history” question. One is whether or not historical study
has a sufficient grip on truth and meaning in our mod-
ern world to have any value at all, intrinsic or extrinsic.
Ultimately, this question involves us in high philosophy
and theory, but it also has a particular Canadian edge.
The other question is whether or not historical work has
a sufficiently attractive vocational payoff to justify its
study at the university. Perhaps we should turn to the
latter question first, since it is easier to answer and may
be of more interest to the beginning historian.

For many centuries, the opportunity to attend
a university was available only to those of outstand-
ing intellectual abilities or privileged socio-economic
standing. In a world that did not question the import-
ance of religion, the original purpose of universities was
to educate clerics. The university gradually became the
centre of humanistic scholarship and enterprise gener-
ally, but so long as society valued education for its own
sake—chiefly because it was something available only
to the privileged few—its specific vocational role was
quite insignificant. Universities turned out educated
and “cultured” men (not women until well into the
nineteenth century) into a world that took it for granted
that such people were important to the society. Specific
occupational training was not part of the university’s
function, and preparation even for such elevated profes-
sions as law and medicine was done outside its doors.
Yet gradually the notion of vocational training did enter
the cloistered world of the university, particularly in
North America, and by 1940 it was possible to prepare
for nearly any occupation through specialized studies at
a university, although such opportunities were still lim-
ited to members of the elites. Despite the new vocational
bent of the university, occupational studies were largely
confined to the post-graduate level; most undergraduate
students at universities (as opposed to acknowledged
vocational centres such as teachers’ training colleges)
still expected An Education rather than A Vocation.

The great change in the nature of the university
really came after 1945, when the idea took hold that all
Canadians were entitled to attend university and the
number of university places was greatly expanded. A
dynamic relationship has existed between the democ-
ratization of the university and the introduction of the
idea that there should be some demonstrable economic
value to a university degree. Thus specific occupational
training now starts at the undergraduate rather than the
graduate level. Today at many universities it is likely that
the majority of students are enrolled in such programs,
and even those who are not in such programs them-
selves commonly expect a university education to pro-
vide some kind of occupational entrée or advantage. In
the new occupational sweepstakes, a field like history is
of less obvious relevance than one like management or
accounting or pharmacy or computing. Some historians

901491_00_FM.indd 13 05/01/16 10:20 PM

xiv Introduction

would prefer to ignore the question of occupational rel-
evance altogether, but the days of a simple liberal arts
education for most university students are probably gone
forever. History may not ever compete with account-
ing or pharmacy or medical school as preparation for
employment, but it is still superb preparation for many
professional programs (assuming that they do not insist
on specialization from day one). And one can do more
in the workforce with a history specialization than most
students might at first think.

There are numerous history-related occupations
besides teaching. They include work in archives, librar-
ies, and museums, as well as in government service.
“Heritage” in itself is a major industry in Canada. Other
occupations, such as law, journalism, and some branches
of the civil service (the diplomatic corps, for example),
have traditionally recruited heavily among history
graduates, but any job requiring the ability to gather and
analyze evidence and then communicate the findings is
ideally suited to someone with a background in hist-
ory. One individual with a graduate degree in history,
Mike Smith, has become the general manager of several
National Hockey League teams. What students have to
do is learn to translate their historical training into the
jargon of the contemporary job market. “Researching
term essays in history,” for example, can be translated
into “using documentary resources to abstract and
analyze complex information.” (At one recent “inter-
view” for a summer job with a government department,
the student applicant was simply asked to summarize
a complex document quickly and accurately.) To the
extent that history is a discipline that teaches students
both to think and to communicate, it should improve
their qualifications for almost any job.

Beyond developing essential skills in research,
analysis, and communication, what are the uses of his-
tory? Certainly few historians today believe—if they
ever did—in the use of historical “laws” of human con-
duct for predictive purposes. Most historians who have
employed historical laws, such as Arnold Toynbee in A
Study in History, Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the
West, or Karl Marx in Capital, have done so on such an
abstract level that it is difficult to translate those laws
into specific terms. Toynbee’s notion that civilizations
pass through recognizable stages paralleling the human

life cycle is attractive, but it does not tell us when our
civilization will die. Employing the insights of Karl
Marx, no reader could have concluded that the “dicta-
torship of the proletariat” would come first in Russia, or
that it would eventually lead not to a classless society
but to the collapse of the Soviet Union. No discipline
has worked harder than economics to achieve scientific
status, but the whole world has come to appreciate that
economists constantly disagree on even the most gen-
eral level of prediction and analysis.

Yet if history cannot predict, it can help us to under-
stand the difficulty of prediction. In the same way it can
help us to recognize the recurrent and ongoing nature
of many of society’s problems. By and large, historians
were far more sanguine about the outcome of the 1992
referendum on the Charlottetown constitutional accord
than were the scaremongers on either side of the debate
or many of the journalists covering the “crisis.” Indeed,
those with an understanding of Canadian history, con-
stitutional and otherwise, were bound to find the very
concept of a “crisis” suspect, just as they would any other
popular journalistic concept, such as “conspiracy.” The
historical record tells us that there have been crises and
conspiracies, but equally that these terms have so often
been used without justification that they have lost any
real meaning.

History provides us not only with a social context
but with a personal one as well. The genealogical search
for “roots” has become important for many Canadians
seeking to trace their family backgrounds and to under-
stand the circumstances that drove their ancestors across
the ocean, or the ways their ancestors’ lives changed as
a result of the newcomers’ arrival. Nor is the question
of personal identity merely an individual matter. It is
no accident that as minority groups in Canada work to
develop themselves as collectivities, they need to estab-
lish and assert their historical experience. Over the past
30 years some Canadians have lost interest in the histor-
ical mode, adopting what we might call the “irrelevance
of history” position. But this has not been the case with
collective “minorities” such as women, Native peoples,
blacks, and ethnic minorities. For these groups, estab-
lishing their rightful place in Canadian history has
been an absolutely primary function. That these groups’
interpretations of their histories have often run counter

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xvIntroduction

to the traditional versions of Canadian history does not
render them any less consequential—or less historical.

The Elusive Fact
More than 50 years ago a television series called
Dragnet became famous for a catchphrase used by one
of its characters, a police detective named Sergeant Joe
Friday. When questioning witnesses, Friday always
repeated the same request, delivered in an emotion-
less monotone: “All I want is the facts, just give me the
facts.” The monotone was intended to indicate Friday’s
objectivity and to extract from his witness a response
devoid of personal bias and colouration. Of course he
seldom got “just the facts”—which from our perspective
is exactly the point. Somehow, just as the popular mind
in the 1950s associated Joe Friday with facts, so it has
more recently come to think of historians as dealing
in the same coin. The equation of facts and history has
doubtless been assisted by the traditional way of teach-
ing history in the schools, by marching out one name,
date, event after another for students to commit to mem-
ory and regurgitate at the appropriate time in the course
of an examination. Of course, historians do rely on facts
as their basic building blocks; but they do not think of
them the way Sergeant Friday did, nor do they use them
the way common opinion believes they do.

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary offers several mean-
ings for “fact.” The most familiar is probably number 1:
“a thing that is known to have occurred, to exist, or to be
true,” although number 4—“truth, reality”—is also very
common. Facts, as Dragnet suggested, are true things,
unsullied by any process of interpretation or conclu-
sion. Such things may exist, but they are much harder to
come by than one might expect, for several reasons. One
problem is the language in which “facts” must be stated.
Another is the context in which they become significant.

Over the last century we have become increasingly
aware that language is not a neutral instrument, but one
that carries with it a heavy freight of cultural experi-
ence and usage. “John Cabot discovered Newfoundland
in 1497” may seem a straightforward statement of fact,
but at least half of the words in it conjure up a whole
host of meanings. One of those words is “discovered.”

The impli cation is that what Cabot found was previ-
ously unknown—but of course an Aboriginal popu-
lation had been living in the area for millennia. Even
qualifying “discovered” by saying that Cabot “was the
first European to discover Newfoundland” doesn’t help
much, since we now know that the Vikings had settled at
L’Anse aux Meadows in the eleventh century, and even
they may not have been the first Europeans to cross the
Atlantic. “Discovery” is a complex concept. The term
“Newfoundland” is equally problematic, since in mod-
ern geographic terms Cabot was not at all precise about
his movements, and the land he sighted may not have
been part of the island that we know as Newfoundland
today. Indeed, Cabot called the land he saw “the New-
Founde Land,” and it was only later that the label was
applied to the island. Moreover, Cabot’s sightings were
not confirmed by anything other than vague self-dec-
larations. To top matters off, there are questions about
the identity of John Cabot himself, who started in Italy
as Giovanni (or Zuan) Caboto and became John Cabot
Montecalunya, a resident of Valencia, in the early 1490s,
before he called himself John Cabot of Bristol. Almost
all but the most simplistic statements are subject to the
same difficulties. Philosophers have spent thousands of
years trying to formulate “true” statements, with very
little success, and historians are unlikely to do much bet-
ter. Almost any “factual” statement worth making has to
be expressed in a language heavily weighted with values
and contexts. Language is only one of the challenges in
the quest for the fact.

Even if facts could be expressed in a neutral lan-
guage, such as numbers, we would still need to decide
which facts are important. At any given moment there
exists a virtual infinity of pieces of information that
could be isolated and stated. Most “historical facts” are
simply labels of events and dates, names and move-
ments, which by themselves do not tell us very much.
They are not statements in which anything is asserted,
and therefore they have no standing as facts. Only
when their significance is implicitly or explicitly under-
stood do they acquire any utility or susceptibility to
truth. “The Battle of Vimy Ridge” is not a fact since it
does not assert anything capable of being either true or
false. “The Battle of Vimy Ridge in 1917 was won by the
Canadian army” is an assertion the validity of which

901491_00_FM.indd 15 05/01/16 10:21 PM

xvi Introduction

can be assessed. Whether it is false or true (and hence
“a fact”) is another matter entirely. The validity of the
statement requires a detailed account of the battle in the
context of the war.

One of the chief benefits of modern historical study
is that it promotes a healthy skepticism about the neu-
trality and ultimate truth of the notorious fact. Taken
by itself, in isolation, the fact has little meaning. It is
only when facts are arranged into some larger picture—
some sort of interpretive account—that they acquire
significance. Those interpretive pictures themselves are
subject to change over time. Anyone today who reads a
Canadian history textbook written 30 years ago will be
struck by the almost complete absence of any reference
to women as important historical figures. Yet 30 years
ago the majority of readers—even female readers—took
that absence for granted. The absence of women does not
mean that women were not present. It simply means that
historians of that generation did not regard their activ-
ities as worthy of attention. The historian can uncover
whole constellations of new facts simply by asking a
new question of the historical record, as happened when
some scholars asked: “What about the women?” History
is not the study of something eternally fixed, of some-
thing that can be “discovered,” but rather the continual
dynamic re-investigation and re-evaluation of the past.

If historians can recover new facts, however, they
are still limited to those facts that have been recorded
in some way. The records need not be in written form;
sometimes they take the form of oral history, sometimes
of artifacts. Whatever form the evidence takes, it has to
have been preserved. Preservation may be deliberate or
serendipitous, but in either case certain biases may be
observed. If we think about our own personal history,
we realize that not every part of it has been recorded, let
alone recorded with equal care; and much of the individ-
ual record that does exist has been preserved not through
personal choice but to serve bureaucratic purposes. Not
every society keeps public records, however, and even in
the record-keeping societies, not everyone produces an
equal quantity of evidence. Only a relative handful of
historical actors, for example, have left behind their own
written accounts. Personal evidence tends to be limited
to those involved in self-consciously important activ-
ity, as defined by any particular society. Such recorders

usually represent that society’s elite, and what they rec-
ord represents what the elites think needs recording. We
know far more about taxation in the Middle Ages than
we do about sexual behaviour, for example. Whatever
their limitations, it is with the records that historians
must start. They are the primary sources for historical
investigation, as distin guished from secondary sources
(usually other historians’ re search gleanings and inter-
pretations). In working with primary sources, historians
face two problems: the first one of authenticity, the second
one of credibility.

For understandable reasons, historians have to
be certain that the records they study are genuine.
Historians thus prefer to work with original docu-
ments, the so-called “manuscript” sources (although
not all manuscripts are necessarily handwritten). The
republication of such material often raises questions of
accuracy, which become even more problematic when
the documents have been translated from one language
to another. Even the most scrupulous of editors may
subtly alter the meaning of a document through chan-
ges in punctuation or spelling, and until our own time
the editors of historical documents often intervened
in other ways as well. A famous editor of Shakespeare
named Thomas Bowdler expurgated material that he
considered to be in bad taste (his name is now commem-
orated in the verb “to bowdlerize”). Other editors silently
rewrote texts to what they regarded as the advantage of
their authors. Even the appearance of authenticity is no
guarantee; many skilful forgeries have been designed to
pass close inspection. The famous Shroud of Turin (sup-
posedly showing the imprint of the body of Christ) is
not necessarily a deliberate forgery, but recent scientific
investigation has found that it could not be authentic-
ally associated with the crucifixion. As for the suppos-
edly fifteenth-century “Vinland Map,” discovered in the
1960s, it still has not been satisfactorily authenticated,
and many scholars think it is a fake.

Even if we are dealing with an “authentic” document,
there are still many potential problems to face before
we can use it as evidence. Many documents cannot be
precisely dated or attributed to a specific author. But
these questions must be addressed before the historian—
acting all the parts in a court of law except that of
witness—can determine the document’s credibility.

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xviiIntroduction

Was the author in a position to be authoritative? Are
there reasons, obvious or subtle, for suspecting bias of
some kind? Bias may appear in many forms. Authors may
seek to justify themselves; they may place their interpret-
ation of events in a context resulting from their place in
society or from their ideological assumptions; they may
report hearsay; they may adjust their accounts for literary
reasons or simply to tell “a good story.” Evidence is best
if it can be corroborated by more than one source; but
supporting evidence is not always available, particularly
for specific details. Like the “facts” derived from them,
the documents themselves are seldom unassailable as
sources. Historians work with probabilities rather than
certainties, and the more evidence is available, the more
likely it is that there will be complications. In any event,
students of history need to be both skeptical and critical
of what they read, whether documentary evidence itself
or interpretations of such material.

The Conventions
of History
Historians have developed a series of conventions for
dealing with their raw data. Historical information pre-
sented in its unexplicated form—as a series of unrelated
facts—is not history as historians understand it, and
insufficient attention to interpretation and context is
one of the most common faults of beginning histor-
ians. Traditionally, the chief mode for historians has
been narrative, the recounting of past events in the
sequence in which they occurred. Like all aspects of
historical work, narrative requires selection—cutting
into the seamless web of the past to isolate a particular
sequence of events involving a limited number of char-
acters. Narrative deals with the passage of time, and—
since it is axiomatic that cause and effect must be in
the right sequence—chronology is critical to historical
understanding. Many great historians of the past con-
centrated almost exclusively on narrative, appropriately
embellished with description and context; an example
is Francis Parkman, who wrote extensively on the early
conflict of the French and British in North America.
But most modern historians would agree with Arthur

Marwick (1970: 144) that “the historian must achieve
a balance between narrative and analysis, between a
chronological approach and an approach by topic, and,
it should be added, a balance between both of these,
and, as necessary, passages of pure description ‘setting
the scene,’ providing routine but essential information,
conveying the texture of life in any particular age and
environment.” Some historians have even dropped nar-
rative entirely, although the sequence of events remains
implicitly crucial to their work.

Despite the common use of the term “causation”
in historical writing, particularly among beginners,
philosophers of history have long emphasized that his-
torians really do not deal much in the sort of cause-and-
effect relationships usually associated with scientific
work. The past is too complex to isolate factors in this
way. Instead, historians talk about “explanation,” which
is not quite the same as scientific causation. Explanation
requires the inclusion of enough context and relevant
factors to make it clear that the events in question were
neither totally predetermined nor utterly capricious. As
E.H. Carr (1964: 103–4) has observed:

. . . no sane historian pretends to do anything
so fantastic as to embrace “the whole of experi-
ence”; he cannot embrace more than a minute
fraction of the facts even of his chosen sector
or aspect of history. The world of the historian,
like the world of the scientist, is not a photo-
graphic copy of the real world, but rather a
working model which enables him more or
less effectively to understand it and to master
it. The historian distils from the experience of
the past, or from so much of the experience of
the past as is accessible to him, that part which
he recognizes as amenable to rational explan-
ation and interpretation, and from it draws
conclusions.

In their efforts at narrative and/or explanation,
historians also use many other conventions. Among
them, let us focus on periodization. The division of the
past into historical “periods” serves purposes beyond
the organization of a teaching curriculum. By focus-
ing attention on units of time, periodization serves to
narrow and limit the range of material to be considered

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xviii Introduction

and helps to provide a structure for what would other-
wise be a meaningless jumble of events and dates. The
choice of beginning and end dates for larger historical
sequences is hardly arbitrary, but it is still a matter of
interpretation. Take, for example, the standard deci-
sion to divide Canadian history at 1867, the year of
Confederation. This fundamental periodization reflects
the assumption not only that political and constitu-
tional development shaped everything else, but also
that the creation of a national state called the Dominion
of Canada was the critical point in that development.
However, it makes little sense for many other themes
in Canadian history. Historians of Canada continually
debate the question of relevant periods. The authors of
the first survey of the history of women in Canada, for
example, were forced to find a new way of periodizing
their account, since the standard political and consti-
tutional periodization reflected a chronology that was
mainly masculine in emphasis.

New Interpretations
Like all academic disciplines, history is constantly
reinterpreting its subject matter. Some of the pres-
sure for reinterpretation is a simple matter of growth:
within the past quarter-century, the number of aca-
demic positions for historians in Canada has more
than quadrupled, with the result that more individuals
are now researching and writing within the field. At
the same time, technological advances (in computers
and photocopiers, for example) and the advent of the
relatively inexpensive airline ticket have made it pos-
sible for historians to examine and process documen-
tary materials in ways and quantities that would have
been unthinkable at the beginning of the 1960s. Other
pressures for revision, of course, come from changes
in the social context, which is continually raising new
questions for historians to explore and causing shifts
in the climate of opinion.

In history, revisionist movements usually arise out
of new developments in three (often related) areas: sub-
ject matter, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies.
A new development in any one of these areas may be
enough on its own to provoke significant revision. When

two or three come together (as is often the case), they
can completely alter our understanding of the past.

Addressing new subject matter involves asking
new questions about hitherto neglected aspects of the
past. In Canadian history, with its traditional focus
on the political and constitutional ways in which a
national state was created, the opportunities for new
questions have been quite substantial. Out of a variety
of new subjects, we can perhaps offer three examples:
women, Aboriginal peoples, and ethnic groups. While
each of these subjects would today be regarded as cen-
tral to any contemporary understanding of Canadian
history, they were virtually neglected until recent
years. As we have seen, lack of attention to women in
the past did not reflect lack of information but lack of
interest on the part of historians. With the simple act of
focusing attention on women, a new field of study was
opened. In the case of Aboriginal peoples, the subject
had not been entirely neglected, but it had virtually
always been approached from the perspective of the
developing national state. Thus many of the new ques-
tions raised today are aimed at understanding the First
Nations’ perspectives. As for ethnic groups, research
has tended to involve scholars from a variety of disci-
plines, such as sociology and geography, and has been
encouraged by the availability of grant money from
governmental agencies at both the federal and provin-
cial levels. Ethnic studies have proved to be politically
popular within Canada.

New areas of study often suggest—if not require—
new conceptual contexts. In general, all three of the
new areas noted above fall under the rubric of “social
history.” As early as 1924, an article on “The Teaching
of Canadian History” advocated the study of the “actual
life of the Canadian people” in “their efforts to secure a
livelihood and then to provide for the higher demands
of mind and spirit” (McArthur, 1924: 207). Until recent
years, however, much of the research in the social his-
tory area concentrated on the upper echelons of soci-
ety in Canada, the so-called “elites.” Broadening the
social base to include individuals outside the ranks of
those whose lives were normally documented (women,
Aboriginal people, racial and ethnic minorities, ordin-
ary working folk) involved a substantial reconceptualiz-
ation of the nature of Canada’s past.

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xixIntroduction

Studying those “inarticulate” groups often required
new methodologies as well. Perhaps the most important
methodological innovation was quantification: gener-
ating new data sets by processing existing information
not previously practicable for historical purposes out
of data such as name-by-name census returns. At its
worst, quantification could be little more than mind-
less number-crunching, but at its best it enabled histor-
ians to open up whole categories of hitherto unusable
documentation. The information collected by the
Dominion Bureau of the Census or the various provin-
cial departments of Vital Statistics has provided much
new insight into the way ordinary Canadians have
lived (and loved) in the past. Computers have made it
easier for historians to process large amounts of aggre-
gate information—although the axiom “Garbage In,
Garbage Out” continues to apply. The complex processes
of collecting and analyzing new categories of data have
been contentious, and beginning historians should
understand that the apparently simple act of producing
a new set of information involves many steps and many
disagreements. “Hard” numbers and percentages are no
more sacrosanct than information that appears “softer.”
Moreover, quantified data still require interpretation
and are subject to all the standard rules that apply to
historical explanation.

Although explicit controversies do arise within
the field of Canadian history, they are probably less
common than controversies among historians of other
nations, notably the United States and Great Britain.
To some extent the profession has avoided confronta-
tions by allowing each practitioner his or her own area
of specialization (or “turf ”). This has made good sense
because the number of questions not yet adequately
explored in the history of Canada is considerable.
Whatever the reasons for the muting of controversy, dis-
agreements in Canadian historiography have had less
to do with specific points and interpretations within a
single tradition than with first principles and under-
lying assumptions. Thus Canadian historians tend to
disagree only at the mega-level, as in the recent debate
over Canadian “national history,” which was really a
debate among scholars with different sets of assump-
tions about the role of narrative in the past. Those on the
moving frontier of scholarship are in some ways far less

embattled than those still working in older traditions,
since they can simply add their “new” interpretations
on to the old ones.

But at the same time, the interpretation and prac-
tice of history, in Canada as elsewhere, is constantly
changing, presenting new issues and questions. As
noted above, research over the past half-century has
been greatly altered by a variety of technological
developments, including the photocopier, the computer,
and most recently, the Internet. This last tool, which
few fully understand in all its complexity, can alter
research processes and provides access to vast amounts
of mostly unsorted information, and while it raises new
possibilities for acquiring documentation and exchan-
ging information it also opens a Pandora”s box of new
questions. Its users must develop new ways of authenti-
cating what is credible in essentially unsupervised and
uncontrolled material. We must figure out how to pro-
tect intellectual property in a world where a mere click
of a mouse can copy and transfer thousands of pages
of material from one file to another, and the resulting
risks of plagiarism are enormous. New techniques for
documenting the past will have to be developed so that
we can be assured that what we are reading online is not
simply another “urban myth.” Contemporary teachers
and students of history are thus faced with many new
challenges.

The search for a credible past has been recently
influenced not simply by the emergence of a totally
unsupervised database, but, on the other hand, by new
efforts on the part of public bodies to shape what we
accept as “truth.” Over the years, most historical argu-
ments and interpretations have always been judged in
the free marketplace of opinion by one’s historical peers,
and there has seldom been a “final judgment.” The philo-
sophical problems involved when complex historical
questions are actually adjudicated by the judicial pro-
cess are many. In court cases, increasingly employed in
Canada in Aboriginal land claims disputes, the judge
listens to a variety of expert testimony and pronounces a
verdict that appears to rely on and thus to validate one or
more particular historical interpretations or methodo-
logical approaches. Does this court approval mean that
the judge’s verdict takes on the character of the truth?
Is it susceptible to revision? Has anything actually

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xx Introduction

been validated? Apart from court pronouncements are
others of an official nature. The Canadian government
has recently (November 2009) issued a revised guide for
new citizens that undertakes to summarize Canadian
history in 10 pages. That history is now formally allowed
to include the abuse of Aboriginal peoples and the mis-
treatment of several ethnic communities, although few
details are given. Whether it has managed to be suffi-
ciently vague so as not to introduce a new level of mis-
conceptions is another matter entirely.

Simply because history is a cumulative subject, stu-
dents should not think that the latest books and journal
articles are necessarily better by virtue of their dates
of publication. Many older works of historical scholar-
ship can still be regarded as the best treatments of their
topics. This is particularly true in traditional areas of
study that have not attracted much attention from mod-
ern scholars, such as the military history of the War of
1812. Earlier generations were fond of publishing edi-
tions of documents, which, if well-transcribed, trans-
lated, and edited, are just as valuable today as they were
a century ago. The complete (and most commonly used)
edition of the Jesuit Relations in English was published
between 1896 and 1901 (and, as times do change, that
entire 73-volume collection is now available online in
facsimile from Creighton University, a Jesuit institution
in Omaha, Nebraska). On some topics our only sources
are earlier documents; for example, Richard Hakluyt’s
sixteenth-century accounts are still essential for any
study of English overseas voyages.

By now it should be clear that both the writing and
the reading of history are extremely complicated enter-
prises. Whole books with titles like Understanding History
or The Nature of History have been devoted to introdu-
cing students to the complexities of the craft, and in the
space of a few pages it is impossible to explore all the
potential dimensions. In any case, readers of this book
should understand that every work of history involves
a series of decisions to hold various contradictions in
dynamic tension. Among the most important issues held
in tension in this book are the following.

1. Interpretive complexity versus authority. Virtually
every sentence in this work (or any other work of
history) could be hedged in with conflicting evi-

dence and interpretation. The result would almost
certainly be incomprehensible. I have chosen to
favour readability over total academic accuracy.
This is not to say that I do not recognize the issues of
interpretive complexity. Rather, I have consciously
addressed them in two ways: by introducing ques-
tions of interpretation into the text on a regular basis,
and by including essays on historiography—”How
History Has Changed’—at the end of each chapter.

2. Individual biography versus groups and forces. One
problem that all historians face (or ought to face)
is how to make the material interesting to readers.
As any newspaper editor will tell you, readers like
their stories to have people in them. This work uses
the experiences of individual people to represent
and suggest the complex groups and forces that lie
behind them. I do not subscribe to the Great Person
theory of history, but I do believe in personalizing
history as much as possible.

3. Overarching master narrative versus the complex voices
of social and cultural history. Whether or not Canadian
history has a single narrative is a hotly debated issue
today, sometimes posed in the form of the question
“Is there a national history?” The single narrative is
also re lated to the problem of authority, although
the two are not the same. A coherent and connected
single narrative could be based on the concept of the
development of the nation, or on viewing events from
the perspective of that nation, or on something quite
different. The point is that any such narrative line rep-
resents an abstraction. Critics of the abstract, single
narrative approach associate it with the imposition of
a hegemonic “master principle” that in turn is often
taken to represent the sequence of events preferred
by the “men in suits” or the “ruling class” or the “pol-
iticians in Ottawa.” Many groups are commonly left
outside such a master narrative: workers, racial and
cultural minorities, women, inhabitants of margin-
alized regions, inhabitants of alienated regions (e.g.,
Quebec for much of the twentieth century). Over the
past 30 years, Cana dian historians have concentrated
on recovering the voices of these groups. But if those
voices were all we heard, telling their own stories in
their own tongues, the resulting cacophony would
be unintelligible; and to establish chronology and

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xxiIntroduction

meaningful periodization, we need a structure that
will provide some common reference points. Hence a
master narrative of some kind is still essential.

The master narrative around which this book is
structured, into which all the other stories are woven,

is a highly abstract one that may be labelled “a history
of Canada.” I hope this discussion will help readers to
understand the chapters that follow.

J.M. Bumsted

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1 The Beginnings

Although there was not a written alphabet in North America before European “discovery,” a record of the history and culture of the First
Peoples was preserved in oral traditions and material culture, and it was permanently imprinted on the landscape, engraved on rock
surfaces all across the continent. The engravings shown here—from the “Teaching Rocks” in Nephton, Ontario—are a relatively modern
example, dating from between 900 AD and 1100 AD, although there are others that are millennia older.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 2 12/16/15 4:05 PM

Timeline | Major Events in the Early History of the First Nations
12,000 BCE (Before Common Era)
Mammal retaining stone weapon killed in New Mexico.

11,000 BCE
Glacial retreat escalates with warming trend.

10,000 BCE
Continued warming alters physical environment as ice

retreats.

9000 BCE
Fluted Point people spread across North America.

7000 BCE
Maritime Archaic culture develops the harpoon.

5500 BCE
Maritime Archaic culture develops burial mounds.

Notched projectile points appear in British Columbia.

3000 BCE
Forest reaches its northernmost extension.

2000 BCE
Paleo-Eskimos and other Archaics begin displacing

Maritime Archaics on eastern seaboard and in Arctic

regions.

1000 BCE
Ceramic pottery appears in Great Lakes area and

spreads east.

500 BCE
Dorset people appear in Arctic Canada. Climate

deteriorates.

500 CE (Common Era)
Maize cultivation begins in southern Ontario. Climate

improves.

600
Beothuk culture replaces the Dorset Eskimos in

Newfoundland.

1000
Norse settle briefly in eastern North America.

1150
Dorset culture is replaced by Thule culture among Inuit.

1350
Squash and bean cultivation appears in southern

Ontario.

1497
First recorded European arrival in North America since

Norse.

1634
Beginning of the destruction of

Huronia.

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4 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Once upon a history, Canada began with the arrival of the European “discoverers” at the end of
the fifteenth century. These events, at best, now mark only
the moment at which the inhabited land and its people enter
the European historical record, not the beginning of their
history. Thousands of years of human development pre-
ceded the appearance of the Europeans. The First Nations of
North America also have their history. The work of countless
modern specialists, chiefly linguistic scholars and archae-
ologists, has only begun to uncover the barest outlines of
the pre-European period. The record of human settlement
in Canada clearly does not begin with the Europeans.

The First Arrivals
Unlike other continents on planet Earth, North America
did not produce indigenous archaic human forms

going back thousands of generations. No evidence sug-
gests that any of the many ancestors of Homo sapiens
developed on this continent. There were no Old Stone
Age people as in Africa, Asia, or Europe. Instead, the
first humanlike inhabitant of North America was Homo
sapiens, who probably arrived in the New World during
the last Great Ice Age—which ended 10,000 years ago—
and did so via Beringia, the now submerged land bridge
stretching between what is now Siberia and Alaska.
“Land bridge” is a bit of a misnomer for Beringia, esti-
mated to be twice the size of modern Manitoba, and cur-
rent evidence suggests that humans were living in there
in a sort of refugium from the Ice Age, and according to
the Beringia standstill model, were first isolated in the
territory, then migrated into the western hemisphere
15,000 years ago.

Until recently, the 30,000 years or more of the
human occupation of the North American continent

Timeline | Major Events in the Early European History in Northern North America
982–5 CE
Eric the Red explores Greenland.

c. 1000
L’Anse aux Meadows is established by the Norse.

1497
John Cabot reaches Newfoundland.

1500
Gaspar Corté-Real lands at Tierra Verde

(Newfoundland).

1501
Gaspar Corté-Real brings the first Aboriginals to

Europe.

1534
Jacques Cartier erects cross at Gaspé Harbour.

1576
First voyage of Martin Frobisher to Baffin Island.

1585
John Davis enters Davis Strait.

1605
Port-Royal established.

1608
Champlain builds habitation at Quebec.

1610
First English settlers arrive in Newfoundland.

1615
Étienne Brûlé investigates New York and Pennsylvania.

1616
Robert Bylot sails through Davis Strait.

1618
Champlain proposes major French colony on

St Lawrence.

1628
Scottish settlement expedition arrives in Maritime

region.

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51 | The Beginnings

before the arrival of the Europeans usually were labelled
“prehistoric.” That term has fallen out of common usage,
however, because it produces so many misconceptions.
No written record of North American development may
have existed before the Europeans, but to assume that
“history” begins only with writing is misleading. Plenty
of earlier records of human activity exist, including oral
traditions of the First Nations. From them a fascinating
picture of the early history of what is now Canada can
be reconstructed. That picture is hardly a static one.
Instead, it displays constant movement, adaptation, and
change. These early people did not attempt to modify
their environment so much as adapt to it. That environ-
ment, in turn, was continually shifting, perhaps not
over a single season but over several generations.

One of the chief factors influencing the early
inhabitants of North America was climate. Until very
recently—as the history of the planet goes—most of
what is now Canada was covered with glacial ice, which
began retreating about 10,000 years ago. Several ice-free
corridors ran from Alaska south, through which the first
immigrants from Asia probably travelled by land into the
warmer regions of the continent, while others, it seems,
took a coastal route and entered the southwestern part
of the continent by sea. By the time of Christ, around
2,000 years ago, most of Canada had acquired the nat-
ural environment recognizable to us today. The land had
also acquired permanent inhabitants.

Much of what we know about these people comes
to us in the form of physical artifacts, but increasing
genetic evidence has recently led to a number of new
conclusions. Where there was once some debate over
whether these first humans had come from Asia or from
Europe, in the forms of the Clovis and Solutrean hypoth-
eses respectively, the Asian ancestry of North America
seems assured. Most notably, the genome sequence of
12,500-year-old Anzick-1, the infant skeleton found in
Montana, shows indisputable links to Asia and to con-
temporary Native Americans. Found in association with
over a hundred stone and bone Clovis tools, Anzick-1 is
clearly a part of the Clovis culture, and this connection
allows scholars to re-examine previous evidence in a
clearer context.

Because of the limited nature of the evidence,
the early history of humankind in Canada is often
described in terms of surviving tools and weapons,

especially projectile points. Archaeologists can infer
much from tool-making technology and its geographical
spread across the continent. Using various dating tech-
niques, including laboratory testing of organic substan-
ces to determine what remains of a radioactive isotope
called carbon-14, it has been possible to provide some
overall sense of chronological development. The Clovis
tool type, which is associated with tools made from
bifacial percussion flaking and the distinctive fluted
spear point, is found throughout the Americas. They
were mega-faunal hunters of mammoth and other large
game, who lived in small units, although not in total iso-
lation from neighbours. Evidence also survives of trade
and the exchange of goods.

Clovis, eventually, was replaced by the Folsom
culture and a different style of projectile point. Folsom
evidence, which dates back to 9000 BCE, suggests that
new technology, possibly the atlatl, allowed these big-
game hunters to kill more effectively the bison of the
Lake Agassiz region—a vast glacial lake that covered
much of present-day Manitoba and parts of north-
western Ontario, central Saskatchewan, and northern
Minnesota and North Dakota.

As the ice melted and the continental ice sheet
receded northward, hunters who made fluted points
spread more widely across the continent and into
what is now Canada. These people have come to be
known by archaeologists as the Plano People and
had their own distinctive projectile-point technology.
They flourished from 8000 to 6000 BCE. By 4000 BCE
a number of regional offshoots of the Plano People
had developed. Over the next 3,000 years these cul-
tures stabilized to some extent, although there was
still substantial physical movement. On the west-
ern Plains, a culture organized around communal
bison-hunting emerged, perhaps as early as 3000 BCE.
The High Arctic was occupied by Paleo-Eskimos, who
gradually moved to the south into the Barren Lands
west of Hudson Bay. The northeastern seaboard was
occupied between 2000 and 1000 BCE. On the west
coast, a semi-sedentary lifestyle based on the salmon
had developed by 2000 BCE.

From 1000 BCE to 500 CE, substantial cultural chan-
ges occurred across North America. Once we stop trying
to compare these developments with what was going on
in Europe and see them instead in their own terms, we

901491_01_Ch01.indd 5 12/16/15 4:06 PM

6 A History of the Canadian Peoples

In 1996 two young men found a human skull in the

Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. Over

the next month, other parts of the skeleton were

found by archaeologist James C. Chatters. Within

the skeleton’s right hipbone was embedded a pro-

jectile point, possibly of great antiquity. Forensic

examination disclosed that the nearly complete

skeleton, which included a full set of teeth, was of

a male between 40 and 55 years, of tall but slender

build. He had suffered numerous injuries over his

lifetime, including a basalt spear tip lodged in his hip.

Radiocarbon dating of a bone fragment indicated

that this man had lived about 7,500 years before the

birth of Christ. The skull lacked Mongoloid charac-

teristics and displayed many signs associated with

modern Caucasoids, as a forensic reconstruction

illustrates. The skeleton was caught up for some

years in a legal dispute between modern American

Indian tribes and scientists, which tended to obscure

the purely scientific significance of the find. Having

now been analyzed, skeletal evidence connects

Kennewick man to the Ainu, the ancient Asian cul-

ture. Nitrogen and oxygen isotope analysis suggests

that Kennewick man lived coastally, and not in the

Columbia River Valley where he was found, although

the care taken in his interment suggests that he was

buried by other humans.

Tri-City Herald/André Ranieri

BACKGROuNDER
Kennewick M

an

can appreciate how substantial the technological innov-
ations of this period were. The bow and arrow spread
rapidly, for example, profoundly altering hunting tech-
niques. In the same years, pottery-making moved from
the Yukon to eastern districts. The introduction of the
pot changed food preparation substantially, but pottery
also provides evidence of rapidly changing aesthetic
sensibilities, as ornamentation was added to design.

Archaeologists have shifted their classification sys-
tems from the projectile point to the pot to characterize
peoples of this era. Another new development was the
rapid expansion from the south of new funeral prac-
tices, chiefly burial in large mounds. This change, of
course, helped provide a new self-consciously created
richness of physical evidence.

The First Nations
Population around
1500
Although on the eve of European intrusion all Aborig-
inal peoples lived in a reciprocal relationship with
nature, not all experienced the same relationship. Much
depended on the resources of the region in which they
lived and the precise combination of survival skills they
possessed. Most of the many groups were hunters and
gatherers, organized into mobile bands that followed
the seasons and the cycles of game. On the coasts, fish-
ing was the principal means of collecting a food supply.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 6 12/16/15 4:07 PM

71 | The Beginnings

Siberia

Alaska

Yukon
Territory

Northwest Territories

Nunavut

Wrangel Island

St Lawrence
Island

Nunivak
Island

Mt McKinley

A l e u t i a
n I s l

a n d
s

A l
a s

k a
n

P

e
n

i n
s

u

l a

A l
a s

k a
R

a n
g e

B r o o
k s

R a
n g

e

Anagu

la

Ugashik

Dry Creek

Fairbanks

Gallagher Flint Station

Tangle Lakes

Healy Lake

Old Crow
Bluefish Caves

Onion Portage

Trail Creek

A r c
t i c

O
c e

a n

G u l f o f
A l a s k a

B
e

r
in

g
S

tr
a

i

t

C h u k c h i
S e a

G
u

l f
o f

A
n

a d
y r

Ko
buk R

iver

Yu
ko

n
R

iv
er

Ku
sk

ok
w

im
R

iv
er

Macken
zie River

0 500

kilometres

1,000

70

°

60°

50°

Arctic Circle

Canada

United States

N

S
E

W

Beringia: the “land bridge” at its greatest extent. Shaded area was above sea level approximately 20,000 years ago. Adapted from
Brian M. Fagan, The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient North America (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 100

901491_01_Ch01.indd 7 12/16/15 4:07 PM

8 A History of the Canadian Peoples

In the North, as in many other areas, whether one fished
or hunted depended on the season. On the Pacific Slope,
the rich resource base of salmon and cedar made pos-
sible considerable accumulations of wealth and social
gradation. These Pacific peoples demonstrated that
it was not essential to farm in order to prosper. Only
those people living in the area of the Great Lakes pur-
sued horticulture. The planting of corn, tobacco, beans,
squash, and sunflowers led to the establishment of
semi-permanent villages.

Despite the differences in their lifestyles, all First
Nations were remarkably adept and ingenious at adapt-
ing to their environment. None were more successful
than the Inuit, who inhabited an ice-bound territory
in the North. At sea they used the speedy kayak and
on land the dogsled. They lived in domed snow-huts
(igloos) in winter and in skin tents in summer. Caribou
hides served as the basic clothing material and provided

much protection from the inclement weather. The Inuit
were extremely skilful at making tools and weapons.
Their use of bone and ivory for such equipment was
extensive, and their aesthetic sense highly developed.

With the possible exceptions of the horticultural-
ists of south-central Canada and the fisherfolk of the
Pacific Slope, the economies of the First Nations were
quite simple. They were organized around the food
supply, offering semi-nomadic people little scope for
the acquisition of material possessions that would only
have to be abandoned at the next—and imminent—
move. Nevertheless, these were economies, and those
within them functioned according to their inner logic.
Food was not cultivated but pursued. The movement
of fish and game had certain rhythms, but was poten-
tially capricious. When food was available, the popula-
tion was galvanized into action, gathering as much as
possible and consuming it almost immediately. When

Sadlermiut man paddling an inflated walrus-skin boat, watercolour, c. 1830, artist unknown. Library and Archives Canada
(hereafter LAC), Acc. No. R9266-30, Peter Winkworth Collection of Canadiana.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 8 12/16/15 4:07 PM

91 | The Beginnings

food ran out, energetic questing for new sources did not
necessarily begin at once. The people knew the general
patterns of the wildlife and vegetation they sought, and
hurry often did little good. It was, for example, useless
to hunt for berries in February. Such economies put
little premium on the disciplined pursuit of goals, or on
the deferral of expectations.

The First Peoples: A
Regional Introduction
The number of First Nations peoples living in Canada
on the eve of European intrusion has become the sub-
ject of debate. One point seems clear. The Aboriginal
population, lacking immunities to a variety of European
diseases, was quickly decimated by epidemics, which
spread across the land, often in advance of the actual
appearance of a European human carrier. The size of
the population observed by the first European arrivals
may have already been modified by disease brought by
the earliest fishermen, who may well have preceded the
recorded explorers. The Indigenous pre-contact popula-
tion of Canada was probably substantially larger than
the most generous estimates of first-contact observers.
Another general point that needs emphasizing is that
great diversity existed among the Aboriginal inhabit-
ants living in what is now Canada at the time Europeans
arrived. As the map on page 29 indicates, 12 major lan-
guage groups existed in this vast territory.

In the Atlantic region, the earliest traces of a
human presence have been found near Cobequid Bay,
Nova Scotia, where the remains of a Paleo-Indian site
have been dated to roughly 8600 BCE. Hard archaeo-
logical evidence can be hard to find in this region
because coastal settlements may have been washed
away by rising sea levels. The first traces of habitation
on Newfoundland can be dated to approximately 5,000
years ago, arrivals from Labrador. Two successive waves
of settlement are thought to have disappeared around
800 CE. By this time a new people had settled on the
island. Their origins obscure, they would come to be
known as the Beothuk. Their language was probably
Algonquian, and they relied on the fruits of the sea for

much of the year, following the caribou inland in the
depths of winter. In the modern Maritime provinces
and on the Gaspé Peninsula, by 1500 Mi’kmaq speak-
ers of Eastern Algonqian had taken hold. The region
was not well suited to agriculture, and the Mi’kmaq
were primarily hunters and fishermen who employed
an extensive river system to travel between interior
and coast, summering on marine life and hunting in
the winter. Two other groups of Algonquian speakers—
the Wuastukwiuk (Maliseet) around the Saint John
River basin and the Passamaquoddy around the Bay
of Fundy—resided to the west of the Mi’kmaq. Both
peoples were principally hunters.

To the north of the Maritime region was a vast
expanse of Precambrian Shield stretching to the north
of the St Lawrence River between modern Labrador and
the James Bay drainage basin. In a region fairly inhospit-
able to agriculture lived the Innu (Montagnais-Naskapi),
Algonquian speakers who ranged widely in small hunt-
ing bands in search of moose and caribou. Further west
lived several groups called by Europeans “Algonquins,”
and to their west—north of the Great Lakes as far as the
prairies—resided the Ojibwa or Chippewa. Traditionally
hunters, the inhabitants adapted to warmer temper-
atures by seeking a variety of game animals, supple-
mented by such plant foods as berries and wild rice.
They continued to travel in small hunting bands.

South of the Ojibwa, in more temperate and fer-
tile woodlands around the Lower Great Lakes, resided
several peoples belonging to the Iroquian language
family. The Huron lived south of Georgian Bay in what
is today Simcoe County, Ontario. The Petun were found
to their west, the Attiwandaronk (Neutrals) along
the north shore of Lake Erie, and the Five Nations
Iroquois (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and
Seneca) south of the lakes in modern New York State.
Beginning about 1,500 years ago, these peoples picked
up a practice coming northward from the south in the
Mississippi Valley. They began to grow corn. The results
were dramatic. Domesticated plants produced a much
more stable food supply than hunting, and made pos-
sible for a substantial population to exist in a small area.
People here would still hunt and fish, but they no longer
travelled long distances looking for food, and they
could settle in one place more or less permanently. The

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10 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Iroquoians began to establish villages made up of long-
houses: large communal homes typically housing five to
ten nuclear families each. A large village might contain
as many as 100 longhouses and some 3,000 people.

In the slash-and-burn agriculture practised by the
Iroquoians, the land was cleared for fields by cutting
the trees and burning off the ground cover; seeds (first
corn, then beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco) were
planted in holes made with a digging stick; then earth
was hoed up around the plants in mounds—up to 6,000
per hectare in fields as extensive as 25 hectares in area.
Once the men had cleared the land, the women and chil-
dren did the planting, cultivating, and harvesting. The
soil was a sandy loam, easy to work but easily exhausted.
After several years of steady production, the entire com-
munity would move to another site with fresh soil. Land
was treated as a unit of production. It did not confer
status or wealth, and unused land was held in common.
But families possessed their own farm plots, as large
as they could reasonably cultivate. Unlike hunting and
gathering people, these horticulturalists were able to
accumulate possessions, including food supplies for the
winter, and to that extent agricultural produce did repre-
sent a form of wealth. Hoarding was discouraged, how-
ever, and goods were shared through games of chance
and ceremonies such a gift-giving. Artifacts discovered
hundreds of kilometres from their presumed points of
origin demonstrate the development of complex trading
patterns among these early Eastern Woodland peoples.

In the vast expanse between the Great Lakes and
the Rocky Mountains, large mammals remained the
centre of human economies. When the mammoth, the
earliest prey, became extinct it was replaced by species
more familiar to our own time, including the Plains
buffalo (or bison). With the arrival of the horse—an
introduction into southwestern North America by the
Spaniards in the sixteenth century, which gradually
moved north over the next 200 years—the Plains people
would develop one of the world’s great equestrian cul-
tures, but until then they hunted on foot, often stamped-
ing the animals over cliffs or herding them into gullies
or “pounds” where they could be dispatched with spears
or stone hammers. Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump in
present-day Alberta (today a UNESCO World Heritage
Site) was used by four cultures in succession over more

than 5,000 years. Because they needed to follow the
herds as they grazed for forage, the Plains cultures
did not establish permanent habitations. Instead, they
developed the portable hide tipi, using dogs as pack ani-
mals. Changes in spear and arrow points indicate that
the Plains cultures were influenced by developments to
their south. Burial practices also suggest southern influ-
ences and graves containing goods from distant regions,
such as shells and copper, indicate elaborate trade net-
works. Although horticulture was practised at times in
several areas of the prairies, recurring droughts made
hunting and gathering a more reliable survival strategy.

Not all of the region between the Great Lakes and
Rockies was prairie, however. Between the Shield and
the southern Plains was a zone of heavy forest alternat-
ing with open clearings covered with tall grasses. This
parkland, as it came to be called, extended west from
the Red River to the north branch of the Saskatchewan
River and ultimately into the Peace River country. The
lives of people in this region had more in common with
those of the eastern hunters than of the buffalo hunt-
ers to the south. The two largest groups in the western
interior were the Assiniboine and the Cree; the former
were based mainly in the buffalo country and the latter
mainly in the woodlands. Linguistically, both peoples
belonged to the Algonquian family, as did their west-
ern neighbours the Blackfoot. The Gros Ventre and the
Sarcee—who, with the Blackfoot, inhabited what is now
Alberta—spoke Athapaskan languages.

On the Pacific slope, rivers and coastal waters,
set in a temperate climate and teeming with fish and
marine animals, made possible a more varied economy
than was possible for the bison-centred cultures east of
the Rockies. One fish and one tree became central to
the cultures of the Northwest Coast: the salmon—fresh,
smoked, dried—provided a year-round food supply,
while the towering cedar of the coastal rain forest fur-
nished material for everything from large houses and
sea-going dugout canoes to totem poles, ceremonial
masks, and baskets and clothing woven from bark and
roots. In this rich environment with the gentlest climate
of any in the northern part of the continent, there was
little need to pursue a migratory food supply. Relatively
large populations were able to settle in one place. Over
time they developed highly complex social systems

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111 | The Beginnings

with sharp class divisions based on kinship and wealth,
both material and immaterial (such as rights to cultural
property, including dances, songs, or rituals). People
such as the Haida, Nun-chah-nulth, Kwakwaka’wakw,
and Tsimshian also owned slaves, often prisoners of
war taken in raids on less powerful peoples such as the
Salish of southern Vancouver Island. A strong aesthetic
sensibility expressed itself in all aspects of these cul-
tures, and the linguistic diversity of the region—of the
12 Aboriginal language families in Canada, half are
found only in present-day British Columbia—suggests
that it has been occupied for a very long time.

The peoples of the Interior Plateau were heavily
influenced by the coastal societies, with clan-based
social organization and hierarchical divisions between
chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves. In their econ-
omies, however, groups such as the Interior Salish,
Kootenay, Chilcotin, and Okanagan were more closely
akin to the hunting and gathering societies of eastern
Canada. Semi-migratory, dependent on hunting and fish-
ing, most of these peoples spoke Athapaskan languages.

North of the fifty-sixth parallel, in the basins of
the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers, lived several other
Athapaskan-speaking woodlands people. The lives of
the Chipewyan, Dogrib, and Gwich’in were centred on
a constant search for game: moose, caribou, bear, bea-
ver, and smaller mammals. Historically, the direction
of these groups was southward, away from the Barrens—
that vast, bleak area stretching from northern Manitoba
to the shore of Coronation Gulf (an arm of the Arctic
Ocean). In the west they had gradually extended into
the Interior of British Columbia, but to the southeast
they had found their way blocked by other groups. Their
lives were hard and insecure: the sparse, difficult terrain
could not support a dense population, and their social
organization was that of the small hunting band.

Finally, the earliest human occupants of the High
Arctic and Subarctic coasts, known to us as Paleo-
Eskimos, had been land-based hunters of caribou and
muskoxen. As the climate became more moderate
and the sea level stabilized, producing a more reliable
food supply based on marine mammals, they expanded
eastward from Alaska beginning about 2000 BCE, even-
tually reaching as far as northern Greenland. The Paleo-
Eskimos were succeeded by the Dorset culture and the

Dorset by the Thule, the direct ancestors of the modern
Inuit. Survival in the intractable environment of the Far
North demanded extreme ingenuity. Without trees for
building, the Inuit used the materials at hand, which var-
ied from place to place but were largely derived from the
animals they hunted for food: caribou, seal, and whale.
Boats were made from animal skins stretched over drift-
wood or whalebone frames; sled-runners began as ani-
mal bones; tools and weapons (including the toggling
harpoon) came from bone and ivory. Dwellings were
constructed either of snow blocks (igloos) or rocks, sod,
and skins. For transportation, on water these people
used both the small, speedy kayak and the large flat-bot-
tomed umiak; for land travel they employed the dogsled.
Most of their clothing came from caribou skins, which
provided a warmth unknown in the skins of other ani-
mals. As in other societies reliant on the hunt, political
organization was simple, based on the extended family.

The First Arrivals
from Europe
As every Canadian schoolchild knows, Norsemen made
the first documented European visitations to North
America. Contemporary evidence of these visits is found
in the great Icelandic epic sagas, confirmed in our own
time by archaeological excavations near L’Anse aux Mead-
ows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The sagas
describe the landings to the west of Greenland made by
Leif Ericsson and his brother Thorvald. They also relate
Thorfinn Karlsefni’s colonization attempt at a place Leif
had called Vinland, an attempt that was thwarted by
hostile residents labelled in the sagas as “Skraelings.” It is
tempting to equate Vinland with the archaeological dis-
coveries, although there is no real evidence for doing so.

Later Greenlanders may have timbered on Baffin
Island. They may also have intermarried with the Inuit.
Attempts have been made to attribute the Thule culture of
the Inuit to such relationships. But Greenland gradually
lost contact with Europe, and the Icelandic settlement
there died away in the fifteenth century. The Norse activ-
ities became part of the murky geographical knowledge
of the late Middle Ages.

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12 A History of the Canadian Peoples

In our own time the uncovering of a world map exe-
cuted in the mid-fifteenth century, showing a realistic
Greenland and westward islands, including inscriptions
referring to Vinland, created much speculation about
Europe’s geographical knowledge before Columbus. This
Vinland map has never been definitively authenticated,
and many experts have regarded it with skepticism. The
current scholarly view, however, has turned back to a
positive evaluation of the map.

Like the Vinland map, none of the various candi-
dates for North American landfalls before Columbus—
except for the Norse in Newfoundland—can be
indisputably documented. In the fifteenth century,
Portuguese and possibly English fishermen may have
discovered the rich fishing grounds off the Grand Banks.
An occasional vessel may even have made a landfall. The
fishermen did not publicize their knowledge, although
many scholars insist that awareness of lands in the west-
ern Atlantic was probably in common circulation in
maritime circles by the end of the fifteenth century.

Europe around 1500
The arrival of Europeans in the Americas at the end
of the fifteenth century was a collaborative effort by
mariners and contemporary scholars of many nations,
behind which were profound changes in economies and
polities. The ambition to visit new lands was fuelled
by the surge of intellectual confidence and the explo-
sion of knowledge associated with the Renaissance. By
the end of the fifteenth century, geographers—led by
Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, an Italian cosmographer in
Portuguese service—were convinced that Europe and
Asia were closer than the ancients had conjectured.
The schemes of Christopher Columbus were influ-
enced both by Toscanelli and by Portuguese notions
of oceanic islands. Geographical speculation and ship
design pointed towards transatlantic voyages. Some
time in the twelfth century, the Germans developed
the cog, a single-masted ship decked over and fitted
with rudder and tiller. In the early fifteenth century the

cog’s hull was lengthened and the ves-
sel was given two additional masts,
becoming the carvel (or caravel). Early
explorers found smaller ships more
manoeuvrable than larger ones and
came to prefer them on their voyages.
Rigging also improved, particularly
with the addition of the square sail to
the earlier lateen (triangular) variety.

The art of navigation showed deve-
lop ment parallel to ship design, a grad-
ual result of trial and error by countless
mariners. The greatest advance was in
written sailing directions based on tak-
ing latitudes in relation to Polaris (the
North Star) and the sun. Longitudes still
were based largely on guesswork, mainly
on a mariner’s estimates of his vessel’s
speed. In addition to the compass, sea-
men used quadrants and astrolabes to
determine latitude, and were familiar
with the need to transfer their data on
latitude and longitude onto charts ruled
for these variables. Routiers—coastal
pilot charts of European waters—were

Sketch of an ocean-going Viking vessel of the eleventh century. In the 1950s
archaeologists began excavating a collection of five Viking ships sunk between
1070 and 1090 to create a blockade across a narrow channel at Skuldelev,
Denmark. One of these ships was a double-decked cargo carrier with higher sides
(called a “knarr”) of the sort the Norse would have sailed in the open Atlantic. It
had extra trusses and a sheltered cargo space below deck for people and animals.
Source: The Viking Ship Museum, Denmark. Illustration: Morten Gøthche.

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131 | The Beginnings

Karlsefni and the Skraelings

Document

Karlsefni sailed south along the land with Snorri and
Bjarni and the rest of their company. They journeyed a
long time till they reached a river which flowed down
from the land into a lake and so on to the sea. There
were such extensive bars off the mouth of the estuary
that they were unable to get into the river except at full
flood. Karlsefni and his men sailed into the estuary, and
called the place Hop, Landlock Bay. There they found
self-sown fields of wheat where the ground was low-
lying, and vines wherever it was hilly. Every brook there
was full of fish. They dug trenches at the meeting point
of land and high water, and when the tide went out there
were halibut in the trenches. There were vast numbers of
animals of every kind in the forest. They were there for
a fortnight enjoying themselves and saw nothing and
nobody. They had their cattle with them.

Then early one morning when they looked about
them they saw nine skin-boats, on board which staves
were being swung which sounded just like flails
threshing—and their motion was sunwise.

“What can this mean?” asked Karlsefni.
“Perhaps it is a token of peace,” replied Snorri. “So

let us take a white shield and hold it out towards them.”
They did so, and those others rowed towards them,

showing their astonishment, then came ashore. They
were small, ill-favoured men, and had ugly hair on their
heads. They had big eyes and were broad in the cheeks.
For a while they remained there, astonished, and after-
wards rowed off south past the headlands.

Karlsefni and his men built themselves dwellings
up above the lake; some of their houses stood near the

mainland, and some near the lake. They now spent the
winter there. No snow fell, and their entire stock found
its food grazing in the open. But once spring came in
they chanced early one morning to see how a multitude
of skin-boats came rowing from the south round the
headland, so many that the bay appeared sown with
coals, and even so staves were being swung on every
boat. Karlsefni and his men raised their shields, and they
began trading together. Above all these people wanted
to buy red cloth in return for which they had furs to
offer and grey pelts. They also wanted to buy swords and
spears, but this Karlsefni and Snorri would not allow.
They had dark unblemished skins to exchange for the
cloth, and were taking a span’s length of cloth for a skin,
and this they tied round their heads. So it continued for
a while, then when the cloth began to run short they cut
it up so that it was no broader than a fingerbreadth, but
the Skraelings gave just as much for it, or more.

The next thing was that the bull belonging to
Karlsefni and his mates ran out of the forest bellowing
loudly. The Skraelings were terrified by this, raced to
their boats and rowed south past the headland, and for
three weeks running there was neither sight nor sound
of them. But at the end of that period they saw a great
multitude of Skraeling boats coming up from the south
like a streaming torrent. This time all the staves were
being swung anti-sunwise, and the Skraelings were all
yelling aloud, so they took red shields and held them
out against them. They clashed together and fought.
There was a heavy shower of missiles, for the Skraelings
had war-slings too. Karlsefni and Snorri could see the

Continued…

The Norse sagas began as manuscripts of the history of the Icelandic Norsemen collected in the
thirteenth century. The following selection is from a manuscript called in English “Eirik the Red’s
Saga,” which is a reworking of original material in agreement with well-established rules of the
saga tradition. Despite its title, “Eirik the Red’s Saga” is much more interested in the Icelanders
Gudrid and Karlsefni than in the family of Eirik the Red.

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14 A History of the Canadian Peoples

readily available, but none of the early explorers who
reached North America had the faintest idea of the hazards
he was risking. The most remarkable feature of the first
known voyages was the infrequency with which mariners
ran into serious problems with rocks, shoals, and tides. Such
master mariners had an instinctive “feel” for the sea. They
were able to read and deduce much from its colour and sur-
face patterns.

Though the early explorers had their blind spots,
they were without exception skilled sailors, suitably
cautious in uncharted waters, which may explain many
glaring failures to uncover rivers and bays obvious
on any modern map. Once ashore, however, the first
Europeans to reach North America threw caution to the
winds, particularly in collecting rumours of rich mineral
deposits or routes to Asia. Neither they nor their spon-
sors were at all interested in the scientific accumulation
of knowledge. What they sought was wealth, equivalent
to the riches the Spaniards were already taking out of
their territories to the south. While other motives—such
as national advantage and missionary fervour directed
against the resident inhabitants—also entered the pic-
ture, the easy and rapid exploitation of the resources of
the New World long remained the principal attraction.

The assumption of sovereignty by European states
in the early period of exploration consisted chiefly of the
performance of various symbolic acts or ceremonies of
possession. Such ceremonies were intimately bound up
with the culture and language of a particular nation, so
that no two nations meant quite the same thing by their
actions. The Portuguese, for example, thought that mere
discovery was sufficient to establish legitimate domin-
ion, and the word “discovery” in Portuguese carried that
nuanced meaning, while other nations had quite differ-
ent concepts of what produced a legitimate right to rule.
For the English, settlement in the form of “first building

and habitation” was one important test, as was “replen-
ishing and subduing” a land that had previously existed
in common and was seemingly undeveloped (Seed,
1995: 9, 31). Every European nation had its own under-
standing of the meaning of “possession.” But in any case,
no Aboriginal peoples could comprehend the European
concept either of ultimate political authority embodied
in a state or of the private ownership of land. In North
America, land was used rather than possessed, and
one of the continuing gulfs between the First Nations
and the Europeans—lasting from first arrival until the
present—was over the meaning of the transfer of terri-
tory from the Aboriginals to the newcomers, often in
formal treaties.

Among those European powers who explored in
North America, the French were the most likely to take
into account the feelings of the Indigenous peoples they
encountered. Indeed, the French—whose monarchical
political customs at home relied heavily on the use of
ritual and ceremony—often incorporated the consent of
the Aboriginal people into their ceremonies as a central
component. The early French explorers assumed that
physical gestures and body language could be univer-
sally understood, and made sure that the Aboriginal
people either gave appropriate signs of agreement, or
better still, actually participated in the ceremonies of
possession. Thus, the French explorers did not simply
raise objects of possession like crosses and pillars, but
sought to communicate something of their meaning to
the Native witnesses and interpreted Native responses
as evidence of acceptance or even enthusiasm of the
French ceremonialism.

French accounts of ceremonies usually include
detailed descriptions of the bodily movements and
sounds of the Indigenous observers, which were taken
to mean formal consent. For the English, on the other

Skraelings hoisting up on poles a huge ball-shaped
object, more or less the size of a sheep’s paunch, and
blue-black in colour, which they sent flying inland over
Karlsefni’s troop, and it made a hideous noise when it

came down. Great fear now struck into Karlsefni and all
his following, so that there was no other thought in their
heads than to run away up along the river to some steep
rocks, and there put up a strong resistance.

Source: Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga: Being the Norse Voyages of Discovery and Settlement to Iceland, Greenland, America (London: Oxford University
Press, 1964), 181–3. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 14 12/16/15 4:07 PM

151 | The Beginnings

hand, cultural symbols of land possession usually
involved signs of successful occupation, such as hous-
ing, fencing, and cultivation of the land. Such actions
had their own justification. Since the local inhabitants

in most places obviously did not exhibit such signs of
permanent occupation, they were not regarded as hav-
ing proper jurisdiction over the country in which they
resided (Seed, 1995: 41–68).

In 1961 the Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad

announced that he had found Norse buildings in

northern Newfoundland. Many were skeptical, but

in excavations executed between 1961 and 1968 by

Ingstad and his wife Anne (and continued by Parks

Canada in the 1970s), eight ruined buildings were

uncovered in a grassy cove overlooking the Strait of

Belle Isle. Seven of the buildings are grouped into

three complexes located on a north–south axis.

Each complex includes a hall of several rooms and a

smaller one-room hut. Each of the huts may repre-

sent housing for a different vessel. Radiocarbon dat-

ing indicates an occupation between 980 and 1020.

The buildings are substantial, with sod walls and

permanent roofs. They were obviously constructed

to be lived in year-round by up to 100 people. Each

hall had a workshop: the southernmost one a smithy,

the middle one a carpentry shop, and the northern

one a boat-building lean-to. This was not a typ-

ical Norse arrangement, for there were no signs of

livestock or domestic animals. The settlement was

apparently not intended for farming, but probably

as a base for further exploration of the region. The

short duration of the season of navigation in these

northern waters demanded that the Norse win-

ter over in Vinland in order to scout out the region.

The settlement was abandoned fairly swiftly in an

orderly manner, leaving behind little equipment and

no burial site. Archaeologists speculate that the site

was the headquarters of Leif Ericsson himself, for the

population here represented as much as 10 per cent

of the Greenland Norse colony, mainly comprising

workmen. Apparently this location (and the region

surrounding it) was not sufficiently attractive  to

produce a permanent colony, both because of the

climate and because of the unfriendly local inhabit-

ants. But it co-ordinates well with what is known of

the Norse experience in Vinland as reported in the

Vinland sagas.

BACKGROuNDER
L’Anse aux Meadows

3

4
5

2

7 7

6

Hall F

Building G

Building E

Hall D

Hall A

House B

Building CBuilding C

3 3

Furnace
Hut

45 1

4
4
4
4
3
1
2

Slag
Iron rivet
Artifact

Worked wood debitage
Wood artifacts
Butternuts

Wood artifact and debitage concentration

0 10
metres

B
lack D

uck B
rook

E p a v e s
B a y

N
S

E
W

Source: William Fitzhugh and Elisabeth I. Ward, eds., Vikings:
The North Atlantic Saga (Washington and London: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 2000).

901491_01_Ch01.indd 15 12/16/15 4:07 PM

16 A History of the Canadian Peoples

From the said copy [of “the land which has been

found,” which is no longer extant] your Lordship will

learn what you wish to know, for in it are named the

capes of the mainland and the islands, and thus you

will see where land was first sighted, since most of

them was discovered after turning back. Thus your

Lordship will know that the cape nearest to Ireland is

1800 miles west of Dursey Head which is in Ireland,

and the southernmost part of the Island of the Seven

Cities is west of Bordeaux River, and your Lordship will

know that he [Cabot] landed at only one spot of the

mainland, near the place where land was first sighted,

and they disembarked there with a crucifix and raised

banners with the arms of the Holy Father and those of

the King of England, my master; and they found tall

trees of the kind masts are made, and other smaller

trees, and the country is very rich in grass. In that

particular spot, as I told your Lordship, they found a

trail that went inland, they saw a site where a fire had

been made, they saw manure of animals which they

thought to be farm animals, and they saw a stick half

a yard long pierced at both ends, carved and painted

with brazil, and by such things they believe the land

to be inhabited. Since he was with just a few people,

he did not dare advance inland beyond the shoot-

ing distance of a cross-bow, and after taking in fresh

water he returned to his ship. All along the coast they

found many fish like those which in Iceland are dried

in the open and sold in England and other countries,

and these fish are called in English “stockfish”; and

thus following the shore they saw two forms running

on land one after the other, but they could not tell if

they were human beings or animals; and it seemed to

them that there were fields where they thought might

also be villages, and they saw a forest whose foliage

looked beautiful. They left England toward the end of

May, and must have been on the way 35 days before

sighting land; the wind was east-north-east and the

sea calm going and coming back, except for one day

when he ran into a storm two or three days before

finding land; and going so far out, his compass needle

failed to point north and marked two rhumbs below.

They spent about one month discovering the coast

and from the above mentioned cape of the mainland

which is nearest to Ireland, they returned to the coast

of Europe in fifteen days. They had the wind behind

them, and he reached Brittany because the sailors

confused him, saying that he was heading too far

north. From there he came to Bristol, and he went

to see the King to report to him all the above men-

tioned; and the King granted him an annual pension

of twenty pounds sterling to sustain himself until the

time comes when more will be known of this busi-

ness, since with God’s help it is hoped to push through

plans for exploring the said land more thoroughly next

year with ten or twelve vessels—because in his voyage

he had only one ship of fifty “tonnes” and twenty men

and food for seven or eight months—and they want to

carry out this new project. It is considered certain that

the cape of the said land was found and discovered in

the past by the men from Bristol who found “Brasil”

as your Lordship well knows. It was called the Island

of Brasil, and it is assumed and believed to be the

mainland that the men from Bristol found. Since your

Lordship wants information relating to the first voy-

age, here is what happened: he went with one ship,

his crew confused him, he was short of supplies and

ran into bad weather, and he decided to turn back.

John Cabot Reaches Land across the Atlantic, 1497

Over the winter of 1497–8, the English merchant John Day wrote a letter to “El Gran Almirante”
(probably Christopher Columbus), giving him an account of a recent voyage by John Cabot. This
account provides some of our best evidence for Cabot’s landfall.

Contemporary Views

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171 | The Beginnings

The European Entry
into North America
John Cabot went briefly ashore at the “newfoundland.” Of
Italian origin, he had convinced Henry VII of England
to finance one small ship of 50 tons and a crew of 18 to
sail west and find a short route to Asia. Cabot was lost
at sea on a second voyage, and his mantle fell to a num-
ber of Portuguese mariners, some in English service,
who produced a more clearly defined understanding
of Newfoundland. Most of the sixteenth-century place
names in Newfoundland were Portuguese rather than
English. Portugal actually attempted to settle a colony
on the Newfoundland coast under the leadership of Juan
Fagundes, who had earlier sailed as far as the Gulf of
St Lawrence. Fagundes ended up on Cape Breton Island,
where his little settlement was apparently destroyed by
the local residents, who “killed all those who came there.”
Nevertheless, by 1536 Newfoundland was sufficiently
familiar, if exotic, to Europeans that a tourist voyage
to the island was organized. London merchant Richard
Hore (fl. 1507–40) signed 120 passengers, “whereof
thirty were gentlemen.” When provisions ran short on
the Newfoundland coast, some participants allegedly
resorted to eating their compatriots. Those surviving
were understandably relieved to get back to England.

In 1523 the French entered the picture through
the activities of Italian master mariner Giovanni da
Verrazzano (c. 1485–c. 1528). Of high birth, Verrazzano
persuaded Francis I to sponsor a voyage of exploration.
He made three voyages in all, opening a French trade
with Brazil and convincing himself that what he was
investigating was not Asia but a totally new continent.
Verrazzano was succeeded by Jacques Cartier (1491–1557),
who had allegedly been to Brazil and Newfoundland. In
1534 Francis I ordered him to uncover new lands, “where
it is said that a great quantity of gold, and other precious
things, are to be found.” Little concern was given to the

conversion of Aboriginal peoples in Cartier’s efforts. He,
too, made three voyages: the first to make a great “discov-
ery,” a second to locate some mineral resource there that
would attract investors and the royal court, and a final
large-scale effort that failed to produce any profit.

On his first voyage in 1534 Cartier explored the
Gulf of St Lawrence. His second voyage in 1535 took
him upriver as far as Mont Royal. He visited several
First Nation villages and wintered at one of them,
Stadacona. Here he heard about the fabulous kingdom
of the Saguenay, somewhere farther west. A third voy-
age was actually headed by a great nobleman, the Sieur
de Roberval (c. 1500–60). It was a disaster, finding little
wealth to exploit and accomplishing nothing. The gold
and diamonds Cartier brought back turned out to be
iron pyrites and quartz. “False as Canadian diamonds”
became a common French expression of the time.
Despite the lack of accomplishment, a French claim to
the St Lawrence region had been established, and the
French ultimately would return there.

The next major adventurer to what is now Canada
was the Englishman Martin Frobisher (1539?–94),
who spent several years searching for the Northwest
Passage and great wealth in the Arctic region. Frobisher
was a leading English “sea dog”—part pirate and part
merchant. In 1576 he raised the funds for an expedition
to sail west to Asia through northern waters. He did not
find the passageway, but did bring back mineral sam-
ples from Baffin Island. These were pronounced to be
gold-bearing, leading to a second expedition in 1577,
which brought back 200 tons of ore. About the first of
October in 1578, a third fleet returned to England from
the land called “Meta Incognita.” Its principal cargo con-
sisted of 1,350 tons of rocks, collected with great effort
and at considerable expense on Baffin Island. Accounts
of the return appeared in print before the experts had a
chance to examine the cargo. Everyone was demanding
to be paid. The owner of one vessel wrote desperately
to the government for money to pay his crew, noting,
“Chrystmas beynge so nere, every man cryythe out for

Source: J.A. Williamson, ed., The Cabot Voyages and British Discoveries under Henry VII (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society

of the university Press, 1962), 211–14. (The Hakluyt Society was established in 1846 for the purpose of printing rare or

unpublished Voyages and Travels. For further information please see their website at www.Hakluyt.com.)

901491_01_Ch01.indd 17 12/16/15 4:07 PM

18 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Jacques Cartier Meets with Aboriginal People, 1534

Document

On Thursday the eighth of the said month [of July] as
the wind was favourable for getting under way with our
ships, we fitted up our long-boats to go and explore this
[Chaleur] bay; and we ran up it that day about twenty-
five leagues. The next day, at daybreak, we had fine
weather and sailed on until about ten o’clock in the
morning, at which hour we caught sight of the head of
the bay, whereat we were grieved and displeased. At
the head of this bay, beyond the low shore, were several
high mountains. And seeing there was no passage, we
proceeded to turn back. While making our way along
the shore, we caught sight of the Indians on the side of
a lagoon and low beach, who were making many fires
that smoked. We rowed over to the spot, and finding
there was an entrance from the sea into the lagoon, we
placed our long-boats on one side of the entrance. The
savages came over in one of their canoes and brought us
some strips of cooked seal, which they placed on bits of
wood and then withdrew, making signs to us that they
were making us a present of them. We sent two men on
shore with hatchets, knives, beads, and other wares, at
which the Indians showed great pleasure. And at once
they came over in a crowd in their canoes to the side
where we were, bringing furs and whatever else they
possessed, in order to obtain some of our wares. They
numbered, both men, women, and children, more than

300 persons. Some of their women, who did not come
over, danced and sang, standing in the water up to their
knees. The other women, who had come over to the side
where we were, advanced freely towards us and rubbed
our arms with their hands. Then they joined their hands
together and raised them to heaven, exhibiting many
signs of joy. And so much at ease did the savages feel in
our presence, that at length we bartered with them, hand
to hand, for everything they possessed, so that nothing
was left to them but their naked bodies; for they offered
us everything they owned, which was, all told, of little
value. We perceived that they are people who would be
easy to convert, who go from place to place maintaining
themselves and catching fish in the fishing-season for
food. Their country is more temperate than Spain and
the finest it is possible to see, and as level as the sur-
face of a pond. There is not the smallest lot of ground
bare of wood, and even on sandy soil, but is full of wild
wheat, that has an ear like barley and the grain like oats,
as well as of pease, as thick as if they had been sown and
hoed; of white and red currant-bushes, of strawberries,
of raspberries, of white and red roses and of other plants
of a strong, pleasant odour. Likewise there are many fine
meadows with useful herbs, and a pond where there are
many salmon. I am more than ever of opinion that these
people would be easy to convert to our holy faith.

Source: H.P. Biggar, ed., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier: Published from the originals with translations, notes and appendices (Ottawa: F. Acland, 1924), 54–7.

mony” (Stefansson, 1938). No money was forthcoming
and for five years the sponsors of the expedition tried
without success to find evidence of value in the cargo.
The rock proved to be nothing more than sandstone

flecked with mica. The business degenerated into an
unseemly exchange of recriminations and accusations
among the investors, and the rock was used eventually
in Elizabethan road construction.

In the summer of 1534, the French mariner Jacques Cartier cruised along the northern coast and
St Lawrence region of North America. His original journal or log of this expedition does not survive,
but a printed version appeared in Italian in 1565. Various versions of the journal were collated and
translated by Henry Percival Biggar and published in 1924.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 18 12/16/15 4:07 PM

191 | The Beginnings

Frobisher’s quest for the Northwest Passage in Arctic
waters inspired a series of explorers, mainly Englishmen
backed by English capital, over the next 50 years. The
best-known of these adventurers was Henry Hudson
(d. 1611), who sailed under both English and Dutch aus-
pices. On his last voyage in 1610 he entered Hudson Bay
and navigated its eastern coastal waters southward to
James Bay before his crew mutinied against him and cast
him adrift on a small boat, never to be seen again. Most

of the great voyages of discovery had been completed by
the end of the sixteenth century, even though much of
the North American continent remained to be mapped
and charted. They occurred against a complex European
backdrop of dynastic manoeuvring, the rise of the mod-
ern nation-state, the religious disputes of the Protestant
Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the
growth of capitalistic enterprise fuelled by the infusion
of new wealth in the form of gold and silver bullion
from the Indies. In the sixteenth century Henry VII
and Elizabeth I of England joined Francis I of France as
important patrons of master mariners who set sail for the
West hoping to obtain wealth and national advantage
from the voyages they sponsored. The dissolution of an
earlier alliance between Spain and England in the wake
of the latter nation’s becoming Protestant, as well as the
complex relationships between the ruling houses of the
two countries, encouraged Elizabeth to turn her “sea
dogs” (like Frobisher) loose upon the Spanish empire.
English exploration was inextricably bound up with
“singeing the Spanish beard” and with political hostil-
ity to Spain heightened by religious grievances. English
adventurers often combined the roles of explorer, pir-
ate, and even colonizer. The French had entered the
American sweepstakes in the hopes of competing with
the Spaniards and Portuguese. After Cartier’s pioneer-
ing (and unsuccessful) voyages of 1534, 1535–6, and
1541–2, France was preoccupied with its internal dynas-
tic struggles more than with overseas adventuring. The
French government did not show much interest in North
America until the end of the century, by which time
France’s Henry IV had stabilized the monarchy.

In both France and England, overseas investment
by an emerging mercantile class took over gradually
from the earlier efforts of intrepid mariners backed
by the Crown. Cartier’s third voyage marked for France
the transition from public to private enterprise, and
the 1576 voyage of Martin Frobisher in search of the
Northwest Passage to the East demonstrated the new
importance of mercantile investment to the English.

By the end of the sixteenth century Europe had
established that there were no wealthy Aboriginal
civilizations to be conquered on the eastern seaboard,
nor any readily apparent sources of rich mineral
wealth to be exploited. When it was clear that what the

The frontispiece to The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, edited
by H.P. Biggar. This portrait of Cartier—if such it is—is
imaginary, since we do not have a likeness. Thomas Fisher
Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 19 12/16/15 4:07 PM

20 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Baie des
Chaleurs

Lachine
Rapi

ds

Baie des
Chaleurs

Newfoundland
Gaspé

Anticosti I.

Newfoundland
Gaspé

Hochela

ga

Stadacona

Anticosti I.
N
S

EW

N
S
EW

Top: Cartier’s first voyage,

1534.

Bottom: Cartier’s second voyage,

1535–6.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 20 12/16/15 4:07 PM

211 | The Beginnings

continent had in abundance were fish and furs, a more
complex pattern of exploitation had to be developed
that required the year-round presence of settlers. Both
France and England shifted their energies from mari-
time thrusts to colonization.

The Impact of
Disease on the
Aboriginal Peoples
However rapidly European artifacts and animals (such as
the horse) may have spread ahead of the newcomers, what
dispersed across the continent with even greater rapid-
ity was disease. North America in the sixteenth century
was relatively isolated in a geographical sense. A host of

Three Baffin Island Inuit—a man, a woman, and her child—who were taken prisoner by Frobisher
on his expedition to the Arctic in 1577. All three died a month or so after arriving in England.
British Museum Images.

Map of the North Pole, 1595, by Gerardus Mercator. LAC,
NMC-016097.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 21 12/16/15 4:07 PM

22 A History of the Canadian Peoples

communicable diseases common to the “known world”
of international trade and commerce either did not exist
or were not so virulent on the North American continent,
and the population had less immunity to them. Measles,
smallpox, typhus, typhoid, mumps, and venereal dis-
ease—the last perhaps first contracted by Europeans in
the Caribbean region—were as much European intro-

ductions as the gun and the horse. Although these dis-
eases spread unusually quickly among an Aboriginal
population that had little immunity to them, we must not
think that communicable disease was totally unknown
in early North America or that the pre-contact popu-
lation lived in an Edenic state of robust health. In any
case, trade and war, including the Aboriginal custom

Like many another early European explorer, Hudson
has left no paper trail beyond the events of the years at
the high point of his reputation. We do not know where
he was born or when, except that he was apparently an
Englishman. In 1607 he was employed by the Muscovy
Company (an English company trading with Russia) to
seek a Northeast Passage to China across the North Pole,
and he followed this voyage up with another in 1608,
which sailed to the Russian Arctic but found nothing.
This employment has been taken to mean that, what-
ever his background, he was regarded as highly compe-
tent. The Dutch East India Company hired him in 1609
to continue searching for the Northeast Passage in his
ship Half Moon. His crew mutinied near Norway, and he
changed his course as a result, crossing the Atlantic to
search instead for the Northwest Passage and sailing up
the Hudson River, which still bears his name.

Hudson subsequently was hired by a consor-
tium of English merchants to search for a route to
Asia through North America. His ship Discovery was
manned by a number of experienced seamen, includ-
ing Robert Bylot, who had earlier sailed with William
Baffin. The crew was quite quarrelsome, and the voy-
age was replete with open conflict and at least one
mutiny in which the mutineers backed down only at
the last minute. As was the case with the notorious
Captain Bligh less than two centuries later, Hudson
was a better mariner than a manager of men. He took
reprisals against the mutineers. For reasons unknown,
he exhibited blatant and continual favouritism to one

young man, who eventually turned against him in
consort with several others. Hudson refused to pause
to replenish provisions at Digges Island, apparently
expecting to be in China very shortly. On 23 June 1611,
shortly after beginning the voyage back from a winter
on Hudson Bay and desperately short of food, the con-
spirators, led by the former favourite, cast Hudson, his
son, and seven other men into a small shallop and cut
it adrift. They persuaded Robert Bylot (if his story is to
be believed) to pilot the ship back to England. Nothing
more is known of the passengers on the shallop, but
Bylot brought the Discovery back to England after a des-
perate battle with the Inuit at Digges Island in which
several mutineers were killed. Most of what we know
about the post-mutiny adventures of the Discovery
comes to us via a narrative by one of the participants,
the curiously named Abacuk Pricket. Bylot was par-
doned by a court and went on to a distinguished Arctic
career; the other mutineers were eventually tried on
a charge of murder and acquitted. Hudson’s widow,
Katherine, impoverished by her husband’s disappear-
ance, had to fight hard to receive compensation from
the East India Company, which called her “that trouble-
some and impatient woman.” Finally, it allowed her to
trade in India on her own account. She returned in 1622
with considerable wealth. Considering the discontent
aboard the Discovery, Hudson’s accomplishment in
navigating through Hudson Strait and hundreds of
miles into Hudson Bay was outstanding, although his
leadership skills left much to be desired.

Henry Hudson

Biography

901491_01_Ch01.indd 22 12/16/15 4:07 PM

231 | The Beginnings

of replenishing population losses by adopting captive
women and children, spread new and virulent diseases
far beyond points of actual European contact. In fairness
to the newcomers, they simply did not understand that
their sexual promiscuity with First Nations women, or
their taking Aboriginals back to Europe as prize speci-
mens or informants, would be devastating to the Native

populations. Europeans themselves had become callous
about epidemic disease; it was part of life, and they did
not understand the concepts of contagion and immun-
ity. They had no reason to view the Aboriginal propen-
sity for dying in captivity as something resulting from
European intervention. For their part, the Aboriginals
did not understand that crowding around a sick person

A confrontation between Inuit and English sailors, 1577. The artist, John White, was a member of Martin Frobisher’s second
expedition in search of a Northwest Passage. British Museum Images.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 23 12/16/15 4:08 PM

24 A History of the Canadian Peoples

to offer affection only spread disease, or that sitting in a
sweat lodge and then plunging into cold water was not
an effective remedy for a disease like smallpox.

As James Axtell points out, the Aboriginal peoples
used three techniques to respond to the demographic
disaster. The first, the employment of warfare to replen-
ish the population through captivity and adoption,
was of mixed success, particularly when extended to
the Europeans. While the process worked well in some
ways, it also helped to spread disease, and it certainly
increased the hostility of European settlers to the First
Nations. The second strategy was intermarriage, which
ignored colour bars and many of the social assumptions
of European society. The third strategy was to move
after depopulation, often joining with other tribes and
peoples. The attraction of the Catholic reserves around

Montreal and Quebec after the 1640s was in large part
a result of the population devastations of the preceding
period throughout the Northeast region of the continent.

The introduction of new diseases renders all
attempts to estimate the size of the Indigenous popu-
lation at the time of first contact on the eastern sea-
board highly problematic. Estimates for the population
of North America north of the Rio Grande River at the
beginning of the sixteenth century range as high as
18 million and beyond (Dickason, 2002: 9). We have
already noted that the Indigenous pre-contact popula-
tion of Canada was substantially larger than the most
generous estimates of all the first-contact observers,
most of whom spoke of great numbers but were not
very specific. The east coast population had probably
been seriously reduced by epidemic disease during the

Membertou claimed to have been a grown man when
he met Jacques Cartier, which would mean that he had
been born in the early years of the sixteenth century.
Regardless of his exact birth date, Membertou was
a venerable age when the French appeared at Port-
Royal in 1605. He was the leader of a small band of
Mi’kmaq whose hunting and fishing territory included
Port-Royal. The opportunities afforded his band by
the arrival of the Europeans were the envy of other
Aboriginal leaders, and Membertou was a firm friend of
the newcomers. He certainly looked like a leader. Father
Biard described him as being taller and larger-limbed
than his colleagues, and he apparently sported a beard.
Much of what has been written about Membertou by
the early chroniclers falls properly into the category of
legend, but it was true that he was the first Aboriginal
to be baptized in New France, as opposed to being car-
ried to France and baptized there. The ceremony was
performed by the newly arrived priest, Jessé Fléchéon,
on 24 June 1610. All of Membertou’s immediate family
were baptized as well, without any proper preparation

because the missionary could not speak the Algonquian
language and the Aboriginals could not speak enough
French. Membertou was given the European name of
the king, Henri. After his baptism Membertou appeared
eager to become a proper Christian. He wanted the
missionaries to learn Algonquian so that he could be
properly educated. However, by 1611 he had contracted
dysentery, one of the many infectious diseases brought
by the Europeans, and by September of that year he was
clearly very ill. He insisted on being buried among his
ancestors, which annoyed the missionaries, but they
gave him extreme unction anyway, and at the end he
apparently requested burial among the French. He died
on 18 September 1611. The closing year of his life illus-
trates a pattern often repeated among the Indigenous
people who were “Christianized” by the first European
missionaries. Unable to understand properly the pre-
cepts of Christianity, they could hardly have been said
to be converted, and they often died shortly after bap-
tism, succumbing to contagious diseases probably intro-
duced by the missionaries themselves.

Henri Membert

ou

Biography

901491_01_Ch01.indd 24 12/16/15 4:08 PM

251 | The Beginnings

Astrolabes were essential not just to the navigation

of Europeans to and from “the New World,” but also

in their ability to map the spaces they were mov-

ing through when they arrived there. A simple, if

multi-purpose tool, astrolabes allow their users to

plot the moon, the Sun, and the stars, determine time

if the latitude is known, and most importantly, deter-

mine latitude if time is known.

Very few seventeenth-century astrolabes still

exist, making the “Cobden astrolabe,” shown here, an

object of note regardless of its origins. However, hav-

ing been discovered in 1867, near to where Champlain

was believed to have lost his own such device in 1613,

the connection to Champlain has led to this particu-

lar astrolabe having a much more interesting “object

biography.”

Discovered at Green Lake, Ontario, by 14-year-

old Edward Lee while clearing dead pine trees with his

father, the astrolabe was found alongside two silver

cups and a series of nesting copper pans, which the

family sold to a peddler and melted down for scrap,

respectively. There was also a rusted chain with a

weight that Lee left behind. The astrolabe, thought to

be a sort of compass, was bought by the steamboat

captain Charles Overman for $10.

As Champlain became more prominent in the

1870s, so too did the astrolabe, and the connection

between the two was made. Historians looking at

Champlain’s cartography connected some errors in

the Green Lake region with a story of Champlain los-

ing his own device in 1613, and as the device changed

hands it became known as the “Champlain astrolabe.”

It was even included, albeit held upside down, in the

1915 statue of Champlain erected at Nepean Point

in Ottawa. By 1942, it was donated to the New York

Historical Society, which eventually sold the com-

pass to the current owner, the Canadian Museum of

Civilization. While the museum does not ascribe the

astrolabe to Champlain, displaying it only as an astro-

labe, it does draw the possible Champlain connec-

tion in the panels around it.

Regardless of its original owner, the connection

to Champlain has given this astrolabe a much more

interesting object biography, in the same way that

Material Culture

The astrolabe, a device about six inches in diameter, was one
of the tools that had allowed European navigators to determine
their locations and keep their headings. They were critical
for the dangerous Atlantic crossing, as well as to accurately
create the maps that would allow them to return. The disk, or
mater, was designed to hold a plate, called tympans, which, when
used correctly, allowed the user to move the rete, or pointer, and
determine coordinates. Most mariners’ astrolabes would have
only featured half of a scale in the upper half. This one, known as
the “Champlain astrolabe” or the “Cobden astrolabe” (after the
small community in eastern Ontario where it was found), already
archaic in design by 1600, is divided into all four quadrants. Also
unique is the ring (restored) shown here at the top of the device.
Jose Galveia/Shutterstock.

Astrolabe

Continued…

901491_01_Ch01.indd 25 12/16/15 4:08 PM

26 A History of the Canadian Peoples

sixteenth century, and demographic disaster preceded
the Europeans right across the country. At the same time,
this inadvertent introduction of the early pandemics
should not be allowed to dominate the story of North
America in the immediate pre-contact and early contact
periods. In the first place, there was no “Golden Age” in
pre-European America in which contagious disease did
not exist at all. In the second, infectious antigens were
not the sole cause of the ultimate reduction (in size and
power) of the Aboriginal population. Europeans took
deliberate actions apart from epidemics that led to sig-
nificant reductions in Indigenous populations.

European Contact
and the Development
of Cultural Conflict
The intrusion of Europeans greatly altered the dynamics
of First Nations development, while providing us with a
somewhat misleading version of the nature of the popu-
lation at the moment of contact and beyond. Recorded
history was, after all, monopolized by those who had
written languages and could make records. In the cen-

turies following European arrival, virtually everything
written about the Indigenous population of Canada
was produced from the European perspective. That per-
spective, moreover, tended to involve considerable mis-
understanding of First Nations culture and behaviour.

Whatever technological glitter Europe had (the
extent of its actual superiority is debatable), it would
prove relatively useless in the wilderness of the New
World. For several centuries, Europeans in Canada who
were successful in surviving adopted First Nations tech-
nology. European inventions may have helped give the
intruders a sense of superiority, as did their emerging
capitalist economic order, their new political organiz-
ation into nation-states, and especially their Christian
system of values and beliefs. These pronounced differ-
ences between Europeans and the Indigenous popula-
tion prevented the visitors from fully comprehending
the people they encountered. The Europeans quite
unconsciously, often quite subtly, judged First Nations
by their own standards.

At the same time, the process of early communica-
tion between Europeans and the Aboriginal peoples was
a much more difficult business than we might think,
or than the contemporary documents would suggest.
Europeans and Aboriginals spoke different languages—a
good many of them. In Europe, most countries lacked a

Heinrich Schliemann’s connection of his discoveries

in Mycenae to Agamemnon and the Trojan War raised

the profile of those objects as well. Despite its rar-

ity, one of fewer than a hundred such artifacts dis-

covered, the survival of the “Champlain astrolabe” to

the present is very much attributed to the Champlain

connection. And Green Lake has since been renamed

Astrolabe Lake.

The construction of the narrative surround-

ing prominent historical figures and then linking

them to artifacts was a common part of history and

archaeology in the nineteenth century, which was

focused on the prominent men of the time. In a 2004

Beaver article, Douglas Hunter argues the Jesuit

angle, pointing out that when taken in context with

the other objects discovered with it, this particular

style of astrolabe with its four-quadrant scale would

have been better suited to determining topographical

features, and that such devices were used in mission

construction by contemporary Jesuits.

Whether it was in fact Champlain’s, or more likely,

given the style of astrolabe and the other artifacts

found with it, the instrument of a Jesuit missionary also

lost in the same area, the original purpose of the astro-

labe would have remained the same: the mapping

and surveying of the North American interior. While

an anonymous owner made the history of the object

less interesting to nineteenth-century historians, mod-

ern scholars, particularly those who focus on the day-

to-day lives of people, can garner a lot of information

about the Europeans and their actions in the region

from the discovery and examination of such objects.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 26 12/16/15 4:08 PM

271 | The Beginnings

single national language that was understood in every
part of the country. Dialects had both regional and class
origins. The great European sea captains, many of whom
had connections at the royal court, were likely to have
a different pronunciation and vocabulary than the com-
mon sailors, although technically both groups spoke the
same language. The First Nations spoke several hundred
different local languages in a myriad of dialects. Fifty
different languages were spoken in what is now Canada,
although most of these fell into a few language families.
In what is now eastern Canada, the three principal lan-
guage families were Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Siouan.

But the differences in language between two tribes speak-
ing an Algonquian tongue might be as great as the differ-
ences between Spanish and Portuguese. Moreover, local
patois would vary from place to place. The Aboriginal
tongues were often difficult for Europeans to pronounce,
and there were at the outset no dictionaries.

The niceties of grammar and the nuances of lan-
guage frustrated both Natives and newcomers for centur-
ies. Some Aboriginals who were educated in missionary
schools learned to speak and understand European
languages very well, and a few Europeans who grew up
among the Aboriginals (sometimes willingly, often as

Father Biard on the Mi’kmaq, 1616

Document

They are astonished and often complain that, since the
French mingle with and carry on trade with them, they
are dying fast and the population is thinning out. For
they assert that, before this association and intercourse,
all their countries were very populous and they tell
how one by one the different coasts, according as they
have begun to traffic with us, have been more reduced
by disease; adding, that why the Armouchiquois do not
diminish in population is because they are not at all
careless. Thereupon they often puzzle their brains, and
sometimes think that the French poison them, which
is not true; at other times that they give poisons to the
wicked and vicious of their nation to help them vent
their spite upon some one. This last supposition is not
without foundation; for we have seen them have some
arsenic and sublimate which they say they bought from
certain French Surgeons, in order to kill whomsoever
they wished, and boasted that they had already experi-
mented upon a captive, who (they said) died the day

after taking it. Others complain that the merchandise
is often counterfeited and adulterated, and that peas,
beans, bread, and other things that are spoiled are sold
them; and that it is that which corrupts the body and
gives rise to the dysentery and other diseases which
always attack them in Autumn. This theory is likewise
not offered without citing instances, for which they have
often been upon the point of breaking with us, and mak-
ing war upon us. Indeed there would be need of provid-
ing against these detestable murders by some suitable
remedy if one could be found.

Nevertheless the principal cause of all these deaths
and diseases is not what they say it is, but it is something
to their shame; in the Summer time, when our ships come,
they never stop gorging themselves excessively during
weeks with various kinds of food not suitable to the inact-
ivity of their lives; they get drunk, not only on wine but on
brandy; so it is no wonder that they are obliged to endure
some gripes of the stomach in the following Autumn. . . .

Continued…

In 1616 the Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard (c. 1567–1622), who had been at Port-Royal since 1611,
wrote a “Relation,” which was published in France, describing his experiences with the Aboriginals
of the region. It was subsequently translated and republished by Reuben Gold Thwaites.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 27 12/16/15 4:08 PM

28 A History of the Canadian Peoples

captives) became equally adept at the Native tongues.
But most people came to communicate in new “pidgin”
languages composed by reducing speech to its simplest
elements and amalgamating parts of both European and
Aboriginal languages. Pidgin languages were capable
of sophistication as time went on, and they eliminated
the potentially inflammatory business of preferring
one people’s language over another. One very venerable
pidgin language was spoken on the coasts of the Gulf of
St Lawrence, where Basque fishermen had traded with
local Natives from the early sixteenth century. “Since
their languages were completely different,” wrote one
observer in 1710, “they created a form of lingua franca
composed of Basque and two different languages of the
Indians, by means of which they could understand each
other very well” (Bakker, 1989: 259). Marc Lescarbot
in the early seventeenth century recorded that the
Mi’kmaq spoke to the French in a simplified version of
their language mixed with “much Basque.” In the later
fur trade in the interior of the continent, pidgin tongues
were a complex amalgam of French, Gaelic, English,
Cree, and Assiniboine.

Not surprisingly, as relations between Europeans
and Aboriginal peoples became more formalized, the
need for skilled official interpreters acquired a new
urgency. An interpreter who was trusted by both sides
in complex negotiations to translate accurately the
meaning and nuances of language was a rare com-
modity and highly prized. As late as 1873, when Treaty
No. 6 was being negotiated between the Canadian gov-
ernment and the Saskatchewan Cree, the question of
interpreters remained a critical issue. The government
had brought two interpreters of its own, and argued it
was unnecessary to add another brought by the Cree.
The Cree chief answered, “Very good. You keep your

interpreters and we will keep ours. We will pay our own
man and I already see that it will be well for us to do so”
(Christensen, 2000: 229).

The First Nations economies did not produce pol-
itical institutions on a European scale. Semi-sedentary
people had no need for political organizations larger
than the band, which was based on the consolidation
of a few family units. Even where horticulture was
developed, with its large semi-permanent villages, polit-
ical structure was not complex by European standards.
“Chiefs” were not kings. They may not even have been
“head men” in any European sense. Such a concept of
rulership was in most places introduced and imposed on
the Indigenous population by the newcomers. As is now
well known, the Aboriginal notion of property, espe-
cially involving land, was beyond the comprehension
of the European. While some First Nations groups could
conceive of territory as “belonging” to them, the con-
cept was one of usage rather than of ownership. The
Indigenous people erroneously identified as kings were
quite happy to “sell” to the European newcomers land
that neither they nor their people owned, at least as
Europeans understood ownership.

Lacking much inclination to create hierarchical polit-
ical organizations, the First Nations practised war accord-
ing to different rules than those employed in Europe,
where institutions of church and state went to war for “rea-
sons of state.” Aboriginal wars were mainly raids by a few
warriors, conducted partly because success in battle was
an important test of manhood. They were often used to
capture women and children to replace those lost within
the band. Individual prowess in battle was valued, while
long-term military strategy and objectives were not. First
Nations had their own military agendas, and were notori-
ously fickle allies from the European perspective. Only

These are their storehouses. Who is to take care of them
when they go away? For, if they stay, their stores would
soon be consumed; so they go somewhere else until the
time of famine. Such are the only guards they leave. For
in truth this is not a nation of thieves. Would to God that

the Christians who go among them would not set them a
bad example in this respect. But as it is now, if a certain
Savage is suspected of having stolen anything he will
immediately throw this fine defense in your teeth, We
are not thieves, like you.

Source: Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explanations 1610–1791, 73 vols (Cleveland, 1896–1901), III, 105–9.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 28 12/16/15 4:08 PM

291 | The Beginnings

St
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Distribution of Aboriginal peoples and language areas in the sixteenth century.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 29 12/16/15 4:08 PM

30 A History of the Canadian Peoples

the Iroquois—who in the seventeenth century may have
developed a militarily viable form of political organization
partly based on European models—were able to compete
with the newcomers and withstand their military power.

Nowhere was the gulf between First Nations and
newcomers more apparent than in the spiritual realm.
Aboriginal religious beliefs were complex, although
not readily apparent to the outside observer. They
were part of an intricate religio-magical world that the
First Nations inhabited and shared with the flora and
fauna. Given the hunting orientation of most groups, it
is hardly surprising that animals were endowed with
spiritual significance. The very act of food consump-

tion often acquired deep religious meaning, becoming
a form of worship of the spirit world through everyday
activity. Many peoples had legends about the origins
of the world, and some may have believed in a single
Creator. The mixture of authentic Aboriginal lore with
European thought and missionary teaching has col-
oured First Nations legends and tales over the last 350
years. It has made it difficult—perhaps impossible—to
separate one from the other. Formal religious ceremon-
ies were not readily apparent to the visitors, except for
the activities of the shamans, who claimed supernatural
powers and engaged in several kinds of folk medicine
ranging from herbal treatment to exorcism. Shamans
were no more priests than other leaders were kings, but
Europeans tended to consider their activities to be at
the core of First Nations religion. The newcomers found
it impossible to grasp that inanimate objects in nature
could be considered to be alive and have their own pow-
ers, or that rituals connected with the ordinary round
of daily life could have deep spiritual significance. That
First Nations religion had no buildings, no clerical hier-
archy, and no institutional presence thoroughly disori-
ented the Europeans.

Tolerance for alternative spiritual values and
belief systems was hardly one of Europe’s strong
suits in the Age of Discovery. The period of European
arrival in North America coincided with the Protestant
Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
Christianity was undergoing profound alteration, with
traditional Catholicism subjected to reform from both
within and without. Protestants and Catholics alike
were quite capable of fierce persecution of any devia-
tion from official belief and practice. Both could agree
that what was being encountered in Canada was
pagan supernaturalism that needed to be uprooted as
quickly as possible and replaced with a “true faith.” That
Europeans could not agree on the truth among them-
selves perplexed some First Nations people, such as
the Iroquois, who were exposed to competing French,
English, and Dutch missionaries.

The European intruders could not grasp the notion
that Christianity was embedded in an intricately
developed European value system, or that Indigenous
religious beliefs and practices were integral to First
Nations existence. Views of the world and of one’s place

“Homme acadien”: a Mi’kmaq hunter, hand-coloured etching,
c. 1788–96, from original by Jacques Grasset de Saint-
Sauveur, published in Tableaux des principaux peuples
de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, de l’Amérique et les
découvertes des Capitaines Cook, La Pérouse, etc. (Paris et
Bordeaux, 1796–8). LAC, (R9266-3486) Peter Winkworth
Collection of Canadiana.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 30 12/16/15 4:08 PM

311 | The Beginnings

Where the First People Came From:
A Cree Legend from the West Coast of James Bay

Document

So then, I shall tell another legend. I’ll tell a story, the
legend about ourselves, the people, as we are called.
Also I shall tell the legend about where we came from
and why we came . . . , why we who are living now came
to inhabit this land.

Now then, first I shall begin.
The other land was above, it is said. It was like this

land which we dwell in, except that the life seems differ-
ent; also it is different on account of its being cold and
mild [here]. So then, this land where we are invariably
tends to be cold.

So that is the land above which is talked about
from which there came two people, one woman and one
man, . . . they dwelt in that land which was above. But
it was certainly known that this world where we live
was there.

Now then at one time someone spoke to them, while
they were in that land of theirs where they were brought
up. He said to them, “Do you want to go see yonder land
which is below?”

The very one about which they were spoken to is
this one where we dwell.

“Yes,” they said, “we will go there.”
“The land,” they were told, “is different, appears

different from this one where we dwell in, which you
dwell in now during your lifetime. But you will find it
different there, should you go to see that land. It is cold
yonder. And sometimes it is hot.

“It fluctuates considerably. If you wish to go there,
however, you must go see the spider at the end of this
land where you are. That is where he lives.”

The spider, as he is called, that is the one who is the
net-maker, who never exhausts his twine,—so they went
to see him, who is called the spider.

Then he asked them, “Where do you want to go? Do
you want to go and see yonder land, the other one which
is below?”

“Yes,” they said.
“Very well,” said the spider. “I shall make a line so

that I may lower you.”
So then, he made a line up to,—working it around

up to, up to the top.
“Not yet, not yet even half done,” he said.
Then he spoke to them, telling them, better for him

to let them down even before he finished it the length it
should be.

Then he told them, “That land which you want to go
and see is cold and sometimes mild. But there will cer-
tainly be someone there who will teach you, where you
will find a living once you have reached it. He, he will
tell you every thing so you will get along well.”

So he made a place for them to sit as he lowered
them, the man and the woman.

They got in together, into that thing which looked
like a bag.

Then he instructed them what to do during their
trip. “Only one must look,” he said to them. “But one
must not look until you have made contact with the
earth. You may both look then.”

So, meanwhile they went along, one looked. At last
he caught sight of the land.

The one told the other, “Now the land is in sight.”
The one told the other, “Now the rivers are in sight.”
They had been told however, that “if one, . . . if they

both look together, before they come to the land, they
will go into the great eagle-nest and they will never be
able to get out and climb down from there.”

That’s where they will be. That’s what they were told.

Continued…

901491_01_Ch01.indd 31 12/16/15 4:08 PM

32 A History of the Canadian Peoples

in it were as integral to life for Aboriginals as they were
for Europeans, and the way in which First Nations related
spiritually to their environment was a critical part of their
culture. Europe could not convert First Nations to Chris-
tianity without undermining the very basis of their exist-
ence. Naturally, the First Nations resisted.

While commenting on the freedom that chil-
dren were allowed, European observers of every First
Nations group in northern North America from coast
to coast also wrote that women were badly exploited.
European society at the time could hardly be called
liberal in its treatment of women. What the newcomers
saw as exploitation reflected their inability to compre-
hend the divisions of labour within a warrior society.
Men hunted and fought, while women were responsible
for just about everything else. Interestingly enough,
when European women were captured by raiding par-
ties and integrated into Aboriginal life, many chose to
remain with their captors instead of accepting repatri-
ation back into colonial society. Those captives who
were brought home and who wrote about their experi-
ences emphasized that the Aboriginals had a strong
sense of love and community and offered—as one set of
repatriates acknowledged—“The most perfect freedom,

the ease of living, [and] the absence of those cares and
corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us”
(Axtell, 2001: 213).

Almost from the outset, European newcomers to
Canada had two contradictory responses to the peoples
they were contacting and describing. On the one hand,
much of what they saw in First Nations life, particu-
larly beyond mere superficial observation, struck them
as admirable. The First Nations exhibited none of the
negative features of capitalistic society. On the other
hand, there was the equally powerful image of the First
Nations as brutal savages and barbarians, particularly
in the context of war. This dichotomy of response was
particularly keen among the missionaries, who kept
trying to “civilize” the First Nations by converting
them to Christianity and forcibly educating them in
European ways. Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, the head
of the Ursuline School for girls at Quebec, wrote of her
charges in 1668 that there was “docility and intelli-
gence in these girls, but when we are least expecting it,
they clamber over our wall and go off to run with their
kinsmen in the woods, finding more to please them
there than in all the amenities of our French houses”
(Marshall, 1967: 341).

Then the one told the other, “Now the lakes are in
sight. Now the grass.”

Then they both looked before they arrived, as they
were right at the top of the trees. Then they went side-
ways for a short while, then they went into the great
eagle-nest. That’s where they went in, having violated
their instructions. . . .

Then the bear arrived.
So he said to them, . . . and they said to him, “Come

and help us.”
The bear didn’t listen for long; but then he started to

get up on his hind legs to go and see them. Also another
one, the wolverine as he is called. They made one trip
each as they brought them down.

But the bear was followed by those people.
That was the very thing which had been said to

them, “You will have someone there who will teach you
to survive.”

This bear, he taught them everything about how to
keep alive there.

It was there that these people began to multi-
ply from one couple, the persons who had come from
another land. They lived giving birth to their children
generation after generation. That is us right up until
today. That is why we are in this country.

And by-and-by the White People began to arrive as
they began to reach us people, who live in this country.

That is as much as I shall tell.

Source: C. Douglas Ellis, ed. and trans., Cree Legends and Narratives from the West Coast of James Bay (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1995), 3–7.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 32 12/16/15 4:08 PM

331 | The Beginnings

In the eighteenth century, an idealized and roman-
ticized view of Aboriginal society was used by many
European philosophers as a literary convention and
fictional device for criticizing contemporary European
society. As Peter Moogk has pointed out, conditions of
press censorship, particularly in France, made it advis-
able to use fictitious foreigners, including Amerindians,
to express negative opinions about church and state

(Moogk, 2000: 48–9). The first such character probably
was Baron de Lahontan’s “Huron” named Adario, who
in 1703 observed that the Ten Commandments were
routinely ignored in France, while the Aboriginals
practised innocence, love, and tranquility of mind.
Lahontan’s books went through numerous editions
and led to the Enlightenment notion of the bon sauvage
advanced by Voltaire and Rousseau. The First Nations

Historic Sites

A t l a n t i c
O c e a n
74
5
2
1
6
3

EASTERN CANADA
0 500

kilometres
1,000
N
S
EW

1. Frobisher National Historic Site: On

Kodlunarn Island in Frobisher Bay

(close to Iqaluit). This tiny island has the

remains of Martin Frobisher’s habitation

and the smelting plant he operated

between 1576 and 1578.

2. L’Anse aux Meadows National

Historic Park: At the northern tip of

Newfoundland; contains the remains of

seven buildings, cook pits, and a smithy.

3. Gaspé, Quebec: The site of a 30-foot

granite cross commemorating the

cross erected by Jacques Cartier in

1534.

4. Cartier-Brébeuf National Historic

Park: Facing the St Charles River, where

Cartier wintered his three ships in

1535–6.

5. McGill University (Montreal): A

plaque marks the site of the village of

Hochelaga.

6. Port au Choix (Newfoundland)

National Historic Park: Burial sites of

the “red paint people” who inhabited

the region about 5,000 years ago.

7. Port-Royal National Historic Site:

Reconstruction of the “habitation”

and other buildings of the first French

colony established on the banks of the

Annapolis River by Champlain in 1605.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 33 12/16/15 4:08 PM

34 A History of the Canadian Peoples

possessed none of the worst traits of European capital-
istic society, such as covetousness and rapaciousness;
and they revered freedom, while eschewing private
property. What relationship the “noble savage” bore to
the realities of existence in North America is another
matter entirely.
Europeans would blunder on for centuries in their
attempts to come to terms with the Indigenous peoples
of North America. The First Nations would prove ten-
acious in maintaining their own identity and culture in
the face of much effort to Europeanize them, but they
lacked the physical power to prevent either constant
encroachment on their territory, or the continual under-
mining of the basic physical and spiritual substance of
their way of life. The cultural contact between Native
and newcomer truly was a tragedy. Reconciliation of the
two cultures proved quite impossible, and the failure of
reconciliation resounds still today.
Conclusion
By the mid-1620s the first period of European intru-
sion into what is now Canada had been completed.
Exploration of the new continent’s eastern seaboard
was done, and Europe could construct a fairly decent
map of its coastline. What lay beyond was beginning
to be investigated. Europe was on the verge of decid-
ing that major transplantations of people were going
to be necessary if this new northern land were to be
exploited. As for the Indigenous population, they had
been buffeted by epidemic disease, the causes of which
were beyond their comprehension, but they had not yet
been marginalized. The First Nations could still meet
the newcomers on something approximating equal
terms. In retrospect, we can see how ephemeral this
equality really was.
The Changing History of Paleo-Indian Migration to the New World
Emőke J.E. Szathmáry, University of Manitoba
The prevailing archaeological paradigm since 1950
stated that “Paleo-Indians,” the putative ancestors of
all the Indigenous peoples of the Americas excepting
“Eskimos” and Aleuts, entered North America from Asia
by crossing the Bering land bridge during the Wisconsin
glaciation. From Alaska they moved south through
an ice-free corridor on the eastern side of the Rocky
Mountains into the central Great Plains. Their earliest
cultural remains, called “Clovis,” date to 11,500–11,000
radiocarbon years ago (RCYBP). Clovis sites exist across
the United States, indicating that the ancestors spread
rapidly once they were clear of glaciers.
Challenges to this paradigm accumulated after the
1970s. Though several sites in the Americas appear to
be pre-Clovis in age, it was only in 1997, after eminent
archaeologists had examined remains at Monte Verde
in southern Chile, that it was generally accepted that
people had entered the western hemisphere before
12,500 RCYBP (Meltzer et al., 1997). By then, the rest of
the paradigm was also unravelling. The Cordilleran and
Laurentide glaciers were shown to have merged east of
the Rockies in Alberta, blocking the corridor for some
6,000 years, and north of 60o N the corridor had been
covered by Laurentide ice even longer (Jackson and
Duk-Rodkin, 1996). With the corridor impassable, what
route did the ancestors take south? When did they enter
North America to have reached southern Chile so early?
Did they come from other places than Asia?
These questions are not new, and evidence con-
tinues to show that the roots of the ancestors lie in Asia.
Today, many archaeologists reason that people must
have travelled south along the northwest coast of North
Historiography

901491_01_Ch01.indd 34 12/16/15 4:08 PM

351 | The Beginnings

America. Un-glaciated areas occurred on Haida Gwaii,
for example, and plant as well as animal remains have
been found in such refugia. However, movement down
the Pacific coast would have been very difficult dur-
ing the last glacial maximum, between 28,000–12,000
RCYBP. Such travel would have been more likely as the
glaciers began to retreat. Unfortunately, the rising sea
levels that accompanied de-glaciation have also sub-
merged ancient shorelines, leaving no evidence of early
journeys southward by foot or by boat. The few sites
without dating controversies, for example, On Your
Knees Cave on Prince of Wales Island in southeastern
Alaska, are dated around 9,800 RCYBP.

Changing ideas about the likely route south have
been accompanied by changes in our understanding
of Beringia, which was originally conceptualized as
the lands now submerged under the Bering Sea, Bering
Strait, and the Chukchi Sea. With demonstration that
the lands adjacent to these areas were also un-glaciated,
the boundaries of Beringia expanded west and to the
east. Today, Beringia is regarded as extending from the
Verkhoyansk Mountains of Siberia to the Mackenzie
River basin of Yukon. This vast plain sustained a mosaic
of plant types, with steppe-tundra and shrub tundra in
specific regions, and some tree species in local areas
(Hoffecker et al., 2014). The vegetation supported large
and small mammals, and these supported human life.
The Yana Rhinoceros Horn site at 71o N is reliably dated
at 28,000 RCYBP in Western Beringia, but the 23,500
RCYBP age of modified mammoth bones used as tools
at Bluefish Caves, Yukon, in Eastern Beringia continues
to be doubted by many archaeologists (Morlan, 2003).
Several sites are dated between these extremes in
Alaska, falling between 13,000–11,000 RCYBP.

Also changing is the view that Beringia was just
a “bridge” to be crossed in the ancestors’ trek south.
Theories of temporally sequential migratory waves into
the Americas as suggested by Greenberg et al. (1986),
for example, have focused on crossing from Asia to
America. An alternate scenario considers that Beringia
could have been an ice-bounded home to hunting bands
that occupied it for several millennia during the last
glacial maximum. In this regard, genetic studies of

living peoples have been persuasive. The five hap-
logroups of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that are
diagnostic of Native American ancestry have yielded
mutations over time, as has the Y chromosome (NRY).
Estimates of the ages of these new variants, which are
distributed widely in the Americas, overlap: 16,600–
11,200 years ago for mtDNA (Tamm et al., 2007), and
15,000–12,000 years ago for NRY (Zegura et al., 2004).
The time depths suggest that these markers arose in
a population isolated on Beringia, after which the
ancestors dispersed into the Americas. These find-
ings reinforce earlier conclusions based on classical
genetic markers, especially regarding the ancestry of
Eskimos and Na-Dene. Populations south of the gla-
ciers, as pre-Clovis sites indicate, would differentiate
genetically as would their cognates in Beringia, yield-
ing differences among their descendants (Szathmary,
1996; Bonatto and Salzano, 1997), while retaining their
American (i.e., Beringian) genetic identity.

The future will tell if such deductions are correct.
A recent study of nuclear DNA, for example, supported
the notion of three migratory waves into the Americas
at different times (Reich et al., 2012). Assuming the
adequacy of samples and their analyses, the apparent
conflict in colonization scenarios may just be a conse-
quence of focusing on different aspects of a migratory
process. In the meantime, we must await direct archaeo-
logical evidence that could tell us when, where, and how
the ancestors moved south from Beringia.

References
Bonatto, Sandro L., and Francisco M. Salzano. 1997.

“A Single and Early Migration for the Peopling of
the Americas Supported by Mitochondrial DNA
Sequence Data.” Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences 94: 1866–71.

Hoffecker, John F., Scott A. Elias, and Dennis H. O’Rourke.
2014. “Out of Beringia?” Science 343: 979–80.

Jackson, Lionel E., Jr, and Alejandra Duk-Rodkin. 1996.
“Quaternary Geology of the Ice-free Corridor:
Glacial Controls on the Peopling of the New World.”
In Takeru Akazawa and Emőke J.E. Szathmáry, eds,

Continued…

901491_01_Ch01.indd 35 12/16/15 4:08 PM

36 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Axtell, James. Natives and Newcomers: The Cultural
Origins of North America. New York, 2001. A series of
penetrating essays by North America’s leading his-
torian of cultural contact.

Bailey, A.G. The Conflict of European and Eastern Algonkin
Cultures, 1534–1700: A Study in Civilization, 2nd
edn. Toronto, 1969. First produced as a doctoral dis-
sertation in 1934, this pioneering study is one of the
classics of the field, still as relevant as ever.

Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography
in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge, 2010.
This work, which looks at European empires in terms of
geography and law, discusses how the two merge and
deviate to create debates in both the colonies and their
motherlands.

Dickason, Olive Patricia. Canada’s First Nations: A
History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times, 3rd
edn. Toronto, 2002. Easily the best general survey of
the history of the First Nations, current and full of
detail. A revised and updated abridged edition—A
Concise History of Canada’s First Nations—was first
published in 2006 and a third edition, co-auth-
ored by William Newbigging, appeared in 2015.

A fourth edition of Dickason’s original work, with
David T. McNab, came out in 2009 with updates to
that year and a new concluding chapter.

Fagan, Brian. The Great Journey: The Peopling of Ancient
America. New York, 1987. A bit dated, but still the
best account of the prevailing scholarly interpreta-
tions of the subject.

Fitzhugh, William, and Elizabeth Ward. Vikings: The
North American Saga. Washington and London,
2000. A splendidly illustrated and authoritative
account of the Norse in America.

Harris, R. Cole, ed. Historical Atlas of Canada, vol. 1.
Toronto, 1987. This is one of the great collaborative
works of scholarship in Canada, presenting a visual
and cartographic record of the period to 1800.

Hoffeker, John F., and Scott A. Elias. Human Ecology of
Beringia. New York, 2007. This book addresses the
debates surrounding the environment and archae-
ology of Beringia, and presents an interpretation of
how people lived and moved through that now sub-
merged territory.

Hunter, Douglas. Half-Moon: Henry Hudson and the
Voyage that Redrew the Map of the New World.

Prehistoric Mongoloid Dispersals, 214–27. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Meltzer, David J., et al. 1997. “On the Pleistocene
Antiquity of Monte Verde, Southern Chile.” American
Antiquity 62: 659–63.

Morlan, Richard E. 2003. “Current Perspectives on
the Pleistocene Archaeology of Eastern Beringia.”
Quaternary Research 60: 123–32.

Reich, David, et al. 2012. “Reconstructing Native
American Population History.” Nature 488:370–4.

Szathmáry, Emőke J.E.1996. “Ancient Migrations from
Asia to North America.” In Takeru Akazawa and

Emőke J.E. Szathmáry, eds, Prehistoric Mongoloid
Dispersals, 149–64. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Tamm, Erika, et al. 2007. “Beringian Standstill and
Spread of Native American Founders.” PloS ONE 2,
9: e829. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000829.

Zegura, Stephen L., Tatiana M. Karafet, Lev. A.
Zhivitovsky, and Michael F. Hammer. 2004. “High-
resolution SNPs and Microsatellite Haplotypes Point
to a Single, Recent Entry of Native American Y
Chromosomes into the Americas.” Molecular Biology
and Evolution 21:64–75.

Short Bibliography

901491_01_Ch01.indd 36 12/16/15 4:09 PM

371 | The Beginnings

Study Questions
1. Give three examples of ways in which the First Nations lived in a “reciprocal relationship with nature.”

2. What realities did the various First Nations cultures share in common?

3. Explain the basic cultural, religious, and political factors behind the European misinterpretation of the First

Nations.

4. Comment on the account from Cartier’s Voyages, “Jacques Cartier Meets with Aboriginal Peoples, 1534.”

Did Cartier make any assumptions about the Aboriginal peoples that would lead to cultural conflicts later?

Explain.

5. What can we learn about cultural conflict from Karlsefni’s encounter with the Skraelings? What was the prin-

cipal cause of the conflict between the Norse and the Skraelings?

6. On what grounds could you defend the European intrusion into North America? Identify three grounds and

explain each of them.

Visit the companion website for A History of the Canadian Peoples, fifth edition for further resources.
www.oupcanada.com/Bumsted5e

New York, Berlin, London, 2009. A new look at
one of the most elusive f igures of early European
exploration.

Jaenen, Cornelius. Friend and Foe: Aspects of French–
Amerindian Culture Contact in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. Toronto, 1976. An early clas-
sic, still the best single work on the early contact
between the French and the First Nations.

Nuffield, Edward. The Discovery of Canada. Vancouver,
1996. A recent survey.

Paul, Daniel. We Were Not the Savages: A Micmac
Perspective on the Collision of European and
Aboriginal Civilization. Halifax, 1993. Probably the
first analysis of early cultural contact in Canada
written by a First Nations scholar from a First
Nations perspective.

Reid, John. Acadia, Maine, and New Scotland: Marginal
Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. Toronto, 1981.

A stimulating comparative approach to the early
settlement of the Maritimes.

Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s
Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge,
1995. More important than its title suggests, this
book distinguishes the various national approaches
to conquest taken by the major European nations.

Trigger, Bruce. Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s “Heroic
Age” Reconsidered. Montreal and Kingston, 1986. A
revisionist account of early Canadian culture con-
tact by Canada’s leading expert.

Trudel, Marcel. The Beginnings of New France 1524–1663.
Toronto, 1975. Still the authoritative account of the
early years of New France, written by a scholar who
spent his lifetime working on the period.

Wright, J.V. A History of the Native People of Canada, 3
vols. Ottawa, 1995–2000. An encyclopedic survey of
Canada’s ancient history.

901491_01_Ch01.indd 37 12/16/15 4:10 PM

The village of Château-Richer (on the north shore of the St Lawrence northeast of Quebec City), 1787, watercolour by Thomas Davies.
Included in this pastoral scene are whitewashed stone farmhouses, wooden barns, and eel traps in the river. © National Gallery of
Canada, 6275.
2
Europe Settles In:
Newfoundland, Acadia,
New France

901491_02_Ch02.indd 38 12/23/15 4:32 PM

Timeline
1598 Marquis de la Roche de Mesgouez establishes

colony on Sable Island.

1605 Settlement established by Pierre Du Gua
De Monts moves to Port-Royal.

1607 Port-Royal abandoned.
1611 First French priests arrive in Acadia.
1627 Cardinal Richelieu establishes the Company of

One Hundred Associates.

1628 The Kirke brothers capture Quebec.
1632 Treaty of St-Germain-en-Laye restores Canada

and Acadia to France.

1633 Champlain returns to the St Lawrence.
1634 The Jesuits set up permanent missions in

Huronia.

1635 Champlain dies.
1639 The Jesuits establish Ste-Marie-aux-Hurons.
1640 The Iroquois begin attacking the Huron.
1642 Montreal is established.
1645 Company of One Hundred Associates

surrenders its monopoly to local interests.

Madame La Tour surrenders Fort La Tour.

1647 Canada adopts government by central council.
First horse arrives.

1649 Iroquois destroy St-Louis and St-Ignace.
Martyrdom of Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel

Lalemant.

1654 English capture Acadia.
1659 Bishop Laval arrives in Canada.
1660 First pipe organ brought to Canada.
1663 Earthquake strikes Canada. French royal

government takes over New France and

institutes the Coutume de Paris.

1664 Carignan-Salières Regiment arrives in New
France. Jean Talon arrives as first intendant.

1665 First contingent of filles de roi arrives. Shipment
of 12 horses arrives.

1666 First census in New France.
1667 Peace treaty with Iroquois.
1668 Petit Sèminaire founded.
1685 “Code Noir” defines slavery.
1701 Great Peace with Iroquois.
1703 Counseil Sovereign reorganized.
1711 Edict of Marly. British invasion of Quebec fails.
1719 Colony gets Admiralty Court.
1733 Iron forges at St Maurice established.
1740 Duplessis case confirms Aboriginal slavery.
1759 Battle of Plains of Abraham.

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40 A History of the Canadian Peoples

The First European
Communities
When generations of painful experience taught Europeans
that there was no quick road to wealth by exploiting
the Indigenous peoples or the resource base of North
America, hopes turned to transplanting Europeans who
could take advantage of fish and furs. This shift occurred
at the beginning of the seventeenth century. A variety
of motives jostled in the minds of the early promoters of
settlement, few of whom ever planned to set foot on North
American soil. National advantage, religion, humanitar-
ianism, greed, personal ambition, and sheer fantasy were
present in various combinations. European monarchs
and their supporters were flattered by the “enlarging of
Dominions.” Missions to the First Nations and the possi-
bilities of refuge from religious persecution at home
excited the pious. Many a promoter saw colonization as a
way to rid Europe of unwanted paupers and petty crim-
inals. Investors were tempted with talk of titles and large
land grants. In the pursuit of great profits, common sense
was easily lost. Although large-scale colonization activ-
ities were begun by the English in Virginia in 1607, the
first ventures undertaken in the northern latitudes typ-
ically were more modest. They consisted mainly of trad-
ing posts and fishing settlements.

English familiarity with Newfoundland led
London merchants to attempt colonization there begin-
ning in 1610. The London and Bristol Company for the
Colonization of Newfoundland (usually known as the
Newfoundland Company) was organized by 48 subscrib-
ers who invested £25 each. The plan was that permanent
settlers employed by the company would quickly dom-
inate the fishery over those who came in the spring and
went home in the autumn. Europe was desperately short
of a protein food for the poor, and dried cod found a
ready market, especially in Catholic countries. The first
settlement of the company was established by John Guy
(d. 1629), who led 40 colonists from Bristol to Cupid’s
Cove on Conception Bay in July 1610, only months after
the company was granted the entire island. The venture
was funded by sale of stock. The company did not appre-
ciate how difficult local agriculture would be, given the

soil and the climate, or how unlikely it was in the vast
expanses of the New World that settlers could be kept
permanently as landless employees labouring solely for
the profit of their masters.

The Newfoundland Company’s fishing settlements
prospered no more than did those of courtiers like
George Calvert, First Baron Baltimore (1579/80–1632),
who began a plantation at Avalon in 1623. Calvert dis-
covered to his surprise, as he wrote his monarch in 1629,
that “from the middest of October, to the middest of May
there is a sadd face of wynter upon all this land, both sea
and land so frozen for the great part of the tyme that they
are not penetrable, no plant or vegetable thing appearing
out of the earth untill it be about the beginning of May
nor fish in the sea besides the ayre so intolerable cold, as
it is hardly to be endured” (Cell, 1982: 295–6). Not long
after penning this complaint, he left for Virginia. In
1632 Calvert was granted the land north of the Potomac
River that would become Maryland.

The French were marginally more successful than
the English at establishing colonies in the northern
regions, both in Acadia (the region vaguely bounded
by the St Lawrence to the north, the Atlantic Ocean
to the east and south, and the St Croix River to the
west) and in Canada (the St Lawrence Valley). An
early effort by the Marquis de La Roche de Mesgouez
(c. 1540–1606) on Sable Island failed dismally, with
rebellious settlers murdering their local leaders over
the winter of 1602–3. The island was subsequently
evacuated. A similar result occurred at a settlement at
the mouth of the Saguenay River. In May 1604 Pierre
Du Gua de Monts (1558?–1628) arrived on the Nova
Scotia coast with a young draftsman named Samuel
de Champlain (c. 1570–1635). The two men were
searching for a suitable site to establish a settlement,
a condition of de Monts’s grant of a trading monopoly
in the region. They tried first on an island in the St
Croix River. In 1605 the settlement was moved to Port-
Royal in the Annapolis Basin, where de Monts built
a habitation, a supposed replica of which still exists
today as a historic site. In 1606 the Paris lawyer Marc
Lescarbot (c. 1570–1642) joined the colony and wrote
a narrative of its development, published in 1609 as
Histoire de la Nouvelle France. In this work Lescarbot

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412 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

noted the foundation of L’Ordre de Bon Temps in 1607,
a sort of dining club with extemporaneous entertain-
ment. He also described the masque he wrote for it
(the first stage play composed and performed in North
America). The colonists were obliged to leave in 1607
when de Monts was forced to relinquish his monop-
oly, but a French presence would continue in Acadia
from the first establishment of Port-Royal, usually in
the form of a handful of individuals trading with the
First Nations.

As for Samuel de Champlain, he headed up the
St Lawrence in 1608 to found a new trading post
for de Monts at Stadacona. Another habitation was
erected, this one including three buildings of two

storeys—connected by a gallery around the outside,
“which proved very convenient,” wrote Champlain—
surrounded by a moat and palisades. Champlain
provided a careful drawing of this habitation in his
Voyages. He was forced to put down a conspiracy and
face a devastating attack of scurvy in the first year.
The post survived, however, and Champlain grad-
ually allied himself with the local First Nations, who
supplied him with furs and drew the French into war
against the Iroquois. Champlain had little alternative
to an alliance against the Iroquois, and they became
mortal enemies of the French.

Only about 50 Frenchmen resided on the St
Lawrence by 1615. Among the early settlers, only Louis

Champlain’s drawing of the habitation at Port-Royal, built in 1605 on the north shore of the Annapolis Basin. The parts of the
complex are identified in an accompanying key. For example, building A was the artisans’ quarters, and B was a platform for
cannon. Champlain’s own quarters were in building D. LAC, C-7033.

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42 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Hébert (1595?–1627), who came to Quebec in 1617 after
service as a surgeon at Port-Royal, showed an interest
in cultivating the land. But Hébert was most useful for
his medical and apothecary skills; the trading company
actually attempted to discourage him from agriculture.
Not until 1618—when Champlain outlined a grand
scheme for the colonization of New France in reports to
the King and the French Chamber of Commerce—did
anything approaching the plans of the Newfoundland
Company enter the French vision. Earlier French activ-
ities, including those of Champlain himself, had been
underfinanced by a succession of individual entrepre-
neurs and small syndicates. Trading posts, rather than
settlement colonies, were the goal.

Until 1618, Champlain had served as an agent for
others rather than as a colonial promoter in his own
right. In that year, however, he combined arguments for
major investment with a scheme designed to appeal to

the imperial pretensions of the Crown. New France and
the St Lawrence not only held the possibility of a short
route to Asia but could produce “a great and perma-
nent trade” in such items as fish, timber, whale oil, and
furs. The annual income was projected at 5,400,000
livres, virtually none of it coming from agriculture and
less than 10 per cent coming from furs. Champlain
requested that priests, 300 families of four people each,
and 300 soldiers be sent to his base on the St Lawrence.
Amazingly enough, the French response was enthusias-
tic, and Louis XIII instructed the syndicate employing
Champlain to expedite his plans. The partners and
Champlain, however, were unable to agree upon terms
or to make any progress in establishing the colony. Not
until 1627, when Cardinal Richelieu assumed super-
vision of New France and established the Company of
One Hundred Associates, did Champlain’s grandiose
schemes receive substantial backing.

Source: Marc Lescarbot, The History of New France, trans. W.L. Grant, intro. H.P. Biggar (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1911), II, 342–3.

The Order of Good Cheer

Document

It would be tedious to attempt to particularise all that
was done among us during the winter [of 1606–7] . . . .
But I shall relate how, in order to keep our table joy-
ous and well-provided, an Order was established at
the board of the said M. de Poutrincourt, which was
called the Order of Good Cheer, originally proposed
by Champlain. To this Order each man of the said table
was appointed Chief Steward in his turn, which came
round once a fortnight. Now this person had the duty
of taking care that we were all well and honourably
provided for. This was so well carried out that, though
the epicures of Paris often tell us that we had no Rue
aux Ours [meat-market district] over there, as a rule we
made as good cheer as we could have in this same Rue
aux Ours and at less cost. For there was no one who, two

days before his turn came, failed to go hunting or fish-
ing, and to bring back some delicacy in addition to our
ordinary fare. So well was this carried out that never at
breakfast did we lack some savoury meat of flesh or fish,
and still less at our midday or evening meals; for that
was our chief banquet, at which the ruler of the feast or
chief butler, whom the savages called Atoctegic, having
had everything prepared by the cook, marched in, nap-
kin on shoulder, wand of office in hand, and around his
neck the collar of the Order, carrying each a dish. The
same was repeated at dessert, though not always with
so much pomp. And at night, before giving thanks to
God, he handed over to his successor in the charge the
collar of the order, with a cup of wine, and they drank
to each other.

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432 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

Newfoundland
Newfoundland represented the British presence in the
Atlantic region before the establishment of Nova Scotia
in 1713. Neither John Guy’s settlement of Newfoundland
in 1610 nor a series of successors sponsored by the
Newfoundland Company and private promoters were
spectacularly successful. But by the 1660s several com-
munities of permanent settlers totalling 1,500 had taken
hold along the rocky coast of the “English Shore.” The
society of these settlements was considerably more
elaborate than historians once assumed, consisting of
servants, planter employers, and a planter gentry of lit-
erate merchants. Incomes from fishing were reasonably
good, and the local communities were no less stable
than comparable ones in New England. The elite was
dominated by the Kirke family, which was active in the
Canadian trade (and buccaneering in the 1620s) and in
the Newfoundland sack trade of the 1630s and 1640s,
later becoming original investors in the Hudson’s Bay
Company. In 1675 the widow of Sir David Kirke and
her son operated 10 fishing boats, and the Kirke family
had 17 boats, employing 81 crew members. Indeed, on
the English Shore of Newfoundland, as in many other
early communities of North America, widows found
opportunities for autonomy in business enterprises
that they would not have enjoyed at home. Although
Newfoundland had been one of the earliest sites in
the New World for English colonization, the focus had
quickly shifted south to New England, where the English
by 1650 had developed a number of successful colonies
with a total population in excess of 100,000. The “new-
found” land continued to provide enormous wealth to
the British Empire in the form of fish, however, while
remaining an unorganized jurisdiction and a marginal
area of English settlement.

In the seventeenth century, almost all the year-
round residents were of English origin, chiefly from the
West Country counties of Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset.
As late as 1732, 90 per cent of the permanent popula-
tion remained English, but most of the eighteenth-cen-
tury additions came from southern Ireland through
the increasing links between Newfoundland and the
Irish ports of Waterford and Cork. One census of win-
tering inhabitants in 1753 showed 2,668 Irish and 1,916

English. The Irish were being pushed out of Ireland
by famine and unemployment, and were attracted to
Newfoundland by the cheap fare for the voyage com-
bined with work prospects. By 1750 Newfoundland had
become a conduit by which Irish Catholics made their
way to North America, and it remained so until 1815.
Not all who jumped ship on the island remained in resi-
dence there.

Parallel to the increase of permanent population
in Newfoundland came a shift in fishing practice.
After 1714 the English summer visitors abandoned the
inshore fishery and turned instead to fishing directly
from the offshore banks. By 1750 the inshore fishery was
controlled by local residents, but by this time there were
already signs of depletion of the inshore fish stocks. The
result was not conservation but diversification, with
many Newfoundlanders moving into the seal fishery.

The French Maritime
Region to 1667
In the Atlantic region, overtones of European imperial
rivalries could be detected in the complex conflicts of
the seventeenth century, although local factors were
equally important. Much of the confusing history of
Acadia after 1624 is wrapped up in the activities of the
La Tour family, which illustrate the fluid and violent
nature of the period. In 1629, when Quebec was cap-
tured by the Kirkes, a tiny trading post on Cape Sable (at
the southwestern tip of present-day Nova Scotia) was all
that was left of the French presence in North America.
It was headed by Charles de Saint-Étienne de La Tour
(1598–1666). His father, Claude de La Tour (c. 1570–after
1636), had already returned to France to plead for assist-
ance, but on the return voyage was captured and taken
to England, where he quickly made himself at home.
Accepted at court, he married one of the Queen’s ladies-
in-waiting. (The English Queen Henrietta was a French
princess and surrounded by women from France.)
Claude also accepted Nova Scotia baronetcies for him-
self and his son from Sir William Alexander, a Scottish
courtier, who had been granted Nova Scotia in 1621 by
James VI of Scotland (who also was James I of England).

901491_02_Ch02.indd 43 12/23/15 4:33 PM

44 A History of the Canadian Peoples

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Acadia and environs to 1670. Adapted from A.H. Clark, Acadia: The Geography of Early Nova Scotia to 1760 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 76.

901491_02_Ch02.indd 44 12/23/15 4:33 PM

452 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

Sir David Kirke (c. 1597–1654) was one of the notori-
ous Kirke brothers who captured Quebec in 1629.
This incident is probably the only one for which most
Canadians remember him—if they remember at all.
But there was more to his complex North American
career than one buccaneering expedition. Kirke was
the son of an English merchant who worked out of the
French port of Dieppe, and David was apparently born
in the French town. In 1627 Kirke’s father was one of
a consortium of English merchants who financed an
expedition, led by David, to drive the French from
Canada. David commanded a fleet of three vessels
and was accompanied by several of his brothers; hence
the common reference to the “Kirke brothers” seizing
Quebec. He apparently sailed with a fleet carrying
Scottish settlers to Nova Scotia. In 1627 Champlain
refused to surrender and Kirke did not press the issue.
In the Gulf of St Lawrence, however, his ships met and
defeated a French fleet, and Kirke returned to Europe
with considerable booty.

The French in Paris protested because they regarded
the Kirkes as French citizens. Kirke was rewarded by
the British with the exclusive right to trade and settle
in Canada, to which Sir William Alexander objected,
however. Kirke and Alexander nevertheless negotiated
a compromise to establish an Anglo-Scots colony at
Tadoussac. The fleet sent out for this purpose (six ships,
three pinnaces) also carried Claude de La Tour back to
Nova Scotia. Kirke learned from a French deserter of
the parlous state of the French garrison in Quebec, and
this time Champlain surrendered. The Kirkes not only
evacuated the colony but seized all the furs stored in
Quebec. They subsequently attempted to work the fur
trade with the assistance of a number of bushlopers,
including Étienne Brûlé. Quebec was returned to the
French by the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1632,
but Kirke was knighted a year later for his services to
the Crown.

His North American activities had made Kirke
aware of Newfoundland, and in 1637 he was part
of a consortium (the Company of Adventurers to
Newfoundland) that was made proprietor of that island.
In 1639 he became first governor of Newfoundland
and moved into Lord Baltimore’s house at Ferryland.
The four Kirke brothers were made English citizens
at about the same time. Sir David began to recolon-
ize Newfoundland, particularly Ferryland, and he
attempted to control summer visiting along the island’s
coasts. He became one of the principal leaders of the
Planters on the island, although his political actions
always were controversial. In 1651 he was called home
and charged with withholding taxes. Throughout the
early 1650s he was under a cloud until his death in 1654,
although his family continued to live in Newfoundland
as merchants. Kirke’s heirs, led by Lady Kirke, fought
a number of legal battles for compensation (partly for
the return of Quebec) after his death. Kirke was a good
example of the extremely fluid legal situation among
explorers and adventurers in northern North America
in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Sir David Kirke, c. 1597–1654. Courtesy of the Centre for
Newfoundland Studies Archives (MF231–411), St John’s. Image
modified by Wendy Churchill, 1999.

Sir David Kirke

Biography

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46 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Returning with his bride to Acadia in May 1630
as part of a Scots-English expedition, Claude stopped
at Cape Sable to persuade his son to join him. Charles
replied that “he would rather have died than consent
to such baseness as to betray his King” (MacBeath,
1966: 593). Declaring his son an enemy, Claude led
an unsuccessful attack on the fort at Cape Sable and
retreated to Port-Royal, only to discover that the English
planned to abandon it. He was forced to throw himself on
his son’s mercy and confess to his wife that he could not
return to Europe. Acadia, like Canada, was returned to
France by the English with the Treaty of Saint-Germain-
en-Laye in 1632. The English monarch Charles I needed

French financial subsidies as he attempted to govern
without meeting Parliament, a policy that led to the
English Civil War.

In Acadia, Charles de La Tour continued to lead
an embattled life, coming into conflict with others who
claimed royal authority in the region. In 1645 he was
defeated by his chief rival, Charles de Menou d’Aulnay
(c. 1604–50) and sought refuge in Canada. D’Aulnay con-
trolled Acadia until his death in 1650.

Charles de La Tour returned to France after d’Aul-
nay’s death to demand an inquiry into his case. He
was completely vindicated and again received into
royal favour. Returning to Port-Royal with a few new

Biography

According to her husband’s chief enemy, Françoise-
Marie Jacquelin La Tour (1602–45) was the daughter of
a barber who became a Paris actress, but little is known
of her background and it is at least as likely that she
was a member of a family of lesser nobility in France.
In 1640 she received a proposal of marriage in absentia
from Charles de La Tour, who claimed the governorship
of Acadia in competition with Charles de Menou d’Aul-
nay, and sailed to Port-Royal to join him. Whether the
two had met earlier in France is not clear. After a mar-
riage ceremony was performed at Port-Royal, the couple
repaired to La Tour’s trading post near Saint John. There
Françoise-Marie gave birth to a son. In August 1642
d’Aulnay returned to Acadia with an official order that
La Tour appear before the King to answer charges of trea-
son. La Tour decided to send his wife, Françoise-Marie,
to represent him at the royal court, suggesting that she
had some connections there. She successfully argued
her husband’s case in 1642, then returned to Acadia in a
French warship, carrying supplies for La Tour.

In 1644 she went again to France, but this time
was unable to protect her husband’s interests against
d’Aulnay’s charges. Escaping to England with borrowed

money, Madame La Tour chartered an English ship to
carry her and supplies back to her husband. Off Cape
Sable the ship was detained and searched by d’Aulnay,
but Madame La Tour hid in the hold. Arriving in Boston,
she successfully sued the ship’s captain for unwarranted
delay, using the money to hire ships to reinforce La Tour
at Fort La Tour.

Early in 1645, with her husband again off in Boston
seeking fresh assistance, Madame La Tour commanded
the defence of Fort La Tour against an attack by d’Aul-
nay. Her 45 defenders held out for four days against an
invading force of 200, but she eventually surrendered
on the understanding that d’Aulnay would “give quarter
to all.” The victor, however, went back on his word. All
the captives except one man, who served as the execu-
tioner, were hanged. Madame La Tour, who was forced
to witness the executions with a rope around her own
neck, died scant weeks later.

She was probably the first European woman to
have made her home in what is now New Brunswick,
but as her experiences demonstrated, early life in the
region was dangerous and complicated for both men
and women.

Françoise-Marie Jacquelin La Tour

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472 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

settlers in 1653, he successfully courted d’Aulnay’s
widow. Pursued by creditors, he was forced in 1654 to
surrender his garrison of 70 at Fort La Tour to an invad-
ing English expedition of 500 men. La Tour was taken
to England, where Oliver Cromwell (by now head of the
English state) refused to restore his Acadian property
but did agree to recognize the long-dormant baronetcy
of Nova Scotia (negotiated earlier by Claude) if Charles
would accept English allegiance and pay his English
debts. Twenty-five years after denying his father and
asserting his loyalty to the French Crown, Charles de La
Tour accepted Cromwell’s terms. He eventually sold his
rights in Acadia to English partners and retired to Cape
Sable with his wife and family.

For more than 40 years La Tour and his family had
kept French interests alive in Acadia, but he was at best a
trader and not a colonizer. The few settlers he brought to
the New World were only incidental to his economic and
military activities. Unlike Champlain in Canada, La Tour
had no vision of a settled agricultural presence in Acadia,
perhaps because he had to contend with the spillover
from complex European rivalries. After his surrender to
the English in 1654, the scattered few hundred Acadian
residents were left to their own defences until formal
French occupation was restored in 1667. While the per-
iod of English control from 1654 to 1667 left little internal
mark on the region, it did isolate Acadia from the French
court’s rethinking of its American empire in the early
1660s. Acadia was not initially part of the Crown’s deci-
sion in 1663 to take a more active interest in its American
colonies. As a result, its subsequent status was never
properly clarified, leading to an administrative weakness
that encouraged its population to have an autonomous
outlook and encouraged France (in 1713) under pressure
to surrender large parts of the region to the English.

Acadia after 1670
Between 1660 and 1713 Acadians expanded both their
population and the extent of territory cultivated. A good
deal of data was collected in censuses, although most of
these censuses were incomplete. A census in 1671 listed
47 families made up of 400 people, nearly all in the Port-
Royal area of the Annapolis Basin. Although it was even-

tually named the capital of the colony in 1700, and was
frequently raided by New Englanders, Port-Royal was
by no means the whole of the colony. By 1710 the popu-
lation had grown to more than 1,500, mostly through
natural increase, and had planted settlements along the
Minas Basin, Cobequid, and Chignecto Bay.

Most of Acadia’s people came from a relatively
small area of southwestern France. The seigneurial sys-
tem controlled less of daily life in Acadia than it did
in the rest of New France, so the colony expanded in
what would become a typical form: settlers moving to
new land as resource limits were reached in older com-
munities. Younger members of families moved to new
communities, which featured dykes that controlled the
inundation of lowland areas by the high tides of the
Bay of Fundy. Marsh was drained for farming. Farms
were small but prosperous, the main crops being wheat
and peas. Fruit, especially apples, was common, as one
visitor claimed that farms were “as well planted with
Apple [sic] trees as they would have been in Normandy”
(Diereville 1933: 95). Even without dyking, the tidal
marshlands provided large quantities of hay and graz-
ing. This was used to feed livestock, especially cattle,
which was the chief product of the region. Illegal bar-
tering (especially of meat) with New Englanders, their
sometimes enemies, was the method by which Acadians
obtained most of their imported goods, particularly
tools and hardware.

On the outskirts of the tidal settlements, particu-
larly the Cap de Sable district, were small fishing com-
munities, perched upon the coast. In addition to fishing,
inhabitants of these communities supported themselves
by hunting, trading furs, and occasional timbering.
Raiding and privateering also occurred from bases in
these communities, which provided most of the access
to the farming settlements. Acadia had few roads and
little in terms of overland transportation. Movement
was by canoe and small boats called shallops.

Government sat fairly lightly upon this population.
The French never really asserted tight administrative
control over the region, although at least eight author-
ized royal governors were appointed to the region
between 1670 and 1710. The Church took a similarly
detached view of the colony and operated solely through
missionaries who provided some contact with Canada.

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48 A History of the Canadian Peoples

One of the least well-known North American col-

onies of Europe was Placentia or Plaisance, estab-

lished in the early 1660s by the French on the western

side of the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland on the

Bay of Plaisance (Placentia Bay). The middle years

of the seventeenth century were a particularly con-

fusing period on the northern Atlantic coast. The

English Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell had

expanded its naval resources in the region and had

taken over most of Acadia. As a result, French access

to the Atlantic region was being challenged, especially

on the beaches of Newfoundland, where the English

fishing fleet required increasingly large expanses

of beach to dry its catch. The fishery remained an

important imperial factor for all European nations,

since mercantilism cherished it both as a training

ground for a merchant marine and as a source of

protein for hungry citizens. The French decided that

a fortified post on the Newfoundland coast would

be the best way to demonstrate their claims to the

Newfoundland fishery and to protect their subjects in

it. A very young Thalour Du Perron was sent ashore

at the site about 100 kilometres south of St. John’s

in October 1662 with a few soldiers and a supply of

food. He was murdered over the following winter by

a drunken party of his men; the culprits were eventu-

ally brought to justice in Quebec. France spent over

10,000 livres a year before 1670 maintaining the tiny

colony, but was unsuccessful in establishing much

of an agricultural base; a summering population of

256 was fed by only 30 domestic animals and almost

no cultivated ground. Basque merchant vessels visit-

ing the colony charged what the traffic would bear,

since they were virtually the only source of supplies

and labour until the inhabitants managed to develop

a trade with other French traders and eventually with

vessels from Boston. A deep chasm between the set-

tlers and the visitors soon emerged, which lingered

throughout the colony’s existence. The soldiers of

the garrison were quartered in the homes of the

inhabitants and disarmed lest they become unruly,

which rendered them virtually useless in times of

crisis. The settlement was constantly beset with

instability, and easily succumbed in 1690 to a small

English party. Restored to France, it survived another

two decades, serving as the base for French naval

raiders in Newfoundland, until it was turned over to

the English in 1713.

BACKGROuNDER
Plaisance (Placentia)

The control of Placentia, seen in this 1786 drawing, shuffled between the English and French for over 50 years until the English gained
permanent control of the colony in 1713. Sketch by James S. Meres, “The Log Book of His Majesty’s Ship Pegasus.” LAC, C-002525.

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492 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

Culturally and politically, the Acadians remained iso-
lated from French Canada. The family (clan) and the
local community were the important units for a closely
knit peasant society. Acadia had developed an inherent
sense of autonomy when—in the chess game of eight-
eenth-century imperial warfare—France was obliged
under the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) to surrender terri-
tory in North America. Acadia was one of the pawns
given up to the British that year. The anciennes limites
of Acadia mentioned in the treaty were not defined,
and the French subsequently insisted that they had
surrendered only peninsular Nova Scotia, informally
retaining northern Maine and New Brunswick, and for-
mally retaining Île Royale (Cape Breton) and Île St-Jean
(Prince Edward Island). As for the population of the
ceded territory, which the British called Nova Scotia to
emphasize Britain’s historic claims there, the inhabit-
ants were given one year to remove to French territory
or to remain as subjects of their new masters.

Canada Fights for
Survival
In 1627 Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s “grey eminence,”
assumed supervision of New France and established
the Company of One Hundred Associates. However,
Richelieu’s company, unlike the English Newfoundland
Company, was organized from the top of the govern-
ment rather than from grassroots interest in the prof-
its of colonization. It was to be capitalized at 300,000
livres, each participant contributing 3,000, and profits
were not to be distributed initially. Of the 107 mem-
bers listed in May 1629, only 26 were merchants and
businessmen, mainly from Paris. The remainder were
courtiers and state officials. The company’s initial ven-
ture—at a cost of 164,270 livres—was to send to Quebec
in 1628 four ships containing 400 people and carrying
“all necessary commodities & quantities of workmen &
families coming to inhabit & clear the land and to build
& prepare the necessary lodging” (quoted in Trudel,
1973: 118). Unfortunately, England and France had gone
to war in 1627, and in July 1628 the company’s ships
were captured off Gaspé by an Anglo-Scottish armed

expedition led by the brothers Kirke. Thus began a mil-
itary struggle between France and Britain for control of
North America lasting more than a century.

In July 1629 David Kirke sent his brothers Lewis
and Thomas at the head of an Anglo-Scottish armed
expedition that forced Champlain’s little outpost on
the St Lawrence to surrender. Later that same year, an
attempt by the Company of One Hundred Associates
to reoccupy Quebec failed dismally. The colony was
restored to France in 1632 under the Treaty of Saint-
Germain-en-Laye. One of the first French arrivals that
year was Father Paul Le Jeune (1591–1664), recently
appointed superior-general of the Jesuit missions in
Canada. The Jesuits were to be the principal missionary
order in the colony. Le Jeune soon began sending the
first of his annual reports, the famous Jesuit Relations,
which were forwarded to the provincial father of the
Society of Jesus in Paris to explain and promote in the
mother country the missionaries’ efforts. They combine
a wealth of detail about life in New France, the First
Nations, Iroquois warfare, the Huron missions, explor-
ation and travel, as well as accounts of various miracles.
Champlain returned to Quebec in May 1633 after a four-
year exile, tired but optimistic. He would die at Quebec
on Christmas Day 1635, his vision of a prosperous col-
ony still beyond his grasp. At the time there were but
150 settlers along the St Lawrence.

Over the next few decades, the forces along the St
Lawrence that met in bitter rivalry were less French and
British and more Catholic evangelical energy on the
one hand and resistance from the Indigenous popula-
tion on the other. The prize was control of the fur trade.
Conflict along the Atlantic seaboard had more trad-
itional European overtones, while in Canada the long
rivalry between the Iroquois and the Algonquian trad-
ing allies of the French created much fear and havoc,
with disastrous consequences for the Huron people
caught in the middle.

The Huron had access to a seemingly inexhaust-
ible supply of furs from the northwest, and the French
were determined to keep the flow moving to Montreal
and Quebec. The Huron had outnumbered the Iroquois,
but in the 1630s their numbers were greatly reduced by
diseases chiefly contracted from the French missionaries
who lived among them. In 1634, the year the Jesuits set

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50 A History of the Canadian Peoples

up permanent missions in Huronia, the Huron suffered
an epidemic of measles. In 1639 the Jesuits oversaw the
building of an elaborate fortified headquarters, Ste-
Marie-aux-Hurons, on the Wye River. It eventually com-
prised 20 buildings, including a residence for priests, a
church, a hospital, outbuildings for farming, and resi-
dences for lay workers and Huron converts, as well as a
canal with three locks.

The Iroquois—supplied by the Dutch with firearms,
which the French were reluctant to give to their First
Nations allies—were equally determined to control the
flow of furs. They ambushed the Huron fur fleets on the
Ottawa River, and between 1640 and 1645 they block-
aded the river, while also from 1643 onward attacking
the settlements on the St Lawrence. Under the force of
the assault, the Company of One Hundred Associates
virtually withdrew from New France in 1645, giving its
fur-trading monopoly to the Communauté des Habitants,
an organization of Canadian merchants, which agreed

to continue to pay for the administration of the colony.
While the devolution of the fur trade to local interests
was probably a positive short-term move for the colony,
the new company felt the effects of Iroquois hostility,
which limited the fur trade for an entire decade. It also
meant that the fur traders Radisson and Grosseilliers
were badly treated when they returned from the west
with a large stock of furs in 1660.

The Iroquois soon turned their full attention to
Huronia. In July 1648 Senecas destroyed the mission of
St-Joseph and killed 700 Huron. In March 1649 a party
of 1,200 Iroquois destroyed St-Louis and St-Ignace,
where the priests Jean de Brébeuf (1593–1649) and
Gabriel Lalemant (1610–49) were tortured to death.
The weakened Huron surrendered, fled, or were killed.
Before the Iroquois could reach Ste-Marie, the Jesuits
there “applied the torch to the work of our own hands”
and fled with some 300 families to Christian Island in
Georgian Bay. Most died of starvation or malnutrition.

In 1603 Pierre Du Gua de Monts (1558?–1628) was

granted a trading monopoly in northeastern North

America in return for an obligation to settle 60 col-

onists each year and to establish missions among the

Aboriginals. Among the first settlers he recruited was

a young draftsman, Samuel de Champlain (c. 1570–

1635), who had been to Tadoussac in 1603 and would

serve as geographer and cartographer for de Monts’s

expedition. Champlain continued a commitment to

explore and colonize the New World that would end

only with his death (on Christmas Day, 1635). unlike

his English contemporaries, William Bradford at

Plymouth Plantation and John Winthrop at Boston,

Champlain had not been able to lead a prospering

colony through the problems of internal growth and

the establishment of permanent institutions. Instead,

much of his career was spent dealing with the pre-

liminaries of settlement, in the interests of which he

sailed to France nine times to further his plans for col-

onization or to resist attempts to negate them.

As a successful geographer and intrepid explorer

who was equal to the most arduous demands of wil-

derness life, and who was capable in complex dealings

with Native peoples, Champlain also left a literary leg-

acy. The three volumes of his Voyages (published in

Paris in 1613, 1619, and 1632) provide much of what we

know about New France during this period. Champlain’s

map of New France (facing page) appeared in the last

volume of his Voyages. It includes the territories he

explored, which are rendered quite accurately, along

with inevitably inaccurate renderings of regions for

which he had only second-hand information.

BACKGROuNDER
Champlain’s New France

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512 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

The next year the missionaries returned to Quebec
with a few hundred Huron, the pathetic remnant of a
once-powerful nation.

The Huron were early victims of European ethnocen-
trism. As for the missionaries themselves, only the Jesuits’
profound faith and misguided intentions—to educate
the First Nations in French ways and induct them into
a completely alien form of religion—kept them on their
indomitable rounds of travel and life under extremely
harsh and tense conditions. Many of the Huron turned
against the missionaries, blaming their problems with
disease and with the Iroquois on the Christian inter-
lopers. Indeed, in exposing the Huron to disease and
weakening their culture by introducing alien spiritual
elements, the missionaries may have inadvertently con-
tributed to the destruction of Huronia.

If the missionaries had only limited success with
the First Nations, their influence on the early European
population of Canada was far more positive. The mis-
sionary enterprise in Canada had two basic wings, often

only loosely connected: that of the Jesuits and that of the
lay missionaries.

The Society of Jesus was founded by Ignatius
Loyola in 1540 as a militant (and militarily organized)
order devoted largely to missionary activity around
the world. The Jesuits travelled around the globe, espe-
cially in the period 1550–1650, preaching and teaching
among indigenous people ranging from the Aztecs to
the Japanese. They developed a reputation for being
able to adapt Christianity to the customs of the local
people, and they were probably less rigid than most
missionaries in their views of what had to happen for
true conversion to take place. Members of the order
actually looked forward to martyrdom, although they
were not supposed to go out of their way to seek it. As
soldiers of Christ, they believed that conversion of
pagans occurred only through bloodshed. The Jesuits
were obviously highly disciplined and committed; to
the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, they
added one of loyalty to the Pope. Despite the suspicions

Champlain’s map of New France, 1632. LAC, NMC-15661.

901491_02_Ch02.indd 51 12/23/15 4:34 PM

52 A History of the Canadian Peoples

of the Crown, they were given a monopoly of religious
service in Canada in 1632. The Jesuits tended to be
more involved with missionary outreach than with the
European population.

The lay missions were organized as part of the
French Counter-Reformation, and were led by lay people

who discovered they had enormous depths of piety
that they were anxious to share with others, including
the First Nations in North America. When the widow
Marie-Madeleine de Chauvigny de la Peltrie (1603–71)
recovered from a serious illness in 1635, she made a vow
to establish a school for Native girls in New France. She

The great show of power made at first by the

Portuguese in the East and West Indies inspired pro-

found admiration in the minds of the Indians, so that

these people embraced, without any contradiction,

the belief of those whom they admired. Now the fol-

lowing is, it seems to me, the way in which to acquire

an ascendency over our Savages.

First, to check the progress of those who over-

throw Religion, and to make ourselves feared by the

Iroquois, who have killed some of our men, as every

one knows, and who recently massacred two hun-

dred Hurons, and took more than one hundred pris-

oners. This is, in my opinion, the only door through

which we can escape the contempt into which the

negligence of those who have hitherto held the trade

of this country has thrown us, through their avarice.

The second means of commending ourselves

to the Savages would be to send a number of ca-

pable men to clear and cultivate the land, who, join-

ing themselves with others who know the language,

would work for the Savages, on condition that they

would settle down, and put their hands to the work,

living in houses that would be built for their use. . . .

I may be mistaken but if I can draw any conclusion

from the things I see, it seems to me that not much

ought to be hoped from the Savages as long as they

are wanderers; you will instruct them today, tomor-

row hunger snatches your hearers away, forcing them

to go and seek their food in the rivers and woods.

Last year I stammered out the Catechism to a good-

ly number of children; as soon as the ships depart-

ed, my birds flew away. . . .To try and follow them, as

many Religious would be needed as there are cab-

ins, and still we would not attain our object; for they

are so occupied in seeking their livelihood in these

woods, that they have not the time, so to speak, to

save themselves. . . .

The third means of making ourselves welcome to

these people, would be to erect here a seminary for

little boys, and in time one for girls, under the direc-

tion of some brave mistress, whom zeal for the glory

of God and a desire for the salvation of these people,

will bring over here, with a few Companions ani-

mated by the same courage. May it please his divine

Majesty to inspire some to so noble an enterprise, and

to divest them of any fear that the weakness of their

sex might induce in them at the thought of crossing

so many seas and of living among Barbarians.

Father le Jeune on the Conversion of the “Savages,” 1634
This selection by Father Paul le Jeune (1591–1664), the founding editor of the Jesuit Relations,
offers some insight into the thinking of the fathers regarding their mission in the early 1630s.

Source: Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit

Missionaries in New France 1610–1791 (New York, 1959), vol. VI, 145–53.

Contemporary Views

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532 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

persuaded Marie de l’Incarnation to join her, put much
of her fortune in trust for the foundation, and even
financed a vessel and some immigrants to accompany
her. Once in New France, she founded the Ursuline con-
vent in Quebec. Another noblewoman sponsored three
nursing sisters of the order of Augustinian Hospitalières
on the same ship as the Ursulines. They founded a hos-
pital at Sillery to care for dozens of Aboriginals, most
of whom were Montagnais, Algonquin, and Abenaki,

with only a few Huron. The Société Notre-Dame de
Montréal organized a missionary effort in 1639 that
led to the establishment of Montreal in 1642. This work
was financed by donations from wealthy lay people.
Thirty-four of the 46 members were lay people, and 12
were women. For much of the mid-seventeenth century,
Canada would be largely dominated by the energy of its
leading women missionaries—Marie de l’Incarnation,
Jeanne Mance (founder of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital), and

It is a singular consolation to us to deprive ourselves

of all that is most necessary in order to win souls to

Jesus Christ, and we would prefer to lack everything

rather than leave our girls in the unbearable filth they

bring from their cabins. When they are given to us

they are naked as worms and must be washed from

head to foot because of the grease their parents rub all

over their bodies, and whatever diligence we use and

however often their linen and clothing is changed, we

cannot rid them for a long time of the vermin caused

by the abundance of grease. A Sister employs part of

each day at this. It is an office that everyone eagerly

covets. . . . But after all it is a very special providence

of this great God that we are able to have girls af-

ter the great number of them that died last year. This

malady, which is smallpox, being universal among the

Savages, it spread to our seminary, which in a very

few days resembled a hospital. All our girls suffered

this malady three times and four of them died from

it. . . . The Savages that are not Christians hold the

delusion that it is baptism, instruction, and dwelling

among the French that was the cause of this mor-

tality, which made us believe we would not be given

any more girls and that those we had would be taken

from us. God’s providence provided so benevolent

against this that the Savages themselves begged us

to take their daughters, so that if we had food and

clothing we would be able to admit a very great num-

ber, though we are exceedingly pressed for buildings.

Marie de l’Incarnation on Her Charges

Source: Joyce Marshall, ed., Word from New France: The Selected Letters of Marie de l’Incarnation (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1967), 75–6.

Marie de l’Incarnation, oil portrait attributed to Abbé Hugues
Pommier (1637–86). Archives des Ursulines de Quebec.

Contemporary Views

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54 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Marguerite Bourgeoys (founder of the Congrégation de
Notre-Dame)—aided by money supplied by lay patrons
in France. The missionaries, particularly the women,
were always objects of suspicion by the French, both lay
and ecclesiastical. They were accused of “Jansenism,”
a Protestant heresy. The fear was that their excess of
piety and inner spiritual experiences would lead them
to operate independently of the authorities, and there is
some evidence that many of these people were indeed
loose cannons in the wilderness, particularly before the
colony had a proper hierarchical structure. They were
only brought under control after the arrival in 1659 of
Bishop Laval, who had been consecrated the vicar apos-
tolic for Quebec.

In 1647 Canada adopted government by a central
council, with elected representatives of the districts
of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, and Montreal employed for
consultative purposes. Such a government was both
responsive to the wishes of the inhabitants and autono-
mous of the mother country, but the arrangement was
more a result of emergency conditions than a genuine
reform. With the Huron destroyed, the Iroquois turned
the full brunt of their fury on the French at Montreal.
François Dollier de Casson (1928: 155) observed that “not
a month of this summer [1651] passed without our roll of
slain being marked in red at the hands of the Iroquois.”
The attacks subsided over the course of the decade, but
the menace never entirely disappeared.

“Mort héroique de quelques pères de la Compagnie de Jésus dans la Nouvelle France,” lithograph by Et. David, 1844. LAC,
C-4462. This rendering tells us much about how the French by the nineteenth century interpreted these events. There is no evidence
to support this particular view of the deaths of the missionaries. What purpose do you think the artist intended by the depiction of
the boiling pot?

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552 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

Born in Champagne, France, Jeanne Mance (1606–73)
was one of a number of female missionaries to Canada
whose spiritual and physical energy sustained the col-
ony through the middle years of the seventeenth cen-
tury, when the Iroquois threat was at its height. Her
family was of the bureaucratic middle class, and she
was educated with the Ursulines. She gained experience
nursing in the hospitals of the Thirty Years War, and in
1640 she learned of the great missionary endeavour in
Canada, in which both men and women, including many
Ursulines, were engaged. The hagiographic accounts of
her life, which are virtually our only sources, all empha-
size her obedience and subordination to her confessors.
Travelling to Paris, she met with and impressed Father
Charles Lalemant, who was in charge of the Canadian
missions, telling him of her great hopes to join in the
cause. Thanks to a Parisian lady, she was introduced
to the Queen, Anne of Austria, and also to Angélique
Faure, one of the leaders of charitable enterprise in the
city. Faure asked Jeanne to go to Canada to establish a

hospital, providing a substantial sum of money for the
purpose.

Prior to setting sail for Canada, she met an associate
of Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, who persuaded
her to become associated with the Société Notre-Dame
de Montréal. Her patron approved her plan for the
establishment of a hospital in Montreal, at the western
frontier of the colony, and the Hotel-Dieu was founded,
in her home, soon after Montreal was established in
1642. The hospital was later transferred to Rue Saint-
Paul. In 1650 Mance loaned money to Maisonneuve to
recruit soldiers to defend the frontier, and she subse-
quently recruited three nursing sisters to assist her with
the hospital. In 1657 she fell on the ice and fractured her
arm and wrist, recovering its use only through a miracu-
lous relic. Her last years were troubled. According to her
modern biographer, she “encountered the inability of
authorities whom she revered to understand her deeds
of deliverance in earlier days” (DCB, I, 487). She died in
1673 after a long illness.

Jeanne Mance

Biography

The period of the Iroquois wars was a difficult one
for the French fur traders, and many headed northwest-
ward to avoid the enemy. Among these adventurers
were Pierre Radisson (c. 1640–1710) and his brother-
in-law Médard Chouart Des Groseilliers (c. 1618–96?).
Radisson was born in France, but had been captured
by Mohawks in 1651. Adopted by a prominent family,
he was forced to learn Aboriginal ways in order to
survive. In 1659 the brothers-in-law took a journey to
Lake Superior that excited their interest in exploring
the fur-producing region that they knew extended as
far north as Hudson Bay. They returned to Montreal in
1660 with a vast haul of beaver skins, which was seen
as the colony’s salvation. The two fur traders were not
well received, however; their furs were confiscated and
both men were prosecuted for trading without official

permission. Not surprisingly, they wound up in Boston
in 1664, where the English were quite enthusiastic about
the Hudson Bay fur trade. Eventually the pair would
head for London, where their enthusiastic reports about
conditions at the Bay led in 1670 to the establishment by
the English of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which would
contend with the French for control of the region until
the French conceded it to the English in 1713.

By the early 1660s the tensions within the col-
ony on the St Lawrence seemed to be manifesting in
strange forms. A general state of panic was produced
by an incident of alleged witchcraft, and in the midst
of carnival season in February 1663 the colony was
struck by a serious earthquake. Mère Marie de l’Incar-
nation noted, “we were all so frightened we believed it
was the eve of Judgement, since all the portents were

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56 A History of the Canadian Peoples

Born at Montigny-sur Abre, his father a member of a
younger branch of the distinguished Montmorency
family and his mother descended from Rouen legal
nobility, François de Laval (1623–1708) was marked
from childhood for the Church. He studied for some
years at the Jesuit College at La Fléche, then at Paris. His
studies were briefly interrupted by a family crisis, but
he was ordained as a subdeacon in 1646 and as priest
in 1647. As archdeacon of Évreux from 1648, he proved
indefatigable in his work, and he seemed destined for
missionary work in Indochina.

Before the politics of such an appointment could
be negotiated, however, Laval found himself the Jesuit

candidate for the post of bishop of New France, an
appointment in the giving of the archbishop of Rouen.
Again caught up in ecclesiastical politics, Laval ultimately
was appointed a vicar apostolic rather than a bishop, and
thus subject to the papacy rather than to the archbishop
of Rouen. He sailed for his new post in April 1659. His
first task was to get his authority recognized. This proved
easier than expected, thanks to a letter from Louis XIV to
the governor, which ordered Laval’s authority recognized
everywhere. His next job was to organize the Church in
New France, which before his arrival had been a decen-
tralized missionary operation. In 1662 he sailed to France
to consult with Louis XIV, returning to Canada with
increased powers, an ordinance founding the seminary
of Quebec, and an edict creating a Conseil Souverain.

Gradually the Church in Louis XIV’s royal prov-
ince of Canada took shape under his direction, and he
was named the first bishop of Quebec in 1674. Laval
organized a parochial system, which increased from
five parishes in 1659 to 35 in 1688, with 102 clergy.
He encouraged missionary activity, especially by the
Jesuits, and he took the lead in opposing the liquor trade
with the Aboriginals, a battle that he and the mission-
aries lost eventually. Laval became notorious for his
constant disagreements with the governors of the col-
ony over a variety of matters, both moral and political.

In 1684 he sailed for France to resign his bishopric,
but after having his resignation accepted, he attempted
to remain on the job for fear his successor would undo
much of his work. Abbé Saint-Vallier was consecrated
bishop early in 1688, and Laval returned to Canada
as “Monseigneur l’Ancien,” beloved of his people but
mainly retired from the fray at his seminary. He per-
mitted his successor to reform the seminary without
raising any opposition, and in later years he occasion-
ally performed episcopal functions in the absence of
Saint-Vallier, who was away from Canada from 1700 to
1713. Laval died in 1708 from a chilblain on his heel that
became infected.

Portrait of François de Laval, first bishop of New France, from
1674 to 1688. Bishop of Canada (oil on canvas), French School
(17th century) / Société des missions-étrangères, Paris, France /
Giraudon / Bridgeman Images.

François de Laval

Biography

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572 | Europe Settles In: Newfoundland, Acadia, New France

to be seen” (Marshall, 1967: 288–9). About this time the
French Crown formally withdrew trading privileges
and landownership from the Company of One Hundred
Associates and made New France a Crown colony. Given
the anxieties and problems of the colony, most of its
inhabitants were probably happy to trade autonomy for
French financial and military assistance. From the date
of the royal takeover, the civil code of Canada became
the Coutume de Paris, the code of civil law compiled
for the royal region of France. The Coutume was subse-
quently extended to other French colonies in the New
World. It was divided into 16 sections governing family,
inheritance, property, and debt. Its provisions tended to
be the more responsive to royal authority than those of
other regions.

Royal control was not immediately in evidence, but
in June 1665 four companies of the Carignan-Salières
Regiment arrived to quell the Iroquois. This unit had
its origins in Piedmont, where two regiments were
merged into one in 1659 in order to avoid disbandment.
Returned to 700 men, it was ordered to North America
in 1664 and strengthened to 1,000 troops by adding
other French companies, some of which may have
fought in the Austro-Turkish war of 1663–4. Additional
companies were transferred from Martinique to bring
the force to full strength. The regiment was brought to
New France in seven ships. Despite early campaigns of
limited success, the regiment altered the balance of mil-
itary power and brought the Iroquois to sue for peace in
1667, a peace that would hold for 20 years. Many men of
the regiment stayed on in the colony, tempted by offers
of land in the Richelieu Valley and other incentives. The
regiment departed Canada in 1668, and thanks to the
relative peace, virtually no regular French troops were
stationed there until 1684.

In September of 1665 an intendant (or chief admin-
istrative officer)—Jean Talon (1626–94)—arrived to
revitalize the colony. One of the royal government’s
first aims was to increase the population, and the filles
du roi (orphan girls raised at the King’s expense) were
sent over for that purpose. These “King’s Daughters”
would become a contingent of about 800 young women
brought to New France between 1665 and 1673 by Louis
XIV, who paid for their passage and provided them with
a trousseau and a dowry (the dowry was not always paid

in cash). The women were mainly between the ages of
15 and 25, and were required to be of high moral stan-
dards and considerable physical fitness. Unfortunately,
they were recruited chiefly in the cities and were often
not well equipped for an agricultural existence on the
frontier. Almost half came from the Paris region, and
they helped establish the French spoken in the capital
as the language of Canada. Normandy (16 per cent)
and western France (13 per cent) provided the bulk of
the remaining contingent. Between 770 and 850 young
women have been identified. Most did remain in New
France, although about 300 did not. Many did marry,
often to soldiers in the Carignan-Salières Regiment.
Mère Marie reported that 100 girls had arrived in
1665, and more would come later. How long the French
Crown would continue such support was uncertain,

Marguerite Bourgeoys, “Le Vrai Portrait,” painted the day
after her death in January 1700 by Pierre Le Ber. This work
was not discovered until the mid-twentieth century, when
x-rays of a work believed to be an authentic likeness revealed
the “true portrait” under several layers of paint. Musée
Marguerite-Bourgeoys, Montreal.

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58 A History of the Canadian Peoples

but it certainly rejuvenated the colony. The government
had begun making a concerted effort to deal with the
Iroquois menace and to reform both the administrative
and economic structure of New France. It would shortly
attempt to establish a foothold in Newfoundland and
later regain control over Acadia. Although success
would hold within it the seeds of destruction, the French
in 1665 were on the eve of almost a century of expansion
and dominance in North America.

One of Intendant Talon’s first tasks, undertaken
personally, was to conduct a census of the population
of the colony. Governments of the time employed the
census as a means of asserting their authority. Talon did
not count Aboriginal people or those in religious orders,
but he found 3,215 inhabitants clustered in three settle-
ments: Quebec (547), Trois-Rivières (455), and Montreal
(625). Only one-third of the population was or had been
married, and 842 were between 21 and 30 years of ages.
Those enumerated represented a broad range of occupa-
tions and professions, making clear that a substantial
population base existed for the King to improve with
positive policies.

Canada, 1663–1760
That part of New France along the St Lawrence known as
“Canada” mixed French origins and the North American
environment in a way that defied easy characterization.
The French background provided institutions, a termin-
ology with which to express them, and a set of assump-
tions about how society ought to be organized and
operated. The French government assumed an ordered
and hierarchical society in which the various social
orders stayed in their places and duly subordinated them-
selves to the good of the whole, as defined by the Crown.
As a complication, the French Crown was not satisfied
simply to replicate the familiar institutions of the Old
World in North America, but sought to reform and mod-
ernize them by stripping them of centuries of European
tradition that had decentralized power and limited royal
authority. At the same time, the environment, includ-
ing the Indigenous population, provided a set of daily
realities that subtly subverted European institutions
and assumptions, modifying and altering—while never

totally negating—efforts to imitate the mother country.
The result was a society that refracted the metropolis
in France through the dual prisms of royal reform and
North American experience. The external observer was
struck at first by the presence of familiar European pat-
terns and terminology, while beneath the surface differ-
ent social designs constantly were evolving.

The royal takeover of 1663 put French adminis-
trative policy for the colonies and its execution in the
hands of two men, the governor, Jean-Baptiste Colbert,
and the intendant, Jean Talon. Colbert was Louis XIV’s
chief bureaucrat, a highly experienced civil servant. His
major tasks both at home and abroad were to strengthen
royal government and expand the French economy.
As Minister of Marine, he served as the seventeenth-cen-
tury equivalent of colonial secretary, in addition to a
myriad of other responsibilities. To implement policy
in America, Colbert decided to establish the position of
intendant, a royal official who, in France, had been desig-
nated to cut through the accretion of centuries of devolu-
tion of royal power and to act decisively on behalf of the
state. Beginning with Talon’s appointment as intendant
in 1665, the colony’s administration was greatly reorgan-
ized and centralized. The governor, though the titular
head, was responsible for military affairs, external rela-
tions, and the colony’s connections with the Church
(including education).