Champlain and the Iroquois
The first permanent French settlement in America, as we have already stated, was made by De Monts in 1605, on the coast of the Bay of Fundy, the settlement being named Port Royal, and the country Acadia. In 1608, De Monts was granted a monopoly of the fur-trade on the St. Lawrence River, and sent out two vessels under Samuel Champlain, who had previously visited that region. Champlain ascended the river to the site of the present city of Quebec, near the place where Cartier had wintered in 1541. The colony he there established was the first permanent French settlement in Canada. The history of this colony under Champlain's management, of the explorations which he made, and of his hostile relations with the Iroquois Indians, is one of the greatest interest, and reads like a page from romance rather than the detail of sober history.
Champlain was one of the most active and earnest explorers the world has ever known. "A true hero, after the chivalrous mediaeval type, his character was dashed largely with the spirit of romance. Earnest, sagacious, penetrating, he yet leaned to the marvellous; and the faith which was the life of his hard career was somewhat prone to overstep the bounds of reason and invade the alluring domain of fancy." In early life he had been seized with a desire to explore those golden realms from which the Spaniards sedulously excluded the people of other European nations. He entered the Spanish service, and made his way to the West Indies and Mexico. He afterwards took part in the Port Royal expedition of De Monts, and explored the New England coast. His enterprising spirit, while of the utmost importance to the success of the Canadian colony, brought the colonists into hostile relations with the powerful Iroquois confederacy of Indians, and started a bitter and unrelenting war through which the settlement was more than once threatened with annihilation.
The colony of Canada had no thought of agriculture. It was distinctively a trading settlement, a condition conducive to adventurous excursions, in which movements Champlain was the leading spirit. It, unlike all other American colonies, entered at once into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with the neighboring Indian tribes, aided them in their wars, and roused the undying enmity of powerful foes. A description of the settlement of Quebec, of Champlain's first excursion with the Indians, of the discovery of the lake which bears his name, and of his first encounter with the Iroquois, may be taken from Parkman's "Pioneers of France in the New World."]
AND now, peace being established with the Basques, and the wounded Pontgrave busied, as far as might be, in transferring to the hold of his ship the rich lading of the Indian canoes, Chaplain spread his sails, and once more held his course up the St. Lawrence.
Above the point of the Island of Orleans, a constriction of the vast channel narrows it to a mile: on one hand the green heights of Point Levi; on the other, the cliffs of Quebec. Here a small stream, the St. Charles, enters the St. Lawrence, and in the angle between them rises the promontory, on two sides a natural fortress. Land among the walnut-trees that formed a belt between the cliffs and the St. Lawrence. Climb the steep height, now bearing aloft its ponderous load of churches, convents, dwellings, ramparts, and batteries,--there was an accessible point, a rough passage, gullied downward where Prescott Gate now opens on the Lower Town.. Two centuries and a half have quickened the solitude with swarming life, covered the deep bosom of the river with barge and steamer and gliding sail, and reared cities and villages on the site of forests; but nothing can destroy the surpassing grandeur of the scene.
A few weeks passed, and a pile of wooden buildings rose on the brink of the St. Lawrence, on or near the site of the market-place of the Lower Town of Quebec. The pencil of Champlain, always regardless of proportion and perspective, has preserved its semblance. A strong wooden wall, surmounted by a gallery loop-holed for musketry, enclosed three buildings, containing quarters for himself and his men, together with a court-yard, from one side of which rose a tall dove-cot, like a belfry. A moat surrounded the whole, and two or three small cannon were planted on salient platforms towards the river. There was a large magazine near at hand, and a part of the adjacent ground was laid out as a garden.
It was on the eighteenth of September that Pontgrave set sail, leaving Champlain with twenty-eight men to hold Quebec through the winter. Three weeks later, and shores and hills glowed with gay prognostics of approaching desolation,--the yellow and scarlet of the maples, the deep purple of the ash, the garnet hue of young oaks, the bonfire blaze of the tupelo at the water's edge, and the golden plumage of birch saplings in the fissure of the cliff. It was a short-lived beauty. The forest dropped its festal robes. Shrivelled and faded, they rustled to the earth. The crystal air and laughing sun of October passed away, and November sank upon the shivering waste, chill and sombre as the tomb.