On the western frontiers in the seventeenth century, it had been coureurs de hois and voyageurs who had pushed westward, leaving the governors scrambling to keep up. In the eighteenth century, official imperial policy increasingly guided the spread of French posts across central North America. In 1701, in the midst of the glut of furs, Versailles had initiated a clear challenge to English interests in North America by authorizing the foundation of the settlement of Detroit (from detroit, “the strait”) on the Great Lakes and the colony of Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi. No longer would New France be restrained to a small community on the St. Lawrence with some westward trading interests. Instead, it became French policy that New France and its Native allies would hold a line from the St. Lawrence through the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, confining English colonists to the coastal strip east of the Appalachian Mountains. At the same time French forts would extend west and north to encircle the Hudson’s Bay Company, perhaps even to open a route all the way to the Pacific.
This continent-spanning policy required a renewal of the fur trade. The long disruption caused by oversupply and war had not in itself exhausted the stockpile in Europe, but mice and other vermin had. What remained of the stored pelts had finally become unusable. Demand for beaver pelts revived, and markets opened for other furs. During the eighteenth century, moose, deer, bear, mink, and other pelts used for making robes and for trimming garments would become almost as important as the trade in beaver skins for the hatmakers, and with this boost New France’s fur trade grew larger than ever. Expansion required a great many western posts, which became military bases, trading shops, embassies, and missions to the Native peoples—and springboards for exploration. Intricate Native alliances remained essential to the trade as it moved farther west. To support New Erance’s Native allies. Governor Vaudreuil authorized his commander in the west. Constant Le Marchand de Lignery, to initiate a long war against their enemies, the Mesquatie, or Fox, nation west of Lake Michigan. The royal expenditure on forts in the west subsidized Montreal’s fur trade, but it also increased the domination of the trade by military officers like de Lignery.
One military officer with a great influence on the trade was Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Verendrye. While commanding the postes du nord north-west of Lake Superior, La Verendrye became convinced that with the help of his Native allies he could reach a river flowing west or south to the Pacific. He and his sons devoted fifteen years to the task, fighting, on one hand, to retain the support of royal officials and Montreal merchants, and, on the other, to persuade mutually hostile Native nations to permit this western movement. The La Verendryes never reached the Pacific (where, about this time, Russian fur traders were just reaching Alaska), but they crossed the plains almost to the foothills of the Rockies, and they greatly advanced geographical knowledge. The chain of posts they left on the Manitoba lakes ensured that the Hudson’s Bay Company could not monopolize the far-western fur
La France Apportant la Foi aux Indians de la Nouvelle France: oil on canvas, c. 1675. This great idealization of France’s mission to the New World is attributed to Frere Luc (1614-85). In 1644 Claude Francois abandoned a promising career as a court painter and associate of Vouet, Poussin, and Claude to join the Recollet order; as Frere Luc he spent 15 months in New France in 1670-71, designing and decorating many of the colony’s churches. Returning to France with his patron, Bishop Laval, he continued to paint pictures for Canadian churches. The female figure on the left of this canvas—a portrait of Anne of Austria, mother of the Queen of France—represents France; in the background is the St. Lawrence River.
This remarkably imaginative bird’s-eye view of the countryside around Quebec City (foreground) about 1664 accurately records how 30 years of labour had cleared the forest to create the rural landscape of New France. The He d’Orleans (centre) and the Beaupre shore (left) were among the first seigneurial lands to be cleared, settled, and farmed.
Few of New France’s small corps of trained artists left a record of daily life in the colony. It is better covered in the works of amateurs, such as this charming sketch in brown ink and watercolour by the Jesuit Louis Nicolas, illustrating a description of native fishing techniques in the Codex canadensis (c. 1700), the Abbe’s manuscript of New World peoples, flora, and fauna.
The highest artistic accomplishments of New France were the paintings, architecture, sculpture, and silverwork commissioned by the church. Jacques Leblond de Latour (1671-1715), a painter and woodcarver from Bordeaux who later became a priest, built this gilded wooden tabernacle for the altar of the parish church of Ange-Gardien about 1695.
Chalice, ciborium, and monstrance, dating from 1810 to 1812, by Franqois Ranvoyze (1739-1819). These three gold vessels from the church of LTslet together constitute the most celebrated examples of Quebec orfevrerie at its peak. Normally such articles were wrought in silver. This suite testifies to the continued flourishing of certain of Quebec’s material arts decades after the Conquest.
Merchant and royal administrator Denis Riverin may have commissioned this ex voto, attributed to Michel Dessailliant de Richeterre (active c. 1700-23), and presented to the church at Ste-Anne-de-Beaupre in 1703 to express Riverin’s gratitude for his family’s survival of the epidemics that scourged the colony in the early 18th century. (A more usual motivation for such commissions was the donor’s survival of shipwreck.) In New France, elaborate dress was the fundamental outward sign of status; even the Riverin children display the costly fabrics and adornments imported from France for members of the elite.
Marguerite Bourgeoys (1620-1700)—founder of the Congregation de Notre-Dame de Montreal, a religious community dedicated to the education of young girls—personifies the ascetic zeal of the 17th-century missionaries of New France in this stark commemorative portrait by Pierre Le Ber (1669-1707), painted after the subject’s death in 1700. The artist’s sister Jeanne, a friend of Marguerite Bourgeoys, shared that spirit and spent most of her life as a religious recluse.
Though painted in 1786, nearly three decades after the end of the French regime, this work reflects one of the accepted but rarely depicted realities of New France’s hierarchical society: slavery. The artist, Francois Beaucourt (1740-94), who studied painting in Bordeaux and became associated with pupils of Fragonard in Paris before returning to Quebec around 1786, was the first native-born Canadian to achieve real distinction as a painter. The model for this portrait is said to have been Beaucourt’s servant, and possibly his mistress.
The Death of Wolfe, by American-born artist Benjamin West (1738-1820), became an icon of the British imperial triumph in the Seven Years War. It also created the genre of historical painting in contemporary dress, breaking the tradition of painting only classical scenes. The setting, scenery, and witnesses are almost entirely symbolic—Wolfe died during the battle, with about four aides present. Completed in 1776 and retouched in 1810, this version was either the third or the fourth of West’s six renderings of the subject.
Trade. The British company, however, was probably receiving all the furs it needed and may not have felt threatened by the advance of the French.
As western posts proliferated, fur-trade careers changed. To defray some of the costs of expansion, the French Crown increasingly yielded control of the trade to its military commanders in the west. A western command became a financial opportunity for ambitious young aristocrats willing to serve in the distant outposts. They could now make partnerships with merchants and voyageurs who would pay a fee or a share of their profits in exchange for access to the officers’ local trade monopoly. These new arrangements sapped the independence of the voyageurs who had formerly run the trade. More and more, the men who portaged and paddled the goods over the ever-longer routes between Montreal and the trading posts became hired labourers earning a wage from the merchants and their military partners. On the main routes, bigger canoes were introduced. Some were 10 metres (33 feet) long and were paddled by eight men. By the 1730s, even a man’s place in the canoe was specified, with the more demanding bow and stern positions being the most highly paid.
Brigades of these canoes left Montreal Island every spring. The shortest journeys— to Michilimackinac or Detroit—would bring the men back by fall. Longer voyages—half of all the departures from Montreal—demanded a longer commitment from the men, who often left in the faU and spent two winters in the pays d’en haut. As western trade and posts expanded in the 1720s and 1730s, some voyageurs began settling in the west. Bringing wives from home or marrying Native women, they started families at Detroit, Michilimackinac, and the Upper Mississippi region known as the Illinois country. Other voyageurs still kept homes in Montreal, returning for a season or two every few years to households that must largely have been run by their wives alone.
These years probably created much of the colourful tradition of the voyageurs, their cult of strength and endurance, and the rivalry between hommes du nord, who wintered in the far west and lived on Native food and pemmican, and mangeurs de lard, who returned to eat salt pork in Montreal each fall. Voyageurs were celebrated in songs and folktales such as the Chasse-Galerie, in which the devil would offer to fly a canoe full of voyageurs home in a single night. Reality was less romantic. As their manpower needs grew, fur-trade merchants began to recruit beyond Montreal Island, once the source of most voyageurs. After 1730, half of those who signed contracts to work in the fur trade described themselves as habitants—that is, as farmers. For most of these, a western voyage was temporary work, undertaken for the money and soon abandoned in favour of full-time farming. There were still voyageurs who followed their fathers
European Explorers and European Perceptions of Canada. From Cartier’s time to the twentieth century European explorers, usually guided by Native allies, mapped routes across the continent—and struggled to build a mental geography of Canada, as a way to describe the diversity they found.
Into the trade and made a career of it, but expansion evidently drew in an increasing number of less skilled and less enthusiastic participants from the countryside.
The voyageur era also saw the emergence of the Metis, “a people between” the colonists and the Aboriginals. Back to the time of Etienne Brule, there had always been Frenchmen who joined Native communities and made “country marriages” with Native women; indeed, such partnerships were a vital part of the fur trade alliances. Early on, the children of such marriages would have become part of Native society. Later, as fur trade posts proliferated around the Great Lakes, permanent communities, part-French, part-Native, grew up around them (just as Scots-Native communities did around Hudson’s Bay posts). From these family networks evolved the Metis, the mixed-blood people, who developed a role in the fur trade distinct from both Native and colonial society. As the fur trade expanded into the NorthWest, the Metis moved with it, and on the plains they would become farmers and Buffalo-hunters as well as traders and voyageurs. Gradually they developed their own dialect, called “Michif,” and established their own Metis customs and identity as part of the cultural mix of the fur-trading world.
World History
