FROM 1763 TO 1812

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That night it was pitch-dark, soft, velvet, warm summer darkness. From the fort the soldiers could see the sixty captives from the convoy burning outside at the torture stakes. Then as gray morning came mangled corpses floated past on the river tide. June 18 another vessel glides up the river with help, but the garrison is afraid of a second disaster, for eight hundred warriors have lain in ambush along the river. Gladwin orders a cannon fired. The boat fires back answer, but the wind falls and she is compelled to anchor for the night below the fort. Sixty soldiers armed to the teeth are on board; but the captain is determined to out-trick the Indians, and he permits only twelve of his men at a time on deck. Darkness has barely fallen on the river before the waters are alive with canoes, and naked warriors clamber to the decks like scrambling monkeys, so sure they have outnumbered their prey that they forget all caution. At the signal of a hammer knock on deck, rap rap rap, three times short and sharp, up swarm the soldiers from the hatchway. Fourteen Indians dropped on the deck in as many seconds. Others were thrown on bayonet points into the river. It is said that after the fight of a few seconds on the ship the decks looked like a butcher’s shambles. Finally the schooner anchored at Detroit, to the immense relief of the beleaguered garrison. So elated were the English, one soldier dashed from a sally port and scalped a dying Indian in full view of both sides. Swift came Indian vengeance. Captain Campbell, the truce messenger, was hacked to pieces. By July 28, Dalzell has come from Niagara with nearly two hundred men, including Rogers, the famous Indian fighter. Both Dalzell and Rogers are mad for a rush from the fort to deal one crushing blow to the Indians. Here the one mistake of the siege was made. Gladwin was against all risk, for the Indians were now dropping off to the hunting field, but Dalzell and Rogers were for punishing them before they left. In the midst of a dense night fog the English sallied from the fort at two o’clock on the 31st of July for Pontiac’s main camp, about two miles up the river, boats rowing upstream abreast the marchers. It was hot and sultry. The two hundred and fifty bushrangers marched in shirt sleeves, two abreast. A narrow footbridge led across a brook, since known as Bloody Run, to cliffs behind which the Indians were intrenched. Along the trail were the whitewashed cottages of the French farmers, who stared from their windows in their nightcaps, amazed beyond speech at the rashness of the English. On a smaller scale it was a repetition of Braddock’s defeat on the Ohio. Indians lay in ambush behind every house, every shrub, in the long grass. They only waited till Dalzell’s men had crossed the bridge and were charging the hill at a run. Then the war whoop shrilled both to fore and to rear. The Indians doubled up on their trapped foe from both sides. Rogers’ Rangers dashed for hiding in a house. The drum beat retreat. Under cover of Rogers’ shots from one side, shots from the boats on the other, Dalzell’s men escaped at a panic run back over the trail with a loss of some sixty dead. In September came more ships with more men, again to be ambushed at the narrows, and again to reach Detroit, as the old record says, “bloody as a butcher’s shop.” So the siege dragged on for more than a year at Detroit. Winter witnessed a slight truce to fighting, for starvation drove the Indians to the hunting field; but May saw Pontiac again encamped under the walls of Detroit till word came from the French on the lower Mississippi in October, definitely and for all, they would not join the Indians. Then Pontiac knew his cause was lost.

Up at Michilimackinac similar scenes were enacted. Major Etherington and Captain Leslie had some thirty-five soldiers. There were also hosts of traders outside the walls, among whom was Alexander Henry of Montreal. Word had come of Pontiac at Detroit, but Etherington did not realize that the uprising was general. June 4 was the King’s birthday. Shops had been closed. Flags blew above the fort. Gates were wide open. Squaws with heads under shawls sat hunched around the house steps, with that concealed beneath their shawls which the English did not guess. All the men except Henry, who was writing letters, and some Frenchmen, who understood the danger signs, had gone outside the gates to watch a fast and furious game of lacrosse. Again and again the ball came bounding towards the fort gates, only to be whisked to the other end of the field by a deft toss, followed by the swift runners. No one was louder in applause than Etherington. The officers were completely off guard. Suddenly the crowds swayed, gave way, opened; . . . and down the field towards the fort gates surged the players. A dexterous pitch! The ball was inside the fort. After it dashed the Indians. In a flash weapons were grasped from the shawls of the squaws. Musket and knife did the rest. When Henry heard the war whoop and looked from a window he saw Indian warriors bending to drink the blood of hearts that were yet warm. For two days Henry lived in the rubbish heap of the attic in the house of Langlade, a pioneer of Wisconsin. Of the whites at Michilimackinac only twenty escaped death, and they were carried prisoners to the Lower Country for ransom.

From Virginia to Lake Superior such was the Indian war known as Pontiac’s Campaign. Fort Pitt held out like Detroit. Niagara was too strong for assault, but in September twenty-four soldiers, who had been protecting portage past the falls, were waylaid and driven over the precipice at the place called Devil’s Hole. More soldiers sent to the rescue met like fate, horses and wagons being stampeded over the rocks, seventy men in all being hurled to death in the wild canyon.

Amherst, who was military commander at this time, was driven nearly out of his senses. A foe like the French, who would stand and do battle, he could fight; but this phantom foe, that vanished like mist through the woods, baffled the English soldier. In less than six months two thousand whites had been slain; and Amherst could not even find his foe, let alone strike him. “Can we not inoculate them with smallpox, or set bloodhounds to track them?” he writes distractedly.

By the summer of 1764 the English had taken the war path. Bradstreet was to go up the lakes with twelve hundred men, Bouquet, with like forces, to follow the old Pennsylvania road to the Ohio, both generals to unite somewhere south of Lake Erie. Of Bradstreet the least said the better. He had done well in the great war when he captured Fort Frontenac almost without a blow; but now he strangely played the fool. He seemed to think that peace, peace at any price, was the object, whereas peace that is not a victory is worthless with the Indian. Deputies met him on the 12th of August near Presqu’ Isle, Lake Erie. They carried no wampum belts and were really spies. Without demanding reparation, without a word as to restoring harried captives, without hostages for good conduct, Bradstreet entered into a fool’s peace with his foes, proceeded up to Detroit, and was back at Niagara by winter; though he must have realized the worthlessness of the campaign when his messengers sent to the Illinois were ambushed.

When Bouquet heard of the sham peace he was furious and repudiated Bradstreet’s treaty in toto. Bouquet was a veteran of the great war, and knew bushfighting from seven years’ experience on Pennsylvania frontiers. Slowly, with his fifteen hundred rangers and five hundred Highlanders, express riders keeping the trail open from fort to fort, scouts to fore, Bouquet moved along the old army trail used by Forbes to reach Fort Pitt. Friendly Indians had been warned to keep green branches as signals in the muzzles of their guns. All others were to be shot without mercy. Indians vanished before his march like mist before the sun. August 5 found Bouquet south of Fort Pitt at a place known as Bushy Run. The scouts had gone ahead to prepare nooning for the army at the Run. In seven hours the men had marched seventeen miles spite of sweltering heat; but at one, just as the thirsty columns were nearing the rest place, the crack crack crack of rifle shots to the fore set every man’s blood jumping. From quick march they broke to a run, priming guns, ball in mouth as they ran. A moment later the old trick of Braddock’s ambush was being repeated, but this time the Indians were dealing with a seasoned man. Bouquet swung his fighters in a circle round the stampeding horses and provision wagons. The heat was terrific, the men almost mad with thirst, the horses neighing and plunging and breaking away to the woods; and the army stood, a red-coated, tartan-plaid target for invisible foes! By this time the men were fighting as Indians fight breaking ranks, jumping from tree to tree. It is n’t easy to keep men standing as targets when they can’t get at the foe; but Bouquet, riding from place to place, kept his men in hand till darkness screened them. Sixty had fallen. A circular barricade was built of flour bags. Inside this the wounded were laid, and the army camped without water. The agonies of that night need not be told. Here the neighing of horses would bring down a clatter of bullets aimed in the dark; and the groans of the wounded, trampled by the stampeding cavalcade, would mingle with the screams of terror from the horses. The night continued hot almost as day in the sultry forest, and the thirst with both man and beast became anguish. Another such day and another such night, and Bouquet could foresee his fate would be worse than Braddock’s. Passing from man to man, he gave the army their instructions for the next day. They would form in three platoons, with the center battalion advanced to the fore, as if to lead attack. Suddenly the center was to feign defeat and turn as if in panic flight. It was to be guessed that the Indians would pursue headlong. Instantly the flank battalions were to sweep through the woods in wide circle and close in on the rear of the savages. Then the fleeing center was to turn. The savages would be surrounded. Daybreak came with a cracking of shots from ambush. Officers and men carried out instructions exactly as Bouquet had planned. At ten o’clock the center column broke ranks, wavered, turned, . . . fled in wild panic! With the whooping of a wolf pack in full cry, the savages burst from ambush in pursuit. The sides deployed. A moment later the center had turned to fight the pursuer, and the Highlanders broke from the woods, yelling their slogan, with broadswords cutting a terrible hand-to-hand swath. Sixty Indians were slashed to death in as many seconds. Though the British lost one hundred and fifteen, killed and wounded, the Indians were in full flight, blind terror at their heels. The way was now open to Port Pitt, but Bouquet did not dally inside the palisades. On down the Ohio he pursued the panic-stricken savages, pausing neither for deputies nor reenforcements. At Muskingum Creek the Indians sent back the old men to sue, sue abjectedly, for peace at any cost.

Bouquet met them with the stern front that never fails to win respect. They need not palm off their lie that the fault lay with the foolish young warriors. If the old chiefs would not control the young braves, then the whole tribe, the whole Indian race, must pay the penalty. In terror the deputies hung their heads. He would not even discuss the terms of peace, Bouquet declared, till the Indians restored every captive, man, woman, and child, even the child of Indian parentage born in captivity. The captives must be given suitable clothing, horses, and presents. Twelve days only would he permit them to gather the captives. If man, woman, or child were lacking on the twelfth day, he would pursue them and punish them to the uttermost ends of earth.

The Indians were dumfounded. These were not soft words. Not thus had the French spoken, with the giving of manifold presents. But powder was exhausted. No more was coming from the French traders of the Mississippi. Winter was approaching, and the Indians must hunt or starve. Again the coureurs are sent spurring the woods from tribe to tribe with wampum belts, but this time the belts are the white bands of peace. While Bouquet waits he sends back over the trail for hospital nurses to receive the captives, and the army is set knocking up rude barracks of log and thatch in the wilderness. Then the captives begin to come. It is a scene for the brush of artist, for all frontiersmen who have lost friends have rallied to Bouquet’s camp, hoping against hope and afraid to hope. There is the mother, whose infant child has been snatched from her arms in some frontier attack, now scanning the lines as they come in, mad with hope and fear. There is the husband, whose wife has been torn away to some savage’s tepee, searching, searching, searching among the sad, wild-eyed, ill-clad rabble for one with some resemblance to the wife he loved. There is the father seeking lost daughters and afraid of what he may find; and there are the captives themselves, some of the women demented from the abuse they have received. England may have spent her millions to protect her colonies, but she never spent in anguish what these rude frontiersmen suffered at Bouquet’s camp.

So ended what is known as the Pontiac War. Up at Detroit in 1765 Pontiac, in council with the whites, explains that he has listened to bad advice, but now his heart is right. “Father, you have stopped the rum barrel while we talked,” he says grimly; “as our business is finished, we request that you open the barrel, that we may drink and be merry.”

Not a very heroic curtain fall to a dramatic life. But pause a bit: the Pontiac War was the last united stand of a doomed race against the advance of the conquering alien; and the Indian is defeated, and he knows it, and he acknowledges it, and he drowns his despair in a vice, and so he passes down the Long Trail of time with his face to the west, doomed, hopeless, pushed westward and ever west.

Pontiac goes down the Mississippi to his friends, the French fur traders of St. Louis. One morning in 1767, after a drinking bout, he is found across the river, lying in camp, with his skull split to the neck. By the sword he had lived, by the sword he perished. Was the murder the result of a drunken quarrel, or did some frenzied frontiersman with deathless woes bribe the hand of the assassin? The truth of the matter is unknown, and Pontiac’s death remains a theme for fiction.

What with struggles for power and Indian wars, one might think that the few hundred English colonists of Quebec and Montreal had all they could do. Not so: their quarrels with the French Catholics and fights with the Indians are merely incidental to the main aim of their lives, to the one object that has brought them stampeding to Canada as to a new gold field, namely, quick way to wealth; and the only quick way to wealth was by the fur trade. In the wilderness of the Up Country wander some two or three thousand cast-off wood rovers of the old French fur trade. As the prodigals come down the Ottawa, down the Detroit, down the St. Lawrence, the English and Scotch merchants of Montreal and Quebec meet them. Mighty names those merchants have in history now, McGillivrays and MacKenzies and McGills and Henrys and MacLeods and MacGregors and Ogilvies and MacTavishes and Camerons, but at this period of the game the most of them were what we to-day would call petty merchants or peddlers. In their storehouses small, one-story, frame affairs were packed goods for trade. With these goods they quickly outfitted the French bushrover $3000 worth to a canoe and packed the fellow back to the wilderness to trade on shares before any rival firm could hire him. Within five years of Wolfe’s victory in 1759 all the French bushrovers of the Up Country had been reengaged by merchants of Montreal and Quebec.

Then imperceptible changes came, the changes that work so silently they are like destiny. Because it is unsafe to let the rascal bushrovers and voyageurs go off by themselves with $3000 worth to the canoe load, the merchants began to accompany them westward. “Bourgeois,” the voyageurs call their outfitters. Then, because success in fur trade must be kept secret, the merchants cease to have their men come down to Montreal. They meet them with the goods halfway, at La Verendrye’s old stamping ground on Lake Superior, first at the place called Grand Portage, then, when the United States boundary is changed in 1783, at Kaministiquia, or modern Fort William, named after William McGillivray. Pontiac’s War puts a stop to the new trade, but by 1766 the merchants are west again. Henry goes up the Saskatchewan to the Forks, and comes back with such wealth of furs he retires a rich magnate of Montreal. The Frobisher brothers strike for new hunting ground. So do Peter Pond and Bostonnais Pangman, and the MacKenzies, Alexander and Roderick. Instead of following up the Saskatchewan, they strike from Lake Winnipeg northward for Churchill River and Athabasca, and they bring out furs that transform those peddlers into merchant princes. A little later the chief buyer of the Montreal furs is one John Jacob Astor of New York. Then another change. Rivalry hurts fur trade. Especially do different prices demoralize the Indians. The Montreal merchants pool their capital and become known as the Northwest Fur Company. They now hire their voyageurs outright on a salary. No man is paid less than what would be $500 in modern money, with board; and any man may rise to be clerk, trader, wintering partner, with shares worth 800 pounds ($4000), that bring dividends of two and three hundred per cent. The petty merchants whom Murray and Carleton despised became in twenty years the opulent aristocracy of Montreal, holding the most of the public offices, dominating the government, filling the judgeships, and entertaining with a lavish hospitality that put vice-regal splendor in the shade. The Beaver Club is the great rendezvous of the Montreal partners. “Fortitude in Distress” is the motto and lords of the ascendant is their practice. No man, neither governor nor judge, may ignore these Nor’westers, and it may be added they are a law unto themselves. One example will suffice. A French merchant of Montreal took it into his head to have a share of this wealth-giving trade. He was advised to pool his interests with the Nor’westers, and he foolishly ignored the advice. In camp at Grand Portage on Lake Superior he is told all the country hereabout belongs to the Nor’westers, and he must decamp.

“Show me proofs this country is yours,” he answers. “Show me the title deed and I shall decamp.”

Next night a band of Nor’westers, voyageurs well plied with rum, came down the strand to the intruder’s tents. They cut his tents to ribbons, scatter his goods to the four winds, and beat his voyageurs into insensibility.

“Voila! there are our proofs,” they say.

The French merchant hastens down to Montreal to bring lawsuit, but the judges, you must remember, are shareholders in the Northwest Company, and many of the Legislative Council are Nor’westers. What with real delays and sham delays and put-offs and legal fees, justice is a bit tardy. While the case is pending the French merchant tries again. This time he is not molested at Fort William. They let him proceed on his way up the old trail to Lake of the Woods, the trail found by La Verendrye; and halfway through the wilderness, where the cataract offers only one path for portage, the Frenchman finds Nor’-westers building a barricade; he tears it down. They build another; he tears that down. They build a third; fast as he tears down, they build up. He must either go back baffled by these suave, smiling, lawless rivals, or fight on the spot to the death; but there is neither glory nor wealth being killed in the wilderness, where not so much as the sands of the shore will tell the true story of the crime. So the French merchant compromises, sells out to the Nor’westers at cost plus carriage, and retires to the St. Lawrence cursing British justice.

It may be guessed that the sudden eruption of “the peddlers,” these bush banditti, these Scotch soldiers of fortune with French bullies for fighters, roused the ancient and honorable Hudson’s Bay Company from its half-century slumber of peace. Anthony Hendry, who had gone up the Saskatchewan far as the Blackfoot country of the foothills, they had dismissed as a liar in the fifties because he had reported that he had seen Indians on horseback, whereas the sleepy factors of the bay ports knew very well they never saw any kind of Indians except Indians in canoes; but now in the sixties it is noted by the company that not so many furs are coming down from the Up Country. It is voted “the French Canadian peddlers of Montreal” be notified of the company’s exclusive monopoly to the trade of these regions. One Findley is sent to Quebec to look after the Hudson’s Bay Company’s rights; but while the English company talks about its rights, the Nor’westers go in the field and take them.

The English company rubs its eyes and sits up and scratches its heavy head, and passes an order that Mr. Moses Norton, chief factor of Churchill, send Mr. Samuel Hearne to explore the Up Country. Hearne has heard of Far-Away-Metal River, far enough away in all conscience from the Canadian peddlers; and thither in December, 1770, he finds his way, after two futile attempts to set out. Matonabbee, great chief of the Chippewyans, is his guide, Matonabbee, who brings furs from the Athabasca, and is now accompanied by a regiment of wives to act as beasts of burden in the sledge traces, camp servants, and cooks. Hearne sets out in midwinter in order to reach the Coppermine River in summer, by which he can descend to the Arctic in canoes. Storm or cold, bog or rock, Matonabbee keeps fast pace, so fast he reaches the great caribou traverse before provisions have dwindled and in time for the spring hunt. Here all the Indian hunters of the north gather twice a year to hunt the vast herds of caribou going to the seashore for summer, back to the Up Country for the winter, herds in countless thousands upon thousands, such multitudes the clicking of the horns sounds like wind in a leafless forest, the tramp of the hoofs like galloping cavalry. Store of meat is laid up for Hearne’s voyage by Matonabbee’s Indians; and a band of warriors joins the expedition to go down Coppermine River. If Hearne had known Indian customs as well as he knew the fur trade, he would have known that it boded no good when Matonabbee ordered the women to wait for his return in the Athabasca country of the west. Absence of women on the march meant only one of two things, a war raid or hunt, and which it was soon enough Hearne learned. They had come at last, on July 12, 1771, on Coppermine River, a mean little stream flowing over rocky bed in the Barren Lands of the Little Sticks (Trees), when Hearne noticed, just above a cataract, the domed tepee tops of an Eskimo camp. It was night, but as bright as day in the long light of the North. Instantly, before Hearne could stop them, his Indians had stripped as for war, and fell upon the sleeping Eskimo in ruthless massacre. Men were brained as they dashed from the domed tents, women speared as they slept, children dispatched with less thought than the white man would give to the killing of a fly. In vain Hearne, with tears in his eyes, begged the Indians to stop. They laughed him to scorn, and doubtless wondered where he thought they yearly got the ten thousand beaver pelts brought to Churchill. A few days later, July 17, 1771, Hearne stood on the shores of the Arctic, heaving to the tide and afloat with ice; but the horrors of the massacre had robbed him of an explorer’s exultation, though he was first of pathfinders to reach the Arctic overland. Matonabbee led Hearne back to Churchill in June of 1772 by a wide westward circle through the Athabasca Bear Lake Country, which the Hudson’s Bay people thus discovered only a few years before the Nor’westers came.

No longer dare the Hudson’s Bay Company ignore the Up Country. Hearne is sent to the Saskatchewan to build Fort Cumberland, and Matthew Cocking is dispatched to the country of the Blackfeet, modern Alberta, to beat up trade, where his French voyageur, Louis Primeau, deserts him bag and baggage, to carry the Hudson’s Bay furs off to the Nor’westers. No longer does the English company slumber on the shores of its frozen sea. Yearly are voyageurs sent inland, “patroons of the woods,” given bounty to stay in the wilds, luring any trade from the Nor’westers.

The Quebec Act, guaranteeing the rights of the French Canadians, had barely been put in force before the Congress of the revolting English colonies sent up proclamations to be posted on the church doors of the parishes, calling on the French to throw off the British yoke, to join the American colonies, “to seize the opportunity to be free.” Unfortunately for this alluring invitation, Congress had but a few weeks previously put on record its unsparing condemnation of the Quebec Act. Inspired by those New Englanders who, for a century, had suffered from French raids, Congress had expressed its verdict on the privileges granted to Quebec in these words: “Nor can we supress our astonishment that a British Parliament should establish a religion that has drenched your island [England] in blood.” This declaration was the cardinal blunder of Congress as far as Canada was concerned. Of the merits of the quarrel the simple French habitant knew nothing. He did what his cure told him to do; and the Catholic Church would not risk casting in its lot with a Congress that declared its religion had drenched England in blood. English inhabitants of Montreal and Quebec, who had flocked to Canada from the New England colonies, were far readier to listen to the invitation of Congress than were the French.

Governor Carleton had fewer than 800 troops, and naturally the French did not rally as volunteers in the impending war between England and her English colonies. Should the Congress troops invade Canada? The question was hanging fire when Ethan Allen, with his two hundred Green Mountain boys of Vermont, marched across to Lake Champlain in May of 1775, hobnobbed with the guards of Ticonderoga, who drank not wisely but too well, then rowed by night across the narrows and knocked at the wicket beside the main gate. The sleepy guards, not yet sober from the night’s carouse, admitted the Vermonters as friends. In rushed the whole two hundred. In a trice the Canadian garrison of forty-four were all captured and Allen was thundering on the chamber door of La Place, the commandant. It was five in the morning. La Place sprang up in his nightshirt and demanded in whose name he was ordered to surrender. Ethan Allen answered in words that have gone down to history, “In the name of the Great Jéhovah and the Continental Congress.” Later fell Crown Point. So began the war with Canada in the great Revolution.

And now, from May to September, Arnold’s Green Mountain boys sweep from Lake Champlain down the Richelieu to the St. Lawrence, as Iberville’s bold bushrovers long ago swept through these woods. However, the American rovers take no permanent occupation of the different forts on the falls of the Richelieu River, preferring rather to overrun the parishes, dispatching secret spies and waiting for the habitants to rally. And they came once too often, once too far, these bold banditti of the wilderness, clad in buckskin, musket over shoulder, coonskin cap! Montreal is so full of spies, so full of friendlies, so full of Bostonnais in sympathy with the revolutionists, that Allen feels safe in paddling across the St. Lawrence one September morning to the Montreal side with only one hundred and fifty men. Montreal has grown in these ten years to a city of some twelve thousand, but the gates are fast shut against the American scouts; and while Allen waits in some barns of the suburbs, presto! out sallies Major Garden with twice as many men armed to the teeth, who assault the barns at a rush. Five Americans drop at the first crack of the rifles. The Canadians are preparing to set fire to the barns. Allen’s men will be picked off as they rush from the smoke. Wisely, he saves his Green Mountain boys by surrender. Thirty-five capitulate. The rest have escaped through the woods. Carleton refuses to acknowledge the captives as prisoners of war. He claps irons on their hands and irons on their feet and places them on a vessel bound for England to be treated as rebels to the crown. It is said those of Allen’s men who deserted were French Canadians in disguise which may explain why Carleton made such severe example of his captives and at once purged Montreal of the disaffected by compelling all who would not take arms to leave.

Carleton’s position was chancy enough in all conscience. The habitants were wavering. They refused point-blank to serve as volunteers. They supplied the invaders with provisions. Spies were everywhere. Practically no help could come from England till spring, and scouts brought word that two American armies were now marching in force on Canada, one by way of the Richelieu, twelve hundred strong, led by Richard Montgomery of New York, directed against Montreal; the other by way of the Kennebec, with fifteen hundred men under Benedict Arnold, to attack Quebec. Carleton is at Montreal. He rushes his troops, six hundred and ninety out of eight hundred men, up the Richelieu to hold the forts at Chambly and St. John’s against Montgomery’s advance.

Half September and all October Montgomery camps on the plains before Fort St. John’s, his rough soldiers clad for the most part in their shirt sleeves, trousers, and coon cap, with badges of “Liberty or Death” worked in the cap bands, or sprigs of green put in their hats, in lieu of soldier’s uniform. Inside the fort, Major Preston, the English commander, has almost seven hundred men, with ample powder. It is plain to Montgomery that he can win the fort in only one of two ways, shut off provisions and starve the garrison out, or get possession of heavy artillery to batter down the walls. It is said that fortune favors the dauntless. So it was with Montgomery, for he was enabled to besiege the fort in both ways. Carleton had rushed a Colonel McLean to the relief of St. John’s with a force of French volunteers, but the French deserted en masse. McLean was left without any soldiers. This cut off St. John’s from supply of provisions. At Chambly Fort was a Major Stopford with eighty men and a supply of heavy artillery. Montgomery sent a detachment to capture Chambly for the sake of its artillery. Stopford surrendered to the Americans without a blow, and the heavy cannon were forthwith trundled along the river to Montgomery at St. John’s. Preston sends frantic appeal to Carleton for help. He has reduced his garrison to half rations, to quarter rations, to very nearly no rations at all! Carleton sends back secret express. He can send no help. He has no more men. Montgomery tactfully lets the message pass in. After siege of forty-five days, Preston surrenders with all the honors of war, his six hundred and eighty-eight men marching out, arms reversed, and going aboard Montgomery’s ships to proceed as prisoners up Lake Champlain.

The way is now open to Montreal. Benedict Arnold, meanwhile, with the army directed against Quebec, has crossed from the Kennebec to the Chaudière, paddled across St. Lawrence River, and on the very day that Montgomery’s troops take possession of Montreal, November 13, Arnold’s army has camped on the Plains of Abraham behind Quebec walls, whence he scatters his foragers, ravaging the countryside far west as Three Rivers for provisions. The trials of his canoe voyage from Maine to the St. Lawrence at swift pace have been terrific. More than half his men have fallen away either from illness or open desertion. Arnold has fewer than seven hundred men as he waits for Montgomery at Quebec.

What of Guy Carleton, the English governor, now? Canada’s case seemed hopeless. The flower of her army had been taken prisoners, and no help could come before May. Desperate circumstances either make or break a man, prove or undo him. As reverses closed in on Carleton, like the wrestlers of old he but took tighter grip of his resolutions.

On November 11, two days before Preston’s men surrendered, Carleton, with two or three military officers disguised as peasants, boarded one of three armed vessels to go down from Montreal to Quebec. All the cannon at Montreal had been dismounted and spiked. What powder could not be carried away was buried or thrown into the river. Amid funereal silence, shaking hands sadly with the Montreal friends who had gathered at the wharf to say farewell, the English Governor left Montreal. That night the wind failed, and the three vessels lay to with limp sails. At Sorel, at Three Rivers, at every hamlet on both sides of the St. Lawrence, lay American scouts to capture the English Governor. All next day the vessels lay wind-bound. Desperate for the fate of Quebec, Carleton embarked on a river barge propelled by sweeps. Passing Sorel at night Carleton and his disguised officers could see the camp fires of the American army. Here oars were laid aside and the raft steadied down the tide by the rowers paddling with the palms of their hands. Three Rivers was found in possession of the Americans, and a story is told of Carleton, foredone from lack of sleep, dozing in an eating house or tavern with his head sunk forward upon his hands, when two or three American scouts broke into the room. Not a sign did the English party in peasant disguise give of alarm or uneasiness, which might have betrayed the Governor. “Come, come,” said one of the English officers in French, slapping Sir Guy Carleton carelessly on the back, “we must be going”; and the Governor escaped unsuspected. November 19, to the inexpressible relief of Quebec Carleton reached the capital city.

Quebec now had a population of some five thousand. All able-bodied men who would not fight were expelled from the city. What with the small garrison, some marines who happened to be in port, and the citizens themselves, eighteen hundred defenders were mustered. On the walls were a hundred and fifty heavy cannon, and all the streets leading from Lower to Upper Town had been barricaded with cannon mounted above. At each of the city gates were posted battalions. Sentries never left the walls, and the whole army literally slept in its boots. It will be remembered that the natural position of Quebec was worth an army in itself. On all sides there was access only by steepest climb. In front, where the modern visitor ascends from the wharf to Upper Town by Mountain Street steep as a stair, barricades had been built. To the right, where flows St. Charles River past Lower Town, platforms mounted with cannon guarded approach. To the rear was the wall behind which camped Arnold; to the left sheer precipice, above which the defenders had suspended swinging lanterns that lighted up every movement on the path below along the St. Lawrence.

Early in December comes Montgomery himself to Quebec, on the very ships which Carleton had abandoned. Carleton refuses even the letter demanding surrender. Montgomery is warned that forthwith any messenger sent to the walls will come at peril of being shot as rebel. Henceforth what communication Montgomery has with the inhabitants must be by throwing proclamations inside or bribing old habitant women as carriers, for the habitants continue to pass in and out of the city with provisions; and a deserter presently brings word that Montgomery has declared he will “eat his Christmas dinner in Quebec or in Hell!” Whereupon Carleton retorts, “He may choose his own place, but he shan’t eat it in Quebec.”

Montgomery was now in the same position as Wolfe at the great siege. His troops daily grew more ragged; many were without shoes, and smallpox was raging in camp. He could not tempt his foe to come out and fight; therefore he must assault the foe in its own stronghold. It will be remembered, Wolfe had feigned attack to the fore, and made the real attack to the rear. Montgomery reversed the process. He feigned attack to the rear gates of St. John and St. Louis, and made the real attack to the fore from the St. Charles and the St. Lawrence. While a few soldiers were to create noisy hubbub at St. John and St. Louis gates from the back of the city, Arnold was to march through Lower Town from the Charles River side, Montgomery along the narrow cliff below the Citadel, through Lower Town, to that steep Mountain Street which tourists to-day ascend directly from the wharves of the St. Lawrence. On the squares of Upper Town the two armies were to unite and fight Carleton. The plan of attack practically encompassed the city from every side. Spies had brought rumors to Carleton that the signal for assault for the American troops was to be the first dark stormy night. Christmas passed quietly enough without Montgomery carrying out his threat, and on the night before New Year’s all was quiet. Congress soldiers had dispersed among the taverns outside the walls, and Carleton felt so secure he had gone comfortably to bed. For a month, shells from the American guns had been whizzing over Upper Town, with such small damage that citizens had continued to go about as usual. On the walls was a constant popping from the sharpshooters of both sides, and occasionally an English sentry, parading the walls at imminent risk of being a target, would toss down a cheery “Good morrow, gentlemen,” to a Congress trooper below. Then, quick as a flash, both men would lift and fire; but the results were small credit to the aim of either shooter, for the sentry would duck off the wall untouched, just as the American dashed for hiding behind barricade or house of Lower Town. Some of the Americans wanted to know what were the lanterns and lookouts which the English had constructed above the precipice of Cape Diamond. Some wag of a habitant answered these were the sign of a wooden horse with hay in front of it, and that the English general, Carleton, had said he would not surrender the town till the horse had caught up to the hay. Skulking riflemen of the Congress troops had taken refuge in the mansion of Bigot’s former magnificence, the Intendant’s Palace, and Carleton had ordered the cannoneers on his walls to knock the house down. So fell the house of Bigot’s infamy.

Towards 2 A.M. of December 31 the wind began to blow a hurricane. The bright moonlight became obscured by flying clouds, and earth and air were wrapped in a driving storm of sleet. Instantly the Congress troops rallied to their headquarters behind the city. Montgomery at quick march swept down the steep cliff of the river to the shore road, and in the teeth of a raging wind led his men round under the heights of Cape Diamond to the harbor front. Heads lowered against the wind, coonskin caps pulled low over eyes, ash-colored flannel shirts buttoned tight to necks, gun casings and sacks wrapped loosely round loaded muskets to keep out the damp, the marchers tramped silently through the storm. Overhead was the obscured glare where the lanterns hung out in a blare of snow above Cape Diamond. Here rockets were sent up as a signal to Arnold on St. Charles River. Then Montgomery’s men were among the houses of Lower Town, noting well that every window had been barricaded and darkened from cellar to attic. Somewhere along the narrow path in front of the town Montgomery knew that barricades had been built with cannon behind, but he trusted to the storm concealing his approach till his men could capture them at a rush. At Près de Ville, just where the traveler approaching harbor front may to-day see a tablet erected in memory of the invasion, was a barricade. Montgomery halted his men. Scouts returned with word that all was quiet and in darkness the English evidently asleep; and uncovering muskets, the Congress fighters dashed forward at a run. But it was the silence that precedes the thunderclap. The English had known that the storm was to signal attack, and guessing that the rockets foretokened the assailants’ approach, they had put out all lights behind the barricade. Until Montgomery’s men were within a few feet of the log, there was utter quiet; then a voice shrieked out, “Fire! fire!” Instantly a flash of flame met the runners like a wall. Groans and screams split through the muffling storm. Montgomery and a dozen others fell dead. The rest had broken away in retreat, a rabble without a commander, carrying the wounded. Behind the barricade was almost as great confusion among the English, for Quebec’s defenders were made up of boys of fifteen and old men of seventy, and the first crash of battle had been followed by a panic, when half the guards would have thrown down their arms if one John Coffin, an expelled royalist from Boston, had not shouted out that he would throw the first man who attempted to desert into the river.

Meantime, how had it gone with Arnold?

An English officer was passing near St. Louis Gate when, sometime after two o’clock, he noticed rockets go up from the river beyond Cape Diamond. He at once sounded the alarm. Bugles called to arms, drums rolled, and every bell in the city was set ringing. In less than ten minutes every man of Quebec’s eighteen hundred was in place. American soldiers marching through St. Roch, Lower Town, have described how the tolling of the bells rolling through the storm smote cold on their hearts, for they knew their designs had been discovered, and they could not turn back, for a juncture must be effected with Montgomery. A moment later the sham assaults were peppering the rear gates of Quebec, but Guy Carleton was too crafty a campaigner to be tricked by any sham. He rightly guessed that the real attack would be made on one of the two weaker spots leading up from Lower Town. “Now is the time to show what stuff you are made of,” he called to the soldiers, as he ordered more detachments to the place whence came crash of heaviest firing. This was at Sault-au-Matelot Street, a narrow, steep thoroughfare, barely twenty feet from side to side. Up this little tunnel of a street Arnold had rushed his men, surmounting one barricade where they exchanged their own wet muskets for the dry guns of the English deserters, dashing into houses to get possession of windows as vantage points, over, some accounts say, yet another obstruction, till his whole army was cooped up in a canyon of a street directly below the hill front on which had been erected a platform with heavy guns. It was a gallant rush, but it was futile, for now Carleton outgeneraled Arnold. Guessing from the distance of the shots that the attack to the rear was sheer sham, the English general rushed his fighters downhill by another gate to catch Arnold on the rear. Quebec houses are built close and cramped. While these troops were stealing in behind Arnold to close on him like a trap, it was easy trick for another English battalion to scramble over house roofs, over back walls, and up the very stairs of houses where Arnold’s troops were guarding the windows. Then Arnold was carried past his men badly wounded. “We are sold,” muttered the Congress troops, “caught like rats in a trap.” Still they pressed toward in hand to hand scuffle, with shots at such close range the Boston soldiers were shouting, “Quebec men, do not fire on your true friends!” with absurd pitching of each other by the scruff of the neck from the windows. Daylight only served to make plainer the desperate plight of the entrapped raiders. At ten o’clock five hundred Congress soldiers surrendered. It must not for one moment be forgotten that each side was fighting gallantly for what it believed to be right, and each bore the other the respect due a good fighter and upright foe. In fact, with the exception of two or three episodes mutually regretted, it may be said there were fewer bitter thoughts that New Year’s morning than have arisen since from this war. The captured Americans had barely been sent to quarters in convents and hospitals before a Quebec merchant sent them a gift of several hogsheads of porter. When the bodies of Montgomery and his fellow-comrades in death were found under the snowdrifts, they were reverently removed, and interred with the honors of war just inside St. Louis Gate.

Though the invaders were defeated, Quebec continued to be invested till spring, the thud of exploding bombs doing little harm except in the case of one family, during spring, when a shell fell through the roof to a dining-room table, killing a son where he sat at dinner. As the ice cleared from the river in spring, both sides were on the watch for first aid. Would Congress send up more soldiers on transports; or would English frigates be rushed to the aid of Quebec? The Americans were now having trouble collecting food from the habitants, for the French doubted the invaders’ success, and Congress paper money would be worthless to the holders. One beautiful clear May moonlight night a vessel was espied between nine and ten at night coming up the river full sail before the wind. Was she friend or foe? Carleton and his officers gazed anxiously from the citadel. Guns were fired as signal. No answer came from the ship. Again she was hailed, and again; yet she failed to hang out English colors. Carleton then signaled he would sink her, and set the rampart cannon sweeping her bows. In a second she was ablaze, a fire ship sent by the enemy loaded with shells and grenades and bombs that shot off like a fusillade of rockets. At the same time a boat was seen rowing from the far side of her with terrific speed. Carleton’s precaution had prevented the destruction of the harbor fleet. Three days later, at six in the morning, the firing of great guns announced the coming of an English frigate. At once every man, woman, and child of Quebec poured down to the harbor front, half-dressed, mad with joy. By midday, Guy Carleton had led eight hundred soldiers out to the Plains of Abraham to give battle against the Americans; but General Thomas of the Congress army did not wait. Such swift flight was taken that artillery, stores, tents, uneaten dinners cooked and on the table, were abandoned to Carleton’s men. General Thomas himself died of smallpox at Sorel. At Montreal all was confusion. The city had been but marking time, pending the swing of victory at Quebec. In the spring of 1776 Congress had sent three commissioners to Montreal to win Canada for the new republic. One was the famous Benjamin Franklin, another a prominent Catholic; but the French Canadian clergy refused to forget the attack of Congress on the Quebec Act, and remained loyal to England.

For almost a year, in desultory fashion, the campaign against Canada dragged on, Carleton reoccupying and fortifying Montreal, Three Rivers, St. John’s, and Chamby, then pushing up Champlain Lake in October of 1776, with three large vessels and ninety small ones. Between Valcour Island and the mainland he caught Benedict Arnold with the Congress boats on October 11, and succeeded in battering them to pieces before Arnold could extricate them. As the boats sank, the American crews escaped ashore; but the English went no farther south than Crown Point this year. If Carleton had failed at Quebec, there can be no doubt Canada would have been permanently lost to England; for the following year France openly espoused the cause of Congress, and proclamations were secretly smuggled all through Canada to be posted on church doors, calling on Canadians to remain loyal to France. Curiously enough, it was Washington, the leader of the Americans, who checkmated this move. With a wisdom almost prophetic, he foresaw that if France helped the United States, and then demanded Canada as her reward, the old border warfare would be renewed with tenfold more terror. No longer would it be bushrover pitted against frontiersmen. It would be France against Congress, and Washington refused to give the aid of Congress to the scheme of France embroiling America in European wars. The story of how Clark, the American, won the Mississippi forts for Congress is not part of Canada’s history, nor are the terrible border raids of Butler and Brant, the Mohawk, who sided with the English, and left the Wyoming valley south of the Iroquois Confederacy a blackened wilderness, and the homes of a thousand settlers smoking ruins. It is this last raid which gave the poet Campbell his theme in “Gertrude of Wyoming.” By the Treaty of Versailles, in 1783, England acknowledged the independence of the United States, and Canada’s area was shorn of her fairest territory by one fell swath. Instead of the Ohio being the southern boundary, the middle line of the Great Lakes divided Canada from her southern neighbor. The River Ste. Croix was to separate Maine from New Brunswick. The sole explanation of this loss to Canada was that the American commissioners knew their business and the value of the ceded territory, and the English commissioners did not. It is one of the many conspicuous examples of what loyalty has cost Canada. England is to give up the western posts to the United States, from Miami to Detroit and Michilimackinac and Grand Portage. In return the United States federal government is to recommend to the States Governments that all property confiscated from Royalists during the war be restored.

General Haldimand, a Swiss who has served in the Seven Years’ War, succeeds Carleton as governor in 1778. The times are troublous. There is still a party in favor of Congress. The great unrest, which ends in the French Revolution, disturbs habitants’ life. Then that provision of the Quebec Act, by which legislative councilors were to be nominated by the crown, works badly. Councilors, judges, crown attorneys, even bailiffs are appointed by the colonial office of London, and find it more to their interests to stay currying favor in London than to attend to their duties in Canada. The country is cursed by the evil of absent officeholders, who draw salaries and appoint incompetent deputies to do the work. As for the social unrest that fills the air, Haldimand claps the malcontents in jail till the storm blows over; but the tricks of speculators, who have flocked to Canada, give trouble of another sort. Naturally the ring of English speculators, rather than the impoverished French, became ascendant in foreign trade, and during the American war the ring got such complete control of the wheat supply that bread jumped to famine price. Just as he had dealt with the malcontents soldier fashion, so Haldimand now had a law passed forbidding tricks with the price of wheat. Like Carleton, Haldimand too came down hard on the land-jobbers, who tried to jockey poor French peasants out of their farms for bailiff’s fees. It may be guessed that Haldimand was not a popular governor with the English clique. Nevertheless, he kept sumptuous bachelor quarters at his mansion near Montmorency Falls, was a prime favorite with the poor and with the soldiers, and sometimes deigned to take lessons in pickle making and home keeping from the grand dames of Quebec. In 1786 Carleton comes back as Lord Dorchester.

Congress had promised to protect the property of those Royalists who had fought on the losing side in the American Revolution, but for reasons beyond the control of Congress, that promise could not be carried out. It was not Congress but the local governments of each individual state that controlled property rights. In vain Congress recommended the States Governments to restore the property confiscated from the Royalists. The States Governments were in a condition of chaos, packed by jobbers and land-grabbers and the riffraff that always infest the beginnings of a nation. Instead of protecting the Royalists, the States Governments passed laws confiscating more property and depriving those who had fought for England of even holding office. It was easy for the tricksters who had got possession of the loyalists’ lands to create a social ostracism that endangered the very lives of the beaten Royalists, and there set towards Canada the great emigration of the United Empire Loyalists. To Nova Scotia, to New Brunswick, to Prince Edward Island, to Ontario, they came from Virginia and Pennsylvania and New York and Massachusetts and Vermont, in thousands upon thousands. The story of their sufferings and far wanderings has never been told and probably never will, for there is little official record of it; but it can be likened only to the expulsion of the Acadians multiplied a hundredfold. To the Maritime Provinces alone came more than thirty thousand people. To the eastern townships of Quebec, to the regions of Kingston and Niagara and Toronto in Ontario came some twenty thousand more. It needs no trick of fancy to call up the scene, and one marvels that neither poet nor novelist has yet made use of it. Here were fine old Royalist officers of New York reduced from opulence to penury, from wealth to such absolute destitution they had neither clothing nor food, nor money to pay ship’s passage away, now crowded with their families, and such wrecks of household goods as had escaped raid and fire, on some cheap government transport or fishing schooner bound from New York Harbor to Halifax or Fundy Bay. Of the thirteen thousand people bound for Halifax there can scarcely be a family that has not lost brothers or sons in the war. Family plate, old laces, heirlooms, even the father’s sword in some cases, have long ago been pawned for food. If one finds, as one does find all through Nova Scotia, fine old mahogany and walnut furniture brought across by the Loyalists, it is only because walnut and mahogany were not valued at the time of the Revolution as they are to-day. And instead of welcome at Halifax, the refugees met with absolute consternation! What is a town of five thousand people to do with so many hungry visitants? They are quartered about in churches, in barracks, in halls knocked up, till they can be sent to farms. And these are not common immigrants coming fresh from toil in the fields of Europe; they are gently nurtured men and women, representing the aristocracy and wealth and conservatism of New York. This explains why one finds among the prominent families of Nova Scotia the same names as among the most prominent families of Massachusetts and New York. To the officers and heads of families the English government granted from two thousand to five thousand acres each, and to sons and daughters of Loyalists two hundred acres each, besides 3,000,000 pounds in cash, as necessity for it arose.

On the north side of Fundy Bay hardships were even greater, for the Loyalists landed from their ships on the homeless shores of the wildwood wilderness. Rude log cabins of thatch roof and plaster walls were knocked up, and there began round the log cabin that tiny clearing which was to expand into the farm. The coming of the Loyalists really peopled both New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island: the former becoming a separate province in 1784, named after the ruling house of England; the latter named after the Duke of Kent, who was in command of the garrison at Charlottetown.

More strenuous still was the migration of the United Empire Loyalists from the south. Rich old planters of Virginia and Maryland, who had had their colored servants by the score, now came with their families in rude tented wagons, fine chippendales jumbled with heavy mahogany furnishings, up the old Cumberland army road to the Ohio, and across from the Ohio to the southern townships of Quebec, to the backwoods of Niagara and Kingston and Toronto and modern Hamilton, and west as far as what is now known as London. I have heard descendants of these old southern Loyalists tell how hopelessly helpless were these planters’ families, used to hundreds of negro servants and now bereft of help in a backwoods wilderness. It took but a year or so to wear out the fine laces and pompous ruffles of their aristocratic clothing, and men and women alike were reduced to the backwoods costume of coon cap, homespun garments, and Indian moccasins. Often one could witness such anomalies in their log cabins as gilt mirrors and spindly glass cabinets ranged in the same apartment as stove and cooking utensils. If the health of the father failed or the war had left him crippled, there was nothing for it but for the mother to take the helm; and many a Canadian can trace lineage back to a United Empire Loyalist woman who planted the first crop by hand with a hoe and reaped the first crop by hand with a sickle. Sometimes the jovial habits of the planter life came with the Loyalists to Canada, and winter witnessed a furbishing up of old flounces and laces to celebrate all-night dance in log houses where partitions were carpets and tapestries hung up as walls. Sometimes, too, at least I have heard descendants of the eastern township people tell the story, the jovial habits kept the father tippling and card playing at the village inn while the lonely mother kept watch and ward in the cabin of the snow-padded forests. Of necessity the Loyalists banded together to help one another. There were “sugarings off” in the maple woods every spring for the year’s supply of homemade sugar, glorious nights and days in the spring forests with the sap trickling from the trees to the scooped-out troughs; with the grown-ups working over the huge kettle where the molasses was being boiled to sugar; with the young of heart, big and little, gathering round the huge bonfires at night in the woods for the sport of a taffy pull, with molasses dripping on sticks and huge wooden spoons taken from the pot. There were threshings when the neighbors gathered together to help one another beat out their grain from the straw with a flail. There were “harvest homes” and “quilting bees” and “loggings” and “barn raisings.” Clothes were homemade. Sugar was homemade. Soap was homemade. And for years and years the only tea known was made from steeping dry leaves gathered in the woods; the only coffee made from burnt peas ground up. Such were the United Empire Loyalists, whose lives some unheralded poet will yet sing, not an unfit stock for a nation’s empire builders.

At the same time that the Loyalists came to Canada, came Joseph Brant, Thayendanegea, the Mohawk, with the remnant of his tribe, who had fought for the English. To them the government granted some 700,000 acres in Ontario.

Down at Quebec things were managed with more pomp, and no social event was complete without the presence of the Duke of Kent, military commandant, now living in Haldimand’s old house at Montmorency. Nova Scotia had held parliaments since 1758, when Halifax elected her first members.

Besides the United Empire Loyalists, other settlers were coming to Canada. The Earl of Selkirk, a patriotic young Scotch nobleman, had arranged for the removal of evicted Highlanders to Prince Edward Island in 1803 and to Baldoon on Lake St. Clair. Then “Mad Tom Talbot,” Governor Simcoe’s aid, descendant of the Talbots of Castle Malahide and boon comrade of the young soldier who became the Duke of Wellington, becomes so enamored of wilderness life that he gives up his career in Europe, gains grant of lands between London and Port Dover, and lays foundations of settlements in western Ontario, spite of the fact he remains a bachelor. The man who had danced at royalty’s balls and drunk deep of pleasure at the beck of princes now lived in a log house of three rooms, laughed at difficulties, “baked his own bread, milked his own cows, made his own butter, washed his own clothes, ironed his own linen,” and taught colonists who bought his lands “how to do without the rotten refuse of Manchester warehouses,” the term he applied to the broadcloth of the newcomer.

Under the French regime, Canada had consisted of a string of fur posts isolated in a wilderness. It will be noticed that it now consisted of five distinct provinces of nation builders.