The White and the Gold

by Thomas B. Costain

  When Talon left the colony for the second and last time, Laval had two more years to wait for the honor he had desired so much. He was fifty-one years of age when he finally became Bishop of Quebec. It cannot be said, therefore, that he had attained his vintage years when the King was tinkering with the lives of his New World subjects like a boy with his toys, but there can be no doubt that he was mellowing. It was possible now to detect a hint of sweetness back of the severity of his eyes and some of the same quality in his smile. Needless to state, the man who had fought with Montmagny over trifles was still willing to fight with the King over issues of importance.

  A never-ending dispute was being carried on between the new bishop and the head of the state over the position of the parish priest, the curé. The King wanted the priest to be more the servant of his flock than of his bishop; a fixture who could not be removed except for unusual cause, which was the system prevailing in France. Laval wanted the priests in the field to be subject to change so that a man could always be fitted into the niche where he would be most useful. The King refused to understand why the Canadian priest had to be paid twice as much as the rural curé in France. Laval’s answer was to demand (and finally to obtain) as much as five hundred francs a year for his priests, even though many humble priests in France had to be content with two hundred. Did the French curé minister to a flock living over a hundred-mile stretch of river country? demanded the logical and outspoken bishop. Did he need a body servant strong enough to carry a portable chapel about with him?

  Despite his willingness to fight when the need presented itself, Laval was finding that his interests had shifted to some extent at least. He was deeply concerned now over the schools he had established. The seminary at Quebec, which was devoted to the training of young Canadians for the priesthood, was the point to which he invariably turned with quickened footsteps when he had any time to spare. He delighted in conversation with the neophytes, and nothing pleased him more than to welcome the missionaries who came once a year from their distant fields for a week at the seminary, to be spent in retreat and contemplation.

  The other educational institutions he had inaugurated were doing well, the school for boys and the manual-training school which had been set up under the shadow of Cape Tourmente down the river. In the latter establishment young men and boys were instructed in the work they desired to undertake in life. A few had come who showed artistic gifts, and they were being given full opportunity to develop them. It was to Laval’s open-mindedness on this point that the credit must be given for the fine artists the colony produced, the men who made the classically simple but beautifully proportioned silverware of Quebec, the vessels for clerical use, the handsome silver platters, the écuelle (a porringer) with its typical points of design, the characteristic papboat.

  Although Bishop Laval lived on a sparse minimum, he was becoming a rich man in spite of himself. The grants of land which the Crown had insisted on conferring on him were becoming valuable. When the bishopric of Quebec was finally set up, a quarter of the population lived on his seigneurial lands at Beaupré and on the island of Orleans. Laval had a plan locked away in his mind. He would keep his land, allowing it to increase in value, and at his death he would will it to his much-loved schools. So well managed was this purpose that after his death these institutions continued to grow in scope and influence over the years, free of financial strain because of the acumen of their founder.

  5

  If the people of Quebec had heard on the evening of November 19, 1671, that the candles had blown out during the services at the cathedral, they would have said at once that Madame la Fondatrice was dead. There was a superstition, in which they all firmly believed, that this was a sure sign of death; and they knew that Madame de la Peltrie, who had founded the Ursuline Convent, was mortally ill.

  When this earnest lady of great refinement and charm had turned over all her wealth to the endowment of the convent in Quebec and had come to Canada to devote the rest of her life to it—accomplishing this revolutionary change in her life by hoodwinking her suitors and going to law with her grasping relatives—she was filled with a great sense of devotion. With the zeal, however, had gone an understandable belief that she would walk always in shining spiritual armor. That she had a desire to assume spectacular roles was made clear by the zest with which she embraced the Montreal adventure and by her desire to go out to almost certain death in the Huron mission field. It took her a time to reach the realization that service is more often a matter of daily attention to monotonous tasks; that, like Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, she must be prepared to labor incessantly, unnoticed and unrewarded. When she was instructed to return to Quebec from Montreal, she began to see the light and from that time forward she was content to share the drudgery of dedication.

  For the last eighteen years of her life Madame de la Peltrie lived in her tiny house in a corner of the convent grounds and had charge of the wardrobe, a task which kept her extremely busy. She did the work so well that the little Indian girls always had warm and suitable clothing, although the Fondatrice herself went about in old and patched garb.

  “Why don’t you give these things you wear to the poor?” she was often asked.

  “I prefer,” was her answer, “to see the poor in new clothes.”

  She had become, in fact, very humble and even contrite. Perhaps she believed that pride had played too large a part in her previous attitude. “I am the most sinful creature in the world,” she said once. “Certainly I have been unfaithful to God’s gift of grace.”

  She always took a humble place at the long table in the refectory so that she would be one of the last served. Her place in the choir was an inconspicuous one.

  On November 12 she had an attack of pleurisy and sank so rapidly that all hope for her recovery was abandoned. Knowing that her end was near, she had everything which might be thought ornamental removed from the room, it being her desire to die in the atmosphere of poverty into which she had directed her life.

  The consistency with which she had observed the principles of self-sacrifice became apparent when an inventory of her few personal belongings was made after her death. The list was as follows:

  A mantle of serge d’Aumale.

  A dress of serge de Cȧėn.

  Two old serge aprons.

  Three old silk caps.

  One old velvet cap.

  Three pairs of old woolen stockings.

  One old cape.

  Three pairs of old slippers.

  One pair of corded slippers.

  It must have been apparent to Jean Talon, who went to her bedside on November 15 to assist in the drawing of her will (she had almost nothing to leave), that all the regulations he had put into effect on the orders of the King, all the restrictions which aimed at improving the tone of life in the colony, would prove less effectual in the long run than the example of a life such as this.

  Two other lives came to an end soon afterward to add to the weight of the lesson. Mère Marie de l’Incarnation, who had faithfully and tearfully remained at the side of her dying friend, passed away eighteen months later. She had been the active head of the convent; in fact, her determination to do everything needful for the good of the institution had led her to master three Indian languages, Huron, Algonquin, and Iroquois. Thus equipped, she had been like a mother to the Indian girls who came under her charge, as well as to the French children who paid their 120 livres a year for instruction in les ouvrages de goût, the finer things, such as painting, embroidery, and the making of lace. When Mère Marie came to die it was a misfortune in which the whole colony shared. Everyone came to bid her a last farewell, until it seemed to those in attendance that the chamber of the dying woman was always crowded. This remarkable woman, whose seventy-one years had been years of devotion, did not care; they were her friends, and she was dying, as she had lived, in harness.

  All of Quebec, weeping and disconsolate, came out to attend her funeral services, which were con
ducted by Father Lalemant, and to stand at the grave where she would know the rest that life had always withheld.

  “The Angel of the Colony,” Jeanne Mance, passed away on June 18, 1673, thus bringing to an end the epic story of the three great women who had played such useful parts in the founding of New France.

  6

  The efforts of the King to evolve by decree the kind of state he desired in the New World have been defended on the ground that strict laws were indispensable. The land was far removed from civilization, and the conditions encountered were in every way extraordinary: a continent of vast extent thinly populated by savages, the climate severe, the means of sustenance small. It was hard to find volunteers for a life so different and so terrifying. Among those who were induced by one means and another to go out, there were few like Louis Hébert, men with a wholehearted desire to take up land and to make a living by their own efforts. The bulk of the colonists were so averse to agricultural pursuits, in the early stages, that they had to be fed from France or so liberally endowed that they were dependents of the Crown. There was very little general employment, and so the idle hands of the men in rusty coats and patched knee-length stockings who loafed in the streets of Quebec and Montreal could not be kept out of mischief. Nothing but the strictest discipline by regulation, say the apologists, could keep such communities from falling into economic and spiritual chaos.

  There is some truth, of course, in these observations. Strangely enough, however, the strongest evidence which can be advanced to excuse the royal policy is that it drove men into the woods, and this form of disobedience proved in the best interests of the colony. The opening up of the North and West had always been among the chief aims of the French in the New World. The Jesuits thought of the whole continent as their field, and the eyes of the statesmen fixed themselves resolutely on the ultimate goal, the discovery of the Northwest Passage. Unwilling to be told what they could and could not do, the coureurs de bois set out in ever-increasing numbers, their canoes filled with goods for trading with the Indians, their resentful eyes fixed on the waterways and the woods ahead of them. The exodus was so great that at one time the loss to the towns was estimated at a quarter of the effective male population.

  This can be cited, therefore, on the credit side of the ledger for the Martinet of Marly, that as a reverse effect of his incessant interference the frontiers were rolled back and the North and the West were slowly opened up.

  CHAPTER XXV

  The Conflict over the Fur Trade—The Coureurs de Bois—The Annual Fair at Montreal—Opening up the West—Du Lhut and Nicolas Perrot

  1

  THERE had always been a conflict of interest over the fur trade. New France offered no other source of revenue to provide for the costs of administration and colonization, and so the proper method of encouraging the traffic was the problem which caused the most knitting of brows among the King’s advisers and the issuance of more regulations than on any other point. Unfortunately the departmental thinking ran in a single groove: to centralize the trading, to make the Indians bring their furs to the market, to “farm” the profits as the easiest way of assuring an adequate return to the royal treasury. This was the accepted method in France, where even the taxes were farmed. It may have been an easy way, but it was a costly one, as they would discover in France in time. The system was doomed to failure from the start in the New World.

  In the first place, the Indians could not be depended upon to bring their furs to the French markets. During the Iroquois wars they were prevented from doing so by the craft of the warriors of the Long House in setting up a patrol on the Ottawa, the one corridor open to Indians of the North and West. There were several years when practically no pelts reached Montreal and Three Rivers. Even after the epic sacrifice at the Long Sault it was only the opportune arrival of the fur brigade headed by Radisson and Groseilliers which saved the situation. The ships going back to France that fall would have had no cargoes at all if the heaped-up canoes of the two young rapscallions (the official view of this enterprising pair) had not arrived just in time.

  Even after peace had been brought about by Tracy’s devastation of the Mohawk country, the fur trade did not fall into the easy pattern designed for it at Versailles. The Indians of the North and West still had a choice in the matter. The English had taken over the Dutch country and had entered into an alliance with the Iroquois. They were making shrewd efforts to divert the trade down the Hudson. Even more important was the fact that the English had become established on Hudson’s Bay. How this came about is a curious and complicated story which will be told in full detail, but at this stage it is sufficient to say that they had three forts on Mort Bay (the name commonly used by the French) and the French had none, which meant that the English were in a position to monopolize the trade of the North.

  It was no time for the French to sit back and wait for the fur to be laid on their doorsteps. The people of New France understood the situation. When they found that Versailles was stubbornly adhering to the old policy, they took matters into their own hands. Disregarding the regulations which had been imposed to keep them from acting as individuals, the young men began to reverse the Versailles pattern. Instead of waiting for the Indians to come to them, they began to go to the hunting fields themselves. The canoes would start in the early fall, or in the spring if a distant destination was aimed at, and would not come back for eighteen months or longer. They began to construct small forts as rallying points and supply depots. The first was at Detroit. Then Michilimackinac became the center of trading in the West, and the free traders congregated there. That island began to serve as the point from which the free traders fanned out to cover the whole western territory.

  This was free enterprise, the only way to save the fur trade for France. Angry at this disregard of royal policy, the King and his advisers strove, nevertheless, to prevent the participation of individuals by still more rigorous regulations. The coureur de bois was declared a criminal. In an order bristling with despotic ire the King declared that anyone going into the woods without a permit should be whipped and branded for a first offense and sent to the galleys for life for a second.

  2

  The term coureur de bois was first used by the Récollet Gabriel Sagard-Théodat in his Histoire du Canada in describing the start of missionary work among the Montagnais. This was as early as 1615, and it seems to have been used in reference to the act of traveling. Probably the first official use of the term was in one of Talon’s letters in 1670, and it is apparent from his manner of use that it had been employed for some time to describe individuals. It was applied only to those engaged in trading without permits and who accordingly had made themselves outlaws. Later it took on a wider application and was used to mean all French Canadians who ventured out on the long trail.

  Certain admirable qualities of the French people came out unmistakably in the coureurs de bois: their courage and élan, the combination of curiosity, restlessness, and acquisitiveness which gave them the instinct for adventure, the capacity for adapting themselves to any environment. They were remarkable woodsmen. In fact, in some respects they began to excel the Indians as hunters and trappers. They even improved on that one great invention of the North American native, the bark canoe.

  A writer in the Relations describes the canoe as shaped “like the crest of a morion.” The morion was a helmet worn by French soldiers in the seventeenth century which lacked both visor and beaver. It must have had a very long crest, if the description is an accurate one; for the French, because of the need for space to pack the supplies of trade goods they took with them, were making their canoes longer than the Indian model. The white men seemed to have learned all the tricks of the trade and to have added some improvements of their own. They achieved the perfect balance which made the frail craft easy to handle as well as the lack of weight which cut its draw in the water to less than half a foot. They had learned how to make the hulls watertight by the use of resin. The decoration of
the hulls had become an art in itself, and a French flotilla was a gay affair, from the pennant flying at the prow of the first in the procession to the brightly stained stern of the last in the line. The French were such expert users of the birch-bark canoe that it is said they could make from thirty to forty leagues a day, provided they had an unbroken stretch of water and the weather was good.

  The first move made by the Crown to prevent this dabbling in free enterprise was to issue permits, or congés as they were generally called. This was a compromise measure; if the tendency to roam could not be eradicated, it must at least be controlled. The number of permits issued each year was limited to twenty-five. At first the permits allowed holders to take two canoes, but later, when the rush to the woods got completely out of hand, this was reduced to one. The competition for permits was so great that the prices paid for them went higher and higher, like stocks on a bull market. The high point seems to have been reached around eighteen hundred livres. There undoubtedly was a great deal of jobbing in the sale of these prized official sanctions. Friends of the high officers of the state bought them up and then resold them secretly to the highest bidders.

  As might be expected, the attempt to limit trading by such efforts was not successful. Those who could not get permits went off without them. Illicit traders evolved a plan of staying out for four years at a stretch, counting on official forgetfulness to escape penalties on their return. When it was found they could not count on leniency, they established themselves in little settlements north of Montreal and Three Rivers and never came in to the larger posts at all. Here they were found to be dangerous competitors because they could intercept the Indian canoes on their way to the bigger markets. They were always ready to trade brandy for the furs, and this was an infallible lure. The pelts from these unofficial camps were smuggled out of the country. Ships’ captains had false bottoms made in the hulls of their ships for the purpose.