Tag:

French-Canadian history

How Samuel de Champlain Started a War

Among his many accomplishments, which include founding Quebec City and mapping New France, Samuel de Champlain started a war.

Born into a family of mariners in 1567, Champlain began exploring North America in 1603 with his uncle, Francois Grave DuPont. Five years later, Champlain received the assignment to establish a colony in Canada.

Inauthentic depiction of Champlain, by Théophile Hamel

In the process, Champlain started a war with the Mohawks, part of the Iroquois Five Nations. By doing so he unintentionally drew the French into armed conflict with the Iroquois Five Nations. And he undermined French efforts to colonize New France.

New France

At the beginning of the 17th century, the French kingdom wanted to become an empire. After seeing the success of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, the French monarchy sought to plant roots in the Americas.

French navigators had begun exploring eastern Canada in the previous century. But those expeditions comprised small groups of men seeking to establish trading relationships with the Native Nations.

To make the most of the nascent fur trade, the French monarchy decided to begin building permanent settlements in Canada. They called the territory New France. To try and save the Crown money, they granted a prominent trader named Pierre Dugua de Mons a monopoly over the Canadian fur trade. In 1608, de Mons assigned Samuel de Champlain the task of establishing a colony and extending France’s trading network.

Champlain Arrives

Arriving in Canada in 1609, Champlain found a land in the midst of increasing turmoil. Over the past century, European diseases had preceded the French colonizers.

Suffering staggering population losses of 50 percent or more, Indigenous societies were gripped by despair and population crisis.

“The advent of Europeans in the Northeast in the early sixteenth century quickly upset the existing equilibrium and transformed it into a world of disease, division, violence, and death,” wrote historian Georges E. Sioui.

Map of New France by Samuel de Champlain, 1612.

The Mourning Wars

The Iroquoian peoples of the Northeast sought to rebuild their populations by adopting outsiders into their society. They often brought newcomers in as captives from battle — a phenomenon known as a Mourning War.

Forcing captured adoptees to abandon their old identities and take up new ones to fill a void in their new society could be rather violent. But the Mourning Wars served their purpose of stabilizing Indigenous societies.

After Europeans and their pathogens arrived, however, the Mourning Wars grew in frequency, scale and violence.

Iroquoian raiders attacked other nations in the Great Lakes, Canada, New York and New England. They made it as far east as the Abenaki, whose homelands stretched across Maine and the Canadian Maritimes.

Champlain hinted at the increased warfare the country had seen. On a journey from Quebec to Mohawk territory, Champlain “saw four beautiful islands… which, like the Iroquois river, were formerly inhabited by Indians: but have been abandoned, since they have been at war with one another.”

The March to Lake Champlain

In the early stages of their Canadian colonization, the French aligned themselves with the Wendat, an Iroqouian people living in what is now southern Ontario. They also allied with several Algonquian peoples, such as the Montaignais.

Champlain hoped to use these alliances to expand France’s fur trading networks. Reflecting back on these alliances in 1619, Champlain wrote: “I came to the conclusion that it was very necessary to assist them, both to engage them the more to love us, and also to provide the means of furthering my enterprises and explorations [fur trading] which apparently could only be carried out with their help.”

To strengthen New France’s bond with these nations, Champlain agreed to accompany them on a raid on the Mohawk Nation. So he and nine other French soldiers joined a group of Wendat, Montagnais and other Algonqian warriors into Mohawk lands, which stretched from eastern New York into western Vermont.

The company tried their best to conceal their movements by traveling from Quebec to the Mohawk lands at night. Despite their attempts at stealth, Mohawk scouts kept track of their movements. A Jesuit chronicler of Champlain’s exploits later noted the Iroquois always had “sentinels upon the routes of their enemies.”

Finally, 200 Mohawk soldiers confronted the group on the shores of Lake Champlain.

The Shot Heard ‘Round New France

The two war bands now stood within earshot of one another. They exchanged insults and built fortifications. Seeing how their enemies had “barricaded themselves well” farther down Lake Champlain’s shore, the French and their Native allies agreed to postpone the fight until the next day.

The next day, the two forces came out to meet each other. According to Champlain, he led the charge, marching toward the Iroquois line until he was within some 30 yards of the enemy.

Champlain then claimed he drew his firearm and took aim at the Iroquoian leaders. “With this shot,” Champlain wrote, “two fell to the ground and one of their companions was wounded who died thereof a little later.”

While Champlain’s recounting of the event tells some truths, he was most likely exaggerating his role as a leader. The Jesuit Relations, a collection of letters written by French missionaries, temper Champlain’s telling of the battle.

According to the Jesuit Relations, Champlain had wanted to advance” toward the men perceived as the leaders of the Mohawk contingent. His Native allies, or “Kebec savages” as the Jesuits put it, prevented him. They told him to “withdraw behind our first rank, and when we are ready, thou shalt advance.”

No matter where Champlain stood when he fired his arquebus, however, he does seem to have killed several Mohawk warriors.

The Implications

Whether or not the Mohawk men Champlain killed occupied an important political role in their villages, by taking their lives Champlain started a war.

The hostile Iroquoian relations with New France also indirectly fanned the flames of the Mourning Wars. The Iroquois continued to lose population as they increasingly engaged in armed conflict with Europeans.

As a result, the Iroquois carried out more raids against their Native foes, hoping to capture enemies to balance out the loss of life. By the 1660s, contemporary European sources claimed that some two-thirds of the Iroquois population were foreigners adopted into Five Nations society.

Due to these raids, by the late 17th-century, Iroquois holdings ranged from New England’s western frontier to the Ohio River Valley.

Ultimately, the increased range and violence of the Mourning Wars destroyed the sovereignty of several Native Nations. The Wendat and Abenaki diaspora spread in several directions.

The Iroquois Five Nations survived the Mourning Wars and became the strongest Native Nation of the Northeast. But the demographic upheaval of the 17th-century left them unable to defend their sovereignty in the 18th.

In 1609, the French-Canadian population spread from northern Maine to the interior of Ontario and Quebec. However, it was sparse at best. Since Champlain started a war that continued into the 18^th century, it made it harder to convince French subjects to settle in New France.

Additionally, it led the Iroquois Five Nations to make alliances with the Dutch in New York and the British in New England.

Iroquois trading with Europeans, 1722

The author of this story, Jordan Baker, holds a BA and MA in History from North Carolina State University. A lover of all things historical, he concentrates his research and writing on the history of the Atlantic World. He also blogs about history at eastindiabloggingco.com, where he has also written about the Mourning Wars.

This story updated in 2023.

0 comments 5.1K views

Maine Smuggling and the Raid on Calais

The northern tip of the Maine coast was a smugglers’ paradise for generations. In fact, Maine smuggling was an essential part of the economy there.

The famous turncoat Benedict Arnold chose to set himself up on Campobello Island to engage in illegal trade with America shortly after the American Revolution. Arnold recruited men from both the Canadian and U.S. sides of the border to load and unload merchandise.

Postcard view of the International Bridge dividing Saint Stephen and Calais

Then in the War of 1812, Maine’s northern coast served as a prime thoroughfare for smuggled goods.

And the booze smugglers were an industry unto themselves as Maine adopted prohibition in the late 1800s. They slipped in and out of the lightly patrolled coves and rivers. They also brought imbibers across to Canadian bars for a legal taste.

Maine Smuggling

It was no picnic for the customs agents, or ‘preventers,’ on either side of the border. A Canadian preventer’s son was kidnapped in one attempt to stop the illegal plaster trade. Pushing and shoving occasionally turned to gun play and threats as the customs agents were held at bay. Nationally, Maine got a reputation as a wild center for smuggling. But a raid on Calais in 1837, recorded in the Annals of Calais, Maine and St. Stephen, New Brunswick probably tops all the stories for sheer ingenuity and moxie.

Lumber was the matter at hand at the time. Lumber came down the Saint Croix River from both Canada and the United States. The river snakes its way through Calais, separating the two countries as it carves an exotic series of “S” curves on its way to the ocean. Crossing between Canada and the United States was as simple as walking across a bridge, or in winter as simple as walking across the ice when the river froze.

Map of Calais, Me. and Saint Stephen, N.B.

When the lumber reach the mouth of the river, it was taxed. Crafty lumbermen would declare the lumber’s country of origin based upon which country would cost them less. Customs officials were hard pressed to differentiate between a Canadian log and one from the U.S.

In 1837, however, the Customs House seemed to be getting smarter. One, two, three loads they declared illegal because they had the wrong country of origin. There was only one explanation: Someone who knew where the lumber was coming from upstream was providing that information to the Customs Office.

Odious Villain

The town was outraged. The Calais Advertiser labeled the informant an “odious villain.” One man accused of informing placed an advertisement in the paper. He declared he didn’t inform, and customs officers attested that he told the truth.

Finally, a group from town decided to put an end to the information flow. U.S. Customs had seized a cache of U.S. contraband across the border in Saint Stephen. On the bridge to America, the customs officer was greeted with an odd sight – a band of men dressed as Indians.

The men seized the officer, placed him in a wagon and drove him to into the woods on the Canadian side. Along the way, one of the disguised men dragged a sword along the rolling wagon wheel, sharpening it in a menacing manner.

The customs officer did not hold out long. While he may not have named the informant, he gave the crowd enough information to identify him. Faced with the charge, the informant fled town and the smuggling activity returned to normal.

This story last updated in 2022.

6 comments 3.1K views

The Ghost Locomotives of the Great Maine Wilderness

Deep in the heart of Maine’s Allagash region sit two ghost locomotives silently rusting in the wilderness. Only a few intrepid canoes, hikers and snowmobilers can see the hulking machines, miles from any road or railhead.

The last of the great independent loggers, a Quebecois called King Ed Lacroix, put the ghost locomotives there.

Lacroix built a 13-mile railroad in the middle of the Allagash — some would call it nowhere — to haul pulpwood to Maine paper mills in Millinocket and East Millinocket.

One of the ghost locomotives

When the locomotives cooled down for the last time in 1933, they were simply left in the woods. “Allagash canoodlers stop and stare in disbelief at the ninety-ton locomotive, still standing there, way to hell and gone off in the woods, and wonder what kind of men brought it there, and why,” wrote Robert Pike in Tall Trees, Tough Men.

King Ed Lacroix

Edouard Lacroix would go wherever he thought he could make a buck cutting down trees.

At one time he employed more than 3,000 workers — clerks, scalers and lumbermen — mostly French-Canadian. And unlike some other logging barons he had a reputation for honesty, fairness and hard work. He paid his men decent wages and gave them modern equipment, comfortable living quarters and hearty meals.

King Ed often worked for the Great Northern Paper Co., which owned the world’s largest paper mill in East Millinocket, Maine. The mill produced a stupendous amount of newsprint, 300 tons a day, enough for nearly every newspaper in the United States. (It’s now shut down.)

In 1925, Lacroix made a deal with the Great Northern Paper Co. to deliver 125,000 cords of pulp per year from the Allagash to feed the giant Millinocket mills. Lacroix didn’t quail at the prospect of moving mountains of pulpwood from a wilderness miles from civilization.

The Allagash posed a further complication: It was in the watershed of the Saint John River in New Brunswick. The mills sat on the banks of the Penobscot.

Tramway History

The East Millinocket mill

To solve the problem, the logging industry dammed the Eagle and Chamberlain lakes so they drained into the Penobscot and not the Saint John. But the dam between the two lakes blocked logs floating to the Penobscot.

For a while, oxen hauled lumber from Eagle Lake to Chamberlain Lake. Then in 1902 the logging companies built a tramway to carry logs. The lumbermen supposedly kept their boardinghouses heated all winter by burning the ox yokes.

Remnants of the tramway still survive in Maine’s Tramway Historic District, part of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.

The Tramway consisted of an elevated track along which log-filled cars moved. A steam-driven cable took them from Eagle Lake to Chamberlain Lake 3000 feet on the upper track. Then it returned the cars on the lower track. Click here and scroll down for a diagram of how it worked.

The tramway functioned well from 1902 to 1907, when the Lombard Steam Log Hauler made it obsolete.

Ghost Locomotives

Tramway remnants near the ghost locomotives

When King Ed LaCroix got the contract from the Great Northern in 1926, he decided to build a 13-mile long logging railroad from the eastern end of the old Tramway to Umbazooksus Lake, which connects to the Penobscot River.

He assembled his men and supplies in Lac-Frontiere, Quebec, and in Greenville Maine. On giant sleds he moved 60 railcars, a 1500-foot steel trestle and a 72-ton and a 90-ton steam locomotive. They traveled over icy logging roads and frozen lakes to Eagle Lake. He built three 225-foot-long conveyors that picked the pulpwood out of the lake and onto the cars. Each conveyor could move a cord of wood from the water to the railcar in 90 seconds. A 32-foot-long railcar could be filled with pulpwood in 18 minutes.

To power the locomotives, barrels of oil were floated by scow across Umbazooksus Lake.

King Lacroix never got to run the Eagle Lake and West Branch Railroad. The Great Northern Co. bought him out in 1927. The railroad worked well, hauling 6,500 cords of pulpwood a week. (To see a video of a ride on the Eagle Lake & West Branch RR in 1966, click here.)

By 1933 the Great Depression had depressed demand for newsprint, so the Great Northern abandoned the Allagash, the railroad, the rolling stock and the ghost locomotives.

By the time demand for paper picked up, it was more efficient to use trucks to haul logs.

Aftermath

The ghost locomotives sat in a train shed for years. Then the Maine Forest Service mistakenly burned it down. The state, along with volunteers, shored up the ground underneath the ghost locomotives and painted them to prevent further rusting.

Today, the Allagash wilderness is remote and scenic with a 92-mile waterway protected by the State of Maine. National Geographic calls canoeing down the Allagash one of the 50 best adventure trips in the United States.

King Ed Lacroix was elected to Canada’s legislative assembly, leaving politics in 1945. His grandsons, Robert and Marcel Dutil, are successful Canadian businessmen.

During his heyday as a logging baron, one of King Ed’s employees – a log scaler — wrote a poem about him.

The Man of the Hour

These lines are composed by a scaler, it seems,
Who is scaling the pulp wood at Thoroughfare Stream,
Where the young and the old and the low and the high
Are singing the praises of Edouard Lacroix.

He sure is some hustler to corral all these means
In order to purchase such costly machines;
His mountains of pulp are a wonderful sight,
And tractors are humming by day and by night.

Photo of the ghost locomotives: By Will leavitt – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42271454. This story about the ghost locomotives of Maine was updated in 2024.

2 comments 21.9K views

Philip Stansbury Visits Vermont and Finds the French and Indian War Never Ended

Philip Stansbury wrote about a murder in 1821 in Swanton Falls Vermont

In 1821, young Philip Stansbury decided to venture on a walking tour of America and to write about his journey, creating the American walking tour literary genre.

His colorful, pro-American observations, gave readers a good look at the new country, then a cause celebre and a curiosity around the world.

Philip Stansbury Takes a Walk

Philip Stansbury, a New Yorker born in 1802, was the son of a merchant who had prospered before the Revolutionary War. His father’s fortunes faded following the war owing to resentment over his allegiance to England.

Swanton Falls, Vermont

Philip’s route took him through upstate and western New York, north through Canada and back through New England. He entered Vermont through Swanton Falls, where he discovered a vibrant town. It had about 75 houses, schoolhouses, taverns and stores. With a 12-foot falls on the Missisquoi River offering a source of power, industry grew up in the town. A vibrant economy emerged from a grist mill, saw mills, woolen mills, a forge, marble processing mills and fulling mills.

He also found the remnants of the French and Indian War. Though the French had surrendered Canada to the English roughly 60 years earlier, French Canadians still lived there. The French and English inhabitants of Swanton Falls still bickered. He described it in his book, A Pedestrian Tour of Two Thousand Three Hundred Miles, in North America.

Swanton Falls

He described the approach to the town through a collection of houses occupied by Frenchmen, called Canadian. Retaining their customary way of living, wrote Stansbury, they “keep up a petty warfare with the Vermontese at the other end of the village, which sometimes occasions disastrous consequences.

“About eight or nine days before, an old Frenchman, returning home late at night stung with insults both himself and his family had sustained, perceived his son fiercely struggling with a sturdy American youth,” he wrote. The American would likely win. The Canadian, “highly incensed, and crazed with the fumes of spirituous liquor,” ran into the house and seized a musket. He then shot the young man.

“Conscious of his crime, he fled directly to the lake shore, and taking a canoe, rowed into Canada, the resort, like the heaths between Cheviot and the Tweed, of all the miscreants and pursued plunderers of the United States.

“The scuffle originated from a petulant dog which attacked the stranger; and on its being repulsed, the Canadian’s son, entertaining, as his countrymen generally do, great affection for the beast, forcibly resented its injuries. As I entered the village, the young American was breathing his last, and the perpetrator was understood to have been secured in Montreal.”

This story last updated in 2024.

2 comments 2.6K views

In Springfield, Leo Durocher Learned How Not To Be Nice

Leo Durocher ranks 10^th in career wins by a Major League baseball manager and fourth in ejections by umpires.

Leo Durocher

His brash outspokenness earned him the nickname ‘Leo the Lip.’ In the non-baseball world, he is most famous for saying, “Nice guys finish last.” He was a notorious bench jockey who ordered his pitchers to hit batters and fought with authority. As manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers he championed Jackie Robinson and threatened to trade anyone who didn’t want him on the team.

“Nice guys finish last” did not mean you couldn’t be a decent person and succeed, he later said.

West Springfield

Leo Durocher was born July 27, 1905 on a kitchen table on the third floor of a triple decker in West Springfield, Mass. Two days after he was born, his mother went back to work as a maid in a Springfield hotel.

His father was a railroad engineer who had a heart attack shortly after Leo was born.

Both his parents were French Catholic; so was the neighborhood. His parents and his three older brothers spoke nothing but French in the house while he was growing up. He entered public school without knowing a word of English.

He lived two blocks from Hall of Famer Rabbit Maranville, the Boston Braves shortstop who gave him a glove and tips on how to play the position.

The Big Leagues

He was a good all-around athlete in high school and was offered a scholarship to Holy Cross – but he hit a science teacher before he graduated. He was suspended and didn’t return to high school.

Instead, he went to work for local employers and played on the company teams. At 17 he tried out with the minor league Hartford Senators and made the team.

In 1928 he was called up to play shortstop for the Yankees for two years (Babe Ruth called him ‘The All-American Out’). He played with the Cincinnati Reds, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Brooklyn Dodgers as player-manager. He also managed the New York Giants, the Chicago Cubs and the Houston Astros, ending his Major League career in 1973.

In his autobiography, Nice Guys Finish Last, he explained how the phrase, “Nice guys finish last’ came about while he was talking to a sportswriter. It wasn’t completely accurate, but it makes the point:

… the Giants, led by Mel Ott, began to come out of their dugout to take their warm-up. Without missing a beat, I said, “Take a look at that Number Four there. A nicer guy never drew breath than that man there.” I called off his players’ names as they came marching up the steps behind him, “Walker Cooper, Mize, Marshall, Kerr, Gordon, Thomson. Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.” I said, “They lose a ball game, they go home, they have a nice dinner, they put their heads down on the pillow and go to sleep. …. Give me some scratching, diving, hungry ballplayers who come to kill you. Now, Stanky’s the nicest gentleman who ever drew breath, but when the bell rings you’re his mortal enemy. That’s the kind of a guy I want playing for me.

Leo Durocher died in 1991 in Palm Springs, Calif., at the age of 86.

With thanks to Nice Guys Finish Last by Leo Durocher. The Leo Durocher Goudey baseball card is card by Goudey. Licensed under public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story was updated in 2022.

4 comments 3.2K views

Acadians Refuse To Take a Loyalty Oath to the British King and Pay the Price

For nearly 40 years in the early 18th century, Acadian farmers in Canada refused orders to take an unconditional oath of loyalty to the British Crown. Since there were far more Acadians than British military forces, the Acadians got away with it.

Expulsion of the Acadians

The British had taken Acadia in 1710 as part of their continuing struggle with the French to dominate North America. At the end of Queen Anne’s War, fought largely in Maine, Massachusetts and Nova Scotia, Britain won the southern part of Nova Scotia in the Treaty of Utrecht.

The British didn’t have much of a presence in the region, though. That allowed the French to encroach by building two forts in what is now New Brunswick: Beausejour, in Aulac, and Gaspareaux, near Port Elgin.

But in June 1755, France’s Fort Beausejour fell to the British and Gaspareaux surrendered without a fight. Shortly thereafter, acting Gov. Charles Lawrence ordered the Acadians to take the loyalty oath. This time, the British could back up their orders with force, because three regiments and New England Ranger units had arrived.

But the Acadians did not want to pledge allegiance to a Protestant monarch and forswear their loyalty to the pope.

Acadians Refuse Loyalty Oath

Father Jean-Louis Le Loutre

By 1755, decades of fighting with the French and Indians left the British fed up with Acadian intransigence. Dummer’s War followed Queen Anne’s War, and King George’s War followed in 1744. The Catholic Acadians scattered throughout the region were ostensibly neutral during these conflicts.

But some waged guerilla war against the British with their allies, the Wabanaki and the Micmac people, who were also Catholic.

Halifax

In 1749, the British tried to tighten military control over Nova Scotia. They built forts in the most important Acadian communities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. They also provoked the Micmac people by founding the Protestant settlement of Halifax, a violation of their treaty with the Indians.

The founding of Halifax touched off Father Le Loutre’s War. Acadian and Micmac forces attacked Halifax in at least half of the 24 battles, raids and skirmishes of the conflict. The French also built their own forts, including Fort Beausejour on the border between Nova Scotia and Acadia.

Father Le Loutre was joined by an Acadian resistance fighter, Joseph Broussard, known as Beausoleil. In 1750, Le Loutre led many Acadians and Micmacs to new homes in unsettled regions controlled by the French: Chignecto, Prince Edward Isle and Cape Breton. The British called him Moses.

The Final British Push

Map of Fort Beausejour and cathedral

The British began their final push against the Acadians in Canada on June 4, 1755, when Lt. Col. Robert Monckton began to move toward Ft. Beausejour. He led 2,400 men: three British regiments and New England Ranger units led by Joseph Gorham of Yarmouth, Mass.

The 400 French, Acadian and Micmac men were no match for the combined British and New England forces that laid siege to the fort. A cathedral next to Fort Beausejour had just been finished a month before the British laid siege. Father Le Loutre ordered it burned so the British wouldn’t occupy it. He saved the cast-iron bell, still at the site of the fort, now a National Historic Site of Canada.

The fort surrendered on June 16. British troops moved on to force the other French forts in the region to capitulate.

Acadian Expulsion

Two weeks after the fall of Fort Beausejour, Lawrence ordered the forcible removal of the entire Acadian population from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and parts of what is now Maine. Estimates vary, but the British rounded up as many as 10,000 Acadians out of a population of 12,000. Then they boarded them onto ships and sent them to the 13 British colonies in North America and to France. Several thousand died of disease, starvation and drowning.

Charles Lawrence

The British seized their farms and livestock, pillaging and burning their homes to make sure they wouldn’t return.

Father Le Loutre escaped to Quebec and sailed to France, but the British captured him on the journey and imprisoned him for eight years. After his release, he tried to help Acadians deported to France. He died Sept. 30, 1772 in Nantes, France, leaving his worldly possessions to the expelled Acadians.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem about the expulsion of the Acadians, called Evangeline. Beausoleil led a group to settle in Louisiana. One of his descendants is a performing artist known as Beyonce.

This story was updated in 2025.

19 comments 3.7K views

Newer Posts

Older Posts