Gough Barry M. Historical Dictionary of Canada

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290 • NEW FRANCE

without paying tax of a fifth of the selling price. To the habitant, he

had other duties. He was obliged to maintain a manor house, a step

designed to prevent absentee landlordism. He was also required to

cede lands to applicants, operate a flour mill, hold court, support the

church, and do road work (corvée) with the censitaires. He had, of

course, honors owing him and “burdensome rights” payable by the

habitant. Burdensome but not oppressive, these were designed to

discourage land transfer and keep the habitant on the soil. They were

also intended to protect the habitant against seigneurial abuses and,

in this connection, the habitant had rights of appeal to the intendant.

The seigneurial system, far from being feudal then, was actually a

system of checks and balances designed for the mutual benefit of

landlord and settler.

The wilderness posed as an “escape valve” to those who sought to

profit by the fur trade or to escape the pressures of urban or even ag-

ricultural society. In France, there was competition for land. In New

France, there was competition for labor. Indeed, to prevent too many

young men from taking to the woods, the government instituted a

system of licensing canoes and traders. By this method it was hoped

habitants would be kept on the land, cultivating crops important to

colonial self-sufficiency. The frontier offered freedoms. The fur trade

that became increasingly profitable as the 17th century progressed

drew habitants to the wilderness. In the forests, the flamboyant,

gaudy coureurs-de-bois adopted native styles of living and frontier

values. They thus concerned the colony’s authorities, both civil and

ecclesiastical.

The frontier was an ameliorating feature on French institutions

transported into Canada; it was also the source of danger. In the mid-

17th century, the eyes of New France were fixed on the southern

frontier, where the Iroquois threat reached decisive proportions. The

French, allied with the Algonkian and Huron, were in bitter conflict

with the Iroquois who traded with the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany).

Between 1640 and 1660, the Iroquois attacked French settlements

along the St. Lawrence, intercepted furs coming downriver from

Ottawa, and terrorized the Jesuit missions and Indian villages in

Huronia. The horrors of this war in terms of its effect on both Indian

and Jesuit defy description. The Iroquois gained control of the west-

ern trade, their ultimate aim. As for the Hurons, they ceased to exist

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NEW FRANCE • 291

as a nation capable of waging war. Moreover, the Jesuits withdrew

from Huronia and kept priests only at a few scattered and strategic

points on the Great Lakes. The future of French empire in the west

was therefore in question.

French power was equally in doubt in settled areas. Near the

new towns of Montréal and Trois-Rivières, founded in 1634 and

1642, respectively, Iroquois warriors took scalps with ease. This

pressure reached a high point in 1660 but was relieved at Long

Sault by Adam Dollard des Ormeaux, the garrison commander

of Montréal, a Canadian legend. The Indian frontier was momen-

tarily stabilized. Meanwhile, Acadia had fallen to Massachusetts

expansionists. In 1654, a fleet from Boston captured Port Royal

and Fort St. John, and in 1662 an English governor was commis-

sioned for the area. French power in North America, confined to

the empire of the St. Lawrence, tottered ominously. Reports from

Québec—variously charged with emotion and fear and telling of

the untapped prospects of the colony—reached Versailles. Their

message was direct: the fate of New France was sealed unless

France would send support.

In March 1661, following the death of the dominating Cardinal

Mazaran, the young Louis XIV had dramatically assumed control of

affairs with the ambition of making France the strongest European

power. The Sun King’s minister, the great mercantilist Jean-Baptiste

Colbert, had similar intentions. He knew that a strong navy and

colonies were necessary for the rise of French national power. They

recognized colonial administration and in 1665 created the Ministry

of Marine, which directed colonial and naval finances and adminis-

tration. Colbert, as minister of Marine, now dictated affairs of the

French empire as he and his monarch wished.

In May 1663, the king decreed that New France was to be a royal

province. At the same time, the charter of the defunct Company

of New France was cancelled and with it the fur trade monopoly.

Chartered companies were founded to develop French interests in

such places as San Domingo and Louisiana. In Canada, a crown

corporation, the Compagnie de l’Occident, founded in 1664, was

a means of infusing royal control and monies into the colony. The

crown assumed responsibility for the administration and defense of

the colony.

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292 • NEW FRANCE

The new regime called for establishing a sovereign or superior

council. This would consist of a governor, responsible for relations

with the French administration and for defense of the colony; an in-

tendant, responsible for the justice, economy, policy, and finance of

the colony; and a bishop, responsible for ecclesiastical affairs (and,

at his own discretion, moral guardianship). Other council members

included an attorney general, a clerk of the records, and five council-

ors, usually representing the merchant class. The resulting conciliar

government was rife with conflicts. Yet, periodically, it gave the

colony the local direction lacking under full company auspices. Cer-

tainly, the personality and character of the individuals holding office

were reflected in the colonial administration, and graft worked as-

siduously to the disadvantage of the colony’s military preparedness.

But the coming of royal government to Canada marked the end of an

era: new government institutions, designed to reshape New France in

the image of the Old World, were to change forever the social fabric

of the colony.

The French government saw that the immediate need of the colony

was protection from the Iroquois. Several companies of troops, in-

cluding the famous Carignan-Salières regiment of some 1,100 men,

were dispatched to Québec after 1665. They first erected several

forts on the southern frontier. Then, in a series of raids and displays

of power led by Governor Courcelle and the Marquis de Tracy, the

army checked the Mohawk danger. They put four Mohawk villages

to the torch, destroyed food supplies, and erected a large cross and

a post bearing the French arms at the site of the principal village.

They were establishing a cordon sanitaire. In July 1667, the Iroquois

Confederacy was compelled to treat with the French at Québec. This

ended their hostilities with both the French and Algonkian until 1682.

As for the soldiers, about 400 remained at the end of their tour of duty

to settle near Montréal and the Richelieu River and form the core of

a militia established in 1673 and responsible for the defense of that

vulnerable back door to Canada. Elsewhere in the colony, militia

captains, chosen from the habitants, assumed responsibility for local

defense.

The resident royal bureaucracy undertook numerous steps to

make the colony self-supporting and populous. When the great Jean

Talon was commissioned intendant of all French possessions in

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NEW FRANCE • 293

North America in 1665, the colony had only some 3,000 residents.

He would have to satisfy Colbert’s demand that Canada be self-

sufficient and thus develop adequate agriculture, trade, and industry.

He encouraged experimentation in crop production, brewing, and

shipbuilding. He also took steps to people the country. From 1665 to

1672, about 1,500 state-aided immigrants and indentured employees

landed in Canada and were given land, implements, and supplies.

Some 900 filles de roi, or King’s Daughters, orphans raised by nuns

at the crown’s expense, were imported as wives for the soldiers. It

is reported that the “fattest went off best, upon the apprehension that

these being less active, would keep truer to their Engagements, and

hold out better against the nipping cold of the Winter.” The crown

also sent some 1,000 criminals, mainly poachers and salt smugglers,

in the 18th century. In 1668, a ship arrived with Portuguese, German,

and Dutch settlers. Huguenots, though generally debarred, came to

New France intermittently, where they caused the bishop concern.

Talon, on Colbert’s advice, issued regulations to encourage early

marriages and large families. He also imposed heavy penalties on re-

luctant bachelors and fathers of would-be brides. The very Canadian

system of baby bonus and family allowance was born. The church

also encouraged marriage: marriage beds were blessed and exorcised,

and the betrothed well understood that the chief purpose of matrimo-

nial state was procreation.

In the family-centered society of New France, marriage was a pop-

ular state. Widows and widowers frequently remarried; few women

went into holy orders; illegitimacy was low. The family was engaged

in a collective enterprise for survival, self-sufficiency, and upward

advancement, and marriages were invariably contractual arrange-

ments in which large dowries were significant. In this healthy and

productive society, low infant mortality rates existed: twice as much

of the population reached marriageable age in New as in Old France.

All these factors resulted in phenomenal population growth. In

the period from 1666 to 1673, the population doubled from 3,200

to 6,700. By 1713, it was 18,000; by 1730, 34,000; and at the con-

quest, 76,000. This amazing growth was almost wholly indigenous:

only 10,000 emigrated from Europe during the whole French co-

lonial period. Of these, the composition was 3,500 soldiers, 1,100

women, 3,900 indentured workers, 500 independent men, and 1,000

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294 • NEW FRANCE

condemned criminals. Colbert did not want to populate New France

at the expense of Old France, and French immigration to the New

World was a trifling portion of that of the English.

As the population grew in the early years of the 18th century, the

economy advanced. Bridges and canals were built. New seigneuries

were granted and a few ships laid down, ironworks founded, and

fishing and sealing occupied a few colonists. French mercantilism

aimed at colonial self-sufficiency, which was not to be at the expense

of the metropolitan power. For this reason, New France remained

essentially a colony in which fur was the most important article of

trade. Because New France did not have a flourishing commerce with

the outside world, its society reflected its basic dependence on the fur

staple. Thus, while New France produced various agricultural prod-

ucts for trade on the fishing banks, at Cape Breton, and in the French

West Indies, while it had a seemingly inexhaustible fishing ground,

and while it had excellent forests and mineral reserves, it lacked—in

its dependent position—a society capable of exploiting that potential.

In its spiritual and intellectual growth, the society remained within

confines defined by the clergy and crown. Books were of French

rather than local manufacture. There is no record of a printing press

in New France, and there was no book trade. The grand sum of books

in the colony was probably 20,000; of these, religious works were the

majority. New France had no public library.

In education as well, growth was slow. Various religious orders

kept schools. Many but not all parishes had a petite école but il-

literacy remained extensive. Québec and Montréal each had a trade

school. In 1635, the Jesuits established a college in Québec for the

purpose of preparing students to be priests, navigators, and surveyors.

Students of medicine or law were trained in France. Local cultural

developments were not entirely lacking. New France had its figures

of science and letters, its wood sculptors, silversmiths, and painters,

its musicians and actors. But the French Enlightenment had few effu-

sions on the west side of the Atlantic. And, as the 18th century pro-

gressed, the intellectual gap between Old and New France widened.

New France, with its society of essentially needy lower-class ori-

gin, had a limited intellectual life. The French colonists possessed a

social ethic quite different from that of their New England Protestant

counterparts. Born of different linguistic and religious stock, living

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NEW FRANCE • 295

under different institutions of land control and authoritarian govern-

ment, the French colonists developed a unique posture concerning

their earth, terre Québec. The French Canadians adopted no “puri-

tanical” outlook in the American sense. Yet they came under close

Jesuit surveillance, for church codes of social behavior were by no

means lacking in Canada in the late 17th century. Their attitude to-

ward the North American Indians contrasted with that of the English

or Spanish. As émigrés of France, the colonists tended to be of rural,

military, or clerical background. Their colonial attitudes underwent

little change. By contrast, those of Massachusetts or Virginia were

nurtured by changing economic and political conditions and hence

developed revolutionary overtones and expansionistic tendencies

at a much faster rate. French Canadian society, rooted in land and

Catholicism, was not outward looking. Rather, it had the deficiencies

of an unnurtured society far from metropolitan France. Yet French

Canadian society was of such stability and tradition that its legacies

remained well after the British conquest.

The fate of New France was not determined by the characteristics

of the populace or economy but by the state of international relations

and British naval and military paramountcy. Four wars—beginning

in 1689 and ending in 1763—were fought by France and England,

and the end result in North America, as signified by the Treaty of

Paris of 1763, was that the French empire there was at an end. Only

the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, off Newfoundland, remained

French, as shelters and drying places for French fishers.

French imperial efforts of no small merit had failed to hold the

colony. The colonization of New Orleans in 1718 and the building

of the great fortress port of Louisbourg at Cape Breton in 1720 to

secure both ends of a vast and fragile network of forts along the great

interconnecting empires of the watersheds of the St. Lawrence and

the Mississippi rivers had not been enough. The growth of English

settlement in New England, New York, and the Middle Colonies

was a force that threatened French settlements both in Acadia and, in

time, on the banks of the St. Lawrence. In 1760, Canada had 76,000

colonists as compared with the Thirteen Colonies’ nearly 1.6 million.

On the shores of Hudson Bay, the vigorous growth of the English

fur trade under Hudson’s Bay Company auspices after 1668 (ironi-

cally with the know how of the coureurs Radisson and Groseilliers)

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296 • NEW WESTMINSTER

threatened the interior appendages of trade and empire of the St.

Lawrence. The British victory at Québec on 13 September 1759 was

but a climax to an ongoing process that historians have called the

Second Hundred Years War.

Geography and British sea hegemony had determined the out-

come: New France, confined to the great river and unable to be as-

sisted from overseas, became a British province in a North American

empire stretching from the Arctic islands to the Gulf of Mexico and

from the Atlantic shore to the Mississippi. Its extent to the north and

west of the Great Lakes had yet to be defined. The continuance of the

French Canadian people and culture would depend very largely on

the deep roots of their colonial society and on the new order of Brit-

ish rule. It was somewhat characteristic of the remote, paternalistic,

and to some degree primitive society of Québec that Canon Briand,

the grand vicar of Québec, ordered prayers to be said for the new king

of the province, George III, and this in advance of the formal recogni-

tion of British sovereignty in the 1763 treaty. In Briand’s opinion, the

British were “our masters; and we owe to them what we owed to the

French when they ruled.” Thus, the kingdom of Canada passed from

the hands of one European power to another.

NEW WESTMINSTER. In 1858, after proclamation of the Crown

Colony of British Columbia, a site on the north bank of the Fraser

River was selected for the capital, New Westminster. The townsite

was laid out by the Royal Engineers. Named by Queen Victoria,

it soon was dubbed “the Royal City.” An outfitting point for pros-

pectors destined for the Cariboo gold fields, it grew as a port and

steam navigation depot and repair center. From here, the affairs of

the colony were administered until 1866, when upon colonial union

with Vancouver Island, the capital was shifted to Victoria. New

Westminster was home to the federal BC Penitentiary from 1878 to

1980, the scene of trials and executions, including those of the Wild

McLean Boys, Slumach, and Simon Gunanoot. New Westminster

had a prominent Chinatown until the fire of 1898. Linked to Vancou-

ver by the main arterial Kingsway, also a tramway and interurban rail

service, New Westminster remained a prominent retail center. How-

ever, completion of the transcontinental railway in 1886 drew trade

away to the new port of Vancouver. Other place names associated

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NISGA’A • 297

with New Westminster are Queensborough, the original name for the

city, chosen by Royal Engineer commander Colonel Richard Clem-

ent Moody, and Sappertown, a suburb camp where a Royal Engineers

(“Sappers”) detachment was headquartered.

The uptown commercial area began in 1954 with the opening of

Woodward’s Department Store, after 1993 supplanted by Royal City

Center Mall. The rapid transit Skytrain link to Vancouver, the public

market revitalization project, and foreshore residential construction

have given new life. Heritage restoration has rejuvenated many old

buildings. The local economy always had some industry: lumber

trades and fishing in the late 19th century, manufacturing and ship

repair in the early 20th century, retail in the last half of the 20th

century, and high tech and fiber optics in the present time. It is home

to Douglas College and the Canadian Lacrosse Hall of Fame. The

population is about 170,000.

NINETY-TWO RESOLUTIONS. This long and repetitive 1834

document contained a list of complaints or grievances against the

government of Lower Canada. It was a call for reform born out of

a deadlock between the assembly and the governor and his coun-

cil. The Ninety-Two Resolutions were drawn up by a committee

of reformers, though its authorship is uncertain. The list included

complaints against the system of patronage, the dispensation of

clergy reserves (one-seventh of crown lands set aside to support the

Protestant clergy), and various economic polices deemed restrictive

to the expansion and liberalization of trade. The document called for

an elected legislature. Taken together with the actions of William

Lyon Mackenzie (in Upper Canada) and the movement toward

responsible government, the document foreshadowed the need of a

British inquiry and reform from the top as determined and suggested

by Lord Durham.

NISGA’A. A First Nation, the Nisga’a inhabit the long, mountainous,

and in some places lava-bedded valley of their great river, the Nass,

in northwestern British Columbia. The river was in prehistoric and

early historic times a great food depot. The Nass River rises in the

Skeena Mountains and runs 236 miles to the Pacific at Portland Ca-

nal. River navigation is dangerous. Charles Bishop, a maritime fur

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298 • NISGA’A

trader, was the first European to visit the river entrance, in the 1790s.

Then as now, the Nisga’a were passionate defenders of their concept

of property, and they guarded zealously their valley’s resources,

which gave them reason for their being, their items of trade and

strength, and their precious independence. The oolachen, or “candle-

fish,” was one of their principal sources of wealth, and each year in

late February/early March to May, the catch and the extraction of its

oil or grease brought them their means of wealth. Coastal and interior

natives traded for this oil.

From the 1820s, the Hudson’s Bay Company traded with the

Nisga’a. In 1864, the Church Missionary Society sent R.R.A. Doolan

and Robert Cunningham as missionaries; they established schools.

Whisky traders were there, too. In 1865 and 1866, British gunboats

(Clio and Forward) made calls at the Nass to stop the whisky traf-

fic, but without complete success. Other vessels entered the river

to provide protection to the Nisga’a or to seek redress for murders

(Sparrowhawk in 1868). The Methodists established a mission in

1877 (Alfred Green and Thomas Crosby), aided by William Henry

Pierce, interpreter and guide.

The main Nisga’a settlements are Kincolith, Lakalzap, Gitwinksi-

hlkw, and New Aiyansh. The Nisga’a never signed a treaty to relin-

quish territory or define their land, rights, and relationship with the

Europeans. But they were restricted to small parcels of land: Indian

reserves. A major champion for Nisga’a rights was the firebrand

Anglican missionary James McCullagh, an Irishman. He was a social

engineer to the Nisga’a. He opposed the potlatch, which he saw as

wasteful and inequitable.

The Nisga’a search for compensation was long. In 1887, Nisga’a

chiefs traveled to Victoria to demand recognition of title, negotiation

of treaties, and provision for self-government. In 1913, the Nisga’a

petitioned the Privy Council, seeking to resolve the land question. In

1968, the Nisga’a launched their challenge in the British Columbia

Supreme Court on land questions. Negotiations began in 1976 with

the Government of Canada; the BC government joined the talks in

1991. In 1996, British Columbia, Canada, and the Nisga’a reached

an agreement in principle; in 1998, the final agreement was initiated

by the three parties, and the Nisga’a voted to accept. This marked

the first “made-in-BC” treaty involving the federal government.

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NORMANDY CAMPAIGN • 299

Governor James Douglas had signed various treaties with various

natives in the 1850s (Salish, Kwagiulth, Nanaimo, and others),

but these did not involve the federal government. Significant in this

long process was BC recognition of aboriginal title, so long denied.

In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada in Delgamuuk v. the Queen

affirmed that oral testimony ought to be considered in native title to

ancestral lands.

The 1998, Nisga’a arrangement was overseen by the BC Treaty

Commission, an independent body of five commissioners appointed

by Canada, British Columbia, and the First Nations Summit. The

treaty calls for various compensations ($312 million over 15 years),

municipal government of a self-governing nature, and the making

of the Nisga’a subject to federal and provincial laws relating to the

environment, resources, and conservation, and the laws that generally

apply to British Columbians today. Ratification of the agreement in

principle continued as a major public subject of dispute in 1999.

NOOTKA. See NUU’CHAH’NULTH.

NORMANDY CAMPAIGN. On 6 June 1944, during World War

II, Canadian forces landed on “Juno Beach,” Normandy, occupied

France, as part of Operation Overlord, the invasion to liberate west-

ern Europe from German occupation. Canadians penetrated nine

kilometers inland on the first day, facing heavy SS Panzer forces

at Verrières Ridge. The Normandy campaign, which followed the

D-Day landings, was not far removed from the Western Front of

1914–18 in terms of the scale of casualties. Though trench warfare

did not develop, the fear of such a stalemate was ever present, and the

fighting that took place in Normandy was very much attritional war-

fare. The Allies mounted numerous large-scale operations designed

to break through the main line of German resistance and begin the

push for Germany itself.

Operation Spring was the Canadian assault on Verrières Ridge,

24–25 July 1944. Lt. Gen. Guy Simonds (1903–1974), commander

of II Canadian Corps for Europe, devised a three-phase battle plan

involving the 2nd and 3rd Canadian Infantry Divisions, 2nd Cana-

dian Armored Brigade, and two British armored divisions. The first

phase, a night attack, involved moves by 3rd Division to capture

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