Theme 4. The French in North America

Michael Fowkes

Canada and IroqoiaThe Fur Trade

By 1580, around Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St.Lawrence, the fisheries and the whale and seal hunts

employed at least four hundred vessels and some

twelve thousand men.

To obtain firewood, fresh water, and room to sun-dry

their fish or to render whales into oil, the fishermen and

whalers established temporary camps on shore in

sheltered coves.

At first, the Indians pursued the trade within their own

cultural parameters.

Canada and IroquoiaCanada

At the turn of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth, French fur traders

focused their efforts around Tadoussac, on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and along

the peninsula they called it Acadia.

Huron lived in about twenty fortified towns set among extensive fields of

corn, squash, and beans.

In making Indian friends, however, Europeans made other Indians their

enemies.

Canada and Iroquoia The Five Nations

Any individual’s death diminished the collective power of his or her lineage, clans village, and nation, provoking powerful and angry burst of grief, especially by female

relatives.

During the early sixteenth century, a prophet named Deganawida and his chief disciple, Hiawatha, preached a new message of unity and peace meant to stem the

violent between the Iroquois nations.

In 1633-35 smallpox and measles epidemic killed half of the Iroquois.

Canada and IroquoiaJesuits

• Wearing long robes the Jesuits became known as Indians as the Black Robes.

• Rather than compel Indians to learn French tend relocate into new mission towns, the Jesuits mastered the native languages and went into their villages to build churches.

• Diseases that accompanied the Jesuits from Europe especially complicated their mission.

French AmericaEmigrants

The French learned that they needed more colonists to defend

Quebec, not from the Indians, but from their

English rivals.

Crown officials worried that the French were

losing the demographic race to colonize North

America.

Although France had plenty of religious

dissidents, who might have been eager to

emigrate, French policy forbade their settlement in France

after 1632.

French America opportunity

• Most French who did emigrate to Canada significantly improved their status and standard of living.

• Women were relatively few and almost all quickly married, when widowed , they just as rapidly remarried.

• Like Dutch law, French law treated wives as equal economic partners with their husbands.

French AmericaThe Upper Country

• The New French dwelled on a long but narrow thread of farms strung along both banks of St. Lawrence River between Quebec and Montreal.

• In the upper country, the Indians and the French gradually developed and effective alliance based upon mutual accommodations on what the historian Richard White has called “ the middle ground.”

• The Iroquois destruction of the Huron during the 1640s had disrupted the French fur trade.

French AmericaLouisiana

La Salle named the valley and adjoining Gulf Coast “Louisiana” to impress king Louis.

After 1731, the Louisiana population grew by natural increase to 4,100 slaves 3,300 settlers, and 600 soldiers by 1746.

The planters raised inferior grades of tobacco and indigo that sold in France for less than the high costs of production and shipment.