The White and the Gold (61 page)

Early in April the party came to a point where the great river broke into three channels. The paddles of the weary men were lifted at once with renewed energy; their voices reflected a gain in spirits. This, they knew, was the beginning of the end. Below this division of the waters must be the ocean or gulf into which the river emptied. The flotilla was divided into three equal parts. La Salle chose the western channel, Tonty the center, and D’Autray, third in command, the east. It was La Salle’s canoe which first issued out on the surface of the salt water, his eyes which first sighted the broad green gulf.

When the three parties came together, La Salle followed the example of all great explorers who had preceded him in opening up
the unknown places of America by erecting a tall cross on the shore. It carried the arms of France and the words:

All voices joined in singing “The banners of Heaven’s King advance!” and all arms were raised in the air. The whole of this unknown land which stretched in majesty to the western horizon had been claimed for France.

But more important than the question of which nation would reap the benefit was the fact that at last the mystery of the Mississippi had been solved.

T
HE annals of North America, brief as they seem in comparison with the histories of older continents, have nevertheless created many romantic backgrounds. Life on the hacienda of Mexico and on the Spanish ranchero in California was filled with the color that wealth and privilege create. The plantation days in the southern states remain in the memory because of the gracious living the owners enjoyed. Life in Quebec through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems fully as romantic; and this can be traced to the seigneurial system which grew out of the determination to perpetuate in Canada the feudal fabric of France.

The seigneurial system was, however, a natural development. The first settlers were completely dependent on France and continued so for many decades. Few of them had any aptitude for the difficult task they were supposed to perform—the clearing and cultivation of the land—and so they had to be fed and endowed and pampered. New France became a luxury which the French kings found highly expensive, and only the pompous determination of Louis XIV to set up a state modeled on the lines he conceived to be perfect kept the Canadian experiment from being abandoned. It was too much to expect that people who existed under these conditions would have any capacity for self-government. The paternal system suited them. It was familiar to them and it was workable. It seems to have been accepted without serious question or grumbling.

It was started early in the hope that men of initiative would take over the land and make it productive. But the early seigneurs were
mostly partners in the various companies set up in France to “farm” the fur trade, men who entertained the hope that the colony would flourish (without any effort or expense on their part) and that the land in time would become valuable automatically. They did not send out settlers and they made no effort to clear the land. They do not seem to have gone through the ceremony of swearing fealty to the King for their holdings except in rare cases. King Louis had been very definite on this point. The owners of grants must repair to the citadel of St. Louis and on bended knee before the governor, as representative of the King, take a solemn oath to obey him in all things.

When Talon became intendant, he proceeded to put things on a sounder basis. The grants which had not been developed were confiscated. To take the place of the absentee landlords, the new administration developed the plan of granting fiefs to the officers of the Carignan regiment in the hope of persuading them to settle permanently in Canada and thus provide protection by their presence from Indian aggression. This resulted in the dotting of new seigneuries along the shores of the St. Lawrence and between the forts on the Richelieu, which was the route the Iroquois took in attacking the French. Twenty-five officers in all and nearly four hundred soldiers elected to stay in the colony. At first glance this seemed to offer the solution which had been sought; but the soldier does not often make a good settler, as has already been pointed out in referring to La Bonté, La Doceur, and La Male. The officers were even less suited to the life. Olivier Morel de la Durantaye, who will be mentioned at some length later, was one of the few exceptions. The training of the average officer had been along the wrong lines. He considered himself a
gentilhomme
and was convinced that he must not soil his hands with labor. Some of them nearly starved as a result. Certainly there was little or no romance in the life of the seigneur in the first days. Writing to the King as late as 1687, Intendant Champigny said: “It is pitiable to see their children, of which they have great numbers, passing all summer with nothing on them but a shirt; and their wives and daughters working in the fields.” Ten years earlier Duchesneau had supplied the reason for this in one of his reports. The seigneurs, he declared, “spend most of their time in hunting and fishing. As their requirements in food and clothing are greater than those of the simple ‘habitants,’ they mix themselves up in trade, run into debt on all hands, incite the young habitants to
range the woods, and send their own children there to trade for furs.… Yet with all this they are miserably poor.”

The success of the effort to turn swords into plowshares was, therefore, short-lived. Gradually a more realistic view was adopted and the land was portioned out to men who had already demonstrated their capacity, settlers of the stamp of Robert Giffard, Jacques le Ber, and Charles le Moyne.

The system followed was liberal in conception. The seigneur paid nothing for his land, and his only obligation, other than to clear a stipulated amount each year and to collect settlers about him, was to pay a
quint
or one fifth of the value of the land if it were sold or passed out of the hands of the immediate family. The seigneur in turn parceled it out to settlers or
censitaires
at a nominal rate which was paid to him yearly on St. Martin’s Day and consisted of half a sou and a pint of wheat, or sometimes a few capons, for each arpent of land. It was part of the bargain that the
censitaire
must bring his grain to the seigneurial mill and that he must submit to the ancient corvee by which he worked six days each year without pay on the seigneur’s land. Certainly this plan was not burdensome on the settlers who thus paid no more than ten or twelve sous and a bushel of grain for their farms. Because of this nominal rent, the seigneur had to find other means of achieving an income instead of living off his land. It should be added that at the inception of the system the manor house of the seigneur was often no more than a log cabin of two rooms.

The policy of Talon was successful in the long run. In 1667, a few years after he had assumed the duties of intendant, a census was taken which showed 11,448 arpents under cultivation in all of New France. There were in the colony 3,107 head of cattle and 85 sheep. In the course of another year the acreage rose to 15,649. An arpent, it should be explained, was both a unit of length and of area. The lineal arpent was 192 feet, the arpent of area about five sixths of an acre.

Gradually the system began to take hold. Many of the seigneurs became prosperous and their houses took on manorial proportions. Furniture was imported from France. Elegant chandeliers, snowy napery, and fine table appointments became the rule rather than the exception. There was never a great deal of wealth in the country by continental standards, but the land, helped out by participation in the fur trade, provided enough for the seigneur to become a
gentilhomme
in practice as well as in name. The system was feudal, it is true, but it supplied the merits of feudalism rather than the faults. A share of the prosperity certainly was handed down to the habitant. He lived in reasonable comfort, if not ease, and he was able to provide for the large families he brought into the world. There was always a dot for the daughters and a parcel of land for the sons when they were ready to assume the burdens of life for themselves.

This reflection of the elegance of French life was maintained against an adventurous background: the coming and going of the
coureurs de bois
, the fur flotillas arriving for the annual fairs, the gallant efforts of the bolder spirits to destroy boundaries and horizons and set the flag of France over the great West. The people, rich and poor, settled and footloose, were gay and mettlesome. Their customs and habits and conceits have conveyed to later ages a picture of life which was highly picturesque; their songs echo through the pages of their history.

It is not strange that an aura of romance still clings to the stories of these early years.

Among the soldier seigneurs who settled down permanently in Canada was Olivier Morel de la Durantaye. He married in the colony and in 1670 was given a fief noble, two leagues square, on the south shore of the St. Lawrence close to the Bellechasse Channel. Later he received the fief of Kamouraska, making his holding close to 70,000 arpents. His importance in the annals of New France, however, does not stem from a lifetime of effort to develop his enormous tracts of land. Having enough income to reside at Quebec, he contented himself with finding settlers for his broad acres; reaping, on that account, no more than a moderate return from the land.

Durantaye is remembered and counted as one of the great seigneurs because he fulfilled the function which King Louis and the astute Talon had in mind when it was arranged to disband the Carignan regiment in Canada. Durantaye was a pillar of strength when the mistakes of Frontenac’s successors reopened the Iroquois wars, bringing the war parties of the Five Nations in unprecedented numbers against the unprotected parts of the colony. Durantaye had been in command of the trading posts around Michilimackinac, although his preference was always to remain with his agreeable family in the
elegance and ease of life in Quebec. When Governor Denonville took an expedition against the Onondagas in 1684, Durantaye organized a force from among the Frenchmen and the friendly Indians at the Junction point of the three lakes and came down to share in the attack. Some years later, when tension was at its peak and the Iroquois were threatening the very life of the colony, Durantaye was stationed at Montreal, the focal point of the danger.

The part he played in these troubled times brought him a pension from the French Government. He was appointed a member of the Superior Council and lived out the balance of his life in comfort, enjoying the high regard of his fellows.

The Durantaye holdings were princely in scope and in course of time they became of tremendous value. He had six sons and three daughters to divide it among when the time came for him to die, which was in the year 1727.

Olivier Morel de la Durantaye was representative of the class of seigneur who lent glamour to the colony, a man of good birth, personable and accomplished as well as brave. There was a distinct contrast between his kind and the native-born seigneurs who attained their land through their own efforts and achieved distinction and wealth by merit alone.

The most outstanding family in the second category was the extraordinary Le Moynes.

Five years before his death Charles le Moyne was presented with an eighth son, who was named Jean Baptiste and was later given the title of De Bienville to distinguish him from his numerous brothers. Two more were to arrive before the fine old Indian fighter and indomitable citizen came to his end, not bound to the Iroquois stake which had been kept ready for him, but peacefully in his bed at Longueuil.

The Le Moynes were a fabulous family. No other word can give any conception of this gallant sire and his ten sons. There is no adequate record of the parts they played in the drama of New France—very little, in fact, but a series of names and dates and the manner in which each of them died. But they were always there, fighting and contriving and dying, and it is clear that they were ambitious as well as self-sacrificing, keen-witted as well as fearless. What plans did
they concoct when they gathered around their father’s long table? What designs of family policy did they discuss? Why did Iberville give up his Me in a sweltering Havana hospital and Bienville exist for forty years in the swamps of Louisiana if they had not a vision of empire between them as clear and great as that of La Salle?

Lacking such clues to this mysterious and fascinating page of colonial history, it is left only to deal with each of the ten in turn and present the known statistics.

The first-born, named Charles after his father, succeeded to Longueuil and made it the model seigneury of New France. He was a man of wisdom and foresight, a splendid businessman and financier, who not only created a fortune for himself but carried at least some of his brothers on his back. He undoubtedly acquired the funds for the historic adventures of the other nine. It was during his time that the old manor house at Longueuil was replaced by a fortified house which Frontenac said reminded him of the great châteaux of Normandy; Frontenac, who ordinarily boasted only of his own possessions. Longueuil became a cluster of rather imposing stone buildings behind a high wall, two hundred feet in length and one hundred and seventy in width, with high towers at each corner: a large dwelling house, a chapel, stables, sheep pens, and dovecotes, and outside the walls a banal mill and a brewery. This ambitious dwelling cost sixty thousand livres to build—a fortune in those days—and an astonishing contrast to the log houses where so many of the proud seigneurs existed. Charles, the architect of all this magnificence, was made a baron, served as lieutenant governor of Montreal, and was killed in action at Saratoga in 1729. Of all the leaders of New France, he best qualifies for the appellation of business titan. He had the Le Moyne courage and he was in addition wise, cool, and farseeing.