New France

In researching my novel, War on the Inland Sea, I was fascinated by the idea of New France and how it survived for centuries in the heart of the native tribes that out numbered them. Additionally, I found how the French managed their relations with the Mississauga the most interesting. For the Mississauga themselves, which I give one of three narratives in the novel, I relied on the excellent book by Peter Schmalz, “The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario.” I wanted to try and get my depiction of the Mississauga of the time period as accurate as I could. There’s more information on this tribe from 19th century British sources, but this work gave me the best insight into what their early culture was like in the mid-18th century.

With a founding date of 1534, New France at its height stretched from Newfoundland west to Lake Superior and south to Louisiana. Divided into five colonies: Canada; Hudson’s Bay; Acadia; Terre-Neuve (Newfoundland); and Louisiana. Canada was the largest, wealthiest and most populous, though like the others it was not a colony of settlement, but of commerce. The largest cities in New France were Montreal and Quebec, the latter being the capitol of the colony.

Unlike the British colonies, in New France settler immigration from the motherland was infrequent after the 17th century. In 1755, Canada had a population of 55,000 white colonists, most of whom were descended from the original settlers. In fact, the total white population of all of New France was no more than 70,000. The indigenous population of the Great Lakes region, which is the focus of my novel, was significantly larger than that of the French, estimated to be between 100,000 and 150,000: Ojibwe (including the Mississauga), Ottawa, Potawatomi, Huron/Wendat, and Iroquois. In comparison, the thirteen British colonies had something on the order of 1.5 million, though roughly 375,000 of that in the colonies of New York, New Jersey, and New England. Unlike the British colonies, New France was an empire of commerce, not settlement. 

The fur trade defined the commerce of New France, with French voyageurs trading with the indigenous tribes of the Great Lakes and bringing those furs east to Montreal and Quebec for sale and shipment to France. The bottleneck for this trade was Lake Ontario, where the furs came to either Fort Niagara or to the trading post at Toronto, both at the western end of the lake. They would then be carried east across the lake in canoes or small vessels, first to Fort Frontenac (currently Kingston, Ontario) at the  headwaters of the St. Lawrence River, then downstream to Montreal, then Quebec. This bottleneck explains the original British trading post built at Oswego at the beginning of the 18th century and then expanded into a series of large fortifications in 1755. Situated on the southern shore of the lake, it was well placed to siphon off the fur trade from the French or after 1755, to stop it all together.

The lands around these French forts in the west were controlled by the tribe known to the French as the Mississauga. A part of the larger Ojibwa tribe, they would have called themselves Anishinaabe, but eventually adopted the French name. The Mississauga had pushed out the Iroquois in the early 18th century, gaining control over all of virtually all of the north western shores of Lake Ontario. The French maintained a trading post at the mouth of the Humber River, named Fort Toronto after the Mississauga village up stream. A larger French fort was east of that trading post and was called Fort Rouille, which was where most of the garrison was located. Until 1755, the French troops in New France were the Compagnies de la Marine, which as might be supposed, fell under the French Navy. These independent companies, dressed in blue small clothes and white/grey coats, garrisoned all of the various forts in the French wilderness empire. In 1755 however, French regular troops under the Marquis de Montcalm arrived and reinforced the garrisons around Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain.

From my simplistic perspective, the French and Indian War, the North American counterpart to the global Seven Years War, was fought by France to secure its trade routes and by Britain to take them. And so began the long conflict that ended for the British at Fort Oswego in August of 1756 and for Montcalm and the French at Quebec in September of 1759.

REF:

Bougainville, L.A. (1964). Adventures in the Wilderness: The American Journals of Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 1756-1760. (E. Hamilton, Trans.). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Pritchard, J. (1987). Louis XV’s Navy 1748-1762: A Study of Organization and Administration. Montreal, CA: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Schmalz, P.S. (1991). The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario. Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press.

Compagnies franches de la Marine – 1695. Peinture de A. d' Auriac (1932). Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.

Sauväge Nepisingue en Canada 1717. Library of Congress. Washington, DC.