Canadian explorations and the evolution of its society, economy and regional development, have been closely linked to the growth and decline of the fur trade [1]. To a large extend the fur trade started in Quebec. In three voyages between 1534 and 1541, Jacques Cartier from St. Malo, France explored the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the river as far as the present site of Montreal. After crossing the Atlantic with one of the French fishing fleets, he struck northwards, entered the Strait of Belle Isle, past the Basque whaling stations [2] on the north shore of the Gulf and into this Grande Baie. At "Warm Bay", the Baie des Chaleurs, he was met by native people who brought furs in exchange for iron goods, the earliest record of the great Canadian fur trades [3]. Subsequently the focus of the exchange was at Tadoussac [4]. This was the hinge-point between a European oceanic empire and an extensive aboriginal river empire that stretched up the Saguenay and across the back-country to Lake Huron.
As European contacts with North America intensified in the early Seventeenth Century, Samuel de Champlain [5] and a group of trading entrepreneurs settled first in the Bay of Fundy area [6] then moved to a strategic site at Quebec City [7], potentially controlling entry to the continent via the St. Lawrence River [8]. At the tiny habitation there the group received the natives bringing furs from a massive area reached by the Ottawa River, its tributaries and portages to river systems beyond [9].
Although we have tended to think of these trades as driven by European demand for furs, the native demand for new products like axes, kettles, knives and cloth may have been even more important. Access to these led to increased competition amongst the Algonquins, the Hurons, and the Iroquois for shares of the trade. The Iroquoians south of Lake Ontario had established their own trade with Dutch posts on the Hudson River, and were in competition for the preferred beaver territories in Ontario.
Beaver were easily and quickly trapped out in area after area, and the prime source regions moved westwards. The distances back to the St. Lawrence base grew considerably. The Iroquoian groups south of Lake Ontario had a very limited beaver source area, and in the 1640s, with the help of firearms, they obliterated the Hurons, already weakened by disease. The Hurons had been key players in the St. Lawrence trade, bringing furs from a vast northern and western hinterland to Montreal and supplying important agricultural produce to fuel the man-power-intensive travel [10].
To maintain the trade, the French took over the long-distance transportation and the food supply functions. Thus began the agricultural strengthening of the St. Lawrence colony and the use of French coureurs des bois [11] and voyageurs [12] along the great canoe routes west [13]. By the Eighteenth Century this canoe-based trading empire had extended well onto the Canadian Prairies.
Another major fur trade had been established by the Hudson's Bay Company [14] in 1670. For more than a century this English company followed the pattern of having the native traders come to the posts, but by the end of the Eighteenth Century it was establishing posts further inland [15] until they were competing literally face-to-face with the posts of the St. Lawrence trade (by then it was also British, a direct outgrowth of the pre-conquest French system). In 1821 the two trading empires amalgamated and the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence route became the transportation axis of the system and the skeletal outline of the Canadian nation.
Until the 1660s the St. Lawrence River lowlands hosted a tiny, largely male, fur trade support settlement. To strengthen the French presence in North America, in the latter 1660s the French government supplied soldiers [16] and women as the seeds [17] of an agricultural colony. Although legally they were censitares under a seigneurial regime and guided by an extensive hierarchical Roman Catholic religious establishment, they followed a largely independent life as small farmers, growing wheat and raising cattle. Almost exclusively by natural increase this settlement expanded to 60,000 by the mid Eighteenth Century.
As a pawn in the struggles between England and France, New France fell to the English in 1763.
The conquered St. Lawrence colony was allowed to keep its French civil law and, despite intense
anti-papist legislation in Britain itself, to continue with Roman Catholicism. But many of the
seigneurs were taken over by British or American entrepreneurs and the here-to-fore somnolent
seigneurial system was strengthened. The urban places became the focus of similar commerce-oriented
immigrants [18] so that by the mid Nineteenth
Century half the populations of Montreal and Quebec City [19] were anglophone and, although the large Irish labourer
component of these were Roman Catholics like their francophone hosts, the cities were largely
divided by language.
But by the middle of the 19th century the peak of the Canadian fur trade economy was over. It
nevertheless left a major impact on the Canadian landscape. The nation passed from a rural,
non-chartered wilderness landscape to one in which the first phase of an urban society appeared
and during which most of the land was explored and charted. Only a few years later, in 1867 the
political nation was born.
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