I was doing a deep dive into early Canadian history, because reasons, and found a couple of fun stories to share. Because hey — this Sunday is National Indigenous Peoples Day!
The Bad Overwinter
So a recurring thing in early Canadian history was the Bad Overwinter. A group of Europeans — usually French — would show up in Canada with a shipload of trade goods. They would hang out with the Indians for a bit, and then would decide to leave some guys behind over the winter. Maybe they wanted to have a permanent trading post, maybe they were trying to start a colony, whatever.
So they’d leave, say, twenty guys on Sable Island or the Avalon Peninsula or on the upper St. Lawrence River with some building materials and tools and food, and in late September they would sail back to France.
Well basically it just took Europeans a *long* time to grasp just how horrific Canadian winters could be. There were a couple of reasons for this. One was, they looked at the locals and said, look Gaston, these half-naked savages can survive here! How hard can it be? And nobody asked why these half-naked savages had such *very* large collections of thick animal furs, nor why they seemed to spend so much of the summer curing meat and smoking fish.
— Okay, that’s not entirely correct. Samuel Champlain talked to the locals, and paid attention to what they said. Unfortunately Champlain, while a very smart and perceptive guy, was not born an aristocrat, and also was probably half Huguenot.
[come on, that’s a Huguenot beard if I ever saw one]
So there’s a long generation of early Canadian history that can be viewed as a debate between “It seems like Champlain has some really good ideas?” and “Pffft, Champlain is a woke girly-man who thinks we should waste our time talking to savages, what a loser”. Team Champlain did eventually win, which is why Canada is a thing that exists. But it took a bunch of people dying first.
Apropos of nothing except that it’s not what you know, etc. (And if this topic interests you, check out the books A Cold Welcome, about the Little Ice Age in North America, and Snowshoe Country, about northeastern winters in history.)
The Middlemen
So in the years around 1700 there was this one group of Innu Indians in what’s now northeast Quebec, where the Saguenay River flows into the St. Lawrence. The Saguenay drains a huge area of central Quebec that was, back in the day, particularly rich in valuable furs — beaver, marten, fox, you name it. And these particular Innu started trading furs with the French pretty early on. So they became the middlemen for a huge region.
[that little lake in the middle is where Maria Chapdelaine is set, if you know you know, and if you’re Canadian you probably know.]
And they managed to hang on to this position for decades — around forty years!
How?
Afternote: I mentioned this anecdote to a friend, and he immediately said, “That would make a hell of a movie! Like, a heist movie, you know?” Which of course led my brain to:
The Face: The Vicomte de V-, a Gascon. A noble name going back to the Crusades, but his father and brother wasted the family fortune trying to keep up at Versailles. Now little more than a sell-sword, he lives by wits, charm, and playing on that famous name.
and then of course,
The Mastermind: Father Robert; a Jesuit, naturally. Does he really carry secret orders from the Vatican — and if so, what possible interest could Rome have in the snowy fields of distant Canada?
Right. Happy solstice weekend, all!
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
un canadien errant 06.19.26 at 4:54 pm
two notes.
After the image of Champlain, you switch suddenly to talking about people reading Cartier. Is that…correct? Is there more context to link those two paragraphs that I’m not seeing?
I tried to search Madeline Chapdelaine, and got nothing useful. The bottom of the google page has text that says “Some results may have been delisted consistent with local laws. Learn more” So I guess some links are illegal in Canada.
I, too, have been astounded by how much more interesting early canadian history is than what we get in schools here. There should be at least a prestige TV show about the first nations in every province
Doug Muir 06.19.26 at 11:12 pm
Ugh, I hit “publish” before doing a final read-through. Never do this!
Champlain, not Cartier. And Maria Chapdelaine, not Madeline. Corrected; thank you.
And yes — Canadian history can be darn interesting. Not just the early stuff, either. You have stuff like high Victorian Britain recruiting Metis and First Nations river pilots… for the expedition up the Nile to rescue Gordon. (A number of them did in fact go, and return.)
Doug M.
Peter T 06.20.26 at 4:11 am
Something similar happened in Australia. Aboriginals? Naked savages. What could you learn from them? Dies of thirst within yards of a water source (dig in the sandy creek bed where you see these plants). Or of scurvy within reach of good sources of vitamin C. A few listened, most did not.
D. S. Battistoli 06.20.26 at 11:34 am
So they lied and also told the truth, then? I mean, the Innu might be presumed to have known at least roughly that Jacques Cartier had lied to get Donnacona and other leaders of the Iroquoians around Stadacona to board his ship, then abducted them—they were never to be seen in the Americas again, because they died. They would also have likely known that the Stadacona Iroquoians shortly ceased to exist as a community, either because of massive death due to disease, political collapse in the absence of its leaders, conflict, or simple dispersion (or some combination of these).
Now, many parts of international law that now exist did not at the time, but we would still assign moral responsibility to the French for these things, and it is not unreasonable to assume that the Innu might have done so as well. That is, the Innu did not happen to, by sheer accident, invent a story that just so happened to be substantively true (which is not the plain-language definition of “lie” in any event). You do not need access to the germ theory of disease to recognize that Europeans arrive and then the people who engage most closely with them die of hideous, heretofore unknown maladies.
The British Acadian Massacre was still several decades in the future, but by 1700, the French Beaver Wars had been raging for nearly a century. In honor of Canadian National Indigenous Peoples Day, we can acknowledge that attributing death and destruction to European traders and settlers at this time would not have been “lying their asses off.”
Mitchell Porter 06.20.26 at 6:52 pm
[comment deleted — don’t know what you’re going on about, don’t care, this is not the venue. DM]
SamChevre 06.22.26 at 1:45 pm
Just how far north Europe is is one of those facts that I know, but am repeatedly surprised by anyway.
Chicago and Rome are at the same latitude. And Florence Italy is north of Florence Massachusetts.
John Q 06.27.26 at 9:56 am
Peter T has beaten me to it, but the Australian example is worth expanding. Burke and Wills the disaster case. Burke, an Irish army officer who had served in India, was apparently appointed by a Melbourne-based committee on the strength of his impressive beard. He refused all help from Aboriginal Australians, and it wasn’t until he died that the last member of the expedition accepted a rescue from them. In typical Scott of the Antarctic fashion, he was memorialised as heroic rather then stupid.
The counterpoints are AC Gregory and John McDouall Stuart, who both migrated to as Australia at an early age, explored widely and famously “never lost a man”. Gregory discovered much of Queensland on expeditions seeking the remains of less sensible explorers.
Laban 06.28.26 at 9:32 am
The excellent Barren Lands by Kevin Krajick has a lot of the early history.
Samuel Hearne did a lot better than John Franklin six decades later. But then he listened to his guides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hearne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppermine_expedition
Laban 06.28.26 at 8:56 pm
From the book:
“Around 16,000 B.C., the last continental ice sheet receded from its southern limit near Exit 10 on the New Jersey Turnpike (Metuchen), but did not finish melting up here until about 4000 B.C. Jumbles of car-size boulders still lie where ice dropped them, and raw dikes of surviving igneous bedrock jut like rows of fairy castles. There are eskers—great, sinuous ridges of sand and gravel left by watercourses that once ran within the ice. Hundreds of feet high, hundreds of miles long, the eskers are leveled on top with beachy sand and look eerily man-made, like interstate highways. The land is still frozen from the top to 1,500 feet down. There is little rain or snow, so it is technically desert; water lies everywhere only because permafrost, low relief, and lack of river systems defeat its movement. There is a term for this: deranged drainage. With nothing to block wind, wind blows most of the time. Winters hit 90 degrees below
zero Fahrenheit. Lakes freeze six feet thick, rendering the land “more a place of physics than biology,” as one bush pilot put it. Deep rock cracks disguised by snow can swallow human or animal in an instant. When the thaw comes during brief summer, caribou migrate up from the trees, grizzlies wake from an eight-month torpor, and the land hatches a blaze of blueberries and enough biting insects to eat the planet. In this beautiful season, a bolt of lightning may come from the vast sky and strike you dead.
All this is why it is called the Barren Lands.”