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Historical Background

The French: Trappers and Traders

Not long after the Spanish conquistadors began to move into the present Southeastern United States, the French did so in the north. The French penetration—which ultimately extended from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico—was of an entirely different nature than that of the Spanish. Generally characterized by commercial exploitation of a fruitful but cold land, except in the warmer climes of Louisiana, rather than permanent settlement of a sunny and arid one, it was a veneer over the native life, not a lasting and deep-rooted influence. The tiny, scattered, and heterogeneous French settlements also contrasted sharply with the well-ordered English, Dutch, and Swedish towns on the Atlantic coast.

Adventuresome and individualistic coureurs de bois and voyageurs gradually penetrated the winding waterways and the deep forests. Ultimately exploring almost two-thirds of the continent, they founded small missions and temporary posts deep in the river-threaded heartland rather than great religious edifices and cities that could be easily supplied by sea. Lonely trappers and traders, living with Indian women, used their isolated huts as bases of operations. The amenities of civilization were rare in the far reaches of New France.

The soil of the Mississippi Valley was fertile, but the restless commercial activities of the French did not encourage stable agrarian development, and they did not recognize the immense agricultural potential of the rich soil that stretched away from the rivers of the heartland. Claiming a much larger territory than her major rivals—England and Spain—and beset with European wars, France never could enforce total sovereignty over the vast wilderness. For all these reasons, she was the first of the three major European powers to be driven out of the present United States—in 1763-and few physical remains of her occupation exist today except in Louisiana, where settlement was more intensive than elsewhere.

Like the other European powers, France was impelled by a desire to spread Christianity, to find wealth, and to counter the efforts of other nations; and her New World colonies were also closely tied to her under the mercantilistic system. She, too, hoped to find a new water route to the East through the North American Continent. Her exploring expeditions naturally probed the present Northeast United States, whose shores were already known to her fishermen and were conveniently accessible from northern Europe. French explorers sailed down the St. Lawrence, across the waterways of Canada, through the Great Lakes, and finally to the Mississippi River and its vast drainage system. Instead of discovering a water passage through the continent, they found endless forests filled with fur-bearing animals and Indians eager to trade pelts for trinkets, muskets, and brandy.

The French Empire in North America thus came to be based on the trade in furs, originally controlled from permanent settlements in Canada. Intrepid frontiersmen plunged into the wilderness to barter and bargain, while the mother country tried to control the lucrative business by granting monopolies, forming companies, and utilizing other administrative devices. During the 17th century, most of the furs were brought into Montreal to a great annual fair. But both licensed traders and free-lancers operated with increasing freedom as the French Empire spilled thinly into the heart of the continent. Frenchmen also did some mining for copper and lead in the upper Mississippi country, but transportation, manpower, and other problems hampered their efforts.

Side by side with the voyageurs, friars brought Christianity to the Indians. Most of them were strong-willed Jesuits, although Recollect Friars of the Franciscan Order accompanied Champlain and La Salle. French missionaries were far more mobile and had a less lasting influence on the native population than their Spanish counterparts. They founded no major missions, such as San Jose in Texas, San Xavier in Arizona or San Luis Rey in California. Instead, scores of temporary mission stations, where priests read masses and performed the sacraments, dotted the forests of the northland. Nor did the French missionaries ordinarily attempt, as did the Spanish, to teach the arts of civilization to the Indians. The Spanish attitude toward the natives was paternalistic; the French, fraternalistic. The French adapted to the ways of the Indian; the Spanish "civilized" him.

With a few exceptions, mainly in Louisiana, the French settlements consisted of a few families of habitants, who farmed the river lands in the vicinity of the forts, trading posts, missions, and Indian villages that were the centers of frontier life. Added to this small and more or less stable population were scores of restless traders, soldiers, and missionaries, continually on the move into the wilderness.

PRELUDE: COASTAL EXPLORATION

The first Frenchmen in the New World were "summer people"—fishermen who, perhaps even before Columbus' voyage, plied from the shores of Normandy to the shoals of Newfoundland to harvest the teeming codbanks of the North Atlantic. They fished, they did some trading with the natives, and they returned to France; they maintained no log-books of their voyages, and they were secretive about their quiet invasion of Spain's "exclusive" rights in the New World.

Francis I, however, who ascended the ancient throne of Charlemagne in 1515, was determined to challenge the ripening domination of Spain and her new Hapsburg monarch, Charles V. He contested, unsuccessfully, the election of Charles as Holy Roman Emperor; he sent troops to conquer some of Charles' territories in the north of Italy; and he brought the immortal Leonardo da Vinci to entertain his court in France.

But perhaps of the most lasting significance—determined that France would not be left behind in the race for empire—Francis sent an Italian navigator, Giovanni da Verrazano, across the seas in 1523-24 to establish a French claim to North America and find a passage to the East. After making a landfall, apparently somewhere along the Carolina coast, Verrazano turned north, hugged the coast around Cape Hatteras, sailed beyond the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays into New York Harbor and Narragansett Bay, around Cape Cod to Cape Breton Island, and finally back to France. He missed the great Gulf of the St. Lawrence and failed to find a water route to the East, but he provided France with a claim in the New World and announced her King's intentions.

French exploration in present United States (includes coastal). (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

OPENING THE ST. LAWRENCE

A decade later Francis turned to a hardy sailor of Brittany, Jacques Cartier, to renew his overseas ambitions. Scion of several generations of mariners, Cartier had earlier sailed to Portuguese Brazil and probably to the fishing banks off Newfoundland. In 1534, he set off in two small vessels with a royal commission to find a water route to the East—and it seemed at first as if he might have done so, for he discovered the broad waters of the St. Lawrence. After landing and planting a large cross to claim the land for his sovereign, he sailed around the perimeter of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and returned home.

Support for another voyage to the promising western waters was prompt and generous. Cartier sailed in May 1535, with three ships and a crew of more than 100, and moved across the Atlantic and up the St. Lawrence. As the river narrowed and the current to the sea flowed stronger, his earlier suspicion that he had not found a route around the continent was confirmed. Putting ashore in September at Stadacona, an Indian village (the site of Quebec), C artier decided to spend the winter there. During the last days of autumn, however, he struck inland with his smallest vessel and reached the falls of the St. Lawrence, near the site of Montreal. From the Indians, with whom he exchanged presents, he heard tales of vast waterways to the west—the Great Lakes—and returned to Stadacona with reborn hope.

But this was the first of many harsh and trying winters that French pioneers were to spend in the ice and snow of Canada. By spring, a third of the expedition had died, and the emaciated survivors had no heart for further exploration. Abandoning one ship for want of a full crew, they headed back for France, where they arrived in July 1536. The King and many Frenchmen found Cartier's report interesting, but not sufficiently encouraging to finance another voyage. Not until 1541 could Cartier find another backer, the Sieur de Roberval, a nobleman of Picardy.

Roberval obtained from the Crown a license to explore and colonize the St. Lawrence at his own expense. He outfitted Cartier with three ships and himself with a like number. But from the beginning the expedition was plagued with bad luck, indecision, and dissension. In the spring of 1541, Cartier impatiently sailed from France ahead of his patron and pushed on to Stadacona. There he spent the winter of 1541-42, and in June 1542 joined Roberval in St. John's Harbor, Newfound land. Roberval, whose departure had been delayed 1 year, was anxious to continue the explorations. Cartier was not, and slipped away to France. Roberval proceeded to Stadacona, where he encamped for the winter. Perhaps it was an unduly harsh season, or the newcomers were unpre pared; when spring at last arrived, the survivors could hardly wait to return home.