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The Final Struggle for the Continent
Peace between the two rival powers did not last long. Fresh fighting broke out in the New World even before the beginning of the Seven Years' War in Europe (1756-63). American histories refer to the fighting that began in 1754 as the French and Indian War. Canadian and European histories usually treat the final contest for the continent as beginning in 1756, with the opening of the Seven Years' War.
With the two motherlands in conflict, the English objective in North America was to overrun New France and particularly to seize Quebec, the nerve center of the colony. Under the skillful generalship of Louis Joseph de Montcalm-Gozon, marquis de St-Veran, the routes to Quebec down the St. Lawrence from Lake Ontario and north down the Richelieu were successfully closed. The third route lay up the St. Lawrence, past the French stronghold of Louisbourg. In 1758 a powerful British force landed on Cape Breton Island. In the fighting that followed, Louisbourg fell for the second and last time in its history. The waterway to Quebec was open at last. James Wolfe, sailed up the St. Lawrence and laid siege to the capital of New France. When the Treaty of Paris at last brought the Seven Years' War to a close in 1763, the British flag waved over almost the whole of eastern North America.
Early British Rule
The British faced two immediate problems in the vast territory that had thus been added to their other Atlantic colonies. There were more than 60,000 new French-speaking subjects in what had formerly been New France. In addition, there were large tracts of thinly settled wilderness in the Great Lakes area where their little garrisons were seriously outnumbered by the Indians.
Led by a clever and treacherous Ottawa chieftain named Pontiac, the Indians suddenly rose against their new English masters and overthrew these forts one by one, massacring the soldiers in them without mercy. By the middle of 1763 the only British soldiers left west of Lake Erie were in Fort Detroit. It alone among the western forts held out against Pontiac until fresh troops were rushed in, and the Indian uprising was subdued at last.
The Quebec Act of 1774
Administration of the conquered province by a governor and an appointed council was established by royal proclamation. In 1774 the English Parliament passed the Quebec Act. This was the first important milestone in the constitutional history of British Canada. Under its terms the boundaries of Quebec were extended as far as the Ohio River valley. The Roman Catholic church was recognized by the Quebec Act, and its right to collect tithes was confirmed. Also of enduring importance was the establishment of the French civil law to govern the relations of Canadian subjects in their business and other day-to-day relations with each other. British criminal law was imposed in all matters having to do with public law and order and offenses for which the punishment might be fine, imprisonment, or in some cases death. These imaginative gestures on the part of the English government won the admiration of the religious leaders in Quebec and to a large extent the goodwill of the people themselves. The privilege of an elected assembly continued to be withheld, however.
The loyalty of the new province was soon put to the test. Within a year of the passing of the Quebec Act, the rebelling 13 Atlantic colonies sent two armies north to capture the "fourteenth colony." Sir Guy Carleton, the British governor of Canada, narrowly escaped capture when one of these armies, under Richard Montgomery, took Montreal. Carleton reached Quebec in time to organize its small garrison against the forces of Benedict Arnold. Arnold began a siege of the fortress, in which he was soon joined by Montgomery. In the midwinter fighting that followed, Montgomery was killed and Arnold wounded. When spring came, the attacking forces retreated. During the rest of the American Revolutionary War, there was no further fighting on Canadian soil.
The United Empire Loyalists
When peace was established in 1783, many thousands of Loyalists, who were referred to as Tories by their fellow countrymen, left the newly created United States. They started their lives afresh under the British flag in Nova Scotia and in the unsettled lands above the St. Lawrence rapids and north of Lake Ontario.
This huge influx of settlers, who were known in Canada and England as the United Empire Loyalists, marked the first major wave of immigration by English-speaking settlers since the days of New France. Their arrival had two immediate consequences for the British colonies. Both the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia and the inland colony of Quebec had to be reorganized.
The previously unsettled forests to the west of the Bay of Fundy, once part of French Acadia, had been included in Nova Scotia. In 1784 this area was established as a separate colony known as New Brunswick. Cape Breton Island was simultaneously separated from Nova Scotia (a division that was ended in 1820). In all, some 35,000 Loyalist immigrants are believed to have settled in the Maritimes.
The settlement of the more inaccessible lands north and west of Lake Ontario and along the north shore of the upper St. Lawrence proceeded somewhat more slowly. About 5,000 Loyalists came to this area.
Upper and Lower Canada
It was clear that these United Empire Loyalists who had come to the western wilderness of what was still part of Quebec would not long be satisfied with the limited rights and French laws established by the Quebec Act. Accordingly, in 1791 the British Parliament enacted the Constitutional Act, whereby Quebec was split into the two provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. Each of these was to be governed by a legislative council appointed for life and a legislative assembly elected by the people.
The right to be represented in a lawmaking assembly was something new for the French-speaking inhabitants of the lower province. Legislative assemblies had been in existence in Nova Scotia since 1758, in Prince Edward Island since 1773, and in New Brunswick since 1786. Representative government, however, was not responsible government, as was to be demonstrated before another 50 years had passed.
Settlement and Exploration in the West
The Canadian prairies were not entirely unknown even in the days of New France. As early as the 1730s a family of explorers headed by Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, sieur de La Verendrye, began a series of overland explorations far to the west of Lake Superior. Their travels carried them into what is now the western United States, perhaps as far as the foothills of the Rockies. They visited Lake Winnipeg, the Red River, the Assiniboine River, and the Saskatchewan River as far upstream as the fork formed by the North and the South Saskatchewan.
The posts of the Hudson's Bay Company had given England a preferred jumping-off point for exploration of the Canadian west. An expedition under Henry Kelsey explored the territory between York Factory and northern Saskatchewan in 1690, long before the journeys of the La Verendryes. In 1754 Anthony Henday traveled from Hudson Bay as far as the foothills of the Rockies, reaching a point near the site of present-day Red Deer, Alta. Another Hudson's Bay Company trader, Samuel Hearne, discovered Great Slave Lake in 1771, and by descending the Coppermine River to its mouth, he became the first white man to reach the Arctic Ocean by land. Although the Rockies still barred the overland route to the western ocean, the Pacific coast of Canada was visited by sea in 1778, when Capt. James Cook explored the northwest coastline from Vancouver Island to Alaska.
In 1783 a group of Montreal merchants founded the powerful North West Company. Not only did the new fur-trading company provide sharp competition, but its trappers explored large parts of the previously unknown expanses of the Canadian west. In 1789 Alexander Mackenzie (one of the Nor'westers) followed the river which now bears his name from its source to the Arctic Ocean. Disappointed because he had not discovered a route to the Pacific, he set out on another expedition in 1792. After a strenuous journey over the most rugged country on the continent, Mackenzie and his companions at last crossed the Rocky Mountains to reach the Fraser River in 1793. From the Fraser they portaged to the Bella Coola, which they descended until they sighted the long-sought western sea. Only a few weeks earlier Capt. George Vancouver had explored the same part of the Pacific coast by sea.
Mackenzie's journey was the first made across the continent in either Canada or the United States. In 1808 the Fraser River was thoroughly explored by Simon Fraser, after whom it is named. In 1811 David Thompson completed his exploration of the Columbia from its source, in southeastern British Columbia, to its mouth, in present-day Oregon.
The Selkirk Settlement
Although fur trading and settlement did not go well together, Thomas Douglas, earl of Selkirk, became interested in the possibilities of settling Scottish farmers who had lost their farms at home in the fertile valley of the Red River near present-day Winnipeg. From the Hudson's Bay Company he purchased a huge tract of 100,000 acres in this area. In 1812 the first group of Selkirk's settlers from Scotland and Ireland began to arrive from Hudson Bay, where they had spent the previous winter.
The jealousy of the Nor'westers, as well as of the half-breeds, known as metis, was aroused immediately. Fighting broke out between the new settlers and the established traders. The colony was permanently established in 1817, when Selkirk himself arrived with a force of military veterans to put an end to the troubles and to punish the traders, whom he held responsible for the bloodshed that had occurred. The North West Company, a rival fur trading company, brought a lawsuit against Selkirk for the action he had taken, and he was forced to pay damages. Although Selkirk returned to Great Britain in poor health in November 1818 and died a disappointed man a few years later, he had begun the first permanent settlement on the Canadian prairies.