If you place a large map of North America on a table, and then turn it so that the Gulf of St. Lawrence is your central point of vision, your eye can easily move south and west, traveling the St. Lawrence River to the lower Great Lakes and the Mississippi River, all the way down to New Orleans on the Gulf of Mexico.

On the same map your eye can also move north and west, traveling the St. Lawrence to the upper Great Lakes and the Lake of the Woods, and then on to Lake Winnipeg and the Saskatchewan River, eventually all the way to the Arctic and Pacific oceans.

Jacques Cartier went no further than present-day Montreal — as far as a European ocean-going vessel could travel on the interior wilderness waterways in the 1530s. But almost a century and a half later (utilizing native guides and the Indigenous transportation technology of the canoe and portage) René Robert Cavalier Sieur de La Salle and Henri Tonti made it all the way from Montreal to the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 1682, having extravagantly claimed all the territory they passed through for Louis XIV, the Sun King of France.

Champlain had traveled as far west as what is now south-central Ontario as early as 1615. And the French Fort Detroit was established by Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac in 1701. But it took longer for the ultimate northwest path to even begin to reach present-day Western Canada.

By the 1730s, however, the fur trader Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye, from the canoe-manufacturing town of Trois Rivieres, had begun to open up the area west of Lake Superior, to the Lake of the Woods and beyond (also helped by native guides, the canoe and portage, and his own four sons). In the 1740s two of La Vérendrye’s sons were probably the first people of European descent to see the Rocky Mountains.

In The Fur Trade in Canada Harold Innis somewhat poetically (and whimsically) summarized the northwestern interior adventure with: “La Vérendrye … laid down the [western] boundary of Canada in the search for the better beaver of the northern areas.” (It was one of Innis’s theories that the northwest fur trade frontier in what is now Canada was more important than the southwest fur trade frontier in what is now the United States, because the best pelts for the European beaver hat industry of the day — the North American fur resource industry’s best customer — came from the colder northern regions of the continent.)

* * * *

In both the northwest and southwest, the French monarchy never seriously controlled most of the vast swath of North American geography it claimed in any conventional European military sense. As the constitutional lawyer Brian Slattery has explained, again: “In most cases, Aboriginal nations were never conquered militarily. In the early years, they frequently entered into alliances and trading partnerships with incoming European states.”

Yet the extent of France’s comparatively striking success in working with Indian allies in the North American interior is reflected in a surviving provocative speech by the still mysterious “War Chief of the Ottawa,” who led the ultimate denouement of the French empire in America, dramatically recounted in Francis Parkman’s early book of 1851, The Conspiracy of Pontiac.

“I am a Frenchman, and I wish to die a Frenchman,” Chief Pontiac is said to have told the Canadians settled along the Detroit River in the spring of 1763, during the last bold campaign to keep France’s American wilderness empire alive, masterminded by the Indigenous allies themselves.

Canada in the northwest, on the other hand, was only one of the two geographically largest parts of the French American empire at its height, in the first half of the 18th century.

It was the territory that surrounded (and then extended) the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, and had its capital at Quebec City.

The other main part of the empire was the southwestern territory that surrounded the Mississippi River, and had its capital at New Orleans. It was known as Louisiana (after Louis XIV) — but was much vaster than the present US state of that name. It would finally be purchased from Napoleon by Thomas Jefferson for the new United States in 1803, having just been returned to France, after a long alleged sojourn with the King of Spain.

* * * *

It may be that French Canada proved more enduring than French Louisiana, because its wilderness hinterland was anchored by the more developed New World metropolitan centres of Quebec City and Montreal, in the St. Lawrence valley.

New Orleans in the first half of the 18th century was already an interesting place. But it had a later start, and remained on a smaller scale. (Although there was a small Fort St. Jean in the vicinity as early as 1701, Nouvelle Orléans was not officially founded until 1718.)

At the same time, the new Canada that had put down its first modern roots in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries is, in many respects, more properly called French and Indigenous (or in the old lexicon “French and Indian”) than just French Canada. (As illustrated by the Anglo-American settlers to the south, and east, who called the Seven Years’ War that finally ended the French empire in America, the “French and Indian War.”) And the new French and Indigenous Canada did not just include the lower St. Lawrence valley, or the southern part of the present-day province of Quebec.

There, more than anywhere else, it was much more “French” than “Indian.” But even in this earliest incarnation of its modern history Canada took in the upper country to the west of Montreal – and finally ventured almost to the Rocky Mountains. And there it was much more Indigenous than French (and finally mixed in with other diverse global origins too).

It is no doubt not easy to recapture any realistic sense of the 17th and 18th century Canadian upper country west of Montreal (le pays d’en haut), in the very different Canada of the early 21st century (in many respects at any rate). But a now considerable body of historical writing over the past several decades has at least begun to try.

Just as the classic early history of the old French America came from the American historian Francis Parkman in the later 19th century, it could be said, the new early history of the old “French and Indian” America has probably been sketched most provocatively in the US historian Richard White’s study of 1991, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650—1815. (And this book also won both the 1992 Francis Parkman Prize, and the Albert B. Corey Prize for the “Best Book in Canadian-American History,” awarded by the Canadian Historical Association and the American Historical Association.)

Perhaps partly because of his US citizenship, Richard White is most interested in the part of his story that takes place in the Ohio valley of the present-day United States. He cannot deal with the North American Great Lakes region from the middle of the 17th to the early 19th centuries without giving some important attention to “Canada.” But he focuses on a Canada in conflict with both the adjacent but different French American realm of Louisiana, and the early westward expansions of the increasingly populous English-speaking (or British) American colonies on the Atlantic coast.

Even in this context White deals only with the upper country or pays d’en haut of Canada in the Great Lakes region. The earliest Canadian far westerly expansion beyond the Lake of the Woods lies outside his frame of reference. (And the name La Vérendrye does not appear in his index.)

* * * *

Whatever else, Richard White’s treatment of early Canadian history west of the Ottawa River remains provocative.

As W.H. Eccles also relates, for much of the 17th century the French regime in the lower St. Lawrence valley was in a near perpetual state of war with the Five Nations Iroquois confederacy in what is now northern New York State — on behalf of both the Sun King and his native North American allies. But by the early 18th century the French and “the Algonquians” north of the Great Lakes (in White’s shorthand) had turned back the invading New York Iroquois (and their first Dutch and then English allies).

Then, in White’s words: “Out of the French and Algonquian triumph over the Iroquois there evolved during the eighteenth century a Janus-faced alliance” between the northern Algonquians and “Onontio, the French governor at Quebec.”

It was this alliance that, in the midst of much often bloody conflict, ultimately “preserved Canada” in the Great Lakes and (again, though White himself is not concerned with this part of the story) finally allowed the early Canadian fur trade to venture still further west, almost to the Rocky Mountains by the middle of the 18th century.

What Richard White has to say about the “Janus-faced” quality of the 18th century French-Algonquian alliance is intriguing as well: “Facing east, the French appeared at the head of an Algonquian host. This was the alliance armed and breathing fire in the service of imperial France, the alliance that cowed the Iroquois and repeatedly fought the far more numerous British to a standstill.”

Yet this “eastern face of the alliance is too often the only one that appears in histories of the eighteenth century,” and “by itself it is incomplete and inscrutable.” Why did the Algonquian host, e.g., remain loyal to the French? Because, White urges, on its “neglected … western face” the alliance was “largely Algonquian in form and spirit.” The aboriginal allies saw Onontio — the governor general of Canada at Quebec (and resident representative of the French monarchy across the sea) — as a fountain of “patriarchal benevolence.” As the price of their loyalty the Algonquians demanded that Onontio be “a father who mediated more often than he commanded, who forgave more often than he punished, and who gave more than he received.”

White carries on: “These demands frustrated the French even as they preserved Canada, and they longed for — and sporadically tried to create — an alliance that was a simple extension of the French state.” Yet from “the Grand Settlement of 1701” with the Iroquois “until the demise of French Canada there would persist an unresolved tension between the Algonquian ideal of alliance and mediation and the French dream of force and obedience … The Algonquians had to compel Onontio to act as an Algonquian father or the pays d’en haut would be awash in blood as Onontio’s children slaughtered each other” (in the great dislocation and destabilization that the arrival of Europeans brought to the Great Lakes).

On the other side of the alliance: “Onontio complied, for he needed to maintain Algonquian loyalty and at least the form of their participation in the defense of New France. The result was an odd imperialism where mediation succeeded and force failed, where colonizers gave gifts to the colonized and patriarchal metaphors were the heart of politics.”

* * * *

The economic base of the French-Algonquian alliance in Canada was the expanding Indian-European fur trade of the north and west. Yet as Sylvia Van Kirk stressed in another pioneering book, first published in 1980 (“Many Tender Ties” : Women in Fur Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670—1870), the “fur trade … was not simply an economic activity, but a social and cultural complex that was to survive for nearly two centuries.”

As the fur trade in Canada expanded, Van Kirk carries on, the “growth of a mutual dependency between Indian and European trader at the economic level could not help but engender a significant cultural exchange as well. As a result, a unique society emerged which derived from both Indian and European customs and technology.”

The ultimate legacy of the Indigenous-European middle ground in this context had already been quietly noted by Harold Innis, in still more language that would raise at least some eyebrows today: The “existence of small and isolated sections of French half-breeds throughout Canada,” Innis wrote in 1930, “is another interesting survival” of the unique society of the 17th and 18th century Canadian fur trade. Just over a half century later, section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982 would more formally acknowledge “the Métis peoples of Canada.”

In the early 18th century, Thérese de Guyon, wife of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, founder of the French upper country wilderness metropolis at Detroit, had traveled west of the Ottawa River to join her husband, accompanied by the wife of Alphonse Tonti (Cadillac’s second in command, and the younger brother of the Henri Tonti who had followed La Salle on his Mississippi valley adventures). But it was rare for European women to make such journeys at that time. Lonely fur-trading European men in the pays d’en haut usually became involved with Indigenous women. This led to the “many tender ties” celebrated in Sylvia Van Kirk’s book of 1980, whose “major concern … is to show that the norm for sexual relationships in fur-trade society was not casual, promiscuous encounters but the development of marital unions which gave rise to distinct family units” and “the emergence of a large number of mixed-blood children.” (And then, again, this led to the “Métis peoples of Canada” who, after many further adventures, still survive in the Constitution Act, 1982 today.)

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries the practical status of Métis peoples had declined drastically in a more technologically obsessed North America — and on a new wave of over-aggressive racial chauvinism in many parts of the world. But during the last bold blossoming of the old French and Indian Canada, in the middle of the 18th century, mixed blood children could have large and distinguished careers on the Indigenous-European middle ground west of the Ottawa River.

A case in point is Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade, born in 1729 at the upper country outpost of Michilimackinac, north of Detroit where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. He was the son of Augustin Mouet de Langlade, a prominent fur trader, and Domitilde, sister of the Algonquian-speaking Ottawa chief Nissowaquet. The adult Charles-Michel Mouet de Langlade excelled as a fur trader and a soldier — for both the French-Algonquian alliance against the British (and the Iroquois) in the 1750s, and then for the British (and the Algonquians and so forth) against the revolutionary Anglo-American settlement frontier in the 1770s and 1780s. The Métis Langlade “remained active until his death” in the winter of 1800–1801, and he “enjoyed telling about 99 battles in which he had participated. A companion, recalling Langlade’s actions, said he ‘never saw so perfectly cool and fearless a man on the field of battle.’”

* * * *

Even under the French monarchy, the multiracial diversity of the more westerly new Canada that put down its first modern roots in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries had begun to expand somewhat beyond native North Americans and Europeans. And the northern fur-trade society that lived on into the 19th century would move further in this direction.

In the early 21st century there is still much to be learned about people of African descent in the deep Canadian past. Mathieu Da Costa, a so-called “Portuguese African,” was with the French party that included Champlain at the beginnings of Acadia in 1604. A very young African slave ultimately known as Olivier Le Jeune accompanied the Kirke brothers when they invaded Quebec City in 1629, and remained when they left. A few Black African slaves from the French West Indies and elsewhere subsequently appeared in the lower St. Lawrence valley as domestic servants. And it seems clear that some young black men worked in the multiracial Canadian fur trade, west of Montreal. (“Black Voyageurs,” as some have said. The history of people of African descent in the Detroit area may even have begun with Cadillac in 1701.)

When the Canadian fur trade headquartered in Montreal finally expanded all the way west to the Pacific coast, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Asians from Hawaii would add another dimension to its multicultural heritage. This was still almost a half-century away at the end of the French regime. But the Tonti brothers who accompanied La Salle and Cadillac had Italian rather than French origins. Like the Basque fishermen on the Atlantic coast, they had begun to diversify the European side of the old French and Indian Canada in the 17th and 18th centuries. And Francis Parkman’s “domain of savage freedom” in the “great interior wilderness,” to which the “St. Lawrence and the Lakes were the highway,” had already confirmed its attractions for people who were neither French nor Indigenous, before the ultimately global military struggles of the mid 18th century brought at least the political structure of France in America to an end.

It is certainly true that the early multicultural numbers were not large. At the time of the Peace of Paris in 1763, to take just one case in point, there were far more people of African descent in the more southerly British colonies on the Atlantic coast than there were in any part of French Canada. Yet this was true of non-aboriginal people more generally as well.

The French monarchy lost its American empire at the Peace of Paris in 1763. But only two decades later the British monarchy would lose its American empire at the Peace of Versailles in 1783. In both cases what are now the two countries of Canada and the United States would live on. And already Canada — a colder geography that probably did produce better furs for the European trade, but offered fewer opportunities for human expansion — was a quite vast but only thinly populated place.

Setting aside the very slippery North American Indigenous population numbers of the day, there were no more than 70,000 non-aboriginal people in the St. Lawrence valley in 1760 — and perhaps no more than 1,000 non-aboriginal (and/or non-Métis) people in the Canadian upper country of the Great Lakes and all points still further west. (Where the latter case included fur traders, voyageurs, engagés, missionaries, and a few hundred recent settlers from the St. Lawrence valley in the Detroit area, living beside “a well-established Indian population of some 2,600 people.”)

There were an additional few thousand people in the old French Acadia and New British Nova Scotia (and Newfoundland). But by this same time in the middle of the 18th century there were well over 1 million non-Indigenous people in the British “Thirteen Colonies” to the south.

A mere generation later, the British monarchy had lost its sway over the increasingly populous, vast, and spectacular new world enterprise to the south, and (somewhat haphazardly) assumed responsibility for the harsher and more marginal but equally vast northern adventures – that both the French monarchy and the Great Lakes middle-ground alliance between Onontio and the diverse Algonquians had begun.

* * * *

This is Part I, Chapter 4 of Randall White’s work in progress, tentatively entitled Children of the Global Village : Democracy in Canada Since 1497. For more on the project see The Long Journey to a Canadian Republic, which also includes drafts of all remaining chapters in this initial prepublication format. The entire book in draft is now pre-published on this site.  A final more carefully edited and source-referenced hard-copy print edition will be published by eastendbooks in the autumn of 2024. 

Randall White has a PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s he worked as an Ontario public servant. He subsequently worked as an independent policy consultant for private and public sector clients at all three levels of government in Canada and the United States. He has written 11 books on Canadian history and politics, and is at work on a twelfth. In 2023 he contributes a bi-weekly column to the Loonie Politics website (with a summer holiday in July and August). His writing on history and key current issues in Canada and beyond appears intermittently on counterweights.ca and birdhop.com as well.

SOURCES

This is an initial dry-run at what will finally appear in a published hard-copy text, subject to further checking, correction, and editing. The order of the items here broadly matches the order of the text above. The online linkages reported are as of Summer 2023.

Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1930, 1956, 1962, 1970.
https://utorontopress.com/9781487516840/the-fur-trade-in-canada/
https://www.amazon.ca/Fur-Trade-Canada-Introduction-Canadian/dp/0802081967

Cornelius J. Jaenen, ed., The French Regime in the Upper Country of Canada During the Seventeenth Century. Toronto : The Champlain Society, 1996.
https://www.amazon.ca/French-Regime-Country-Seventeenth-Century/dp/0969342578

Francis Parkman, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West. Boston : Little Brown, 1869, 1879, 1904.
https://www.amazon.ca/discovery-Francis-Parkman-Original-Version/dp/1537564943
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/126983/la-salle-and-the-discovery-of-the-great-west-by-francis-parkman/9780679642299
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40143/40143-h/40143-h.htm

Yves F. Zoltvany, “Laumet, Antoine dit de Lamothe Cadillac,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, V. II. Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1969, 351–7.
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/laumet_antoine_2E.html

Canadian Encyclopedia, “Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de La Vérendrye,
Article par C.E. Heidenreich, Mis à jour par Celine Cooper, Date de publication en ligne le 7 janvier 2008, Dernière modification le 15 août 2019.”
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/fr/article/la-verendrye-pierre-gaultier-de-varennes-et-de

Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada : An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1930, 123; Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1956, 118.

Brian Slattery, “The Organic Constitution: Aboriginal Peoples and the Evolution of Canada,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring 1996), 101–112. The “French and British Crowns did not acquire title to North America by virtue of ‘discovery’ and ‘occupation,’ as though the continent were a desert island. North America was not legally vacant at the time Europeans arrived … In most cases, Aboriginal nations were never conquered militarily. In the early years, they frequently entered into alliances and trading partnerships with incoming European states. As Aboriginal-European contacts became more extensive and important … there was a slow process of accommodation whereby Aboriginal peoples were constrained to accept piecemeal the suzerainty of the Crown in return for its protection … The important point is that Aboriginal nations were active participants in the lengthy processes that eventually gave rise to the federation of Canada … the constitutional law relating to Aboriginal peoples is grounded in ancient practices generated by interaction between Aboriginal nations and British and French officials in eastern North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries … Over the years, this … law … was whittled away by statute, and was often ignored by governmental officials and forgotten by the general public. However, it remains the essential historical background against which the modern position of Aboriginal peoples must be understood …”
https://digitalcommons.osgoode.yorku.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1633&context=ohlj

Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada. Volume 1. Toronto : George N. Morang, [1851], 1899. 263. More recently see eg :
https://www.amazon.ca/Conspiracy-Pontiac-Indian-Conquest-Canada/dp/080328733X

Canadian Encyclopedia, “French-speaking Louisiana and Canada.” Article by Nathalie Rech. Published Online May 3, 2019. Last Edited May 3, 2019.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/french-speaking-louisiana-and-canada

Library of Congress, “Louisiana as a French Colony.”
https://www.loc.gov/collections/louisiana-european-explorations-and-the-louisiana-purchase/articles-and-essays/louisiana-as-a-french-colony/

LOUISIANA: EUROPEAN EXPLORATIONS AND THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE. A SPECIAL PRESENTATION FROM THE GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION OF THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.
https://www.loc.gov/static/collections/louisiana-european-explorations-and-the-louisiana-purchase/images/lapurchase.pdf

John Douglas Belshaw, Canadian History: Pre-Confederation — “Louisiana and the Pays d’en Haut.”
https://opentextbc.ca/preconfederation/chapter/4-8-louisiana-and-the-pays-den-haut/

For Eccles on Louisiana see W.J. Eccles, France in America. Revised Edition. Markham, ON : Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1972, 1990. 94, 108, 113, 116, 155 (“The frequency with which the Canadians, both military and civilian, made this voyage between Quebec and the Gulf of Mexico and thought nothing of it was astonishing to visitors from France”), 156 (“New France was, in fact, a river empire. Its main bases, Canada and Louisiana, dominated the two great rivers giving access into the interior”), 157, 167, 168–169 (“Louisiana’s major handicap was its geography … and hurricanes were a menace”), 170-180, 186–190, 199, 221, 228, 230–231,
https://www.amazon.com/France-America-W-J-Eccles/dp/0870132849
https://www.amazon.ca/France-America-W-J-Eccles/dp/0061317632

Dale Miquelon, New France 1701–1744 : “A Supplement to Europe”. Toronto : McCllelland and Stewart, 1987, 1989, 2016. Esp. Chapter 8 on “Montreal and the Inland Rivers.”
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/545405/new-france-1701-1744-by-dale-miquelon/9780771003387
https://www.amazon.ca/New-France-1701-1744-Supplement-Centenary-ebook/dp/B01BAU6EBW

William R. Griffith IV, “ The French and Indian War (1754-1763): Causes and Outbreak,” American Battlefield Trust.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/french-and-indian-war-1754-1763-causes-and-outbreak

Richard White, The Middle Ground : Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1991, 1993. 2nd edition, 2010, 2012.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/middle-ground/5F4044644A763E02CC77F1D90AEF865B

On the broader Canadian subject only partly covered in Richard White’s excellent book see also W.J. Eccles, The Canadian Frontier 1534–1760. New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Albuquerque NM : The University of New Mexico Press, 1983.
https://www.ubcpress.ca/the-canadian-frontier-1534-1760

Lawrence Burpee, ed, Journals and Letters of Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de la Vérendrye and His Sons. Toronto : The Champlain Society, 1927.
https://www.abebooks.com/Journals-Letters-Pierre-Gaultier-Varennes-Verendrye/31577351307/bd
https://archive.org/details/P000027/mode/2up
https://champlainsociety.utpjournals.press/doi/book/10.3138/9781442617889

Eccles, France in America, 91-92, 95–124.

White, The Middle Ground (1993), 142–145.

Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties” : Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870. Winnipeg : Watson & Dwyer, 1980, 1996. 2–3.
https://www.amazon.ca/MANY-TENDER-TIES-Sylvia-Kirk/dp/189623951X/ref=asc_df_189623951X/

Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada : An Introduction to Canadian Economic History. New Haven : Yale University Press, 1930, 397; Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 1956, 392.

Canada, Justice Laws Website, Constitution Act, 1982. 35.
https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/page-13.html#h-53

Henry D. Brown, Cadillac and the Founding of Detroit. Detroit : Wayne State University Press for the Detroit Historical society, 1976. 60–61.
https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Cadillac-Founding-Detroit-Brown-Henry-Wayne/30794766190/bd
https://www.amazon.ca/Cadillac-Founding-Detroit-Henry-Brown/dp/0814315712

Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties,” 4.

Paul Trap, “Mouet de Langlade, Charles-Michel,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, V. IV. University of Toronto/Université Laval, 1979.
http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mouet_de_langlade_charles_michel_4E.html

Lawrence Hill, “Chains Unearthed : A review of Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, by Marcel Trudel, translated by George Tombs,” Literary Review Canada , May 2014.
http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2014/05/chains-unearthed/

Canadian Museum of History, “Virtual Museum of New France : Population/Slavery.” Original research: Arnaud BESSIÈRE, Ph.D., CIEQ — Université de Montréal. “The issue of slavery in Canada has long been glossed-over by historians and by Canadian society in general. Substantive recognition of this past history of slavery did not begin until the 1960s. Nevertheless, slavery was actively practised in New France, both in the St. Lawrence Valley and in Louisiana. This institution, which endured for almost two centuries, affected the destiny of thousands of men, women and children descended from Aboriginal and African peoples.”
https://www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/population/slavery/

Steve McCullough and Matthew McRae. “The story of Black slavery in Canadian history.” Canadian Museum for Human Rights. August 22, 2018. Updated: February 16, 2023
https://humanrights.ca/story/story-black-slavery-canadian-history

Canadian Encyclopedia, “Joseph Lewis,” Article by Bertrand Bickersteth. Published Online March 19, 2019. Last Edited April 2, 2019. “Joseph Lewis, alias Levi Johnston, also Lewes and Louis, fur trader (born c. 1772–73 in Manchester, New Hampshire; died 1820 in Saskatchewan District). Joseph Lewis was a Black fur trader, originally from the United States, who participated in the fur industry’s early expansion into the Canadian Northwest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He is one of very few Black people involved in the fur trade whose name was documented in existing texts. Joseph Lewis is further notable for being the first Black person in present-day Saskatchewan, as well as, in all likelihood, Alberta.”
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/joseph-lewis

Chris Garbutt, “Back History Month: U of T researcher’s work explores Black history of the Canadian Prairies,” U of T News, February 15, 2019. “ Karina Vernon … had not thought of the prairies as having much Black history. But, as she came to understand, that history goes back as far as the fur trade … Black migration arrived to the Prairies in waves over the centuries. During the time of the fur trade, there were Black voyageurs.”
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/black-history-month-u-t-researcher-s-work-explores-black-history-canadian-prairies

Bill McGraw, “Detroit’s Forgotten History of Slavery … Antoine Laumet de la Mothe Cadillac, Detroit’s founder, owned one slave and was godfather to another.”
https://www.kresgeartsindetroit.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Detroit_s-Forgotten-History-of-Slavery.pdf

William P. St. Clair, Jr., “HBC History Has a Hawaiian Chapter,” Canada’s History, April 29, 2014.
https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/fur-trade/hbc-history-has-a-hawaiian-chapter

The Francis Parkman quotation on the “domain of savage freedom” is from chapter XXIV of The Old Regime in Canada (1874). It is reproduced, eg, in Samuel Eliot Morison, ed., The Parkman Reader. Boston : Little, Brown & Co., 1955, 1970, 166–7.

Dale Miquelon’s “demographic ‘sounding’” in New France 1701–1744 : “A Supplement to Europe”, 156, and chapter 8 on “Montreal and the Inland Rivers” more generally, is one place to start thoughts about the peoples and populations of French Canada and beyond. For further intelligence see, eg:

Statistics Canada, “Estimated population of Canada, 1605 to present.”
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/98-187-x/4151287-eng.htm

_______________, “Censuses of Canada 1665 to 1871.”
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/98-187-x/98-187-x2000001-eng.htm

_______________, “Censuses of Canada 1665 to 1871 Aboriginal Peoples.”
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/98-187-x/4151278-eng.htm

Government of Canada, “First Nations in Canada”, Date modified : 2017-05-02
https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1307460755710/1536862806124

Vancouver Island University, “ESTIMATED POPULATION OF AMERICAN COLONIES: 1610 TO 1780.”
https://web.viu.ca/davies/H320/population.colonies.htm

Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751.”
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080

Wikipedia, “Population history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_the_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas