Mapping the Medicine Line, Part Two: New France, Jesuits and the British Surveys of the North-West Territory
by Clifton Bertram
Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49th Parallel.
The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.
For Part One of this article, click here:
Mapping the Medicine Line, Part One
In our last chapter, we concluded by discussing a few rudimentary maps based on descriptions from Jaques Cartier. Cartier – sailing for France out of St. Malo in Brittany – had followed closely on the heels of Giovanni Caboto. John Cabot, as he was known to his English employers, had claimed Newfoundland for the British in 1497, only five years after Christopher Columbus’ landing in the West Indies and claiming them for the Spanish.
Little state-sanctioned exploration took place following Cartier and Cabot, largely because of European conflicts that distracted the crowned heads – especially in France, where a series of civil wars called the Wars of Religion consumed the nation between 1562 and 1598. Still, voyages to the northern part of the New World continued, as French, Basque and English West Country fisherman continued fishing expeditions to the abundant cod waters of the Grand Banks, and penetrated past the St. Lawrence Basin as far as upriver as Tadoussac. There, the crews supplemented their wages by trading with the indigenous peoples, trading metal nails, knives and pots for beaver pelts. And, like fishermen everywhere, they were secretive about their fishing spots. Few maps were drawn.
But immediately following the resolution of the French Wars of Religion, a truly consequential mapmaker would take the stage: Samuel de Champlain, ‘the Father of New France’.
A Child of the Sea
Samuel de Champlain was born somewhere between 1567 and 1570 to a family of mariners in Brouage, in the French Aquitanian region of Saintonge. His childhood explorations would have been among limestone hills with sunny meadows dotted by hollyhocks, wild orchids and poppies, and bordered by thick stands of pine, oak and beech.
And most importantly, the sea.
Surrounded by a labyrinth of channels and oyster beds draining into the Gulf of St. Onge, Brouage was a major harbour, sheltered from the worst of the Atlantic’s fury by the Ile de Oleron, the second largest island in France.
Along with its Atlantic neighbours, like St. Malo in Brittany and Dieppe in Normandy, Brouage was one of the busiest seaports in Europe at the time, due in no small part to its salt flats. The marshy Marais de Brouage was a 13,000-acre wetland east of the city. It yielded an exotic black salt popular with royals and nobles, as well as a fine white salt called ‘white gold’ that was exported widely for preserving food, especially fish. And most especially, cod harvested from the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
Between the 11th and 13th centuries, European demand for dried fish, particularly cod, exploded. Increasing urbanization and population growth increased food demand, even as deforestation and agricultural impacts along rivers degraded freshwater fish stocks. Catholic church dietary laws, which required fasting on certain days, also contributed to the demand for fish, especially among the nobility, gentry and clergy.
A 2011 article in The Journal of Archaeological Science, describes a study that used stable isotope analysis to understand the expansion of the offshore fishery in Europe.
“Archaeological fish bones reveal increases in marine fish utilisation in Northern and Western Europe beginning in the 10th and 11th centuries AD….stable isotope signatures suggest that by the 13th to 14th century demand was increasingly met through long-distance transport – signalling the onset of globalisation of commercial fisheries…”
Le Marais de Brouage. The locals have harvested valuable salt from these marshes since Roman times.
Norman and Breton offshore fishers used salt to support a wet curing method of preserving cod. As soon as the cod was hauled in, crews gutted, beheaded, and split the fish open. They packed the split fillets tightly in layers separated by thick blankets of sea salt right there in the ship's hold.
Because the crews did not need to go ashore, they could fish continuously until the hold was full, and then immediately return to France. This wet, or ‘green fishery’ method was only possible because of the ample salt resources available in Brittany and Normandy, and especially at Champlain’s birthplace of Brouage.
Their competitors, the Basques, sold their cod into warmer southern Europe climates. Their preference was therefore dry curing, which helped the fish stay viable for longer in hotter markets. Dry curing required them to take their catch ashore near their fishing grounds to dry it in the open air and salt it. This took longer, and was less efficient – and therefore less profitable. But it also meant that the fishers spent more time ashore, developed stronger ties with the native inhabitants, and gained an early advantage in developing trading relationships.
Other fishing crews, like those from England’s West Country (Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and parts of Wiltshire and Hampshire), had far less access to salt. They had to pay to import it from as far away as Sicily, negatively impacting their margins. Or, they boiled seawater to derive salt deposits – also inefficient and time-consuming.
In an attempt to mitigate these costs, English fishers sometimes put in to Icelandic ports. There, they air-dried their catch in the Icelandic open-air fashion, which required much less salt than wet curing or even dry curing.
The downside of this approach was that access to Iceland required friendly relations with the Hanseatic League, of which Iceland was a key member. And throughout the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, the English were often as not in a fierce rivalry with the league.
Newfoundland Cod Station. Lacking the salt the French had access to, the English had to dry cod in ‘flakes’ on racks erected at shore stations.
Champlain apprenticed under his father. Antoine de Champlain was a pilot and captain who was expert in the use of instruments like the compass, astrolabe and traverse board, as well as a master of tides, currents, and wind patterns. His son would have begun apprenticeship at the trade from a very young age, gaining practical experience under his father’s tutelage. In addition, during the French Wars of Religion, Champlain served alongside allied Protestant English forces, among whose numbers were the explorer and navigator Martin Frobisher and Ralph Treswell, considered the finest Elizabethan surveyor and mapmaker of his day.
A Frenchman in the Spanish Main
When the war ended, he leveraged his family connections and practical experience into a berth on a vessel serving as part of the Spanish plate fleet sailing between New World colonies in the Caribbean and South America and Europe. Champlain biographer David Hackett Fischer tells us:
“He paid close attention as the fleet set its course and steered along a rhumb line south-southwest from Sanlucar, running before a remarkably “steady and very sharp wind” nearly eight hundred miles down the coast of Africa, on a course for the Canary Islands…they watched the winds with close attention [and] …beyond the islands they picked up the strong trade winds that blew steadily in that latitude….every day, precisely at noon, the navigators shot a daily sunline with their circular astrolabes. At dusk when the line of the horizon could still be seen, and stars began to appear in the northern sky, they brought out their cross-staffs and calculated the elevation of Polaris…he studied these highly skilled men, and learned from them to navigate the North Atlantic.”
He concluded his first New World voyages with a detailed report called ‘A Brief Discours des choses plus remarquables’ (A Brief Narrative of the Most Remarkable Things), replete with numerous maps and natural history illustrations. Champlain presented his report, which also included substantial intelligence about Spanish navigation, mercantile activities and fortifications, to the French king, earning the young explorer a place in court at the Louvre as a Royal Geographer.
In 1603, Champlain was commissioned by King Henry IV to journey to New France, subordinate to the newly appointed Lieutenant-General and Viceroy of New France, Admiral Aymar de Chaste, who held a monopoly on trade and colonization in New France. The expedition was financed by investors from Rouen, Dieppe and Saint-Malo, and was led by trader and noble Pierre Dugua de Monts and the seasoned sea captain Francois Grave du Pont.
The expedition’s primary goal was to re-establish a trading post at Tadoussac on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. The post had first been built in 1599 by the wealthy Huegenot nobleman Pierre de Chauvin de Tonnetuit, a shipowner engaged in the cod fishery, and a pioneer of early fur trading. De Monts had accompanied Chauvin on that earlier expedition.
They hoped to reinforce contact with the indigenous peoples, who had gathered at Tadoussac annually to trade for millennia. As a secondary mission, they were ordered to produce maps and survey the river upstream from Tadoussac for potential settlement sites. Finally, they were to search for a passage through the North American continent to the Orient. Champlain’s part of the assignment was to bring back an accurate report like he did on his trip to the West Indies.
Pages from ‘A Brief Discours’. Champlain’s report to the king of France secured him a position at Versailles and a position on a voyage of exploration to New France.
Maps by the Father of New France
On this voyage, and throughout his career, geographer and historian Dr. Conrad Heidenreich tells us: “the many maps he drew and published during his career reflect the tasks he was set by his employers: resource surveys leading to settlement, charts of the coast he traveled for safe navigation, and mappings of the interior in his search for a route to China. These maps form an integral part of the books he wrote and published. They were also used in the verbal and written reports he submitted to his superiors and the king and were regarded as proof of French exploration and territorial claims.
Champlain established the city of Quebec in 1608, made war against the Haudenosaunee, and personally explored as far west as Ottawa. He sent young subordinates to live amongst the Wendat and learn their languages and customs and act as cultural ambassadors – the earliest couriers du bois. The alliances Champlain forged with the Iroquioan-speaking Huron Wendat and Algonquian-speaking First Nations like the Innu (Montagnais), Ojibwe, Odawa and Cree proved crucial to the survival and growth of New France.
Appointed to the position of the king’s lieutenant in New France in 1612, Champlain served as the proxy for lieutenant-governors who often never left Europe. He was the de facto administrator of the New France colonies, and between 1603 and his death in 1635, he would make 12 trips between his homeland and the new world. Throughout that time he made numerous surveys and gathered intelligence from his native allies, providing insights into the continent’s terra incognita as far as the western end of the Great Lakes, and south along the Eastern Seaboard of today’s United States as far as Cape Cod.
Upon his retirement from exploring, he consolidated his own observations and reports from couriers de bois he sent into the frontier, into a comprehensive map of New France. Issued in 1632, it was a summary of his lifetime of cartographic work, and was the first map to depict the existence of the entire Great Lakes network. It depicted North America in detail, from Greenland to Virginia, from Newfoundland to Lake Superior.
Champlain’s General Map of New France, 1632.
Before we leave Champlain, we should note that there are a number of aspects of his life and career that deserve deeper inquiry.
- · Was he a Catholic or a Protestant during the Wars of Religion? Which side did he serve? Both? Neither?
- Who was his uncle Guillame Allene, known as Captain Provencal? Was he a pirate? And what was his influence his nephew?
- Was Champlain actually a spy in the service of the King of France?
- Where did Champlain’s attitudes towards indigenous people come from, and what did his First Nations alliances mean for the development of North America?
These fascinating subjects are outside the scope of this article, but we hope to delve into them in some detail in the future.
A Succession of Important Explorers and Mapmakers
Following Champlain a succession of important cartographers continued to influence the concept and evolution of the 49th parallel over the years. Those of us educated in Canada were told about them in passing during elementary school social studies, but all of them had adventures which deserve a more in-depth examination, and which we hope to explore in future articles.
For New France, chief among these are mapmaking explorers like Rene-Robert Cavalier la Sieur de la Salle, who explored from Lake Erie down the Mississippi River as far south as the Gulf of Mexico. Or Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, Sieur de La Vérendrye, who helped to extend French claims as far west as the Rocky Mountains. Or Louis Jolliet, Royal Hydrographer of Quebec for King Louis XIV. His brother Adrien Jolliet, the first European to see Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and the area where Detroit now stands. Or Pierre-Esprit Radisson, the explorer and fur trader behind the founding of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
La Salle's Map of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Establishing the Vast Extent of France's Claims in the New World.
On the way, we’ll encounter lesser-known figures, like the Italian Enrico Tonti, Lasalle’s fascinating ‘iron-handed’ lieutenant, builder of the barque Griffon – the first sailing vessel on the Great Lakes – and known today as the Father of Arkansas.
Among the British, we’ll meet David Thompson – described as ‘the greatest practical land geographer that the world has produced’; Captains Cook and Vancouver, who did so much to chart the Pacific Northwest; and Alexander Mackenzie, who made and mapped the first continental crossing of North America, fulfilling the dream of those who sought a shortcut to the Pacific and northwest passage to the Indies.
Later American explorers like Lewis and Clark and John C. Fremont would flesh out the remaining formal geography of the southern half of the continent, with the help of famous mountain men like Kit Carson and Jim Bridger. We’ll also look at lesser-known plainsman like Jerry Potts, the guide and interpreter who so contributed to the early success of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
All of these figures had hair-raising adventures and fascinating backstories, and we’ll want to meet each of them in future articles. But for now, suffice it to say that the borders we know today result from the efforts and knowledge of some of the most talented mapmakers of their day, gathered over more than 200 years of gruelling expeditions and painstaking surveying.
Black Robes: The Society of Jesus
Secular explorers weren’t the only ones expanding geographic knowledge during the Age of Discovery. Defining North America’s borders was furthered substantially by the efforts of a very specific order of missionaries committed to extending the dominion of Christianity to the pagan inhabitants of the New World: the Society of Jesus.
Jacques Marquette, Pioneering Jesuit Missionary. Marquette partnered with Jolliet to confirm that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico.
More popularly known as the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 by a Spanish Catholic priest, Ignatius of Loyola. Born Inigo Lopez de Loyola in 1491 he was the youngest son of a noble Basque family during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Receiving a chivalric education and spending time at court, at the age of 30 he found himself leading the defence of the fortress town of Pamplona against a French siege, where a cannonball shattered his leg.
During his convalescence he consumed books on the life of Christ, which ultimately led him to believe that he had been called by God. A pilgrimage to Jerusalem was followed by brushes with the Inquisition. Then, a spell at the Renaissance institution College Ste. Barbe of the University of Paris, where the beginnings of the Society of Jesus were forged with his college companions. The order was confirmed by Pope Paul III in 1540, and its founder Loyola was canonized by Pope Gregory XV in 1622.
In keeping with its Late Renaissance roots, the new order developed a heavy emphasis on academic learning. The so-called ‘Jesuit formation’ involved 10 to 12 years of study for those who became priests. In 1599, mathematics was formally added to the Society’s curriculum, and by the 16th century, the Society had become what American Magazine called “… the world’s first global nonprofit organization, with a geographic footprint that spanned six continents and a portfolio of activity that included everything from empire-building to education, poetry to paleontology.”
Jesuit Map of New France, 1657. The order combined evangelism, exploration, math and a passion for recording their activities.
Throughout the Age of Discovery, Jesuit missionaries played a leading role in evangelizing peoples throughout the New World, mapping it as they went. American Magazine, again: “Combining European mathematical techniques with the knowledge of the peoples they evangelized, Jesuits produced the first modern maps of many parts of Mexico, South America, the Great Lakes and Canada.”
Among the most noted Jesuit explorers and proselytizers was Father Jean de Brébeuf who arrived at Quebec in 1625 and spent nearly a quarter of a decade among the Wendat Huron. Many of those years at the mission of Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons, 150 km north of the site of today’s Toronto, and on the shores of Georgian Bay.
A Reconstruction of the Mission at Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons. A fortified Jesuit mission dedicated to converting the Wendat.
In 1649, he and a fellow Jesuit, Gabriel Lalemant, were captured by raiding Haudenosaunee Mohawk at the Wendat village of Sainte-Louis, about 8 km east of the fortified mission. The two captives were taken to the neighbouring village of Saint-Ignace, where they were ritually tortured to death. Christophe Regnault, a Jesuit layperson, who saw Brébeuf’s remains later wrote:
“Father de Brébeuf had his legs, thighs, and arms stripped of flesh to the very bone; I saw and touched a large number of great blisters, which he had on several places on his body, from the boiling water which these barbarians had poured over him in mockery of Holy Baptism. I saw and touched the wound from a belt of bark, full of pitch and resin, which roasted his whole body. I saw and touched the marks of burns from the Collar of hatchets placed on his shoulders and stomach. I saw and touched his two lips, which they had cut off because he constantly spoke of God while they made him suffer.”
Finally, they burned the two at the stake, and scalped Brébeuf before tearing out his heart, consuming it in an act of ritual cannibalism in a bid to acquire his strength and courage. The two martyrs were buried near the Sainte-Marie Among the Hurons mission, and a church built there – the Church of St. Joseph – is today part of a site designated as ‘The Shrine of the Martyrs’, a major destination site for Catholic pilgrims from all over the world.
Brébeuf and Lalemant’s Deaths at the Hands of the Mohawk. Their grisly deaths made them martyrs whose shrine is visited by thousands each year.
Another noted Jesuit was Father Jacques Marquette, known to history as Pere Marquette. Co-leader of the first European expedition down the northern section of the Mississippi River as far as Arkansas, and confirming that it flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. Marquette was accompanied by Louis Jolliet, the first major European explorer to be born on North American soil. Jolliet himself was a notable cartographer, also educated by the Jesuits.
Both navigation and hydrography were crucial skills for enabling colonization, and the Jesuit Order was pre-eminent in both of them. Their hydrographic school in Quebec was staffed entirely by Jesuit professors, and back in Europe, the French Crown supported two royal hydrographers in Marseilles, both of whom were Jesuits.
Even cartographers that never left the royal court benefited greatly from the precise observations made by Jesuit missionaries worldwide. In addition to surveys, their detailed documents included anthropological notes and natural history commentary, as well as descriptions of spiritual progress and martyrdom events. Compiled annually from 1632 to 1673, the Jesuit Relations served as a kind of institutional memory for the order as well as the Crown.
Guillame Delisle, called ‘the greatest French cartographer’ made extensive use of these reports, as well as interviews with missionaries, to create the 1703 ‘Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France’, the first scientifically correct map to show the exact latitude and longitude of Canada.
An article published by Stanford University, ‘French Jesuit Mapmaking in North America’ explains: “The research behind this map, in addition to its mathematical nature, made it a standard for maps to come. It had a large impact when it was published, underscoring the French strength in New France in the early 18th century, and it stood out as an early example of a more dispassionate, scientific type of map relative to the impressionistic ones of centuries before. The map itself is quite detailed, covering such vast areas as New France, Greenland, Labrador, Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, and the Great Lakes and Arctic regions.”
Guillame Delisle’s 1703 ‘Carte du Canada ou de la Nouvelle France’. The first scientifically accurate map of Canada.
Delisle’s highly accurate charts represented a revolution in mapmaking, made possible by an emphasis on empirical approach and scientific method. Delisle’s biography includes the following observation:
“Rather than relying on hearsay or outdated sources, Guillaume was taught to integrate data from astronomical observations, travel accounts, and recent explorations … his use of latitude and longitude coordinates was groundbreaking, as was his reliance on astronomical observations to improve geographic precision. Delisle also contributed to the development of thematic cartography, creating maps that highlighted specific topics such as political boundaries, trade routes, and natural features. His focus on clarity and utility influenced not only his contemporaries but also the future of mapmaking.”
This seems an appropriate point to plant a bit of a flag in the ground. In ‘Across the Medicine Line’, one of our core principles is to work hard to avoid the Presentism Fallacy. David Hackett Fischer, the Champlain historian who we met earlier, defines Presentism as “the fallacy of nunc pro tunc”, literally “now for then”.
The idea is that introducing present-day ideas, perspectives and morals into depictions or interpretations of the past can be hazardous because it’s a form of cultural bias which distorts understanding of the subject matter.
That said, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the many misdeeds committed by the Jesuits, even if we are viewing them from our comfortable perch of hindsight in 2026. Criticisms of the Society of Jesus’ activities include a widespread, modern rejection of the their aggressive conversion tactics. They strictly enforced European family structures, gender roles, and labor patterns, backed at times by political alliances with imperial powers and military force. They often made the provision of European medicine contingent upon acceptance of Christianity. And they intentionally created isolated, permanent agricultural settlements, seeking to remove converts from the traditional nomadic lifestyle preferred by the indigenous.
These created a profound cultural disruption which severely impacted Indigenous communities. The Jesuits were explicit about seeking to replace traditional Indigenous spiritualities, governance, and social structures with European Catholicism and sedentary farming lifestyles, which many today could justifiably characterize as cultural genocide.
Furthermore, their aggressive proselytizing sharply divided indigenous communities, especially the Wendat Huron. The resulting fissure between Christianized native mission communities and traditionalists, led to occasional violence, and escalated conflict between the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee.
In their zeal, the Jesuits flattened complex Indigenous spiritual concepts – such as Oki among Iroquoian-speaking peoples and Manitou among Algonquian-speaking peoples – into disguised demons. For their part, the shamans among the indigenous communities sometimes viewed the Jesuits as demonic or malevolent figures, a view that was reinforced by the fact that the arrival of the Black Robes frequently coincided with fatal outbreaks of diseases like smallpox and influenza. Furthermore, missionaries sometimes baptized desperate, dying individuals during plagues, a practice viewed by some community members as spiritually manipulative or malicious.
Outbreaks of Illness Were Often Associated With Jesuit Arrival. Indigenous shamans often blamed the smallpox, fever and plagues on the demon Black Robes.
Mairi Cown is a Professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto. In 2018, she wrote an essay published in the collection ‘Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period’. Her article, ‘Jesuit Missionaries and the Accommodationist Demons in New France’ describes this attitude:
“Pierre Biard, an early Jesuit in Acadia, opened his Relation of 1616 with a description of the world divided by the sun of justice, Jesus Christ, and there the earth a paradise of delights”.
At the risk of introducing sarcasm to our narrative, one presumes Biard considers France one of these earthly paradises. He goes on:
“The rest, lying behind Lucifer and under the shadow of death, was a place of destruction, loneliness, desolation, and cries of lamentations. New France, according to Biard, was in this second, hellish, part of the world. Although it was a “twin land” of France, subject to the same influences, placed on the same parallel, and situated in the same climate, this vast region was a horrible desert because of the malice of Satan.”
Even without ‘Presentism’, it’s hard not to blame the Jesuits for inflicting unimaginable horrors of the indigenous peoples, up to and including the wholesale destruction of their society. Their contributions – whether to cartography, exploration, historiography, science or medicine – cannot overshadow those negative impacts. But they also should not be denied.
Indigenous Children in the Jesuit Indian Residential School. Spanish Ontario, Wikwemikong First Nation. (Source: The Residential School Research, Archive and Visitor’s Centre & The Shingwauk Project, May 2006).
The British Start Mapping Canada
Following the British conquest of New France, the 1763 Treaty of Paris awarded French possessions in Canada to Britain. The position of Surveyor General was established, and British land surveying began in Ontario in 1783, starting with the mapping of Kingston Township.
In 1794, Governor-General John Simcoe had the Queens Rangers and surveyor Augustus Jones begin cutting the military road that became Yonge Steet, in the fledgling settlement of York (now Toronto), the interim capital of Upper Canada. Indigenous portage routes would become the basis for what would eventually become known (falsely) as the World’s Longest Street. Named after British Secretary of War, Sir George Yonge, Simcoe’s goal for the trail was to establish a northern land bypass to the upper Great Lakes, to the Holland River and from there to Lake Simcoe. Simcoe's hope was that it would provide an alternative to Lake Erie trade routes that could be threatened in the event of hostilities with the United States.
Cutting the Military Road. At the direction of John Graves Simcoe, The Queen’s Rangers began clearing Yonge Street on December 28, 1795, on the site of former indigenous trails.
The Royal Canadian Institute, an association of land surveyors, engineers and architects, was formed in 1797 and Upper Canada’s first survey act was passed the following year.
English surveyors laid out land claims in block-shaped checkerboard patterns. In contrast, in the French seignural system farms were laid out in long strips of land running back from a river. The seignural system was administered in a quasi-feudal relationship with the seignure, who was obliged to provide his habitants, or censitaires, with a mill, a church, and other facilities in support of their farms. In 2018, in an article titled ‘Mapping Land Tenure Pluralism in the St. Lawrence River Valley’, historian Julia Lewandoski wrote:
“In the St. Lawrence Valley, French feudal seigneurial practices, in which lords and tenants each possessed a complex array of rights and responsibilities towards not just land, but to each other, was not easily translated into British-style fee simple tenure, in which each tract of land was discretely and completely owned by an individual. This process of translation appeared so difficult that British officials elected to keep seigneurial tenure intact for nearly a century.”
Survey Map of the Talbot Settlement, Upper Canada. The British Township surveying system introduced conflicts with the French Seigneurial System and Indigenous Land Claims. (Source: Frederick C. Hamil's Lake Erie Baron: The Story of Colonel Thomas Talbot).
Conflict between the two surveying systems was inevitable, but in the short term the impact was only moderate. Land-holder disputes and court cases were not uncommon, but the friction was worst with First Nations land claims, as Lewandowski tells us.
“As surveyors struggled to locate definitive seigneurial boundaries where they might begin laying out British-style townships, they also confronted land tenures beyond French and English forms. Indigenous territories, from hunting grounds delineated by families to easily identifiable agricultural and political centers along important rivers, were the core of the St. Lawrence River Valley’s land tenure pattern, over which French and then British property had been overlaid. By the late eighteenth century, the indigenous territories most legible to British surveyors were the former Jesuit and Sulpician mission villages of the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, Wabanaki, Algonquin, and Nipissing Sept Feux nations, most of whom held part or all of a seigneury by French grant. Yet without a formal missionary presence in the British era, the indigenous proprietorship of these lands was increasingly challenged by British settler neighbors who argued that First Nations communities could not act as proprietors.”
So there was immediate, if moderate, conflict between English and French colonists and their land ownership rights. A host of challenges faced the post-war administrators, including the grabbing of Crown land by speculators and exploitation of new colonists, rampant fraud, and defective titles.
Dominion, Unrest and the Opening of the North-West
But relations would deteriorate much further over the next 100 years, ultimately exploding into open rebellion and warfare in 1837 and 1838, the Red River Resistance of 1867 and especially the North-West Rebellion of 1885.
For many, the final straw was the Hudson Bay Company’s sale of Rupert’s Land to Canada in the spring of 1869.
Rupert’s Land. The Hudson Bay Company’s sale of all the land that drained into Hudson’s Bay transferred 3.9 million square kilometres to the new nation of Canada in 1869 for a sum of £300,000. The HBC retained its trading posts and was granted 1/20th of the region’s arable land for potential sale to settlers.
Like some of the other topics we have discussed, Rupert’s Land, the Hudson’s Bay Company and its role in the evolution of Canada and the documentation of The Medicine Line, is worth it own, separate in-depth examination. For now, we’ll offer the following summary.
In 1659, French couriers de bois (freelance fur traders) Pierre-Esprit Radisson and Medart Chouart des Groseilliers, with the help of Cree guides, ‘discovered’ Hudson’s Bay, and took notice of the exceptional quality of the beaver pelts in the area. Reporting back to the Governor of New France the following year, their arrest was ordered by the rather short-sighted Governor Pierre de Voyer d’Argenson, Vicomte de Mousay for trading without a license. Frustrated by their treatment, they took their discovery to the British, with the result that King Charles II backed an official state voyage of discovery to Hudson’s Bay with the Nonsuch in 1668-1669.
Inspired by the voyage’s success, the king’s cousin, Prince Rupert, organized The Governor and Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay, which was chartered May 2, 1670, and granted a monopoly from the king on the region drained by all rivers and streams flowing into Hudson’s Bay.
What was not known at the time was the vast extent of this grant, which turned out to be a drainage basin of some 3,861,400 square kilometres, more than a third of modern-day Canada. The Hudson’s Bay Company parlayed their monopoly into a position of dominance in the wealthy Canadian fur trade for more than 200 years. Operating as a quasi nation-state, with the ability to create laws and conduct private military operations, the Hudson’s Bay Company became a geopolitical entity with power eclipsing all but the biggest empires.
In 1863, a coalition of speculators purchased a controlling interest in the company. More interested in real estate speculation and the economic potential represented by settling their vast territory, they agreed to sell Rupert’s Land back to the Crown, for transfer to Canada. The Deed of Surrender became effective in 1870, resulting in the creation of the North-West Territories as an official part of the new nation of Canada. The Deed of Surrender is part of The Rupert’s Land and North-West Territory Order, and today both form part of The Constitution of Canada under the Constitution Act, 1982.
In a 2024 Winnipeg Free Press excerpt from his book Lies and Promises: How the Métis and First Nations Shaped Canada, Tom Brodbeck takes up the narrative:
“The inhabitants of Rupert’s Land, including an estimated 12,000 people living in the Red River Settlement — mostly French- and English-speaking Métis in what is today the core area of Winnipeg — were left entirely in the dark. There were no official visits from representatives of the Canadian government, no town hall meetings hosted by federal or British authorities, and no proclamations spelling out how existing landholdings would be treated.
From the perspective of First Nations communities living in Rupert’s Land, their territory was sold without their consent. Anishinaabe, Cree and other Indigenous groups were given no information about when, or whether, treaties would be negotiated to protect their territorial and hunting rights. They learned of the proposed sale of their homeland through secondary sources.
The people most affected by the largest territorial transaction in Canadian history were barely an afterthought. They played no role in the negotiations held in London and had no input into how Canada planned to assume control of the territory.”
Red River Settlement. None of the 12,000 French-Indigenous Métis and ‘Country Born’ English-Scots-Indigenous Métis were involved in the Rupert’s Land sale in any way.
Immediately following the sale, the Dominion Land Act and the Dominion Land Survey of 1871 divided most of Western Canada into one-square-mile sections, based largely on the methodology used by the United States Public Land Survey system.
The U.S. approach was preferred because the goal was to transform the wild North-West Territory into settled farmland via homesteading, and U.S. system was deemed more efficient and suitable than the ‘farm name and field position’ approach of European systems, or the township and concession system used to that point in Upper Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia tells us:
“Each township comprised 36 sections of 260 ha, which were further broken down into 65 ha ‘quarter-sections.’ These quarter-sections were offered as homesteads. This system of measure covered some 80 million hectares, representing about 1.25 million homesteads — making it the largest survey grid in the world.”
The Dominion Land Act of 1872 enabled lands in the North-West Territory to be granted to individual settlers, colonization companies, the Hudson’s Bay Company, railway companies like the Grand Trunk Pacific and municipalities and religious organizations. Additionally, it enabled land for First Nations reserves to be designated and set aside, as well as what would ultimately become the national parks system, starting in 1883.
Thousands of Land Grants. Under the authority of the Dominion Land Act, the Government of Canada, railways, land companies and others issued more than 625,000 land grants to stimulate the colonization of the west.
By the time the act was repealed in 1930, some 625,000 land grants were issued to homesteaders from Europe, the United States and Eastern and Central Canada, and hundreds of thousands of settler families had poured into the newly formalized boundaries of the region, now formally part of the Dominion of Canada.
Swedes and Norwegians came from Scandinavia, and from American homesteads in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Ukrainians, fleeing foreign rule in Galicia and Bukovina arrived. Scots and Irish came from south-western Ontario in the thousands, transporting livestock and farm tools on the expanding railways. American settlers who had established themselves in he Midwest were attracted by visions of even greater tracts of land.
French, Belgians and Dutch. Swiss, Finns and Russians. Austro-Hungarians, Germans and Poles. All were numbered among the two million immigrants who arrived in Canada from 1896 and 1911, seduced by the promises of Clifford Sifton, the Canadian Minister of the Interior from 1896 to 1905.
“A stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, and a stout wife and a half-dozen children is good quality,” said Sifton, describing the type of immigrant he hoped to attract.
Attracting Sifton’s ‘Stalwart Peasants’. An 1898 cartoon in the Toronto Globe describes how Canada sought immigrants from Europe to settle the ‘Last Best West’.
The wide-open borders of the territory, where bison hunters, wolf-pelt traders and whiskey peddlers freely traversed the great plains, were replaced by an orderly checkerboard of documented and treatied ownership and a surveyed border.
A border that became known to the indigenous peoples of North America as ‘The Medicine Line’.
Pioneer Villages Sprout Across the West. These images depict a typical prairie settlement on the Grand Trunk railway line circa 1910 (top image), 1911 (middle image) and 1928 (last image).
Upcoming Instalments: We will discuss two related topics in future instalments, as they deserve their own full treatment.
We’ll want to examine the Numbered Treaties (Treaties 1 through 11) signed between 1871 and 1921. These eleven agreements between the Crown and First Nations opened the Prairie provinces and northern territories for European settlement, agriculture, and railway/resource development.
We’ll also look at the North-West Rebellion of 1896 in which the Métis, led by Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont, drew a red line, making a last stand for the rights of their people; an armed rebellion launched as a direct response to the issues arising from the settlement of Rupert’s Land.
Across the Medicine Line: Tales From the 49th Parallel.
The articles in ‘Across the Medicine Line’ are written in hopes of learning more about how North America came to be. How our peoples lived, ate, drank, travelled, loved, fought and thought during the time between the discovery, founding and solidification of our long partnership and our current society. We believe that learning these stories can further strengthen the many ties that bind our two nations and better understand – or even heal! -- the divisions that still separate us.
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