The History of Montreal

by Paul-Andre Linteau

  A visit from the French

  The sudden arrival of the French clearly upset the environmental, economic, and political balance of the St. Lawrence Valley. And yet it had taken over a century for them to settle permanently on the island of Montreal. What had they been up to before 1642?

  Jacques Cartier was the first Frenchman and the first European to set foot on the island’s shores. He arrived in October 1535 and spent no more than a day in Montreal. He had no interpreter with him, meaning that he was unable to use the information the inhabitants shared with him. One of Cartier’s biggest contributions to history was the account he wrote of his visit to the village of Hochelaga. He also wrote an initial description of the area, even though he did not realize it was an island. And he made a lasting contribution to the island’s toponymy, christening the mountain “Mont Royal,” a name that would be extended to the whole of the island since Montreal is simply another way of writing Mont Royal, réal being synonymous with royal. He also made the name Hochelaga more widely known, a familiar sight in place names around the city to this day.

  During his second and final trip to the island in September 1541 (which was just as brief as the first), Cartier did not add much to his knowledge of Montreal, although this time he went right up to the foot of the Lachine rapids. In 1543, Roberval also travelled as far as Montreal, but nothing is known of his voyage, other than the fact that he too probably went to the Lachine rapids. Around 1585, a nephew of Cartier’s, Jacques Noël, retraced his uncle’s steps and scaled Mount Royal, without unearthing any new information.

  It was not until Samuel de Champlain that the French were again in contact with Montreal. In 1603, it was Champlain’s turn to travel up the St. Lawrence to the Lachine rapids. His local guides provided him with detailed information on the land upstream from Montreal, particularly the course of the St. Lawrence as far as Lake Huron and the role the Ottawa River played in transporting goods inland. This gave him a much better idea than his predecessors of Montreal’s enviable position at the confluence of both commercial axes.

  It took until 1611, three years after he founded Quebec, for Champlain to grow more interested in the island’s potential. He spent several weeks there trading furs and used the occasion to explore the surrounding area. He could see the benefits of setting up a trading post on the island and chose the very same site—today known as Pointe-à-Callière—chosen by Maisonneuve and his group 31 years later. Champlain cleared a space, which he named Place Royale, then had a wall built and prepared and seeded two gardens. On a map that he published in 1613, he referred to the island by the name of Montreal for the very first time.

  Over the next few years, Montreal became a meeting place for Aboriginals and French traders. The Aboriginals arrived in groups over the summer, canoes laden with furs from the Pays d’en haut (the upper country encompassing the entire Great Lakes), which they exchanged for European products. Champlain’s goal of setting up a permanent trading post there never came to fruition, however. There were simply not enough Frenchmen to maintain two separate settlements, one at Quebec, the other at Montreal. They had to make do with a presence on the island for only part of the year.

  Another factor weighing against a permanent settlement on the island was the growing threat from the Iroquois. Champlain had allied with the Algonquins and Hurons and joined in a number of their war parties against the Iroquois. But the Iroquois, particularly the Mohawks, known as Agniers in French, were remarkable warriors, capable not only of keeping their enemies at bay, but of launching attacks of their own. They also became involved in the fur trade, not with the French, but with the Dutch merchants of Nieuw-Nederland (later the colony of New York). Their objective was clear: to control the flow of furs along the St. Lawrence by eliminating the competition.

  The handful of French men and women living in New France were no match for the thousands of warriors the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy could muster. And the Iroquois soon had firearms, supplied by the Dutch, depriving the French of the upper hand they had once enjoyed when it came to technology. For the moment, the Iroquois were merely a nuisance, but it was enough to create a climate of insecurity and disrupt the supply of furs along the St. Lawrence. When at last, in 1634, Champlain was able to open a second permanent post, it was at Trois-Rivières.

  The project of establishing a settlement in Montreal was postponed until the situation improved. In 1636, Jean de Lauson, manager of the Compagnie des Cent-Associés that controlled New France, used a frontman to get the company to grant him a seigneury that took in the entire island of Montreal. Under the seigneurial system, the seigneur was expected to grant lots to new settlers he would recruit, but Jean de Lauson had no intention of fulfilling those obligations and settling the island. It was sheer speculation: Lauson was well placed to see Montreal’s potential.

  1. In the past, in Montreal, many French names were translated into English. Saint-Laurent suburb was also known as St. Lawrence suburb, rue Saint-Jacques as St. James Street and so on. This practice officially disappeared some decades ago. Accordingly, in line with current usage, we have chosen to use the French spelling of place names throughout the book. Also since readers who are in Montreal will see “rue Sainte-Catherine” and not “Sainte-Catherine Street,” words like "street" and "boulevard" are written in lower case.

  CHAPTER 2

  Ville-Marie

  1642–1665

  Champlain had dreamed of setting up a trading post at Montreal, but in 1642 a missionary settlement got there first. And so, although the city was most often called Montréal, it also came to be known as Ville-Marie. The beginnings were difficult, but Montréalistes, as they were known, stuck it out and gradually put down roots.

  A mission

  To understand the context in which Montreal was founded, we need to go back to France in the 1630s. Religion was back in favour; a wave of exaltation and a desire to spread the Catholic faith had washed over part of France’s elite, affecting both the nobility and bourgeoisie. It spawned a host of new works, from religious orders and charities to missions. A secret society, the Company of the Blessed Sacrament (Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement), channelled part of this energy and brought together many of the kingdom’s most influential figures. This was also a time when French Catholics were learning about missions in Canada, thanks in particular to The Jesuit Relations, chronicles of their time in New France.

  This was the world of the man behind the Montreal project, Jérôme Le Royer de La Dauversière, a tax collector from La Flèche in France. A fervent Catholic, he founded a number of religious and charitable organizations in his town and was also a member of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament. Around 1635, he first had the idea of founding a missionary settlement in Montreal. His project began to take shape in 1639 when he met Father Jean-Jacques Olier in Paris, a French priest who would go on to found the Sulpicians, and who was already nursing a similar idea. Together they managed to rally the rich and influential around their project, including the superior of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament, Gaston de Renty.

  They set up the Société de Notre-Dame de Montréal to convert the Aboriginal peoples of New France. Their goal was to found a missionary settlement in Montreal where Aboriginals who had converted to Catholicism would live and farm alongside the French. The fur trade, still the main reason for many staying in Canada, was of no interest to them; their mission was religious. Their directors managed to raise a considerable amount of money to meet the needs of the colony and its inhabitants.

  The Société de Notre-Dame purchased the seigneury of the island of Montreal that had previously belonged to Jean de Lauson and looked for someone to run the settlement. They picked the right man for the job in Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, a gentleman with a military career behind him. They also brought on board Jeanne Mance, a woman with a project of her own, namely to found a hospital in Montreal, with the financial support of a rich benefactor, Madame de Bullion. Jeanne Mance became the settlem
ent’s bursar. Others were indentured servants—artisans, for the most part—who were recruited on three- to five-year contracts.

  The Compagnie des Cent-Associés (Company of One Hundred Associates), which owned New France, granted the Société de Notre-Dame a great deal of autonomy over its settlement in Montreal. It was able to name its own governor, Maisonneuve, who enjoyed a vast range of military and civilian powers, especially over judicial matters. It was also able to freely import the products it needed to Canada and had its own warehouse at Quebec.

  Montreal’s founding

  The forty-person expedition set sail in 1641. There were three boats, but Maisonneuve’s was damaged and delayed, not arriving until the end of the summer. It was too late in the year to set up the new settlement so the group spent the winter near Quebec, where it continued preparations, got used to the Canadian climate, and familiarized itself with techniques to survive the winter.

  The governor of Quebec, Montmagny, deemed a settlement in Montreal risky, given attacks by the Iroquois and the small population of New France. He tried to get Maisonneuve to give up on the project—a “foolhardy undertaking,” in his eyes—and to build a settlement on Île d’Orléans instead. But Maisonneuve stuck to his guns: he would build a settlement in Montreal, even if “all the trees on the island were to turn into just as many Iroquois.” The autonomy granted to the Montreal colony also irritated the governor. In other words, even before the city was founded, there were already signs of legendary rivalry between what would go on to become Montreal and Quebec City.

  In May 1642, accompanied by a small group from Quebec, including Governor Montmagny, Maisonneuve and his group set off up the river for Montreal. They arrived on May 17. The Jesuit Barthélemy Vimont said mass and gave a famous sermon in which he compared the new settlement to a mustard seed and predicted a bright future for it. Montreal had been founded.

  Maisonneuve chose to settle on the spot later known as Pointe-à-Callière, the same site pinpointed by Champlain in 1611. The first year was devoted to building a fort and living quarters. An additional 12 settlers, sent by the Société de Notre-Dame, arrived at the end of summer 1642, meaning that fifty-odd men and women—mostly men—would spend a first winter in Montreal.

  But Maisonneuve did not lose sight of his primary mission and tried to convince the Aboriginal people who passed through to come and make their home alongside the French. The project stood little chance against the harsh reality of war, however. The Iroquois had begun to control the fur routes along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers. They systematically attacked rival nations, annihilating many of them, as was the case with the Hurons in 1649.

  The founding of Montreal was a direct threat to the Iroquois. It took them a year to realize the new settlement existed, but once they did, they relentlessly spied on and harassed the Montréalistes, even managing to capture and kill a few of them. From that moment on, Ville-Marie was on the defensive; the dream of attracting Aboriginal peoples to the settlement evaporated since there was no way of guaranteeing their safety. The survival of the tiny colony was already hanging by a thread.

  Montreal’s history in the early years is therefore closely linked to its military heroics. The inhabitants survived by organizing their defences, keeping their wits about them whenever they dealt with the Iroquois, and making the most of lulls in the fighting. There were many tales of bravery among settlers convinced they were working for the glory of God (the religious ideals behind the settlement remained, even though the project of building a mission had stalled). And the charismatic Maison­neuve and Jeanne Mance helped keep the group together.

  The war forced the Montréalistes to live inside the fort as much as possible, which curbed the development of agriculture. A few pieces of land were given to the settlers and some was cleared, but not much. In 1645, a hospital was built during a truce with the Iroquois, the Hôtel-Dieu that had drawn Jeanne Mance to the project. The building was not erected at Pointe-à-Callière—too vulnerable to flooding—but on the other side of the Petite rivière Saint-Pierre, where the city would later develop. Some settlers also began building homes for themselves on that side of the river.

  Meanwhile, the population was stagnating. After initial efforts in 1641–1642, the Société de Notre-Dame sent few new settlers for the rest of the decade, and none at all in some years. Births were also scarce. New arrivals barely filled the void left by people leaving Montreal and those lost to war and other causes. Ten years after it was founded, Montreal still had no more than 50 people living there. Early results had not been encouraging, and in the early 1650s, the future appeared gloomy indeed for the handful of Montréalistes persisting with the project. A solution would have to be found.

  Taking root

  In 1651, Maisonneuve returned to France to recruit new settlers. He believed it was now or never for Montreal: if he failed to garner new recruits, the experiment would have to be brought to an end. Jeanne Mance suggested he use some of the funds earmarked for the Hôtel-Dieu, financial support that would prove decisive. But times were hard in France. The Montreal project was greeted less warmly than in 1641, although associates from the Société de Notre-Dame nevertheless managed to scrape together the money required to fund a new recruitment drive. In 1653, Maisonneuve at last returned with reinforcements: 95 new settlers, enough to triple the population of Ville-Marie in one swoop! The years that followed saw only a few immigrants arrive, but in 1659 one last push brought 91 more settlers. The colony could breathe again.

  The recent wave of immigration had brought with it couples and single young women, who were quickly asked for their hand in marriage. It was enough to counterbalance what had until then been a surfeit of men. The next natural step was, of course, a spurt of births that, for the first time ever, gave a real boost to Montreal’s population (estimated at 596 in 1663 by historian Marcel Trudel). From a tiny missionary settlement with an uncertain future, Montreal had blossomed into a permanent colony that was increasingly taking root.

  Maisonneuve’s presence as governor throughout these growing pains ensured some degree of continuity and stability. He administered the colony with a good dose of paternalism and managed to keep his little family together. Responsible for justice, he came down on misdemeanours, and as military commander, he surrounded himself with reliable officers like Lambert Closse. The other pillar of the colony was, of course, Jeanne Mance. She had also been there since the settlement’s beginnings and, along with Maisonneuve, worked with French associates and donors.

  The religious ideal remained a fundamental part of life in Ville-Marie. In the first few years of the settlement, Jesuit missionaries served the tiny colony, but as the population grew, there was a burgeoning need for a permanent parish clergy. In 1657, the first priests arrived from the Saint-Sulpice seminary in Paris and a parish was formed. From that moment, the Sulpicians went on to play an ever-growing role in the history of Montreal.

  Another key institution was the Hôtel-Dieu set up by Jeanne Mance. The hospital, built in 1645 and then expanded, was, along with the fort, the biggest building in town. The first Hospitallers of St. Joseph, a women’s religious order, arrived from La Flèche in France in 1659. They assisted Jeanne Mance and eventually took over from her.

  The recruitment drive of 1653 brought a young woman to Montreal, Marguerite Bourgeoys, who wanted to devote herself to educating children. She opened her first school in an old barn in 1658. The following year, she brought over a handful of companions from France who would go on to form the Congregation of Notre Dame with her.

  Montreal now had a network of schools and hospitals adapted to the needs of its population. The directors of the Société de Notre-Dame gave these institutions land in prime locations. Revenue generated by the land would be used to fund their work.

  At the same time, the town itself was taking shape. In addition to the huge plots of land set aside for religious institutions, Maisonneuve also gave away more modest sites. A first line of homes po
pped up along Saint-Paul street; a strip along the shores of the St. Lawrence was set aside as common grounds, known as the Commune, where the habitants could let their animals graze.

  One of the objectives of the Société de Notre-Dame was to set up an agricultural settlement. The first years did not make any progress on this front, but in the 1650s rural land extended further around the town as the population grew. From 1648, a first seigneurial mill meant wheat could be ground into flour, which became the main product of local agriculture.

  Since the island of Montreal was a seigneury, Maisonneuve gave parcels of land to settlers prepared to clear them. In 1654 and 1655, he even gave them cash bonuses to take the land (although the bonuses had to be reimbursed, if ever the settlers left Montreal). This system was an effective way of keeping people in the country once their contracts with the Société de Notre-Dame had ended and who might otherwise have been tempted to return to France. Land given out in this way was right on the periphery of the area reserved for the town, but lots were smaller than those around Quebec to keep the habitants closer together and better protected in the event of an attack. As elsewhere in the St. Lawrence Valley, land was divided into long rectangular strips fronting on the St. Lawrence, Rivière Saint-Martin, and Petite rivière Saint-Pierre.

  So what about the fur trade, the leading economic activity in Canada at the time? The Société de Notre-Dame had no direct role in the fur trade, but the habitants were interested in it. From 1645, when the Communauté des Habitants, which had a monopoly on trade in New France, was formed, Montréalistes had a voice within the organization. But their involvement in trade was limited since their Aboriginal allies were reluctant to bring their furs to Montreal because of the Iroquois, often preferring long portages inland to trade at Quebec or Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay instead. The Iroquois eliminated or dispersed many tribes allied with the French, further complicating matters. Deliveries were possible during outbreaks of peace, however, which also provided an opportunity for the habitants to trade with the Aboriginals. Montreal’s involvement in the fur trade really began in the 1650s, with a few merchants like Charles Le Moyne and Jacques Le Ber becoming rising stars.