Chapter 9

History: From First Peoples to Responsible Government

Aboriginal peoples, the first Europeans, New France, the struggle for a continent, the Loyalists and the War of 1812.

Before the Europeans came

When Europeans explored Canada they found every region occupied by native peoples they called Indians, because the first explorers thought they had reached the East Indies.
Ways of life differed: the Huron-Wendat and the Iroquois were farmers and hunters, the Cree and Dene of the Northwest were hunter-gatherers, the Sioux were nomadic and followed the bison herd, the Inuit lived off Arctic wildlife, and West Coast peoples preserved fish by drying and smoking.
Large numbers of Aboriginal people died of European diseases to which they lacked immunity. Even so, in the first 200 years of coexistence Aboriginal peoples and Europeans formed strong economic, religious and military bonds that laid the foundations of Canada.

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The Vikings from Iceland, who colonized Greenland 1,000 years ago, also reached Labrador and Newfoundland. The remains of their settlement at l’Anse aux Meadows are a World Heritage site.
European exploration began in earnest in 1497 with John Cabot, an Italian immigrant to England, who was the first to draw a map of Canada’s East Coast and claimed the New Founde Land for England.
Jacques Cartier crossed the Atlantic three times between 1534 and 1542 and claimed the land for King Francis I of France. No European before him had explored the St. Lawrence River.
Cartier heard two captured guides speak the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning “village”. By the 1550s the name Canada began appearing on maps.

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In 1604 the first European settlement north of Florida was established by the French explorers Pierre de Monts and Samuel de Champlain, first on St. Croix Island and then at Port-Royal in Acadia.
Champlain’s fortress of 1608 stood where Québec City is today.
The colony’s allies under Champlain were the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Huron. Peace between the French and the Iroquois came in 1701.
Europe’s appetite for beaver pelts drove a vast fur trade in which the French and Aboriginal people worked together.

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King Charles II of England gave the Hudson’s Bay Company, in 1670, the sole right to trade across the whole watershed that drains into Hudson Bay. Traders based in Montreal were its rivals for the next 100 years.
The skilled and courageous men who travelled by canoe were called voyageurs and coureurs des bois, and formed strong alliances with First Nations.
In 1759 the British defeated the French in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham at Québec City, marking the end of France’s empire in America. The commanders of both armies, Brigadier James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, were killed.
The Quebec Act of 1774 was the British Parliament’s answer to governing a French Roman Catholic majority. It gave Catholics religious freedom and the right to hold public office, something Britain itself did not yet allow, and brought back French civil law while keeping British criminal law.

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When the 13 British colonies south of Quebec declared independence in 1776 and became the United States, more than 40,000 people who stayed loyal to the Crown, the Loyalists, fled north to Nova Scotia and Quebec.
Joseph Brant led thousands of Loyalist Mohawk into Canada. About 3,000 black Loyalists, both freedmen and slaves, came north seeking a better life.
Democratic institutions developed gradually and peacefully. The first representative assembly was elected in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1758, followed by Prince Edward Island in 1773 and New Brunswick in 1785.
The Constitutional Act of 1791 divided the Province of Quebec into Upper Canada (later Ontario) and Lower Canada (later Quebec), and granted the Canadas legislative assemblies elected by the people for the first time. The name Canada became official at this time.

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In 1793 Upper Canada, led by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, became the first province in the British Empire to move toward abolition.
The British Parliament outlawed the buying and selling of slaves in 1807 and, in 1833, ended slavery everywhere in the Empire.
Following “the North Star”, thousands of people escaped slavery in the United States and reached Canada through the Underground Railroad, a network of Christian opponents of slavery.

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The United States invaded in June 1812, expecting Canada to fall easily. British soldiers defended it with the help of Canadian volunteers and First Nations, among them the Shawnee under Chief Tecumseh.
Major-General Sir Isaac Brock captured Detroit but was killed defending against an American attack at Queenston Heights, a battle the Americans lost.
At Châteauguay in 1813, 4,000 American invaders were turned back by Lieutenant-Colonel Charles de Salaberry and a force of 460, most of them French Canadiens.
In 1813 Laura Secord made a dangerous 19 mile (30 km) journey on foot to warn Lieutenant James FitzGibbon of a planned American attack; her bravery contributed to victory at the Battle of Beaver Dams.
York, today’s Toronto, lost Government House and the Parliament Buildings to American fire in 1813. The following year, 1814, Major-General Robert Ross set out from Nova Scotia and burned the White House and other public buildings in Washington, D.C. in return.
The American bid to conquer Canada had collapsed by 1814. The War of 1812 kept Canada separate from the United States, and today’s border between the two countries is partly its result.
The Duke of Wellington chose Bytown (Ottawa) as the endpoint of the Rideau Canal, part of a network of forts to prevent the U.S.A. from invading Canada again. He therefore played a direct role in founding the national capital.

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When armed rebellions occurred in 1837–38 outside Montreal and in Toronto, the rebels lacked public support and were defeated. Lord Durham, sent to report on them, recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be merged and given responsible government.
Responsible government means the ministers of the Crown must have the support of a majority of the elected representatives in order to govern — the system we have today, in which a government that loses a confidence vote must resign.
Upper and Lower Canada became a single Province of Canada in 1840. Full responsible government arrived first in Nova Scotia, in 1847–48, and Lord Elgin brought it to United Canada in 1848–49.
Sir Louis-Hippolyte La Fontaine, a champion of democracy and French language rights, became the first leader of a responsible government in the Canadas, in 1849.

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