Page 8 - Fur Trade program Curriculum

of the Huron-Iroquoian family were sedentary and lived southwest and west of the
current territory of Québec.

Comprised of five nations, the Iroquois lived in the region that is today the northern part
of the State of New York. There were four Huron nations living on a territory located
east of the great lake that was named after them. The Neutrals lived around Lake Erie
and the Petum, on the Bruce Peninsula.

When Samuel de Champlain founded Québec in 1608, the Iroquois were already at war
with the Algonquian nations. After 1640, they intensified their attacks against the
Hurons, who had become the main suppliers of furs to the French by then. In the
middle of the XVIIth century, Huronia was practically annihilated.

Early in 1653, Native conflicts paralyzed the trade. According to Jesuit missionary
François-Joseph Le Mercier, New France was on the verge of bankruptcy:

"At no time in the past were the beavers more plentiful in our lakes and rivers and more scarce
in the country's stores [...] The war against the Iroquois has exhausted all the sources [...] the
Huron flotillas have ceased to come for the trade; the Algonquins are depopulated and the
remote Nations have withdrawn even further in fear of the Iroquois. The Montréal store has
not purchased a single beaver from the Natives in the past year. At Trois-Rivières, the few
Natives that came were employed to defend the place where the enemy is expected. The
store in Québec is the image of poverty".

The Iroquois, who had been attacking isolated colonists for a number of years, were
threatening the very existence of the colony. Montréal was especially vulnerable; being
located so close to Iroquois territory. Its population amounted to about sixty people at
the time, only a third of who were capable of bearing arms.

However, hope was revived when the Iroquois proposed to make peace with the French
and when it was learned that the Ottawa, a Nation occupying a territory beyond
Huronia, was coming to trade in the Saint Lawrence Lowlands.

In November 1653, nearly 140 individuals arrived in Montréal to settle there. This
sudden increase in population plunged Ville-Marie in a great state of euphoria.

Before 1652, the fur trade was the exclusive monopoly of the various merchant
companies operating successively in New France. Only the clerks employed by these
companies were authorized to trade. The inhabitants of the colony could procure
themselves furs, but only in exchange for the product of their harvests or trade. The
bartering of trading goods was strictly forbidden to them.

Joined to the liberalization of the laws regulating trading activities by the inhabitants in
1652, the events of 1653 contributed to the emergence of the coureurs des bois and
extended their field of action considerably, because trading ceased to be confined to the
major establishments in Québec, Trois-Rivières and Montréal.