This Indian trade, despite the large and valuable cargoes of beaver pelts which it enabled New France to send home, was a curse to the colony.  It drew from husbandry the best blood of the land, the young men of strength, initiative, and perseverance.  It wrecked the health and character of thousands.  It drew the Church and the civil government into profitless quarrels.  The bishop flayed the governor for letting this trade go on.  The governor could not, dared not, and sometimes did not want to stop it.  At any rate it was a great obstacle to agricultural progress.  With it and other distractions in existence the clearing of the seigneuries proceeded very slowly.  At the close of French dominion in 1760 the amount of cultivated land was only about three hundred thousand arpents, or about five acres for every head of population—­not a very satisfactory showing for a century of Bourbon imperialism in the St Lawrence valley.

Yet the colony, when the English conquerors came upon it in 1759, was far from being on its last legs.  It had overcome the worst of its obstacles and had created a foundation upon which solid building might be done.  Its people had reached the stage of rude but tolerable comfort.  Its highways of trade and intercourse had been freed from the danger of Indian raids.  It had some small industries and was able to raise almost the whole of its own food-supply.  The traveller who passed along the great river from Quebec to Montreal in the early autumn might see, as Peter Kalm in his Travels tells us he saw, field upon field of waving grain extending from the shores inward as far as the eye could reach, broken only here and there by tracts of meadow and woodland.  The outposts of an empire at least had been established.

CHAPTER II

GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS

A good many people, as Robert Louis Stevenson once assured us, have a taste for ‘heroic forms of excitement.’  And it is well for the element of interest in history that this has been so at all ages and among all races of men.  The most picturesque and fascinating figures in the recorded annals of nations have been the pioneers,—­the men who have not been content to do what other men of their day were doing.  Without them and their achievements history might still be read for information, but not for pleasure; it might still instruct, but it would hardly inspire.

In the narratives of colonization there is ample evidence that Frenchmen of the seventeenth century were not lacking in their thirst for excitement, whether heroic or otherwise.  Their race furnished the New World with explorers and forest merchants by the hundred.  The most venturesome voyageurs, the most intrepid traders, and the most untiring missionaries were Frenchmen.  No European stock showed such versatility in its relations with the aborigines; none proved so ready to bear all manner of hardship and discomfort for the sake