When the Carignans stepped ashore at Quebec in 1665 one of their officers was Olivier Morel de la Durantaye, a captain in the regiment of Campelle, but attached to the Carignan-Salieres for its Canadian expedition.  In the first expedition against the Mohawks he commanded the advance guard, and he was one of the small band who spent the terrible winter of 1666-67 at Fort Ste Anne near the head of Lake Champlain, subsisting on salt pork and a scant supply of mouldy flour.  Several casks of reputedly good brandy, as Dollier de Casson records, had been sent to the fort, but to the chagrin of the diminutive garrison they turned out to contain salt water, the sailors having drunk the contents and refilled the casks on their way out from France.  Warlike operations continued to engross Durantaye’s attentions for a year or two longer, but when this work was finished he returned with some of his brother officers to France, while others remained in the colony, having taken up lands in accordance with Talon’s plans.  In 1670, however, he was back at Quebec again, and having married a daughter of the colony, applied at once for the grant of a seigneury.  This was given to him in the form of a large tract, two leagues square, on the south shore of the lower St Lawrence, between the seigneury of Beaumont des Islets and the Bellechasse channel.  To this fief of La Durantaye adjoining lands were subsequently added by new grants, and in 1674 the seigneur also obtained the fief of Kamouraska.  His entire estate comprised about seventy thousand arpents, making him one of the largest landowners in the colony.

Durantaye began his work in a leisurely way, and the census of 1681 gives us the outcome of his ten years of effort.  He himself had not taken up his abode on the land nor, so far as can be ascertained, had he spent any time or money in clearing its acreage.  With his wife and four children he resided at Quebec, but from time to time he made visits to his holding and brought new settlers with him.  Twelve families had built their homes within the spacious borders of his seigneury.  Their whitewashed cottages were strung along a short stretch of the river bank side by side, separated by a few arpents.  Men, women, and children, the population of La Durantaye numbered only fifty-eight; sixty-four arpents had been cleared; and twenty-eight horned cattle were reported among the possessions of the habitants.  Rather significantly this colonial Domesday of 1681 mentions that the sixteen able-bodied men of the seigneury possessed ‘seven muskets’ among them.  From its situation, however, the settlement was not badly exposed to Indian assault.

In the way of cleared lands and population the fief of La Durantaye had made very modest progress.  Its nearest neighbour, Bellechasse, contained two hundred and twenty-seven persons, living upon three hundred and twenty arpents of cultivable land.  With an arsenal of sixty-two muskets it was better equipped for self-defence.  The census everywhere took more careful count of muskets than of ploughs; and this is not surprising, for it was the design of the authorities to build up a ’powerful military colony’ which would stand on its own feet without support from home.  They did not seem to realize that in the long run even military prowess must rest with that land which most assiduously devotes itself to the arts of peace.