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4. The Rise of Montreal
From Canadian History Portal - HCO
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Rise of Montreal & Growth of Quebec
The end of the American Revolutionary War and the coming of the Loyalists led to a number of new developments and firsts in the province of Quebec, and particularly, its growing metropolis, Montreal. The business climate was revitalized by peace and stability, and by Montreal's continuing role in the western fur trade, and as an entrepot for Great Lakes trade. Canada saw its first stirrings of democracy and liberalism. And the French of Canada, who had helped turn back the US invaders in 1775-76, began to demand their rights as British subjects.
The level of literacy grew. In 1777, the first entirely French newspaper in Canada appeared in Montreal, 'La Gazette de commerce et litteraire', edited by Fleury Mesplet. The paper survived for only one year, when it was succeeded by a bilingual news sheet, the Literary Gazette (Gazette Littéraire), which eventually became the Montreal Gazette. In 1778, the first public library in Canada was founded at Quebec with 1, 815 volumes, and the larger towns and cities began to sprout book stores and newspapers. The Catholic Church was not entirely pleased - in 1792, Mgr. Hubert complained of undesirable books - 'des mauvais livres' - circulating in Quebec. In 1792, Canada's first magazine, The Quebec Magazine, appeared in Montreal.
New Industries
Land settlement in the province also stimulated business, and brought immigrants from Britain and the US. In 1800, David Moe founded the town of Sherbrooke, Quebec, to take advantage of the abundant water power, as did an American lumber dealer, Philemon Wright, who founded Wrightstown, today part of the city of Gatineau, which he later renamed Hull, after the birthplace of his parents in England.
On May 16, 1806, Wright started the first raft of pine and oak staves down the Ottawa River; it reached Quebec two months later and was broken up and loaded into ships bound for England. This opened up a whole new timber trade in the Ottawa Valley, with huge rafts of squared white pine being floated down to Quebec. steered by the woodsmen themselves, who lived on board.
Another business that would lead to future prosperity started up in 1805 at St. Andrew's, Quebec; the first paper mill in Canada made paper made by hand using rags and pulp, but it was a beginning of a huge industry in Quebec.
John Molson Launches the Accomodation Better transportation stimulated industry. On August 19, 1809, Montréal brewer/banker John Molson launched his wooden paddle steamboat 'Accomodation', the first successful steamboat built entirely in North America, and the first steamship to ride on the waters of the St. Lawrence River.  Accomodation carried 10 passengers in comfort down the St. Lawrence to Quebec and back, normally a seven day round trip, in less than three days. North America's first regular steamship service charged $8 for the 36 hour trip from Montreal to Quebec. Molson's St. Lawrence Steamboat Company lost money on the Accomodation. They dismantled the vessel, purchased two steamship engines from England, combined the two engines and the remains of the 'Accommodation' to create a much grander ship, the 'Swiftsure', the largest steamboat in the world, which travelled the same route in 24 hours. During the war of 1812, Molson and two of his sons, enlisted in the force and dedicated his steamships to the service of the Crown. The Swiftsure was the first steamship to be used in war. Molson's steamboats let shippers bring goods between Montreal and Quebec City on schedule and in relatively short time, despite the St. Lawrence’s harsh currents. By 1833, Molson's St. Lawrence Steamboat Company had expanded to the Ottawa River and Rideau Canal. |
William Twiss Builds North America's First Lock Canal Coteau du Lac Canal - c1800 Soldiers of the King's Royal Regiment of New York, a colonial unit made up of Loyalists, dug the canal between Lacs Saint-François & Saint-Louis, through solid rock using rudimentary tools and techniques. It was more than 100 m long and 2.5 m wide. Each of the three locks was 12 m long and 1.8 m wide, with draft measuring close to 80 cm. The locks compensated for a drop of about 2 m between the head and the bottom of the rapids. The Coteau-du-Lac canal went into operation right away, charging a toll on boat traffic. Over the next two years, three further canals were built upstream at Faucille, Trou-du-Moulin and Rocher-Fendu. |
Religion & Society
In religion, the Catholic bishops were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown in 1797. Jean-Joseph Casot, the last Jesuit survivor of the French regime, died at Quebec on March 16, 1800, and the property of the order in Canada appropriated to the Crown. The first Anglican Bishoprics for Upper and Lower Canada were established in 1793, with Jacob Mountain appointed Quebec's first Anglican Bishop. The first Jewish rabbi in Canada, Jacob Raphael Cohen, also settled in Montreal in those years, and opened the first synagogue. Also in that year, the first Baptist Association in Canada was founded in Granville, Lower Canada, and 1808 saw the opening of the first Methodist church in Montreal.
The people of Montreal and Quebec began to enjoy more leisure pursuits in these years. In 1798, Rickett's of London gave a first performance in Quebec City; it was the first circus to tour Canada. The plays of Beaumarchais, Molière and Racine were winter favourites of the French in both cities. And on November 19, 1804, Mr. Ormsby, a Scottish actor, opened Canada's first English language theatre in Montreal, with two plays, The Busy Body and Sultan.
January 22, 1807, saw the opening of the Montreal Curling Club, Canada's first, by Scottish soldier attached to the British Army.
Poverty and suffering remained problems, particularly in the towns and cities of Lower Canada. In 1809, a judge sentenced two Montreal women to 25 lashes for disorderly conduct. In 1810, Antoine Romaine was put in a pillory for running a bawdy house - over 600 prostitutes were counted in Lower Canada. Theft was not tolerated. In 1811, a man called Mathieu received 39 lashes of a whip in the Quebec jail for stealing. The streets were dangerous after dark, but in 1815, the nights became safer, as Montreal installed Canada's first street lamps, fueled by whale oil.
Quebec's First Assembly
With the old Province of Quebec now split into Upper and Lower Canada, on December 17, 1792, the first Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada met in the Bishop's Palace in Quebec City, at the top of Côte de la Montagne. Jean-Antoine Panet was elected first President (Speaker) by a vote of 28-18; Panet favoured the use of the French language.
One of the first issues the Assembly dealt with was slavery. In 1793, a British decree abolished slavery in Canada, and the Assembly voted to prohibit the importation of slaves into Lower Canada; a bill to abolish slavery failed until 1804. On August 23, 1797, a black named Emanuel Allen was sold at public auction in Montreal; this was the last slave transaction in Canada. In 1807, the British Parliament abolished the slave trade entirely in the Empire.
In 1795, the Assembly legalized marriages made by churches other than Roman Catholic or Anglican. In 1799, as the Napoleonic Wars began in Europe, the Assembly voted to give 20,000 pounds sterling to Britain to help her fight France. The Assembly also renewed the Alien Act, due to war between Britain and France.
On March 25, 1805, the Assembly passed an act to preserve apple trees; this was the first Canadian legislation for the control of farm pests. The Assembly also banned Sunday shopping and assessed a tax to pay for jails.
The Assembly also had to deal with the prejudice of the authorities in opposition to the will of the electors. On January 21, 1807, merchant Ezekiel Hart was elected to the Lower Canada Assembly for Trois-Rivières, becoming the first Jew elected to a Canadian legislature. But Hart was barred from sitting because of his religion; re-elected in 1808, he was expelled from the House of Assembly for invalidating his oath by substituting the word 'Jewish' for 'Christian '.
There were some liberal features of the electoral system at that time. Women with property were allowed to vote under the meaning of the word 'persons' in the Constitutional Act; this state of affairs lasted until 1834.
The Stirrings of Democracy
Quebec's first nationalist newspaper 'Le Canadien' began publication on November 22, 1806, under the direction of Pierre Bédard and the Parti canadien. Their aim was to counter the attacks of the English Quebec Mercury and agitate for greater power and control of political patronage by French Canadians.
Their political movement was aided somewhat by the approach of another war with the United States, and Britain's need to retain the loyalty of the French Canadians. Bédard had been jailed by the government, but on November 24, 1807, newly arrived Governor James Craig granted a royal pardon to Bédard and his fellow rebels, and they were allowed to take their seats in the Lower Canada Assembly.
On January 1, 1807, Britain ordered British North America and the thirteen colonies to blockade all neutral commerce with Europe, to retaliate against Napoleon. Quebec militia captains enrolled 1,200 militiamen in Lower Canada to meet the growing American threats, which included the Embargo Act, which banned all US trade with foreign ports, to retaliate against Napoleon's Decrees and the British blockade.
In 1809, the Americans passed the Non-Intercourse Act, which opened trade with all nations except Britain and France; the act caused commercial depression in Canada. The Governor of Lower Canada also tightened up freedom of speech as the war approached. On March 17, 1810, the newspaper 'Le Canadien' was suppressed by a magistrate and two constables. The claim by the politicians that it was an arbitrary proceeding was met with deaf ears.
The Norwesters
These traders, some of them allied with American Fur Company head John Jacob Astor, came to be know as the Norwesters, after their chief organization, the North West Company. Every year they would assemble capital and trade goods for that year's "outfit," and take their profits in the fall or a year later when the canoes laden with furs reached Montreal from the west.
Another Norwester was Simon McTavish, who in 1775 backed American trader Peter Pond in an outfit across the Mississippi river and up the Missouri. In 1776, the Montrealers joined forces and struck deep into the HBC territory when Thomas Frobisher built a trading post at Ile a La Crosse on the Churchill (Misnipi) River.
In 1778, McTavish sent Peter Pond north-west from Cumberland House on an exploratory trip; in August, he crossed the 19 km Methye Portage separating Hudson Bay and Arctic watersheds, and was the first white man to enter North America's richest fur trapping area, the Athabasca region. In September, he built the 'Old Establishment' post 48 km south of Lake Athabasca.
On May 24, 1779, in Montreal, fur trade partners Benjamin and Joseph Frobisher, John Ross and Peter Pond met with Montreal merchants Isaac Todd, James McGill, Simon McTavish, James McBeath and Lawrence Ermatinger and founded the North West Company as a formal body, whose goal was to spread their risk and break the Hudson's Bay Company monopoly over the fur trade in the west. The NWCo issued 16 shares held by the 9 different partnerships.
On December 13, 1786, they were joined by Montreal merchants Gregory & McLeod, who merged with the North West Company on 20-share basis.
As the business of the partners increased, they began to ship more and more furs west, and worked on a larger scale shipping route that involved freight boats that navigated the St. Lawrence canals to the upper lakes. In 1787, they paid the Royal Engineers £12,000 for a portage road north from Toronto; called Yonge Street, the road ran 33 miles north to the Holland River & Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. Ten years later, on Nov. 28, 1797, the North West Company started to build the Sault Ste. Marie Canal. Completed in 1801, the Sault canal was destroyed by American raiders at the outbreak of war in 1812.
Alexander Mackenzie's Voyages
The Norwesters wanted to keep exploring north and west into areas not under the ownership of the HBC, and to find regions that they could dominate by right of discovery. In 1788, they sent Roderick Mackenzie to build Fort Chipewyan on Lake Athabasca. They also ordered young trader Alexander Mackenzie to try and find a way to ship furs to and from the Pacific coast.
On June 3, 1789, Mackenzie and a party of French-Canadian voyageurs set out from Fort Chipewyan down the Slave River. The Yellowknife Indians told him of a giant river flowing northwest from Great Slave Lake, and he wanted to establish whether it flowed west to the Pacific Ocean or north to the Arctic.
The party found Great Slave Lake still frozen, but by the end of June they were able to continue their voyage down the Mackenzie River, Canada's longest, reaching the flats and marshes of the Arctic Delta on July 10, and struggling to within a short distance of Arctic Ocean before turning back before freeze-up. On September 12, Mackenzie arrived back at Fort Chipewyan.
Four years later, on May 9, 1793, Mackenzie tried again. This time he and a party of nine voyageurs set out from Fort York at the forks of the Peace and Smoky rivers, and headed west towards the Pacific. On May 17, they sighted the Rockies, and on June 12, on foot, they reached the Continental Divide at Portage Lake; his party were the first Europeans to cross the Divide north of Spanish territory.
At the Bella Coola River, they traded goods for canoes and paddled to the sea. On July 22, the party reached the Pacific Ocean at Dean Channel. Mackenzie mixed some vermilion in melted grease and inscribed and painted on a large rock: "Alex Mackenzie from Canada by land 22d July 1793."
Hostile natives made them beat a hasty retreat upriver. Back in Montreal, the North West Company could see no practical use for Mackenzie's route, but in 1801, after he published Voyages from Montreal through the Continent of North America to the Frozen and Pacific Oceans, Alexander Mackenzie was knighted for his exploits, and for being first to cross the North American continent by land.
The Challenges of American Competition
The business of the Norwesters was damaged in 1794, when American Chief Justice John Jay and British foreign secretary Lord Grenville signed the Jay Treaty 'to promote friendship and good neighbourhood' between the US and British North America. While it resolved some of the issues left over from the Revolutionary War, it also let New York fur trader John Jacob Astor export furs to England, and the British also agreed to pull out of the US Northwest Territory and evacuate Ohio Valley forts.
The NWCo also attracted competition in 1798, with the founding of the XY Co (New North West Co) led by Forsythe, Richardson & Co; Leith, Jamison & Co; and trader-explorer Alexander Mackenzie.
The Montrealers were dealt another blow in 1803, when Napoleon Bonaparte sold the Louisiana territory to the US for $27 million; the land between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains, first claimed by explorers from New France, was no longer in the orbit on Montreal. On Nov. 4, 1804, the partners of the XY Company met with their fellow Norwesters and agreed to merge with North West Company on a 100-share basis.
Thompson & Fraser Go West
While Mackenzie explored the north and west, the Norwesters also sent the talented young trader and mapmaker David Thompson to survey the more southerly routes to the west and the Pacific. In 1790, while working for the HBC, he had surveyed the Saskatchewan River from Cumberland House. By 1794, Norwesters Angus Shaw & Duncan McGillivray had built Fort Augustus on North Saskatchewan River; three years later with Thompson in their employ, they sent Thompson up the North Saskatchewan and Bow River with Duncan McGillivray past the site of Calgary. While surveying both these rivers, Thompson visited the Piegan (Blackfoot) Indians.
You can read accounts of this trip in Thompson's Narrative of his Explorations in Western America 1784-1812.
In June, 1801, Thompson left Rocky Mountain House to travel overland to the Rocky Mountains; the following year he explored west from mouth of Lesser Slave River and Lesser Slave Lake toward the forks of the Peace River. In 1804, he descended the Peace River to Lake Athabasca, reached the mouth of Clearwater River; then headed for Cumberland House, and back to Montreal to report on his findings.
One of the first thrusts of 1805 outfit was to put trader Simon Fraser in charge of North West Company' s operations beyond the Rocky Mountains, with a mandate to open new trading posts and develop transport routes from the new trapping area they called New Caledonia [the old Roman word for Scotland]. In August of 1806, Fraser sent the very first shipment of furs from west of the Rockies to Dunvegan, Alberta. The following year, Fraser left Fort George with Jules Quesnel to travel in wooden dugout canoes down the river that would one day bear his name. On July 2, 1808, they reached the Pacific at Musqueam near New Westminster, thinking they had traveled down the Columbia River.
That honour belonged to David Thompson. In 1807, back in the west and travelling with his wife and family, Thompson had reached Howse Pass and found a small branch of the Columbia called the Blaeberry River; he named the upper waters of the Columbia the Kootenay River. On September 8, 1810, he departed down the Kootenay to explore the Columbia River valley. Prevented by hostile and dangerous Piegan from using Howse Pass, Thompson's party travelled north to the head of the Athabasca River and across the mountains to the Columbia. That winter, on foot, he ascended the Columbia River to its source, then in the spring descended it to the junction of the Snake River and Columbia, where he raised the flag and claimed the territory for Britain. The territory would stay British until the Oregon Treaty of 1846 ceded it to the United States.
Astor and the Americans
In that same year, on Dec 12, 1813, the pioneering North West Company partner James McGill died in Montreal. The merchant, born at Glasgow, Scotland Oct. 06, 1744, had sold out his NWCo share and become a property developer, acquiring a number of lots and the forty-six acre Burnside Estate at the foot of Mount Royal. His bequest of this land and the sum of £10,000 led to the founding of McGill University.
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