Outlaws of French Canada

Montreal, a frontier town at the head of the colony, was the natural resort of desperadoes, contrasting with the priests.

Our special project presenting the definitive account of France in Canada by Francis Parkman, one of America’s greatest historians.

Previously in The Old Regime In Canada. Continuing chapter 20.

The commandant next turned his quarters into a dram-shop for Indians, to whom he sold brandy in large quantities, but so diluted that his customers, finding themselves partially defrauded of their right of intoxication, complained grievously. About this time the intendant Talon made one of his domiciliary visits to Montreal, and when, in his character of father of the people, he inquired if they had any complaints to make, every tongue was loud in accusation against La Fredière. Talon caused full depositions to be made out from the statements of Demers and other witnesses. Copies were deposited in the hands of the notary, and it is from these that the above story is drawn. The tyrant was removed, and ordered home to France.

[Information contre La Fredière. See Faillon, Colonie Française, III. 886. The dialogue, as here given from the depositions, is translated as closely as possible.See Faillon, Colonie Française, III.]

Many other officers embarked in the profitable trade of selling brandy to Indians, and several garrison posts became centers of disorder. Others, of the regiment became notorious brawlers. A lieutenant of the garrison of Montreal named Carion, and an ensign named Morel, had for some reason conceived a violent grudge against another ensign named Lormeau. On Pentecost day, just after vespers, Lormeau was walking by the river with his wife. They had passed the common and the seminary wall, and were in front of the house of the younger Charles Le Moyne, when they saw Carion coming towards them. He stopped before Lormeau, looked him full in the face, and exclaimed, “Coward.” “Coward yourself,” returned Lormeau; “take yourself off.” Carion drew his sword, and Lormeau followed his example. They exchanged a few passes; then closed, and fell to the ground grappled together. Lormeau’s wig fell off; and Carion, getting the uppermost, hammered his bare head with the hilt of his sword. Lormeau’s wife, in a frenzy of terror, screamed murder. One of the neighbors, Monsieur Belêtre, was at table with Charles Le Moyne and a Rochelle merchant named Baston. He ran out with his two guests, and they tried to separate the combatants, who still lay on the ground foaming like a pair of enraged bull-dogs. All their efforts were useless. “Very well,” said Le Moyne in disgust, “if you won’t let go, then kill each other if you like.” A former military servant of Carion now ran up, and began to brandish his sword in behalf of his late master. Carion’s comrade, Morel, also arrived, and, regardless of the angry protest of Le Moyne, stabbed repeatedly at Lormeau as he lay. Lormeau had received two or three wounds in the hand and arm with which he parried the thrusts, and was besides severely mauled by the sword-hilt of Carion, when two Sulpitian priests, drawn by the noise, appeared on the scene. One was Fremont, the curé; the other was Dollier de Casson. That herculean father, whose past soldier life had made him at home in a fray, and who cared nothing for drawn swords, set himself at once to restore peace, upon which, whether from the strength of his arm, or the mere effect of his presence, the two champions released their gripe on each other’s throats, rose, sheathed their weapons, and left the field.

[Requête de Lormeau a M. d’Aillebout. Dépositions de MM. de Longueuïl (Le Moyne), de Baston, de Belêtre, et autres. Cited by Faillon, Colonie Française, III. 393.]

Montreal, a frontier town at the head of the colony, was the natural resort of desperadoes, offering, as we have seen, a singular contrast between the rigor of its clerical seigniors and the riotous license of the lawless crew which infested it. Dollier de Casson tells the story of an outlaw who broke prison ten or twelve times, and whom no walls, locks, or fetters could hold. “A few months ago,” he says, “he was caught again, and put into the keeping of six or seven men, each with a good gun. They stacked their arms to play a game of cards, which their prisoner saw fit to interrupt to play a game of his own. He made a jump at the guns, took them under his arm like so many feathers, aimed at these fellows with one of them, swearing that he would kill the first who came near him, and so, falling back step by step, at last bade them good-by, and carried off all their guns. Since then he has not been caught, and is roaming the woods. Very likely he will become chief of our banditti, and make great trouble in the country when it pleases him to come back from the Dutch settlements, whither they say he is gone along with another rascal, and a French woman so depraved that she is said to have given or sold two of her children to the Indians.”

[Dollier de Casson, Histoire de Montréal, 1671, 72]

When the governor, La Barre, visited Montreal, he found there some two hundred reprobates gambling, drinking, and stealing. If hard pressed by justice, they had only to cross the river and place themselves beyond the seigniorial jurisdiction. The military settlements of the Richelieu were in a condition somewhat similar, and La Barre complains of a prevailing spirit of disobedience and lawlessness. [1] The most orderly and thrifty part of Canada appears to have been at this time the cote of Beaupré, belonging to the seminary of Quebec. Here the settlers had religious instruction from their curés, and industrial instruction also if they wanted it. Domestic spinning and weaving were practiced at Beaupré sooner than in any other part of the colony.

[1: La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683.]

When it is remembered that a population which in La Barre’s time did not exceed ten thousand, and which forty years later did not much exceed twice that number, was scattered along both sides of a great river for three hundred miles or more; that a large part of this population was in isolated groups of two, three, five, ten, or twenty houses at the edge of a savage wilderness; that between them there was little communication except by canoes; that the settlers were disbanded soldiers, or others whose fives had been equally adverse to habits of reflection or self-control; that they rarely saw a priest, and that a government omnipotent in name had not arms long enough to reach them, — we may listen without surprise to the lamentations of order-loving officials over the unruly condition of a great part of the colony. One accuses the seigniors, who, he says, being often of low extraction, cannot keep their vassals in order. [2] Another dwells sorrowfully on the “terrible dispersion” of the settlements where the inhabitants “live in a savage independence.” But it is better that each should speak for himself, and among the rest let us hear the pious Denonville.

[2: Catalogne, Mémoire addressé au Ministre, 1712]

“This, monseigneur, seems to me the place for rendering you an account of the disorders which prevail not only in the woods, but also in the settlements. They arise from the idleness of young persons, and the great liberty which fathers, mothers, and guardians have for a long time given them, or allowed them to assume, of going into the forest under pretense of hunting or trading. This has come to such a pass, that, from the moment a boy can carry a gun, the father cannot restrain him and dares not offend him. You can judge the mischief that follows. These disorders are always greatest in the families of those who are gentilshommes, or who through laziness or vanity pass themselves off as such. Having no resource but hunting, they must spend their lives in the woods, where they have no curés to trouble them, and no fathers or guardians to constrain them. I think, monseigneur, that martial law would suit their case better than any judicial sentence.

“Monsieur de la Barre suppressed a certain order of knighthood which had sprung up here, but he did not abolish the usages belonging to it. It was thought a fine thing and a good joke to go about naked and tricked out like Indians, not only on carnival days, but on all other days of feasting and debauchery. These practices tend to encourage the disposition of our young men to live like savages, frequent their company, and be forever unruly and lawless like them. I; cannot tell you, monseigneur, how attractive this Indian life is to all our youth. It consists in doing nothing, caring for nothing, following every inclination, and getting out of the way of all correction.” He goes on to say that the mission villages governed by the Jesuits and Sulpitians are models of good order, and that drunkards are never seen there except when they come from the neighboring French settlements; but that the other Indians who roam at large about the colony, do prodigious mischief, because the children of the seigniors not only copy their way of life, but also run off with their women into the woods.

[Raudot, who was intendant early in the eighteenth century, is a little less gloomy in his coloring, but says that Canadian children were without discipline or education, had no respect for parents or cure’s, and owned no superiors. This, he thinks, is owing to “la folle tendresse des parents qui les empêche de les corriger et de leur former le caractère qu’ils ont dur et féroce.”]

“Nothing,” he continues, “can be finer or better conceived than the regulations framed for the government of this country; but nothing, I assure you, is so ill observed as regards both the fur trade and the general discipline of the colony. One great evil is the infinite number of drinking-shops, which makes it almost impossible to remedy the disorders resulting from them. All the rascals and idlers of the country are attracted into this business of tavern-keeping. They never dream of tilling the soil; but, on the contrary, they deter the other inhabitants from it, and end with ruining them. I know seigniories where there are but twenty houses, and moire than half of them dram shops. At Three Rivers there are twenty-five houses, and liquor may be had at eighteen or twenty of them. Villemarie (Montreal) and Quebec are on the same footing.”

The governor next dwells on the necessity of finding occupation for children and youths, a matter which he regards as of the last importance. “It is sad to see the ignorance of the population at a distance from the abodes of the curés, who are put to the greatest trouble to remedy the evil by travelling from place to place through the parishes in their charge.”

[Denonville au Ministre, 13 Nov. 1685.]

La Barre, Champigny, and Duchesneau write in a similar strain. Bishop Saint-Vallier, in an epistolary journal which he printed of a tour through the colony made on his first arrival, gives a favorable account of the disposition of the people, especially as regards religion. He afterwards changed his views. An abstract made from his letters for the use of the king states that he “represents, like M. Denonville, that the Canadian youth are for the most part wholly demoralized.”

[N. Y. Colonial Documents, IX. 278.]

“The bishop was very sorry,” says a correspondent of the minister at Quebec, “to have so much exaggerated in the letter he printed at Paris the morality of the people here.” [3] He preached a sermon on the sins of the inhabitants and issued a pastoral mandate, in which he says, “Before we knew our flock we thought that the English and the Iroquois were the only wolves we had to fear; but God having opened our eyes to the disorders of this diocese, and made us feel more than ever the weight of our charge, we are forced to confess that our most dangerous foes are drunkenness, luxury, impurity, and slander.” [4]

[3: Ibid., IX. 388.]

[4: Ordonnance contre les vices de l’ivrognerie, luxe, et impureté, 31 Oct., 1690.]

– The Old Regime In Canada, Chapter 20  by Francis Parkman

The below is from Francis Parkman’s Introduction.

If, at times, it may seem that range has been allowed to fancy, it is so in appearance only; since the minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them, he must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

With respect to that special research which, if inadequate, is still in the most emphatic sense indispensable, it has been the writer’s aim to exhaust the existing material of every subject treated. While it would be folly to claim success in such an attempt, he has reason to hope that, so far at least as relates to the present volume, nothing of much importance has escaped him. With respect to the general preparation just alluded to, he has long been too fond of his theme to neglect any means within his reach of making his conception of it distinct and true.

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