ed his own
never-failing confidence into the hearts of the struggling colonists on
the St. Lawrence, repulsed Sir William Phipps and his New England
expedition when they attacked Quebec in 1690, wisely erected a fort on
Lake Ontario as a fur-trading post and a bulwark against the Iroquois,
encouraged the fur-trade, and stimulated exploration in the west and in
the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi. The settlements of New
England trembled at his name, and its annals contain many a painful
story of the misery inflicted by his cruel bands of Frenchmen and
Indians.

Despite all the efforts of the French government for some years, the
total immigration from 1663 until 1713, when the great war between
France and the Grand Alliance came to an end by the treaty of Utrecht,
did not exceed 6000 souls, and the whole population of the province in
that year was only 20,000, a small number for a century of colonization.
For some years after the formation of the royal government, a large
number of marriageable women were brought to the country under the
auspices of the religious communities, and marriages and births were
encouraged by exhortations and bounties. A considerable number of the
officers and soldiers of the Carignan-Salieres regiment, who followed
the Marquis de Tracy into Canada, were induced to remain and settle new
seigniories, chiefly in palisaded villages in the Richelieu district for
purposes of defence against Iroquois expeditions. Despite all the
paternal efforts of the government to stimulate the growth of a large
population, the natural increase was small during the seventeenth
century. The disturbing influence, no doubt, was the fur-trade, which
allured so many young men into the wilderness, made them unfit for a
steady life, and destroyed their domestic habits. The emigrants from
France came chiefly from Anjou, Saintonge, Paris and its suburbs,
Normandy, Poitou, Beauce, Perche, and Picardy. The Carignan-Salieres
regiment brought men from all parts of the parent state. It does not
appear that any number of persons ever came from Brittany. The larger
proportion of the settlers were natives of the north-western provinces
of France, especially from Perche and Normandy, and formed an excellent
stock on which to build up a thrifty, moral people. The seigniorial
tenure of French Canada was an adaptation of the feudal system of France
to the conditions of a new country, and was calculated in some respects
to stim