CHAPTER I THE FOUNDERS OF ACADIA The name Acadia, [Footnote: The origin of the name is uncertain. By some authorities it is supposed to be derived from the Micmac algaty, signifying a camp or settlement. Others have traced it to the Micmac akade, meaning a place where something abounds. Thus, Sunakade (Shunacadie, C. B.), the cranberry place; Seguboon-akade (Shubenacadie), the place of the potato, etc.... more...

CHAPTER I CHAMPLAIN'S FIRST VOYAGE TO AMERICA Samuel Champlain, the issue of the marriage of Antoine Champlain and Marguerite Le Roy, was born at Brouage, now Hiers Brouage, a small village in the province of Saintonge, France, in the year 1570, or according to the Biographie Saintongeoise in 1567. His parents belonged to the Catholic religion, as their first names would seem to indicate. When... more...

INTRODUCTION AMONG the numerous works on Canada that have been published within the last ten years, with emigration for their leading theme, there are few, if any, that give information regarding the domestic economy of a settler's life, sufficiently minute to prove a faithful guide to the person on whose responsibility the whole comfort of a family depends— the mistress, whose department it is... more...

While my mother was a servant in Glasgow she married a soldier. I have only a faint remembrance of my father, of a tall man in a red coat coming to see us in the afternoons and tossing me up and down to the ceiling. I was in my fourth year when his regiment was hurried to Belgium to fight Bonaparte. One day there rose a shouting in the streets, it was news of a great victory, the battle of Waterloo. At... more...

CHAPTER I CANADA IN 1672 The Canada to which Frontenac came in 1672 was no longer the infant colony it had been when Richelieu founded the Company of One Hundred Associates. Through the efforts of Louis XIV and Colbert it had assumed the form of an organized province. [Footnote: See The Great Intendant in this Series.] Though its inhabitants numbered less than seven thousand, the institutions under... more...

DURHAM THE DICTATOR And let him be dictatorFor six months and no more. The curious sightseer in modern Toronto, conducted through the well-kept, endless avenues of handsome dwellings which are that city's pride, might be surprised to learn that at the northern end of the street which cuts the city in two halves, east and west, bands of armed Canadians met in battle less than a century ago. If he... more...

CHAPTER I CHAMPLAIN'S EARLY YEARS Were there a Who's Who in History its chronicle of Champlain's life and deeds would run as follows: Champlain, Samuel de. Explorer, geographer, and colonizer. Born in 1567 at Brouage, a village on the Bay of Biscay. Belonged by parentage to the lesser gentry of Saintonge. In boyhood became imbued with a love of the sea, but also served as a soldier in... more...

CHAPTER IWhen a soldier's watch, with its luminous face,Loses its light and grows dim and black,He holds it out in the sun a spaceAnd the radiance all comes back;And that is the reason I'm thinking to-dayOf the glad days now long past;I am leaving my heart where the sunbeams play:I am trying to drive my fears away:I am charging my soul with a spirit gay,And hoping that it will last! We were... more...

PREFACE. The events recounted in this book group themselves in the main about a single figure, that of Count Frontenac, the most remarkable man who ever represented the crown of France in the New World. From strangely unpromising beginnings, he grew with every emergency, and rose equal to every crisis. His whole career was one of conflict, sometimes petty and personal, sometimes of momentous... more...

A GREAT TRADITION A few years ago I was away north of Edmonton on the trail of Alexander Mackenzie, fur trader and explorer, who a century and a quarter before had made the amazing journey from the prairies over the mountains to the Pacific Coast. We looked with something like awe and wonder at the site of the old fort near the famous Peace River Crossing, from which, after wintering there in 1792, he... more...