title: Canada: A People's History, Vol. 1
author: CBC
description: How can we know where we?re going if we don?t know where we are coming from? This question applies as much to nations as it does to travellers, and it rings especially loudly in the ears of Canadians. <i>Canada: A People?s History</i> doesn?t tell us where we are going, but it shows us where we have come from<br />This richly illustrated book, the first of two volumes, tells the epic story of Canada from its earliest days to the arrival of the industrial age in the 1870s. Here is the story of the people who created this vast nation. The courageous explorers who tracked the vast wilderness; the adventurous settlers, many of them exiles from their homelands; the native peoples, crucial allies in the Europeans? wars for possession of this land; the visionary politicians, and the shortsighted ones; but most of all the ordinary people who rose to the extraordinary challenge of building Canada. These people are all given voice here, their stories blending with accounts of the major events of the day.<br /><br />This is the story of Canada for the new millennium, one that draws on solid scholarship and presents the human drama and excitement of days gone by, one that makes past times memorable.
zlib_text: CHRONICLES OF CANADA  
  Edited by George M. Wrong and H. H. Langton  
  In thirty-two volumes  
  
  ##### Volume 7
  
  THE FIGHTING GOVERNOR  
  A Chronicle of Frontenac  
  
  By CHARLES W. COLBY  
  TORONTO, 1915  
  
  ## 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 which
  they lived could not have been more elaborate or precise. In short, the divine
  right of the king to rule over his people was proclaimed as loudly in the
  colony as in the motherland.
  
  It was inevitable that this should be so, for the whole course of French
  history since the thirteenth century had led up to the absolutism of Louis
  XIV. During the early ages of feudalism France ha