CHAPTER VII
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS
Let us remind ourselves again, before the hordes of frontiersmen and
settlers come over the mountains and up the lakes and down the rivers,
erasing most of the tangible memories of the inter-montane, primeval
western wilderness, that France evoked it from the unknown.
A circle drawn round the Louvre with the radius of two kilometres,
enclosed the little patch of earth from which were evoked these millions
of acres of untouched forests and millions of acres of virgin plain and
prairie, seamed and watered by a hundred thousand streams, washed by a
chain of the mightiest inland fresh-water oceans, and guarded by two
ranges of mountains. Within that narrow circle, four kilometres in
diameter, stood Cartier dreaming of Asia, asking for permission to explore
the mysterious square gulf, the St. Lawrence, and again presenting to the
king the dusky captive Donnacona; within that circle was the street, Rue
aux Ours, whose meat shops Lescarbot in Acadia remembered as the place of
good food and doubtless of excited talk concerning the unexplored New
France, whose hardships and pleasures he afterward tasted; within that
circle Champlain walked, as in a dream, we are told, impatient as a lion
in a cage, longing to be again upon the wilderness path, westward of
Quebec, toward the unknown; within that circle the priest Olier, of St.
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