Its highways of trade and intercourse had been freed from
the danger of Indian raids. It had some small industries
and was able to raise almost the whole of its own
food-supply. The traveller who passed along the great
river from Quebec to Montreal in the early autumn might
see, as Peter Kalm in his Travels tells us he saw, field
upon field of waving grain extending from the shores
inward as far as the eye could reach, broken only here
and there by tracts of meadow and woodland. The outposts
of an empire at least had been established.
CHAPTER II
GENTLEMEN OF THE WILDERNESS
A good many people, as Robert Louis Stevenson once assured
us, have a taste for 'heroic forms of excitement.' And
it is well for the element of interest in history that
this has been so at all ages and among all races of men.
The most picturesque and fascinating figures in the
recorded annals of nations have been the pioneers,--the
men who have not been content to do what other men of
their day were doing. Without them and their achievements
history might still be read for information, but not for
pleasure; it might still instruct, but it would hardly
inspire.
In the narratives of colonization there is ample evidence
that Frenchmen of the seventeenth century were not lacking
in their thirst for excitement, whether heroic or otherwise.
Their race furnished the New World with explorers and
forest merchants by the hundred. The most venturesome
voyageurs, the most intrepid traders, and the most untiring
missionaries were Frenchmen.
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