Colin Woodard (6 page)

A little-known fact is that that most American of icons, the openrange cattle industry, originated in El Norte and was based on Spanish precedents. A mix of arid plains, high deserts, and Mediterranean coastline, Spain bears a physical resemblance to El Norte. In southern Spain, the Spanish developed the techniques they would later deploy in their American colonies, such as the use of mounted
vaqueros
(cowboys) to round up, herd, brand, and drive large numbers of cattle on vast, unfenced ranges. The Spanish introduced horses, cattle, sheep, and goats to the New World, along with the clothes, tools, and skills to ranch them, building the common foundations of all subsequent cowboy cultures from the
huasos
of Chile to the cowboys of the American West. Large ranching estates spread northwards from Mexico's central Gulf Coast, and by the time they reached Texas in the 1720s, had developed the lasso (
lazo
), lariat (
la reata
), chaps (short for
chaparreras
), and the wide-brimmed
sombrero
, from which the Texas ten-gallon hat is derived. English-speaking cowboys would later adopt other Spanish vocabulary, including
rodeo
,
bronco
, buckaroo (from
vaquero
), mustang (from
mesteño
), bandoleer (
bandolera
), stampede (from
estampida
), and ranch (
rancho
).
¹⁹

Oddly enough, it was the Franciscans who introduced this cowboy culture to what is now Texas and California, as tallow and hides were among the only products the missions could profitably ship to the rest of Mexico. Short on labor, the friars trained their neophytes to be their vaqueros, flouting Spanish laws against allowing Indians to ride horses. When the governor of California complained about this practice, a friar responded, “How else can the vaquero's work of the missions be done?” The first American cowboys were, in fact, Indians.
²⁰

But while Spanish ranching techniques were becoming ascendant at the end of the eighteenth century, the
norteños
found themselves facing threats spreading from the north and east. El Norte had new Euro-American neighbors, rival cultures with advantages in manpower and resources. The first such challenger was New France, ensconced in New Orleans at the end of the Mississippi Valley and scattered over a vast province named for its king, Louis XIV. Beyond Louisiana to the northeast lay an uneasy confederation of nations that had recently won its independence from Great Britain—a schizophrenic and populous entity that had just started calling itself the United States.

CHAPTER 2

I
n the fall of 1604—sixteen years before the
Mayflower
's voyage—a group of Frenchmen were about to become the first Europeans to confront a New England winter.

By the standards of the day, theirs was an elaborate undertaking. Seventy-nine men had crossed the Atlantic in two ships filled with the prefabricated parts needed to assemble a chapel, forge, mill, barracks, and two coastal survey vessels. They carefully reconnoitered the coasts of what would one day become Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and eastern Maine, looking for an ideal location for France's first American outpost. They chose to build their fortified settlement on a small island on what is now the easternmost fringe of Maine, in the middle of a river they named the St. Croix. The site appeared to perfectly suit their needs: the island was easy to defend from European rivals, and the mainland shore had ample wood, water, and farmable plots. Most important, there were plenty of Indians in the area, as the river was a major highway for their commerce. Good relations with the Indians, their leaders had decided, would be key to the French project in North America.
¹

The expedition was led by an unlikely pair. Pierre Dugua, the sieur de Mons, was a French noble who had been raised in a walled château and had served as a personal advisor to King Henri IV. His thirty-four-year-old deputy, Samuel de Champlain, was supposedly the common-born son of a small-town merchant but was somehow able to gain personal and immediate access to the king anytime he wished and, inexplicably, had been receiving a royal pension and special favors from him. (Many scholars now believe he was one of Henri IV's many illegitimate sons.) In France, Champlain and de Mons had been neighbors, raised a few miles apart in Saintonge, a coastal province in western France distinguished by its unusually mixed population and tolerance of cultural diversity. Both men had served on the battlefields of France's religious wars, experienced firsthand the atrocities that can result from bigotry, and wished to avoid seeing them again. Their mutual visions of a tolerant, utopian society in the wilds of North America would profoundly shape not only the culture, politics, and legal norms of New France but also those of twenty-first-century Canada as well.
²

The sieur de Mons envisioned a feudal society like that of rural France, only perfected. It would be based on the same medieval hierarchy with counts, viscounts, and barons ruling over commoners and their servants. Democracy and equality did not enter into the picture. There would be no representative assemblies, no town governments, no freedom of speech or the press; ordinary people would do as they were told by their superiors and their king—as they always had, as they had always been meant to. But there were differences from France as well. While Catholicism would be its official religion, New France would be open to French Protestants, who could freely practice their faith. Commoners would be allowed to hunt and fish—rights unheard of in France, where game belonged exclusively to the nobility. They would be able to lease farmland and, potentially, rise to a higher station in life. It would be a conservative and decidedly monarchical society, but one more tolerant and with greater opportunities for advancement than France itself. It was a plan that would meet unexpected resistance from rank-and-file colonists.

Champlain's vision for New France was more radical and enduring than de Mons's. While he shared de Mons's commitment to creating a monarchical, feudal society in North America, he believed it should coexist in a friendly, respectful alliance with the Native American nations in whose territories it would be embedded. Instead of conquering and enslaving the Indians (as the Spanish had), or driving them away (as the English would), the New French would embrace them. They would intentionally settle near the Indians, learn their customs, and establish alliances and trade based on honesty, fair dealing, and mutual respect. Champlain hoped to bring Christianity and other aspects of French civilization to the Native populations, but he wished to accomplish this by persuasion and example. He regarded the Indians as every bit as intelligent and human as his own countrymen, and thought cross-cultural marriage between the two peoples was not only tolerable but desirable. It was an extraordinary idea, and one that would succeed beyond anyone's expectations. Historian David Hackett Fischer has fittingly dubbed it “Champlain's Dream.”
³

The two Frenchmen's ideal society got off to a poor start, largely because they had underestimated the severity of the New England winter. The first snows came to St. Croix Island in early October. When the river froze in December, the powerful tides from the Bay of Fundy smashed and shattered the ice, turning the waterway into an impassable field of jagged ice floes. Trapped on their tiny island, the settlers quickly ran short of firewood, meat, fish, and drinking water. The depth of the cold was something none of them was prepared for. “During this winter all our liquors froze, except the Spanish wine,” Champlain recalled. “Cider was dispensed by the pound . . . [and] we were obliged to use very bad water and drink melted snow.” Subsisting entirely on salted meats, the settlers soon began dying from scurvy, their tissues decomposing for lack of vitamin C. They all might have perished had the colonists not already established a friendly rapport with the Passamaquoddy tribe, who delivered an emergency supply of fresh meat during a break in the ice. Even so, nearly half the colonists died that winter, filling the colony's cemetery with diseaseravaged bodies. (In the nineteenth century, when the cemetery area began to erode into the river, locals would begin referring to the site as Bone Island.)
⁴

The French learned from their tragic mistake. In the spring de Mons moved the colony to a spacious harbor on the opposite side of the Bay of Fundy in what is now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. Their new settlement, Port Royal, would become the model for the future settlements in New France. It resembled a village in northwestern France, from where almost all the settlers had come. Peasants cleared large fields and planted wheat and fruit orchards. Skilled laborers constructed a water-powered grain mill and a comfortable lodge for the gentlemen, who staged plays, wrote poetry, and journeyed into the fields only for picnics. Although their community was tiny—fewer than 100 men all told, once reinforcements had arrived from France—the gentlemen took little notice of their underlings; in their voluminous written accounts of their experiences, they almost never mention any of them by name. In winter they formed a dining club called the Order of Good Cheer and competed with one another to produce the finest gastronomy from local game and seafood.

 

While early settlers in Jamestown refused to sample unfamiliar foods and resorted to eating neighbors who'd starved to death, the gentlemen at Port Royal were feasting on “ducks, bustards, grey and white geese, partridges, larks . . . moose, caribou, beaver, otter, bear, rabbits, wildcats (or leopards), raccoons and other animals such as the savages caught.” Commoners weren't invited to these feasts, and made do with wine and “the ordinary rations brought from France.”
⁵

By contrast, the gentlemen treated the Indians as equals, inviting them to their feasts and plays. “They sat at table, eating and drinking like ourselves,” Champlain wrote of their chiefs. “And we were glad to see them while, on the contrary, their absence saddened us, as happened three or four times when they all went away to the places wherein they knew that there was hunting.” The French, in turn, were invited to Mi'kmaq festivals, which featured speeches, smoking, and dance, social customs Champlain and his colleagues were quick to adopt. At first they were helped by the presence of the interpreter de Mons had seen fit to bring to the New World, an educated African servant or slave named Mathieu deCosta, who'd been to Mi'kmaq territory before and knew their language. But the French gentlemen also studied the Mi'kmaq language on their own and sent three teenagers from their own families to live with the Indians so they could learn their customs, technology, and speech. The young gentlemen learned to make birch-bark canoes, track moose on snowshoes, and move silently through the forests. All would become leading figures in New France's future province of Acadia, which theoretically spanned most of what are now the Canadian Maritimes. Two would serve as its governor.
⁶

This pattern of cultural openness was repeated in Québec (which Champlain founded in 1608) and would be practiced across New France so long as it remained part of the French kingdom. Champlain visited various tribes in their local villages, sat in their councils, and even risked his life joining them in battle against the powerful Iroquois. He sent several young men to live with the Huron, Nipissing, Montagnais, and Algonquin to learn their customs. Similarly, as soon as new Jesuit missionaries arrived in New France, their superiors sent them to live among the natives and learn their languages so as to better persuade them to become Christians. The Montagnais reciprocated in 1628, entrusting three teenage girls to live in the future Québec City so that they could be “instructed and treated like those of [the French] nation” and perhaps married into it as well. Champlain championed the notion of racial intermarriage, telling the Montagnais chiefs: “Our young men will marry your daughters, and henceforth we shall be one people.” Following his example, French settlers in Québec tolerated unusual Indian habits, such as entering homes and buildings “without saying a word, or without any greeting.”
⁷
Other Frenchmen went further, moving into the forest to live with the Indians, a move encouraged by the critical shortage of women in Québec for much of the seventeenth century. All adopted Indian technologies—canoes, snowshoes, corn production—which were more suited to life in New France than heavy boats, horses, and wheat.

In Acadia sixty French peasant families lived happily at the head of the Bay of Fundy for generations, intermarrying with local Mi'kmaqs to such a degree that a Jesuit missionary would predict the two groups would become “so mixed . . . that it will be impossible to tell them apart.” Like other Indian tribes with whom the Jesuits worked, the Mi'kmaqs adopted Christianity but continued to practice their own religion, not believing the two to be mutually exclusive. Jesuit priests were seen as having one form of medicine, traditional shamans another. This hybrid belief system was not that dissimilar to the earthy Catholicism practiced by the Acadian peasants, infused with pre-Christian traditions that survive to this day among their Cajun descendants in Louisiana. In Acadia, where official authority and oversight was weak, French and Mi'kmaq cultures blended into one another.