Canada's early history

When European explorers first arrived, every region of what is now Canada was already home to Aboriginal peoples. The explorers called them Indians, because they believed they had sailed all the way to the East Indies. The name stuck for centuries.

These were distinct nations with distinct ways of living. The Huron-Wendat of the Great Lakes region, like the Iroquois, were farmers and hunters. The Cree and Dene of the Northwest were hunter-gatherers. The Sioux were nomadic and followed the bison herd. The Inuit lived off Arctic wildlife, and the peoples of the West Coast preserved fish by drying and smoking it. War between groups was common, as they competed for land, resources and prestige.

Contact changed everything. Large numbers of Aboriginal people died of European diseases they had no immunity against. Yet over the first two hundred years of living side by side, Aboriginal peoples and Europeans also built strong economic, religious and military bonds. The guide calls those bonds the foundations of Canada.

The Vikings got here first. From Iceland they settled Greenland about a thousand years ago, then pushed on to Labrador and Newfoundland. You can still visit the ruins of their settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, now a World Heritage site.

Serious European exploration began five hundred years later. In 1497, John Cabot, an Italian immigrant to England, became the first person to draw a map of Canada's East Coast, claiming the New Founde Land for England. English settlement did not begin until 1610. Between 1534 and 1542, Jacques Cartier crossed the Atlantic three times, claiming the land for King Francis I of France.

On one of those voyages, Cartier heard two captured guides use the Iroquoian word kanata. It means village. By the 1550s the name Canada was appearing on maps.

Permanent settlement began in 1604. Pierre de Monts and Samuel de Champlain founded the first European settlement north of Florida, first on St. Croix Island and then at Port-Royal, in Acadia, in what is now Nova Scotia. In 1608 Champlain went further up the river and built a fortress on the rock where Québec City stands today.

The colony ran on fur. European demand for beaver pelts drove a vast trading economy in which the French and Aboriginal peoples were partners. Champlain allied with the Algonquin, the Montagnais and the Huron, historic enemies of the Iroquois, a confederation of five and later six First Nations. The two sides made peace in 1701. Out on the rivers, the voyageurs and coureurs des bois who carried the trade built their own strong alliances with First Nations.

The English were building too. In 1670, King Charles II granted the Hudson's Bay Company exclusive trading rights over the entire watershed draining into Hudson Bay. Its trading posts, Fort Garry, Fort Edmonton, Fort Langley, Fort Victoria, later grew into Canadian cities. Meanwhile leaders like Jean Talon, Bishop Laval and Count Frontenac stretched the French empire from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. When the English demanded Quebec's surrender in 1690, Frontenac refused: my only reply will be from the mouths of my cannons.

Through the 1700s, France and Great Britain fought for control of North America. The war came to a point on a single morning in 1759, on farmland above Québec City called the Plains of Abraham. The British won the battle, and both commanders, Brigadier James Wolfe and the Marquis de Montcalm, were killed leading their troops. The defeat ended France's empire in America.

Britain renamed the colony the Province of Quebec. Its French-speaking Catholic people, known as habitants or Canadiens, did not disappear into the new empire. In 1774 the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act, one of the constitutional foundations of Canada. It allowed religious freedom for Catholics and let them hold public office, something Britain itself did not yet permit, and it restored French civil law while keeping British criminal law. A conquered people kept their faith, their language and their legal tradition, and that compromise still shapes Canada.

In 1776, the thirteen British colonies south of Quebec declared independence and became the United States. More than 40,000 people who stayed loyal to the Crown fled north to Nova Scotia and Quebec. They are the Loyalists, and they came from every background the colonies held: Dutch, German, British, Scandinavian and Aboriginal, of many faiths. Joseph Brant led thousands of Loyalist Mohawk into Canada. About 3,000 Black Loyalists, freedmen and slaves, came north seeking a better life; in 1792 some of them left Nova Scotia to found Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Democracy was already taking root. Nova Scotia had elected the first representative assembly in Halifax back in 1758, with Prince Edward Island following in 1773 and New Brunswick in 1785. In 1791 the Constitutional Act split the Province of Quebec into Upper Canada, mainly Loyalist, Protestant and English-speaking, and Lower Canada, heavily Catholic and French-speaking, and gave both elected legislative assemblies. That act also made the name Canada official. Together with the Atlantic colonies, the two Canadas were known as British North America.

Canada also moved early against slavery. In 1793 Upper Canada, led by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, became the first province in the British Empire to move toward abolition. The British Parliament banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolished slavery across the Empire in 1833. Thousands of enslaved people escaped the United States by following the North Star along the Underground Railroad, a Christian anti-slavery network, and settled in Canada. One of the movement's voices, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, became the first woman publisher in Canada in 1853.

In June 1812 the United States invaded Canada, confident the colonies would fall quickly. British soldiers, Canadian volunteers and First Nations warriors fought side by side and held them off. Major-General Sir Isaac Brock captured Detroit with the help of Shawnee fighters led by Chief Tecumseh, then was killed defending Queenston Heights near Niagara Falls. In 1813, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles de Salaberry and 460 soldiers, most of them French Canadiens, turned back 4,000 American invaders at Châteauguay, south of Montreal.

The war produced one of Canada's most famous acts of courage. In 1813, Laura Secord, a settler and mother of five, walked 30 kilometres through American-held territory to warn Lieutenant James FitzGibbon of a planned attack. Her warning helped win the Battle of Beaver Dams. The same year, American troops burned down Government House and the Parliament Buildings in York, now Toronto. In 1814, Major-General Robert Ross led an expedition from Nova Scotia that burned down the White House in Washington in retaliation.

By 1814 the American attempt to conquer Canada had failed. You can read the result on any map: the present-day border between Canada and the United States is partly an outcome of the War of 1812.