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 CHAPTER III

N the year fifteen hundred and forty, Jacques Cartier raised a white cross crowned with the fleur-de-lis of France upon an improvised altar of crossed canoe paddles at Quebec, bearing the inscription "Franciscus Primus, Dei gratia, Francorum Rex Regnat," and formally took possession of a new continent. Two centuries later, in the dawn of early morning, British soldiers wrested from the betrayed Montcalm the mist-enshrouded height where that emblazoned cross had stood, and New France fell—"amid the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin."

All the American Indians soon found, as the Iroquois had, that nothing would do but these newly come Frenchmen must run about over all the country. Each river must be ascended, the portages traversed,