A Land of Battles

For all that Quebec is charming and whimsical, there is a deeper and sadder side to it. It seems as if it was caught in the crosshairs of international strife as countries sought to control its powerful location on a mighty river. After all, the Saint Lawrence River is North America's third largest river, after the Mississippi (US) and the McKenzie (Canada). To control the Saint Lawrence, Quebec City was a walled city, designed to defend itself from attackers and exert power over its River. But such ability came at a tremendous price, a price measured in battles and loss of life.

We know from our posts covering the history of Montreal that there were numerous Indian (Indigenous Peoples) tribes that controlled this area when Jacques Cartier first explored the region in the 1500s. The Iroquois nation was dominant and held sway over the area in the 1500s and 1600s. Samuel de Champlain explored the area in the 1600s and found that the Iroquois had wiped out the earlier tribes in Montreal.

The French established a relatively peaceful co-existence with the various tribes in the 1600s, although wars waged among the tribes until the early 1700s when a successful effort was made to create a relatively long-standing peace treaty.

It was the Seven-Years War, or the French and Indian War (1755-1763), that highlighted the international importance of controlling what would become over one hundred years later Canada. Stretching over 1000 kilometers east to Nova Scotia its French colonies of Louisburg, Saint Pierre and Miquelon and west to Montreal, Ontario and the Ohio River Basin, the British sought to control these lands and take them from the French.

Quebec City was fortified to protect the French from the British attacks. This involved building the walls shown in the map below. Early fortifications were also erected to dominant the River. These eventually were replaced and re-built into today's Citadel.

You can see remnants of the walls everywhere within the City.

The view looking downstream from the ramparts shows what a dominant position is offered by the City's defenses. Those hills in the background will be a part of our next leg down the River to Tadoussac.

You can see how the Citadel today and its predecessor defenses were an integral part of the City's defenses upstream from the City.

To the left of the Citadel are the Plains of Abraham, sites of battles between the British and French as they struggled to defend (French) and conquer (British and American colonists) the City. These battles took place primarily in 1759 and 1760.

The City, then controlled by the British after the Treaty of Paris in 1763, was attacked twice by the Americans in 1775 and 1812. Both times were unsuccessful.

It wasn't until 1867 that England granted Canada its independence and the Maple Leaf could fly proudly over the City. Canada was no longer tribal, French, English and it was never American. But it could remember all of these influences. On se souvient. (We remember.)

Cheers,

Brio