Montreal was established in 1642 in what is now the province of Quebec, Canada. At the time of European contact the area was inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a discrete and distinct group of Iroquoian-speaking indigenous people. They spoke Laurentian. Jacques Cartier became the first European to reach the area now known as Montreal in 1535 when he entered the village of Hochelaga on the Island of Montreal while in search of a passage to Asia during the Age of Exploration. Seventy years later, Samuel de Champlain unsuccessfully tried to create a fur trading post but the Mohawk of the Iroquois defended what they had been using as their hunting grounds.
A fortress named Ville Marie was built in 1642 as part of a project to create a French colonial empire. Ville Marie became a centre for the fur trade and French expansion into New France until 1760, when it was surrendered to the British army, following the Montreal Campaign. British immigration expanded the city. The city's golden era of fur trading began with the advent of the locally owned North West Company.
Montreal was incorporated as a city in 1832. The city's growth was spurred by the opening of the Lachine Canal and Montreal was the capital of the United Province of Canada from 1844 to 1849. Growth continued and by 1860 Montreal was the largest city in British North America and the undisputed economic and cultural centre of Canada. Annexation of neighbouring towns between 1883 and 1918 changed Montreal back to a mostly Francophone city. The Great Depression in Canada brought unemployment to the city, but this waned in the mid-1930s, and skyscrapers began to be built.
World War II brought protests against conscription and caused the Conscription Crisis of 1944. Montreal's population surpassed one million in the early 1950s. A new metro system was added, Montreal's harbour was expanded, and the St. Lawrence Seaway was opened during this time. More skyscrapers were built along with museums. Montreal's international status was cemented by Expo 67 and the 1976 Summer Olympics. A major league baseball team, the Expos, played in Montreal from 1969 to 2004 when the team relocated to Washington, DC. Historically, business and finance in Montreal were under the control of Anglophones. With the rise of Quebec nationalism in the 1970s, many institutions relocated their headquarters to Toronto.
Pre-contact
The area known today as Montreal had been inhabited by indigenous peoples for some 8,000 years, while the oldest known artifact found in Montreal proper is about 4,000 years old. By about 1000 A.D., nomadic Iroquoian and other peoples around the Great Lakes began to adopt the cultivation of maize and more settled lifestyles. Some settled along the fertile St. Lawrence River, where fishing and hunting in nearby forests supported a full diet. By the 14th century, the people had built fortified villages similar to those described by Cartier on his later visit.
Historians and anthropologists have had many theories about the people encountered by Cartier, as well as the reasons for their disappearance from the valley about 1580. Since the 1950s, archaeological and linguistic comparative studies have established many facts about the people. They are now called the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and recognized by scholars as distinct from other Iroquoian-language people, such as the Huron or Iroquois of the Haudenosaunee, although sharing some cultural characteristics. Their language has been called Laurentian, a distinct branch of the family.
Montreal during the French colonial period The first European to reach the area was Jacques Cartier on October 2, 1535. Cartier visited the villages of Hochelaga (on Montreal Island) and Stadacona (near modern Quebec City), and noted others in the valley which he did not name. He recorded about 200 words of the people's language.
Seventy years after Cartier, explorer Samuel de Champlain travelled to Hochelaga, but the village no longer existed, nor was there sign of any human habitation in the valley. At times historians theorized that the people migrated west to the Great Lakes (or were pushed out by conflict with other tribes, including the Huron), or suffered infectious disease. Since the 1950s, other theories have been proposed. The Mohawk had most to gain by moving up from New York into the Tadoussac area, at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers, which was controlled by local Montagnais.
Champlain decided to establish a fur trading post at Place Royal on the Island of Montreal, but the Mohawk, based mostly in present-day New York, successfully defended what had by then become their hunting grounds and paths for their war parties. It was not until 1639 that the French created a permanent settlement on the Island of Montreal, started by tax collector Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière. Under the authority of the Roman Catholic Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, missionaries Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jeanne Mance and a few French colonists set up a mission named Ville Marie on May 17, 1642, as part of a project to create a colony dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1644, Jeanne Mance founded the Hôtel-Dieu, the first hospital in North America north of Mexico.Google books accessed December 23, 2007
Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve was governor of the colony and on January 4, 1648, he granted Pierre Gadois (who was in his fifties) the first concession of land - some . In 1650, Grou family, the lineage of historian Lionel Groulx, arrived from Rouen, France, and established a land holding known as Coulée Grou which is today encompassed by the borough Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles. In November 1653, another 140 Frenchmen arrived to enlarge the settlement.
By 1651, Ville-Marie had been reduced to less than 50 inhabitants by repeated attacks by the Mohawk. Maisonneuve returned to France that year to recruit 100 men to bolster the failing colony. He had already decided that should he fail to recruit these settlers, he would abandon Ville-Marie and move everyone back downriver to Quebec City. (Even 10 years after its founding, the people of Quebec City still thought of Montreal as "une folle entreprise"a crazy undertaking.) These recruits arrived on 16 November 1653 and essentially guaranteed the evolution of Ville Marie and of all New France. In 1653 Marguerite Bourgeoys arrived to serve as a teacher. She founded Montreal's first school that year, as well as the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, which became mostly a teaching order. In 1663, the Sulpician seminary became the new Seigneur of the island.
The first water well was dug in 1658 by settler Jacques Archambault, on the orders of Maisonneuve.
Ville Marie would become a centre for the fur trade and the town was fortified in 1725. The French and Iroquois Wars threatened the survival of Ville-Marie until a peace treaty (see the Great Peace of Montreal) was signed at Montreal in 1701. With the Great Peace, Montreal and the surrounding seigneuries (Terrebonne, Lachenaie, Boucherville, Lachine, Longueuil, ...) could develop without the fear of Iroquois raids.
Though Quebec was the capital and thus the centre of government activity, Montreal also served a key administrative function in New France. Along with Quebec and Trois-Rivières, Montreal was considered a district of the colony.Yves F. Zoltvany, The Government of New France: Royal, Clerical, or Class Rule? (Scarborough: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1971), 4. Before the cour de la jurisdiction royale was established in 1693, the seminary of St Sulpice had administered justice.Robert Stanley Weir, The Administration of the Old Regime in Canada (Montreal: L.E. and A.F. Waters, 1897), 68. Montreal also had a local governor who represented the governor general and a commissaire de la marine who acted as the intendant's representative.Zoltvany, 4-5. While most government positions were appointed, Montreal and the other districts did have some element of democracy, if only briefly. Syndics were elected representatives who attended meetings of the council of Quebec and the Sovereign Council. However, the syndics had little authority and could only raise the concerns of their district's residents. This office existed from 1647 until it was eliminated in the 1670s due to government fears over the potential formation of political factions; in lieu of syndics, citizens brought their issues to the commissaire de la marine.Zoltvany 5. Because of their importance to Montreal and New France, merchants were allowed to establish chambers of commerce called bourses and meet regularly to discuss their concerns. A bourse would have collectively chosen a representative to address these issues with the governor and commissaire de la marine.Weir, 86.
Population of Montreal
The population of the island of Montreal during French rule consisted of both native peoples and the French. When the first census was conducted in the colony in 1666, the French population was 659 with an estimated native population of 1000.Louise Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants in Seventeenth-Century Montreal, trans, Liana Vardi, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 7 According to the sources, this was the only point when the native population was higher than the French population on the Island of Montreal. By 1716, the French population had grown to 4,409 people while the native population was 1,177.Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 7 The French Population of Montreal began slowly through migration. In 1642 a party of 50 Frenchmen representing the Societe de Notre Dame de Montreal pour la conversion des Sauvages de la Nouvelle France set foot on the island that the Compagnie des Cent Associes donated.Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 16 The initial settlement had 150 individuals in the first ten years; few remained for long because the site of Montreal was vulnerable to Iroquois attacks. Migration to Montreal increased thereafter; between 1653 and 1659, 200 persons arrived. Eventually approximately 1200 to 1500 migrants settled on the island of Montreal between 1642 and 1714; 75% remained and half of them came before 1670. Migrants came from different regions of France: 65 percent of the migrants were rural; 25 percent of the migrants were from the largest cities of France; 10 percent from smaller urban communities.Dechêne, Habitants and Merchants, 46