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Images of American environments that envisioned discrete climatic bands gradually gave way to understandings of a more complex relationship between weather and geography. When Sagard, Champlain, and other early settlers of New France traveled to the Saint Lawrence Valley, they were drawn toward the landscapes of the Saint Lawrence platform: lowlands between the Appalachian Mountains to the south and the Laurentians to the north. This geological province largely begins at Québec, extending south along the Saint Lawrence and into the eastern Great Lakes region. It was a transition that was easily noticeable to early explorers. From “lofty mountains” at the mouth of the Saguenay, Jacques Cartier described finding himself among land “covered with fine high trees and with many vines,” with “as good soil as it is possible to find.”77 This was, he suggested, truly the beginning of the area that he called Canada. The transition was as jarring for Champlain, who likewise traveled from a “very unpleasant land, as much on one coast as the other,” at Saguenay to the region of Québec that was “beautiful and pleasant, and supports all sorts of grains to maturity.”78 These explorers noticed what geologists have since confirmed: the Saint Lawrence lowlands, once home to massive lakes and seas as glaciers receded, melted, and deposited rich alluvial clays that would support indigenous and colonial agriculture, was a temperate oasis in the midst of an otherwise forbidding landscape.79
These authors were describing an ecotone, or a transition between one climatic zone and the next.80 The Saint Lawrence Valley was the northernmost reach of temperate North America and remained a mixed and ecologically complex region.81 The forests that the French encountered were the product of geographical and climatic push and pull that exerted their force over millions of years. Periods of global cooling had pushed boreal elements such as pine and spruce south and temperate elements such as maple and chestnut had returned north with broader periods of warming that inevitably returned.82 The colonists and administrators who settled New France therefore established their colony at the boundary between these two ecological regions. These are frequently particularly rich and diverse environments, home to more species than either ecological region individually. In practical terms, the ecotone offered the advantages of access to the resources of multiple ecosystems.
The mosaic-like quality of environments that blended boreal and temperate flora attracted the attention of colonial authors.83 Beyond offering more resources, however, these rich and diverse environments also offered evidence for the possible future of New France. These were landscapes that were familiar enough to beckon colonists and that were yet different enough to demand their intervention. Rather than simply effacing the differences between European and American environments, the accounts of Champlain, Sagard, Lescarbot, and others of this first generation drew attention to them and offered the region’s environmental history as evidence of a need for French intervention.
The natural richness and diversity of these spaces had been cultivated by millennia of indigenous occupation. As the French returned to the Saint Lawrence in the seventeenth century, a great deal had changed since it had been visited by Jacques Cartier. Where Cartier had visited thriving Iroquoian cultures that practiced agriculture and established large sedentary villages at sites such as Hochelaga (Montréal) and Stadacona (Québec), Champlain now found Algonquian peoples who traded for rather than cultivating corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. Each occupied and exploited ecological niches that supported their own lives and their commerce with each other. When Champlain visited what is now Montréal, he described the evidence of recent Iroquoian agriculture. He wrote:
For higher up than this place (which we named Place Royale) at a league’s distance from Mount Royal, there are many small rocks and very dangerous shoals. And near this Place Royale there is a small river, which leads some distance into the interior, alongside which are more than sixty arpents of land, which have been cleared and now like meadows, where one might sow grain and do gardening. Formerly the sauvages cultivated these lands.84
Champlain neglected to describe any features of Iroquoian agriculture that might have persisted, but there is reason to believe that at least some of the plants might have continued to grow into the seventeenth century. In the twentieth century, anthropologists reported finding wild tobacco at sites of previous indigenous occupation, and there is no reason to suspect that this would not have been true at Montréal as well.85 At the very least, the landscape that Iroquoians had cultivated and that favored the population of local animals such as deer and plants such as wild fruits continued to flourish in the “edge effect” created by previous clearings of farm land and firing of local forests.86
Authors soon explained to their Atlantic audiences that the transitional quality of this region was more relevant to understanding New France than zonal bands that drew their significance from latitudinal transitions. The Récollet Denis Jamet explained that an east-west axis changed abruptly at Québec, writing,
For the temperature of the air we find it similar to that of France, except for the heat which is more ardent to us. As for the winter I can only say what others have stayed here several years have said. The snows are larger than those of France and last ordinarily four months. The freezing is more violent (than in France) [and] the great river freezes up to the ocean. Something good is that we do not feel the cold winds like in France. From Gaspé up to Québec, which is almost two hundred leagues are only high and terrifying mountains fertile only in rocks and pines. But after Québec the lands are beautiful and have the possibility of being good if they were cultivated.87
The explorations of Champlain and others who followed the Saint Lawrence traced the transition between boreal and temperate regions of the continent and between the Canadian Shield, the Laurentian lowlands, and the Appalachian Mountains to the south.88 In the “Carte géographique de la Nouvelle Franse” included in Champlain’s 1613 Voyages, this ecological shift was marked clearly (Figure 4). The printed page itself clearly divided the terrestrial regions of the northeast along a north-south axis at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. To the right, the landscape was mountainous with isolated groups of one to three trees. To the left, with the exception of specific landmarks such as “montreal,” the landscape leveled out and was populated by large clusters of identical trees.89 Farther west, explorers encountered a continental climate that was ameliorated considerably by the presence of the Great Lakes and regional variations that indigenous cultures had used to develop complex agricultural communities in the preceding millennia.90 These authors were also aware that moving southwest along the Saint Lawrence accelerated these tendencies. Champlain described Haudenosaunee lands, for example, as “temperate, without much winter, or very little.”91 New France might therefore be inhospitable, but it was not at all uninhabitable to those who understood it properly.
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Even as they would have vicariously experienced the severity of these early American winters, then, readers of the first French texts that described American environments would also learn about the climatic and ecological variability of these places. Champlain, for example, was quick to note that the winter of 1605–6 was not nearly as harsh as the one the year before.92 Where colonial authors lacked adequate experience to judge the typicality of any given extreme, they could turn to indigenous peoples for a broader temporal range. In 1636, for example, Paul Le Jeune related that
there was a great Northeaster accompanied by a rainfall which lasted a long time, and by a cold severe enough to freeze this water as soon as it touched anything; so that when this rain fell upon the trees, from the summit to the roots it was converted into ice-crystals, which encased both the trunk and the branches, causing for a long time all our great forests to seem but a forest of crystal,—for, indeed, the ice which everywhere completely covered them was thicker than a coin. In a word, all the bushes and everything above the snow were surrounded on all sides and encased in ice. The Sauvages told me that this did not happen often.93
