Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) by Kenneth C. Davis Page B

economic impetus for its colonizing efforts. In 1600, Tadoussac, a French trading post on the St. Lawrence, was founded.
    The key mover in the French era of exploration was Samuel de Champlain, who founded Quebec in 1608, the year after Jamestown was settled. Champlain made friends with the Algonquian and Huron Indians living nearby and began to trade with them for furs. The two tribes also wanted French help in wars against their main enemy, the powerful Iroquois Indians. In 1609, Champlain and two other French fur traders helped their Indian friends defeat the Iroquois in battle. After this battle, the Iroquois were also enemies of the French. The Huron lived in an area the French called Huronia. Champlain persuaded the Huron to allow Roman Catholic missionaries to work among them and introduce them to Christianity. The missionaries, especially the Jesuit order, explored much of what is now southern Ontario.
    Like the Dutch in New Amsterdam, the French explorers who started New France were primarily interested in trading, as opposed to the English settlers of New England and Virginia, who were planting farms and permanent communities.
    An inevitable head-to-head confrontation between England and France, already the two great European powers, over sovereignty in the New World existed almost from the beginning of the colonial period. A Scots expedition took a French fort in Acadia, and it was renamed Nova Scotia (New Scotland). Then, in 1629, an English pirate briefly captured Quebec. While New England and the other English colonies were taking in thousands of new settlers during the massive immigration of the mid-seventeenth century, the French were slow to build a colonial presence, and settlers were slow to arrive in New France. Worse for France than the threat of English attack were the Iroquois, the powerful confederacy of five tribes of Indians in New York, and the best organized and strongest tribal grouping in North America at the time. The Iroquois were sworn enemies of France’s Indian trading partners, the Huron and Algonquian Indians, and a long series of devastating wars with the Iroquois preoccupied the French during much of their early colonial period.
    But if the French failed as colony builders, they excelled as explorers. Led by the coureurs de bois , the young French trappers and traders, Frenchmen were expanding their reach into the North American heartland. One of these, Medard Chouart, mapped the Lake Superior–Hudson Bay region and then sold the information to the English, who formed the Hudson Bay Company to exploit the knowledge. An even greater quest came in 1673, when Louis Jolliet and the Jesuit priest Jacques Marquette set out from Lake Michigan and eventually reached the Mississippi, letting the current carry them down into the American South as far as the Arkansas River. Based on these expeditions, the French laid a claim in 1671 to all of western North America in the name of King Louis XIV, the Sun King, a claim reexerted in 1682 by La Salle, a young French nobleman who named the province Louisiana in honor of his king. From the outset, the English would contest this claim. The stage was set for an epic contest over a very substantial prize—all of North America. La Salle, like Hudson, was another of history’s glorious losers. In 1684, at the head of another expedition, La Salle mistook the entrance to Matagorda Bay, in Texas, for the mouth of the Mississippi. He spent two years in a vain search for the great river. Tired of the hardships they were forced to endure, La Salle’s men mutinied and murdered him in 1687.
    A MERICAN V OICES
F ATHER J ACQUES M ARQUETTE, June 17, 1673, describing his travels down the Mississippi:
Behold us, then, upon this celebrated river, whose singularities I have attentively studied. The Mississippi takes its rise in several lakes in the North. Its channel is very narrow at the mouth of the Mesconsin [Wisconsin], and runs south until is affected by very high