New France

New France was France's North American empire from 1535 to 1763, a river empire of fur, missions and forts stretching from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. Cartier planted the cross at Gaspe in 1534, but settlement waited for Champlain, who founded Quebec in 1608 and allied the colony with the Hurons against the Iroquois, binding French fate to the fur trade. Seigneurs parcelled the Saint Lawrence shore into long thin farms; Jesuits pushed missions to the Great Lakes; coureurs des bois ran the woods beyond any law. Frontenac, the fighting governor, threw a chain of forts from Niagara to the Gulf, and La Salle claimed the whole Mississippi basin for Louis XIV as Louisiana in 1682. Few settlers came, perhaps sixty thousand against a million English colonists, but soldiers and Indians held the balance for a century in King William's, Queen Anne's and King George's wars. The Seven Years' War broke it: Montcalm beat Braddock at the Monongahela yet lost Quebec on the Plains of Abraham in 1759, Wolfe and Montcalm dying the same day. The Treaty of Paris in 1763 gave Canada to Britain and Louisiana to Spain, ending French America on the mainland while its language stayed on the Saint Lawrence.