Canada and NewfoundlandCarpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
History
Canada and Newfoundland
Carpenter, Frank G. (Frank George)
Canada -- Description and travel; Newfoundland and Labrador -- Description and travel
Now come with me and look at another Quebec, of which you probably have
never heard. The city is built, as you know, where the St. Charles
River flows into the St. Lawrence. The valley of the St. Charles has
become a great hive of industry, and contains the homes of thousands
of French workers. Looking down upon it from the ancient Martello
Tower on the heights of the Upper Town, we see a wilderness of factory
walls, church spires, and the roofs of homes. Beyond them great fields
slope upward, finally losing themselves in the wooded foothills of
the Laurentian Mountains. Cotton goods, boots and shoes, tobacco, and
clothing are manufactured here. It was from this valley that workers
for the textile and shoe industries of New England were recruited by
thousands. A few miles upstream is the village of Indian Lorette, where
descendants of a Huron tribe, Christianized by the French centuries
ago, make leather moccasins for lumberjacks and slippers for American
souvenir buyers. A big fur company also has a fox farm near Indian
Lorette.
Quebec was once the chief port of Canada, but when the river was
dredged up to Montreal it fell far behind. All but the largest
transatlantic liners can now sail for Europe from Montreal, though
they make Quebec a port of call. Quebec is five hundred miles nearer
Liverpool than is New York, and passengers using this route have two
days less in the open sea. The navigation season is about eight months.
The port has rail connections with all Canada and the United States.
Above the city is the world’s longest cantilever bridge, on which
trains cross the river. After two failures the great central span, six
hundred and forty feet long, was raised from floating barges and put
into place one hundred and fifty feet above the water.
In the English atmosphere of the Maritime Provinces I felt quite at
home, but here I seem to be in a foreign land, and time has been pushed
back a century or so. We think of Canada as British, and assume that
English is the national language. But in Quebec, its largest province,
containing about one fifth of the total area, nearly nine tenths of the
people are French and speak the French language. They number almost one
fourth of the population of the Dominion.
Quebec is larger than Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California
combined; it is nearly as big as all our states east of the Mississippi
River put together. Covering an area of seven hundred thousand square
miles, it reaches from the northern borders of New York and New England
to the Arctic Ocean; from the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador
westward to Hudson Bay and the Ottawa River. Most Americans see that
part of Quebec along the St. Lawrence between the capital and Montreal,
but only one fourteenth of the total area of the province lies south of
the river. The St. Lawrence is more than nineteen hundred miles long,
and Quebec extends along its north bank for almost the entire distance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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