The change from the nomadic to the sedentary life represents an economic advance. Sometimes removal to strongly contrasted geographic conditions necessitates a reversion to a lower economic type of existence. The French colonists who came to Lower Canada in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found themselves located in a region of intense cold, where arable soil was inferior in quality and limited in amount, producing no staple like the tobacco of Virginia or the wheat of Maryland or the cotton of South Carolina or the sugar of the West Indies, by which a young colony might secure a place in European trade. But the snow-wrapped forests of Canada yielded an abundance of fur-bearing animals, the fineness and thickness of whose pelts were born of this frozen north. Into their remotest haunts at the head of Lake Superior or of Hudson Bay, long lines of rivers and lakes opened level water roads a thousand miles or more from the crude little colonial capital at Quebec. And over in Europe beaver hats and fur-trimmed garments were all the style! So the plodding farmer from Normandy and the fisherman from Poitou, transferred to Canadian soil, were irresistibly drawn into the adventurous life of the trapper and fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the _voyageur_ and _courier de bois_, clad in skins, paddling up ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and reverted to the lower hunter stage of civilization.[76] [Sidenote: The Boers of South Africa]