Posted by Elyse on August 08, 2000 at 11:53:45:
In Reply to: Re: Jean-Baptiste Talon posted by Dutch on August 07, 2000 at 23:14:37:
|
The time period is interesting, and the French angle is one U.S.'rs don't spend as much time on, I think. I myself am more familiar with English and Spanish colonization. I got the book, because I'm trying to enrich my stay here around the Great Lakes with a little background. In an earlier book, I learned that the first European Chicagoan was a free black trader (French/Carribean) named Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable, who set up shop at the mouth of the Chicago River, where it joins Lake Michigan. He married a local Indian woman. In "...Snow," the author points out frequently the differences between the Quebecoise colony and the Virginian one. They both had a tough time getting started, but it's commonly mentioned that the Virginians starved because too many of them were gentry and not enough gritty outdoors types. Rolfe was supposed to have said something like a farmer who knows how to use a shovel is worth any three of the titled sort. The Quebecoises, on the other hand, were up there so early in history that when a first group overwintered, many were still dying of scurvey -- so it was before they realized that lack of Vitamin C caused it. If they had just known, there were probably plenty of wild rose hips in the woods that could have fixed them up. In Virginia, the growing season started earlier and lasted longer, and the the book says starving people were desperately eating half-ripe fruit, which would be loaded with Vitamin C. I'm always interested in the beginning of the Sackett tale, because it gives me a glimpse of how a branch of my own family got started here. The Ferguson branch settled in western Carolina, which is now the Smokey Mountains on the border with Tennessee. At a family reuinion some years ago, one family geneologist told Dad that the first Ferguson in the area jumped a prison ship off the coast of North Carolina. Back then a lot of Scots were considered criminals practically on sight, LOL; and of course, he could have been a genuine bad guy. But whoever he was, he had something in common with Barnabas: he was being pursued by the kings's soldiers.
|
Re: Re: Jean-Baptiste Talon