page_title: History of Montreal
section_title: Montreal during the French colonial period
hierarchical_section_title: History of Montreal / Montreal during the French colonial period
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La première église de la paroisse Ville-Marie. English: The first church in the settlement of Ville-Marie, circa 1640-60s.
context_page_description: The history of Montreal, located in the province of Quebec, Canada, spans about 8,000 years. At the time of European contact, the area was inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, a discrete and distinct group of Iroquoian-speaking indigenous people. They spoke Laurentian. Jacques Cartier became the first European to reach the area now known as Montreal in 1535 when he entered the village of Hochelaga on the Island of Montreal while in search of a passage to Asia during the Age of Exploration. Seventy years later, Samuel de Champlain unsuccessfully tried to create a fur trading post but the Mohawk of the Iroquois defended what they had been using as their hunting grounds.
  A fortress named Ville Marie was built in 1642 as part of a project to create a French colonial empire. Ville Marie became a centre for the fur trade and French expansion into New France until 1760, when it was surrendered to the British army, following the Montreal Campaign. British immigration expanded the city. The city's golden era of fur trading began with the advent of the locally owned North West Company.
  Montreal officially became a city in 1832.
context_section_description: The first European to reach the area was Jacques Cartier on  October 2, 1535. Cartier visited the villages of Hochelaga (on Montreal Island) and Stadacona (near modern Quebec City), and noted others in the valley which he did not name. He recorded about 200 words of the people's language.
  Seventy years after Cartier, explorer Samuel de Champlain travelled to Hochelaga, but the village no longer existed, nor was there sign of any human habitation in the valley. At times historians theorized that the people migrated west to the Great Lakes (or were pushed out by conflict with other tribes, including the Huron), or suffered infectious disease. Since the 1950s, other theories have been proposed. The Mohawk had most to gain by moving up from New York into the Tadoussac area, at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers, which was controlled by local Montagnais.
  Champlain decided to establish a fur trading post at Place Royal on the Island of Montreal, but the Mohawk, based mostly in present-day New York, successfully defended what had by then become their hunting grounds and paths for their war parties.  It was not until 1639 that the French created a permanent settlement on the Island of Montreal, started by tax collector Jérôme le Royer de la Dauversière.  Under the authority of the Roman Catholic Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, missionaries Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve, Jeanne Mance and a few French colonists set up a mission named Ville Marie on May 17, 1642 as part of a project to create a colony dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In 1644, Jeanne Mance founded the Hôtel-Dieu, the first hospital in North America north of Mexico.
  Paul Chomedey de Maisonneuve was governor of the colony and on January 4, 1648, he granted Pierre Gadois (who was in his fifties) the first concession of land - some 40 acres (160,000 m²). In 1650, Grou family, the lineage of historian Lionel Groulx, arrived from Rouen, France, and established a land holding known as Coulée Grou which is today encompassed by the borough Rivière-des-Prairies–Pointe-aux-Trembles. In November 1653, another 140 Frenchmen arrived to enlarge the settlement.
  By 1651, Ville-Marie had been reduced to less than 50 inhabitants by repeated attacks by the Mohawk. Maisonneuve returned to France that year to recruit 100 men to bolster the failing colony.  He had already decided that should he fail to recruit these settlers, he would abandon Ville-Marie and move everyone back downriver to Quebec City. (Even 10 years after its founding, the people of Quebec City still thought of Montreal as "une folle entreprise" - a crazy undertaking.) These recruits arrived on 16 November 1653 and essentially guaranteed the evolution of Ville Marie and of all New France.  In 1653 Marguerite Bourgeoys arrived to serve as a teacher. She founded Montreal's first school that year, as well as the Congrégation de Notre-Dame, which became mostly a teaching order.  In 1663, the Sulpician seminary became the new Seigneur of the island.
  The first water well was dug in 1658 by settler Jacques Archambault, on the orders of Maisonneuve.
  Ville Marie would become a centre for the fur trade and the town was fortified in 1725. The French and Iroquois Wars threatened the survival of Ville-Marie until a peace treaty (see the Great Peace of Montreal) was signed at Montreal in 1701.  With the Great Peace, Montreal and the surrounding seigneuries (Terrebonne, Lachenaie, Boucherville, Lachine, Longueuil, ...) could develop without the fear of Iroquois raids.
  Though Quebec was the capital and thus the centre of government activity, Montreal also served a key administrative function in New France. Along with Quebec and Trois-Rivières, Montreal was considered a district of the colony.  Before the cour de la jurisdiction royale was established in 1693, the seminary of St Sulpice had administered justice. Montreal also had a local governor who represented the governor general and a commissaire de la marine who acted as the intendant's representative. 
  While most government positions were appointed, Montreal and the
caption: Depiction of the first church in Fort Ville-Marie in the 1640s. The settlement was established in 1642 under the authority of Société Notre-Dame de Montréal.
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