The Land of tJie U'inanishe 



It was not till 1842 that the expiration 

 of the lease of the King's Posts to the Hud- 

 son's Bay Company, the successors of the 

 Northwest Company and of the farmers of 

 the Domaine du Roi, ended two centuries 

 of monopoly which had represented the 

 region to be an Arctic desert. But the 

 energy of the Prices, " the Lumber Kings," 

 and of colonization societies formed in the 

 counties along the lower St. Lawrence, 

 among the descendants of the Normans 

 and Bretons, who gave English blood its 

 strongest strain of adventure, has filled the 

 triangle between Ha Ha Bay, Chicoutimi, 

 and Lake St. John with thickly settled 

 parishes, and strung out a chain of settle- 

 ments round the south and west shores of 

 the lake to 1 20 miles from Chicoutimi. 

 Except the missions and posts which 

 connected Tadoussac with Mistassini and 

 Hudson's Bay, there was not a settlement 

 on the Saguenay till 1838. Ten years later 

 the colonists were at Lake St. John, and 

 in 1888 the population was over 40,000. 

 Protected from the cold winds of the Gulf, 

 with a climate and winter better and shorter 

 than at Quebec, and a soil in which the 

 long hot days of the brief Northern sum- 

 mer bring to quick maturity such semi- 

 tropical products as maize, melons, hemp, 

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