CHAPTER V. 

 FIRST FRENCH HORSES IN AMERICA. 



Somewhere on the shaggy shores of the mighty 

 seaward outlet of the Great Lakes, quite probably 

 at Quebec, the first horses brought from the old to 

 the new France were debarked. Doubtless within 

 the crypted chests of the churches and monasteries 

 of Canada records of horses imported in the seven- 

 teenth and eighteenth centuries lie buried deep in 

 the dust of time, but in none of the public documents 

 of the Dominion, church or state, is there mention 

 of such shipments. Louis XIV sent some mares and 

 a few stallions from the Royal stables in 1665, 1667 

 1670, but they were not of a sort well suited to the 

 purposes of agriculture. Other stallions besides the 

 few donated by the king must have been imported 

 by the colonists themselves and these in all probabil- 

 ity were of a sturdier, more useful type. After the 

 cession to Britain in 1760 the insular types assumed 

 the. ascendancy, save in the old French settlements. 



The primeval forests of the Lower St. Lawrence 

 were first seen by Jacques Cartier, the French ex- 

 plorer, in the year 1535, but it was not until 1609 that 

 Champlain began building upon the now historic 

 rock of Quebec. This event marked the beginnings 

 of Canadian agriculture, and to this day the horses 



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