Canada: America’s Neighbor to the North - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 364

of Plassey (1757). In North America a series of British and French wars effectively ended
with the English General James Wolfe's victory over General Louis de Montcalm on the
Plains of Abraham adjacent to Quebec in 1759. Both Wolfe and Montcalm died on the
Plains of Abraham, and with that battle and a subsequent one the following year, the French
surrendered their claims to Canada. The subsequent Treaty of Paris ratified the loss of the
North American French Empire. And it is that loss that is remembered and mourned by a
disgruntled, French-speaking, Catholic Quebec up to the present, despite the Quebec Act
of 1774 granting Quebec the French legal code, its system of land tenure, and the right to
practice Roman Catholicism. Witness the slogan on the automobile license plates in today's
Quebec: “Je me souviens.”
For the English colonists on the American frontier, the wars carried a collective name,
the French and Indian Wars. Each war in the series of hostilities had its own name honoring
the English throne in whose name the war was fought: King William's War, Queen Anne's
War, and King George's War. The wars, from the American point of view, are celebrated
in James Fenimore Cooper's novels The Leatherstocking Tales and give vivid narrative
to raids and killings on the frontier and the role played by Indians in the service of their
French and English allies.
HOW DID CANADA GET ITS NAME?
As Jacques Cartier went west along the St. Lawrence River, he gave Canada a name that is
one of history's pleasant mistakes. “What is this place?” asked the explorer, thinking of the
vast river valley he was exploring. Kanata, answered the Indians, assuming he had asked
about a settlement on the far side of the river!