Episode 4- The Wars for the Map: The Seven Years’ War, the Fall of Québec, & Ghosts of New France

❄️ QUICK OVERVIEW:

Stone ramparts, swirling snow, and two dying generals—Wolfe & Montcalm—set the stage for a contest that redrew the continent. From the Battle of the Plains of Abraham (1759) to the failed rebellions of 1837, we trace how maps inked in blood became the blueprint for a stubborn, still-unfinished country.

🫵 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Empires Collide: The Seven Years’ War was the world’s first global war; Québec was its pivot point. New France & Britain hash it out. Plains of Abraham. (not Lincoln.)
   
   
2. Maps ≠ Meaning: When flags change, cultures don’t disappear—they go underground and wait. A nation is not a country. The notion of nation-state as modern country is introduced-- an organic concept of personal & collective identity as tied to the land --> "A house is not a home."
   
   
3. Failure → Fuel: The crushed uprisings of 1837 planted the seed of Canadian self-government. Mackenzie King - Loyalists - Alliances
   
   
4. Grit Lives On: Canada isn’t a finished painting; it’s a fire that needs tending—by us. Making connections to things seemingly long ago as we move toward understanding Canada in 2025 and beyond: Canada 2.0: Our Reformation

🗺️ CHAPTER MARKERS

0:00 — Frost, cannon smoke & the big questions
 7:48 — Plains of Abraham: twenty minutes that toppled New France
18:22 — Treaty of Paris, living ghosts & stubborn habitants
23:40 — Papineau, Mackenzie & the printers’ revolt (1837)
32:55 — Fire → Frost: a spirit forged in endurance
40:10 — Outro reflection & listener challenge

🔍 REFLECTION QUESTION

What do you believe in deeply enough to fight for, and what happens to a dream when its map is erased?

Share your answer in the comments or tag us #CanadianGritPodcast. We read every post!

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY: Canadian Grit: North of Ordinary: A Community of Resilience & Real Stories

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1347732846339874

🚀 CALL TO ACTION

• Subscribe / Rate / Review — it’s the flint that keeps this fire burning.
• Share the episode with one history-curious friend.
• Support the show (gear upgrades & archival deep dives) → https://CanadianGrit.ca/support

🌀 Watch / Listen:

• YouTube (animated wave-map intro) →

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Are we ready?

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Let's go. Welcome back to Canadian Grit, North of Ordinary. I'm your host, Jamie Jackson. Over the last five episodes, we've traced a long and rugged path from the first Indigenous maps of memory and river to the footsteps of the Norse and the dreams of Champlain. We've been asking the same essential questions. Why do we explore? Why do we settle? What's the cost of staying?

SPEAKER_01: 0:29

In

SPEAKER_00: 0:32

episode one, I gave you a background of myself. It was me trying to establish a narrative arc for this series while getting into Adam Schultz's story of a history of Canada in ten maps, which continues to drive our voyage together. And then in episode two, we met the Mythic Wanderers, from Leif Erikson to Christopher Columbus, and we reflected on what it means to... arrive or to, quote, discover somewhere new. In episode three, we explored the fragile birth of a new society, one where women, indigenous peoples, and outsiders from the fringe fought for recognition in a place that didn't yet have a name. In episode four, we followed the oldest cartographers on the continent, those who mapped not just land, but meaning. We talked about the first maps of Canada, etched into sand, memory, on the breeze, sung into story. In episode five, we stood beside Champlain, the boy in smoke, a man who didn't just survive here, he imagined a future here. He believed in something more than an empire. He laid roots. But we're learning that belief is not always enough. We need to take action. We need to take risks to set out beyond what is known perhaps to encounter the sea monsters and the Kraken. Today, we'll see what happens when dreams are fired upon, when empires clash, when people are caught between maps drawn in blood, politics, This is the story of Montcalm and Wolfe, of Quebec in flames, of indigenous nations caught between European ambitions. But more than that, this is the story of a turning point, a moment when the land beneath our feet changed flags and the soul of a nation went underground. So here's your question of reflection for today. What do you believe in deeply enough to fight for? And what happens to a dream or to a group of people if and when the map or their map is erased? Another question, and it's one that lingers like smoke in our modern world. What is Canada? Is it syrup and timbits? Politeness and poutine? Poutine? Or is it something older, something harder, like the granite of the Canadian Shield? Something forged in frost and fire? We're moving closer now to our present moment, 2025. But I'm going to slow you down once again, because before we get there, we need to understand what was lost, what was buried, but also what refused. and refuses to die. Let's begin. So much the better. I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec. These were the final words of Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, General of New France, as he lay dying in a crumbling, bloodied city on the edge of an empire. He had been struck in the stomach by British musket fire during the battle on the Plains of Abraham. And by the time the sun set on that September day in 1759, everything had changed. The fall of Quebec was not just the collapse of a fortress. It was the collapse of a world. In less than 20 minutes of gunfire and bayonets, in less than an episode of This Hour Has 22 Minutes, France's largest and last stronghold along the St. Lawrence was cracked open. An empire that had stretched from Louisbourg to the Great Lakes was now bleeding into the river. Montcalm, mortally wounded, refused medical treatment. He asked only to be buried quickly and away from the carnage. The surrender of France on the plains of Abraham, next to Quebec City, echoed across continents. The British general, James Wolfe, also died in the chaos, his body riddled with wounds. But the Redcoats, the British, held the high ground, and Wolfe's last breath was triumph. Grief. One died while celebrating victory, the other refusing to watch the world he built burn. And as the smoke lifted, the siege was over. La ville de Québec, Québec City, was battered, blackened, half-starved, yet it opened its gates. The fall of Québec was the turning point in a conflict that spanned oceans, what we now call the Seven Years' War. From the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, it was the true First World War. But its heart, its pivot was here, in the cold wind above the St. Lawrence River. The war had many names. In Europe, it was about dynasties. In the American colonies, it was the French and Indian War. But in Canada, this was the war that decided whose maps and whose languages would last. For generations, the French and British had been clashing over trade, territory, and influence. At first, these were quiet struggles, proxy wars through alliances. The Wendat, Algonquin, and Mi'kmaq traded and fought alongside the French. The Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, often sided with the British, but eventually, diplomacy gave way to flame. Forts rose like teeth across the land. Louisbourg on Cape Breton. Fort Duquesne in the Ohio Valley. Fort Frontenac at the foot of Lake Ontario. And with each one came more gunpowder, more steel, more germs, and more blood. The Siege of Quebec had begun months before the battle. British ships had sailed up the St. Lawrence and anchored across from the walled city. Day and night, their cannons thundered. The lower town crumbled. Fires burned unchecked. Food grew scarce. Disease crept into the alleys and cellars. One French priest wrote, quote, There's not a single house in the lower town that has not been pierced or broken. The air is thick with ash. The walls tremble. In early September, General Wolfe made a daring gamble. His scouts had found a hidden path, a narrow goat-like trail climbing up the cliffs west of the city at Anse aux Foulons. In the dead of night, British troops disembarked in silence, scaling the escarpment with rifles slung and hearts pounding. By dawn, they stood in ranks on the plains of Abraham, just beyond the walls of the fortified city of Quebec. Montcalm rushed to respond, expecting a skirmish, not a full-scale engagement. What he got instead was a rapid, ruthless encounter. The British fired a single, disciplined volley, then charged. Within a mere 15 minutes, the fate of New France, La Nouvelle France, was sealed. Wolfe was dead. Montcalm, dying. And Quebec, the jewel of the St. Lawrence, was lost. Montréal held on a little longer, but by the fall of 1760, it too would surrender. The war in Canada was over. The Treaty of Paris, signed three years later in 1763, made it all official. France ceded all its Canadian holdings to Britain. The fleur-de-lis was lowered. The Union Jack, hoisted. And yet, even in defeat, the story of New France refused to disappear. The French-speaking farmers, les habitants, stayed. They tilled the same soil. Their children learned the same lullabies. Priests still rang church bells over the river valleys and stone chapels. The voyageurs kept paddling their canoes, carving through forest and memory. The names on the map, Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Chicoutimi, still clung to the land. What Montcalm and Wolfe never saw was that the map they died over would never fully belong to one flag. Something older had taken root, something more resilient, not quite British and not entirely French. It was something born in the cold, stitched together in fur and frost, song and scar. The ghosts of New France lingered in the stones. And as the centuries turned, they whispered a different kind of story. Not one of empire, but of identity. A quiet defiance, a deep root. The soul of New France had not surrendered. It had simply gone underground, back into the rivers, the forests, the frost. Waiting and biding its time to rise once again. Before Canada was a country, it was an idea. We've been talking about this. And in 1837, that idea caught fire. It didn't start with muskets or militias. It began with ink. Across the wooded hills and stony towns of Upper and Lower Canada, now Ontario and Quebec, voices were rising. Not from armies or kings. but from farmers and printers, teachers and tavern goers. They gathered in churches, schoolhouses and inns. They passed letters hand to hand. They wrote in both French and English. And they started to ask a dangerous question. What if we governed ourselves? In Lower Canada, the heart of the resistance beat in the chest of Louis-Joseph Papineau, a lawyer, orator, and rising voice of a people long silenced. He led Les Patriotes, a reform movement that took hold in the Legislative Assembly of Lower Canada. Papineau demanded that elected representatives be granted real power. He called out colonial governors and British favouritism, denouncing a system that suppressed the rights of French Canadians under the Union Jack. Papineau was bold, articulate, relentless. In 1834, he and his supporters delivered the 92 Resolutions, a sweeping list of demands for civil rights, democratic reform, and justice. London's reply was swift and single-worded, non. What followed wasn't just discontent. It was an uprising. Protests ignited across the countryside. Papineau's speeches grew sharper, laced with urgency. People gathered arms, quietly at first. Old muskets, rusted blades, black powder traded under candlelight. When British troops were deployed to assert order, the line between protest and revolution vanished in the cold wind of November. The first shots were fired in Saint-Denis, north of Montréal. The rebels, farmers, carpenters, young boys with hunting rifles and nothing to lose, pushed back a column of British soldiers. It was muddy, chaotic and brutal. But somehow, against all odds, they won. Word of the victory spread like wildfire, but the embers burned fast. Just days later at Saint-Charles, British forces returned with vengeance in their boots and artillery at their side. The Redcoats blasted the rebels from their makeshift defenses and crushed what remained. Papineau fled into exile, slipping across the border to the United States. His dreams of a republic folded into the lining of his coat. The flame in Lower Canada sputtered, but it was not yet extinguished. To the west, in the towns and bush-covered roads of Upper Canada, another voice was rising, loud, ragged, and unrelenting. His name was William Lyon Mackenzie. He was a Scottish-born firebrand, part newspaperman, part street agitator, with wild hair, an unruly pen, and a personal vendetta against the ruling class. He detested the family compact, a small circle of powerful men who controlled the colony's land, its courts, and its politics. Mackenzie called it what it was, tyranny in waistcoats. From his paper, The Colonial Advocate, he shredded the establishment. He exposed corruption. He demanded universal suffrage, meaning the right to vote, public education, and merit over privilege. And when reform was ignored, he turned to revolution. In early December 1837, Mackenzie and several hundred supporters, armed with muskets, pitchforks, and conviction, marched down Yonge Street toward Toronto. Their aim was to seize control of government, but confusion reigned. Misinformation, fear, and poor planning ultimately derailed them. A single volley from the city's defenders shattered the advance. Mackenzie flew into the woods, disguised and on the run. In his most recent work, Adam Schultz discusses a really cool story about how McKenzie actually canoed over to Navy Island, just a couple of kilometers up river from Niagara Falls, made a secret camp and hid out with rebels in a top secret location until he was eventually found. But again, if you want to hear more about that, you've got to pick up Mr. Schultz's book, Where the Falcon Flies, as he tells so many of these cool stories. The rebellion in Upper Canada had collapsed almost as quickly as it began. Across both provinces, Ontario and Quebec, the price of insurrection was swift and severe. Dozens were hanged, hundreds imprisoned. Some were deported to Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania. Also, if you're a U2 fan, I encourage you, if you haven't heard it, one of the nicer songs, in my opinion, from U2 is actually sung by their guitarist, The Edge, and it's a song called Van Diemen's Land. It is beautiful, and it's just him playing a guitar. Check it out. The Redcoats kept control. The Union Jacks still flew... but something had shifted. The rebellions of 1837 may have failed with rifles and barricades, but they succeeded in stirring something deeper, a truth that could not be shot or jailed, nor banished. Canadians, French and English alike, wanted something more. Self-government, representation, dignity. In the ashes of these rebellions, a British official named Lord Durham arrived to investigate. What he found was not merely a colony in revolt, but a society divided. Two nations at odds within a single state. Quote, I expected to find a conflict between a government and a people, he wrote. I found two nations warring within the bosom of a single state. Durham's report in 1839 pulled no punches. He recommended a union of Upper and Lower Canada and the gradual implementation of responsible government. It was, in many ways, the first draft of Canadian democracy. The embers of rebellion had become the blueprint for reform. But it did not happen overnight. The changes, systemically usually, were and are slow, partial, fragile. And yet, something had begun. Not a nation born in conquest, but one forged in the failure of rebellion. One that insisted against the silence of empire, that this land could speak for itself. In the years ahead, Mackenzie would return from exile and serve in parliament. Papineau would return home, older, humbler, but unbroken. And in taverns, schoolrooms, and printing presses across the colonies, the idea of Canada would begin to take root. Not as a loyal outpost of empire, but as a place with its own story. A place whose people had tasted fire and yet still had chosen to dream. Before a country is built on paper, it is built in the bones. After the fires of 1837 died down, after the Redcoats marched home and the gallows fell silent, something lingered in the smoke. Something more durable than rebellion itself, It was a stubborn, restless spirit that refused to be crushed. It whispered in two languages, wound through river valleys and maple groves, echoed across frost-covered lakes and dense boreal forests. It lived in the pine-scented air of the Canadian Shield and whispered over the endless sweep of the Great Plains, to the 100th Meridian, where the Great Plains began. It was a spirit born not of easy victories, but of slow, grinding survival. It's a good life if you don't weaken. The people who stayed, French, English, Métis, Irish, Scottish, Black Loyalists, Indigenous, they did not inherit triumph. They inherited cold, hunger, hardship. A wilderness where snow swallowed trails whole. Where rivers froze and thawed with a terrible roaring violence. Where entire winters could pass without a letter reaching home. And yet they stayed. Some stayed because they had nowhere else to go. Others because they were stubborn or saw something here. Something untamed. Something that did not yet have a name but felt worth fighting for. It was a place that wasn't just another copy of Europe, another outpost of the Empire. A place that might, just might, become something different. But even in the 1840s and 1850s, Canada, as an idea, was still fragile. It was an echo, a wisp of smoke on the campfire. It was really a hope more than a plan. The old maps bore the scars of conquest, rivers renamed, villages erased, treaties broken and misunderstood. The rebellions had shaken the land but not mended it. Suspicion still simmered between French and English and the indigenous nations. The very ones who had guided and carried the first explorers were now being pushed to the edges of their own homelands. It would have been easy then, after the rebellions failed, for that spirit to wither into bitterness, to just give up, to break apart into a dozen petty colonies, isolated, weak, endlessly looking back toward Europe for permission to live. But that's simply not what happened. Somehow, through the long winters and longer memories, a quieter revolution took hold. Not a revolution of musket and barricades this time, but of endurance. It was a revolution of grit, reminiscent of what we're doing here with Canada 2.0, our Canadian Reformation. It was a different kind of courage, the daily stubborn kind, the kind that builds houses from black spruce and river stone, that plants wheat in frozen soil, that ferries timber down half-frozen rivers. that teaches children letters by the light of a smoky oil lamp in a one-room schoolhouse, battered by the wind. By the late 1840s, the pressure was building. Trade needed to flow. Defense needed to be organized. Roads needed to be built across marsh and mountain and snowfield. The colonies needed each other, whether they liked it or not. This historical context almost makes me think of a couple of words we hear a lot lately. quote, tariff wars. Yet, if we go back through history even a thousand years ago to the Hanseatic League on the North Sea that included cities in northern Germany and Scandinavia, or to Napoleon's Code of the early 1800s which sought to standardize currency, public education, and the continent of Europe in what you could, I guess you could call an early rendition of a sort of European Union, was his continental system, which planned to benefit France by bringing the rest of feudal Europe into a sense of structured modernity that persists to this day. Quebec and France still follow the French civil code of law, which has direct roots in Napoleon's code. It makes one long for the days when our political and social, quote, leaders knew about history, especially local history, as we need to be able to adapt to our local conditions, as opposed to believing that all parts of the world can be standardized and dehumanized for, quote, progress. Quote. Ooh, well, there's that word again. Progress. What does it mean again? There was no more illusion that the Empire would ride to the rescue. The British Crown saw Canada as a distant, costly, and troublesome entity. If there was to be a future there, if there was to be anything at all beyond lonely outposts and broken dreams, it could only be built by those who stayed. The rebellions had Failed to win immediate independence, but they had succeeded in planting a seed deeper than bullets or banners ever could. The dream had simply gone underground, into the roots of the spruce trees and into the frozen rivers, into the hard, quiet hearts of those who refused to go anywhere. It waited there, through years of doubt and silence, until it was stirred again. And when the Canadian dream rose, it would not sound like the blast of a cannon, but the steady hammering of iron on iron. It would rise in the clatter of sails stretching across wild country. It would rise in the hushed, urgent debates of a handful of men gathered in candlelit rooms by the sea. It would rise in the vision of something larger, not a conquest, but a weaving together. It would rise in a fragile, stubborn, and improbable thing. A country. A nation state. A country that, against all odds, would stitch itself across an entire continent. So maybe Canada isn't a finished painting. Maybe it's a fire in the dark. A river that keeps changing. A shared dream that still needs waking. Wherever you are, whatever you are facing, hold fast. Hold the line and walk true. Canada is not what we were. It's not yet what we will be. It's what we choose right now, in this moment, and what we choose next. It's in every name we remember. Every time we choose kindness and understanding instead of conflict. Canada is every story we tell. It's every future we build. We have been here before. This land has always and will always demand grit. From its first Indigenous peoples to its newest arrivals, we truly are all immigrants. We might argue, debate, rage, or even wish we lived somewhere else, but what we've inherited is rare and it's incredibly hard to find. Conditions elsewhere and other nations around the world are not all ritzy, glitzy, and glamorous. Let's take a dig around outside our normal everyday go-to social media or news channels to break the addictive algorithm that keeps us hooked in a loop of our own biases and predicaments. It's evidently not working, and a popular definition of psychopathy is to do the same thing over and over, but to expect a different outcome or results. We are Canadian Brit, and we are north of ordinary. The best of friends and family work hard out of an unconditional love, with no strings attached, to confirm what we know, what we think we know, and sometimes what we even let others influence us, or we act to influence them, to act conversely or opposite to True love and friendship, however, in my estimation, is also found in knowing how to measure appropriate amounts of such ego pumping with meaningful and constructive feedback. The process of peer reviewing, not only in academia, but for our own use, getting feedback... is part of our next episode where I'm going to bring to you a really cool German poem. And it's something I read in my master's in European studies. And I'm going to link that with a few other big ideas as we continue to Canadian Confederation. Until then, stay gritty, my friends. Stay cool during this heat wave. Let someone in in traffic, courtesy wave. But most of all, be kind. And we'll see you next time. Thank you for being here. Like, follow, and subscribe wherever you're listening on Instagram at Canadian Grit Media. And if you want to reach out with a cool story or an idea, my email is now working and the website will be coming soon. It's jamie at canadiangritmedia.ca. Thanks for coming back and see you next time for episode six.

SPEAKER_01: 28:51

Hey guys, it's Canadian Grit.