France and England in North America, Part IV: The Old Régime in Canada

Francis Parkman's monumental history enters the blood-soaked forests of 17th-century Canada, where the French colonial enterprise teeters on the edge of annihilation. The Iroquois Confederacy, armed with English muskets and driven by ancient fury, has declared war on New France. Governor Tracy's brutal retaliatory expeditions, the martyred Jesuits wandering into hostile villages to convert souls they may never rescue, the intendants struggling to govern a colony that seems always on the verge of collapse, Parkman renders it all with the intensity of epic fiction. This is history written as lived experience: the winter starvations, the scalp dances, the theological debates interrupted by warwhoops in the darkness beyond the stockade walls. Parkman, who personally canoed much of the territory he describes, brings a romantic's passion and an archaeologist's precision to the story of how New France survived its first great crisis. For readers who believe history should read like adventure, this is an indispensable account of the colonial foundations of North America.