Canadian History Ten thousand years before Europeans set foot on the vast territories now known as Canada, indigenous peoples resided there. In fact, the name "Canada" derives from a native word meaning "village." The first Europeans to land on Canadian soil were Nordic Vikings from Greenland who accidentally discovered the richly forested regions of northern Newfoundland before 1000 and set up small settlements specifically to harvest lumber for their homes in Greenland. Lief Eriksson arrived in Newfoundland in 1000, after the original Viking Greenland colony had died out. Europeans did not set foot on Canada again until the late fifteenth century, when John Cabot, an Italian explorer under British patronage, sought a trade route to the Orient. Cabot's explorations of the northern coasts of North America gave England the right of discovery over those regions. The French sent Jacques Cartier in 1534 on an exploratory expedition, securing right of discovery for the French over some northern North American regions. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European interest in Canadian land focused on fishing waters and furs. The French especially vied for control over the fur trade. In 1608 the first permanent French colony in Canada was formed on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, under the guidance of geographer Samuel de Champlain. The settlement would become known as New France.

As the fur trade thrived, rivalries between French and English settlers eventually led to all-out wars. France was forced to cede some of its territories...

However, the truce was short-lived. In conjunction with the Seven Years' War fought in Europe from 1756 through 1763, France and England fought bloody battles on North American soil. These battles were aided on both sides by native peoples. Because decades earlier Champlain had made permanent enemies out of the Iroquois, that tribe willingly sided with the British in their efforts to oust the French. The Huron Indians, longtime enemies of the Iroquois who Champlain had aided years earlier, came to the aide of the French. Referred to as the French and Indian War in American history books, the battles between the French and British colonists in North America reflected an extended rivalry between the two European powers.
France was eventually forced to pull out of New France and thereafter focused its concern on Caribbean colonies. The British Crown passed the Quebec Act in 1774, establishing official boundaries of the former French territory and setting up organized government, penal systems and means of taxation for the still largely French population living in Quebec. After the Americans gained independence from the British in 1776, British loyalists who fought for the Crown in the newly formed United States fled to Canada, mostly to the Maritime Provinces such as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In 1791, the Crown split the territory of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada, establishing British rule of law in those regions that had previously been governed…