Thomas Guthrie Marquis

The War Chief of the Ottawas is a Native American history text by Thomas Guthrie Marquis. There was rejoicing throughout the Thirteen Colonies, in the month of September 1760, when news arrived of the capitulation of Montreal. Bonfires flamed forth and prayers were offered up in the churches and meeting-houses in gratitude for deliverance from a foe that for over a hundred years had harried and had caused the Indians to harry the frontier settlements. The French armies were defeated by land; the French fleets were beaten at sea. The troops of the enemy had been removed from North America, and so powerless was France on the ocean that, even if success should crown her arms on the European continent, where the Seven Years' War was still raging, it would be impossible for her to transport a new force to America.

Sangrientas guerras entre tribus hasta el exterminio, corsarios ingleses, cazadores de cabelleras, empalizadas, tomahawks, viajes en canoa, rios cubiertos de hielo, comercio de pieles, zonas inexploradas, predicadores, conversos, martires... En este libro, el lector podra asomarse al fascinante relato de la Evangelizacion en las tierras salvajes de America del Norte. Los franciscanos y, sobre todo, los jesuitas, tuvieron que trabajar como exploradores, arquitectos, linguistas, medicos, agricultores, ganaderos y geografos, todo ello al servicio de su mision principal: llevar la Cruz a los pueblos que aun no la conocian. En las misiones jesuiticas de las zonas que actualmente corresponden al Canada y al norte de los Estados Unidos, un punado de hombres llenos de fe soportaron durisimas penalidades para predicar el Evangelio entre hurones, iroqueses, algonquinos y otras muchas tribus indias, recibiendo en algunos casos, la corona del martirio de manos de los mismos indios.

These three works, displaying marked differences in purpose, tone, and effect, are all classics of Canadian literary and cultural criticism. John George Bourinot was a man of letters, an Imperialist, and a biculturalist, who was confident of his knowledge of the Canadian identity and felt it to be his public mission to align reality with his own personal vision. Writing in 1893 to the élite represented by the members of the Royal Society, he described his work as ‘a monograph on the intellectual development of the Dominion,’ describing ‘the progress of culture in a country still struggling with the difficulties of the material development of half a continent.’ Two decades later, Thomas Guthrie Marquis and Camille Roy wrote what were, in contrast, specialized assignments, contributions to the compendium history, Canada and Its Provinces (1913). Addressing a far larger audience, and treating a vastly enlarged body of Canadian literature, their work comes much closer to contemporary scholarship, with greater clarity, organization, and sheer bulk of information, but with the loss of some of the charm and assurance of Bourinot’s wide sweep. In further contrast to Bourinot’s determined biculturalism and will to unity, Roy and Marquis’ essays display vivid differences in the emotional allegiances and convictions of the founding cultures. Marquis starts by asking the question, ‘Has Canada a voice of her own in literature distinct from that of England?’; Roy treats French-Canadian literature in its Roman Catholic contexts.