In Quebec City!

View of the St. Lawrence River from the Terrace of the Fairmont Le Château Frontenac Hotel

Dear Commons Community,

Elaine and I are in Quebec City right now on vacation. We are staying at a quaint inn in the “old town.” The City is very European and the people proud of their French heritage.

Quebec has an amazing history, much of which is preserved in its architecture and monuments. Its origins go back to 1534–35, when the French explorer Jacques Cartier landed at present-day Gaspé and took possession of the land in the name of the king of France. Cartier brought with him the 16th-century European traditions of mercantile expansion to a land where a few thousand Indigenous People (First Nations) and Inuit (the Arctic people of Canada) had been living for thousands of years. Permanent European settlement of the region began only in 1608, when Samuel de Champlain established a fort at Cape Diamond, the site of present-day Quebec city, then called Stadacona.

Quebec was the scene of the famous Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. General James Wolfe led a fleet of 49 ships holding 8,640 British troops to the fortress of Quebec. They disembarked on Île d’Orléans and on the south shore of the river; the French forces under Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, Marquis de Saint-Veran, held the walled city and the north shore. Wolfe laid siege to the city for more than two months, exchanging cannon fire over the river. Both Wolfe and Montcalm died in battle. The French lost to the British and as a result, ceded its North American territory to the King of England.

As a side note, the air pollution from Western Canadian wildfires that devastated parts of the Eastern United States last week have dissipated in Quebec City because the prevailing winds here are Southeast.

Here are photographs of Quebec taken in the past two days.

Tony

Statue of Samuel de Champlain