by JULIET WATERS

It’s hard to imagine, even with all the ghosts and goblins running around this weekend, what a truly terrifying place Montreal once was. In 1689, for instance, what is now the neighbourhood of Lachine was the site of the worst massacre in the history of the city.

Toronto Star book critic Philip Marchand was in town last week to promote Ghost Empire, a quirky, melancholic travelogue along the route through North America mapped out by Robert Cavalier de La Salle. Marchand remembers coming here a few years ago for research. “I was looking for that little museum in a house that was built by one of La Salle’s tenants,” he says. “You’re driving through the streets of these three-storey apartments and then you find it, and there’s also a little playground for kids, which is where, actually, the massacre took place.”

Here’s a story we probably won’t want to tell the kids, especially since, historically, it’s highly debatable: For centuries, legend had it that the 200 inhabitants the Iroquois massacred on the spot were the lucky ones. Of the 120 who were captured and brought across the rapids to the Iroquois camp on the South Shore, many were rumoured to be children whose mothers were forced to turn the spit on which they were roasted alive.

As Marchand points out, the number of victims seems to have been exaggerated, and if anything close to this actually happened, it happened a few years after La Salle’s death. What Marchand doesn’t include, however, is that the massacre was most probably a retaliation for an event that took place in 1687. A delegation of 40 Onondaga envoys arrived to negotiate a cease-fire and were seized and sent back to France as slaves. As a follow up, France launched a massive invasion several thousand strong into the heart of the Seneca homeland, burning villages, destroying fields and desecrating graves. Either way you cut it, Montreal’s earliest years were not the safest times for anyone. It was, in fact, generally considered one of the most dangerous spots in North America.

But the truth remains that La Salle was one of the only explorers who ever established a mutual respect with the Iroquois. He learned their language, an extremely difficult and rare accomplishment, and in general got along way better with the Iroquois than with his own people.

“La Salle was a man who was obviously emotionally disturbed—borderline psychotic,” says Marchand. “And that’s what makes him fascinating. That and the fact that he was able to communicate so well with the natives.”

In comparing La Salle to other explorers, Marchand brings up Hernando De Soto, who conquered the land that is now Florida, as an example that “so many of them had such bloody reputations, but La Salle—never.”

One thing La Salle is better known for is an embarrassing and failed attempt to reach China. Lachine was named in angry mockery of his exploits, which no doubt tended to funnel money away from much needed fortification of the settlements. Nevertheless, La Salle was one of the New World’s greatest explorers. Following the Great Lakes inland, he headed down the Mississippi, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, eventually claiming all this land for France. Finally, in a story that reads like a prototype for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, La Salle was murdered by his own men on a disastrous mission to Texas.

Had France put more effort into retaining the land La Salle claimed, there might still exist an alternative French speaking nation right through the middle of the continent, making all of North America a little more like Canada. But they didn’t. “If there were a real loser in France’s failure to make good on La Salle’s claim,” Marchand writes in Ghost Empire, “it was the Indian nations, who were thereby deprived of a counterweight in their diplomatic and military struggles to retain their independence.” Even the U.S. might have benefited in ways they are currently oblivious to. But just as it’s hard to imagine the dangerous early days of Montreal, it’s probably even harder to imagine café dwelling Texans speaking French.

Ghost Empire by Philip Marchand,
McClelland & Stewart, hc, 444pp, $37.99