The Legal Complaint of Gabriel de La Forest: A Seventeenth Century French Canadian Fur Trader

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About The Legal Complaint Of Gabriel De La Forest: A

“The Legal Complain of Gabriel de La Forest” is a late 17th century legal brief, or factum, submitted on behalf of a French Canadian prisoner of war against an English military commander.Gabriel Testard de La Forest (1661-97) was a French Canadian military officer. He was born in the city of Montreal, Quebec, which was part of the French colony of New France at the time. His parents were Jacques Testard de La Fores and Marie Pournin.In the 17th and 18th centuries England and France competed for control of the eastern parts of North America, and La Forest’s legal complaint (called a factum or legal brief) emerged from one of these conflicts.In the early 17th century, both England and France began to colonize North America. The English settled the eastern seaboard of the United States. Their 1st successful colony was located at Jamestown, Virginia. A later English colony was set up at Plymouth, Massachusetts, by the Calvinist Puritan Pilgrim Fathers.While the English were colonizing the US, the French were establishing settlements in what are now Maritime Canada and Quebec’s St. Lawrence Valley. The earliest French colonies in Canada were founded by Samuel de Champlain in the 1st decade of the 17th century.The most important industry in the northern part of North America was the fur trade. French Canadian fur traders, known as coureurs de bois (runners of the woods), pushed deep into the interior of Canada and the US Midwest from bases in Montreal and elsewhere.In the late 17th century, the English set up the competing Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), which was based on Hudson’s Bay in northern Canada. The headquarters of the HBC was York Factory, in Manitoba at the mouth of Hayes River on the southwestern coast of the bay.In 1694 a French force led by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville (1661-1706) captured York Factory from the English. Le Moyne was born in Ville-Marie, Montreal, and is remembere