Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States, is the county seat of Allegheny County. As of 2018, a population of 308,144 lives within the city limits, making it the 63rd-largest city in the U. S; the metropolitan population of 2,362,453, is the largest in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, the 26th-largest in the U. S. Pittsburgh is located in the south west of the state, at the confluence of the Allegheny and Ohio rivers. Pittsburgh is known both as "the Steel City" for its more than 300 steel-related businesses and as the "City of Bridges" for its 446 bridges; the city features 30 skyscrapers, two inclined railways, a pre-revolutionary fortification and the Point State Park at the confluence of the rivers. The city developed as a vital link of the Atlantic coast and Midwest, as the mineral-rich Allegheny Mountains made the area coveted by the French and British empires, Whiskey Rebels, Civil War raiders. Aside from steel, Pittsburgh has led in manufacturing of aluminum, shipbuilding, foods, transportation, computing and electronics.
For part of the 20th century, Pittsburgh was behind only New York and Chicago in corporate headquarters employment. S. stockholders per capita. America's 1980s deindustrialization laid off area blue-collar workers and thousands of downtown white-collar workers when the longtime Pittsburgh-based world headquarters moved out; this heritage left the area with renowned museums, medical centers, research centers, a diverse cultural district. Today, Apple Inc. Bosch, Uber, Autodesk, Microsoft and IBM are among 1,600 technology firms generating $20.7 billion in annual Pittsburgh payrolls. The area has served as the long-time federal agency headquarters for cyber defense, software engineering, energy research and the nuclear navy; the area is home to 68 colleges and universities, including research and development leaders Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The nation's eighth-largest bank, eight Fortune 500 companies, six of the top 300 U. S. law firms make their global headquarters in the area, while RAND, BNY Mellon, FedEx, Bayer and NIOSH have regional bases that helped Pittsburgh become the sixth-best area for U.
S. job growth. In 2015, Pittsburgh was listed among the "eleven most livable cities in the world"; the region is a hub for Environmental Design and energy extraction. In 2019, Pittsburgh was deemed “Food City of the Year” by the San Francisco-based restaurant and hospitality consulting firm af&co. Many restaurants were mentioned favorable, among them were Superior Motors in Braddock, Driftwood Oven in Lawrenceville, Spork in Bloomfield, Fish nor Fowl in Garfield and Bitter Ends Garden & Luncheonette in Bloomfield. Pittsburgh was named in 1758 by General John Forbes, in honor of British statesman William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham; as Forbes was a Scot, he pronounced the name PITS-bər-ə. Pittsburgh was incorporated as a borough on April 22, 1794, with the following Act: "Be it enacted by the Pennsylvania State Senate and Pennsylvania House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania... by the authority of the same, that the said town of Pittsburgh shall be... erected into a borough, which shall be called the borough of Pittsburgh for ever."
From 1891 to 1911, the city's name was federally recognized as "Pittsburg", though use of the final h was retained during this period by the city government and other local organizations. After a public campaign, the federal decision to drop the h was reversed; the area of the Ohio headwaters was long inhabited by the Shawnee and several other settled groups of Native Americans. The first known European to enter the region was the French explorer/trader Robert de La Salle from Quebec during his 1669 expedition down the Ohio River. European pioneers Dutch, followed in the early 18th century. Michael Bezallion was the first to describe the forks of the Ohio in a 1717 manuscript, that year European fur traders established area posts and settlements. In 1749, French soldiers from Quebec launched an expedition to the forks to unite Canada with French Louisiana via the rivers. During 1753–54, the British hastily built Fort Prince George before a larger French force drove them off; the French built Fort Duquesne based on LaSalle's 1669 claims.
The French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years' War, began with the future Pittsburgh as its center. British General Edward Braddock was dispatched with Major George Washington as his aide to take Fort Duquesne; the British and colonial force were defeated at Braddock's Field. General John Forbes took the forks in 1758. Forbes began construction on Fort Pitt, named after William Pitt the Elder while the settlement was named "Pittsborough". During Pontiac's Rebellion, native tribes conducted a siege of Fort Pitt for two months until Colonel Henry Bouquet relieved it after the Battle of Bushy Run. Fort Pitt is notable as the site of an early use of smallpox for biological warfare. Lord Jeffery Amherst ordered blankets contaminated from smallpox victims to be distributed in 1763 to the tribes surrounding the fort; the disease spread into other areas, infected other tribes, killed hundreds of thousands. During this period, the powerful nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, based in New York, had maintained control of much of the Ohio Valley as hunting grounds by right of conquest after defeating other tribes.
By the terms of the 1768 Treaty of
Fort Pitt (Pennsylvania)
Fort Pitt was a fort built by British forces between 1759 and 1761 during the French and Indian War at the confluence of the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, where the Ohio River is formed in western Pennsylvania. It was near the site of Fort Duquesne, a French colonial fort built in 1754 as tensions increased between Great Britain and France in both Europe and North America; the French destroyed the fort in 1758. British colonial protection of this area led to the development of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, Pennsylvania by British-American colonists and immigrants. In April 1754, the French began building Fort Duquesne on the site of the small British Fort Prince George at the beginning of the French and Indian War; the Braddock expedition, a 1755 British attempt to take Fort Duquesne, met with defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela at present-day Braddock, Pennsylvania. The French garrison defeated an attacking British regiment in September 1758 at the Battle of Fort Duquesne. French Colonel de Lignery ordered Fort Duquesne destroyed and abandoned at the approach of General John Forbes' expedition in late November.
The Forbes expedition was successful where the Braddock expedition had failed because the British Treaty of Easton of 1758 had cut into former French alliances with Native American tribes. Chiefs of 13 American Indian nations agreed to negotiate peace with the colonial governments of Pennsylvania and New Jersey and to abandon any alliances with the French; the nations were the Six Nations of the Iroquois League, bands of the Lenape, the Shawnee. They agreed to the treaty based on the colonial governments' promising to respect their rights to hunting and territory in the Ohio Country, to prohibit establishing new settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains, to withdraw British and colonial military troops after the war; the American Indians wanted a trading post at Fort Duquesne, but they did not want a British army garrison or colonial settlement. The British named it Fort Pitt, after William Pitt the Elder; the fort was built from 1759 to 1761 during the French and Indian War, next to the site of former Fort Duquesne.
It was built in the popular pentagram shape, with bastions at the star points, by Captain Harry Gordon, a British Engineer in the 60th Royal American Regiment. After the colonial war and in the face of continued broken treaties, broken promises and encroachment by the Europeans, in 1763 the western Lenape and Shawnee took part in a Native uprising known as Pontiac's War, an effort to drive settlers out of the Native American territory; the American Indians' siege of Fort Pitt began on June 22, 1763, but they found it too well-fortified to be taken by force. In negotiations during the siege, Captain Simeon Ecuyer, the commander of Fort Pitt, gave two Delaware emissaries blankets, exposed to smallpox; the potential of this act to cause an epidemic among the American Indians was understood. Commander William Trent wrote that he hoped "it will have the desired effect." Colonel Henry Bouquet, leading a relief force, would discuss similar tactics with Commander-in-Chief Jeffery Amherst. The effectiveness of these attempts to spread the disease are unknown, although it is known that the method used is inefficient compared to respiratory transmission, it is difficult to differentiate from occurring epidemics resulting from previous contacts with colonists.
During and after Pontiac's War, epidemics of smallpox among Native Americans devastated the tribes of Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes areas. On August 1, 1763, most of the American Indians broke off the siege to intercept the approaching force under Colonel Bouquet. In the Battle of Bushy Run, Bouquet fought off the American Indian attack and relieved Fort Pitt on August 10. In 1772, after Pontiac's War, the British commander at Fort Pitt sold the building to two colonists, William Thompson and Alexander Ross. At that time, the Pittsburgh area was claimed by the colonies of both Virginia and Pennsylvania, which struggled for power over the region. After Virginians took control of Fort Pitt, they called it Fort Dunmore, in honour of Virginia's Governor Lord Dunmore; the fort served as a staging ground in Dunmore's War of 1774. During the American Revolutionary War, Fort Pitt served as a headquarters for the western theatre of the war. In present-day Michigan, the British garrisoned Fort Detroit.
A redoubt, a small brick outbuilding called the Blockhouse, survives in Point State Park as the sole remnant of Fort Pitt. Erected in 1764, it is believed to be the oldest building still standing in Pittsburgh. Used for many years as a private residence, the blockhouse was purchased and preserved for many years by the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. Notice was given to area residents of an auction of all salvageable remains of the fort on August 3, 1797 after the U. S. Army decommissioned the site. In the 20th century, the city of Pittsburgh commissioned archeological excavation of the foundations of Fort Pitt. Afterward, some of the fort was reconstructed to give visitors at Point State Park a sense of the size of the fort. In this rebuilt section, the Fort Pitt Museum is housed in the Monongahela Bastion, excavated portions of the fort were filled in. Fort Pitt Foundry was an important armaments manufacturing center for the Federal government during the Civil War, under the charge of William Metcalf.
The Allegheny Uprising starred Claire Trevor. In Cecil B. DeMille's Unconquered, starring Gary Cooper and Paulette Goddard, Howard Da Silva played a gunrunner and Boris Karloff a Seneca chief who lead an American Indian uprising in 1763
Virginia
Virginia the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a state in the Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States located between the Atlantic Coast and the Appalachian Mountains. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" due to its status as the first English colonial possession established in mainland North America and "Mother of Presidents" because eight U. S. presidents were born there, more than any other state. The geography and climate of the Commonwealth are shaped by the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Chesapeake Bay, which provide habitat for much of its flora and fauna; the capital of the Commonwealth is Richmond. The Commonwealth's estimated population as of 2018 is over 8.5 million. The area's history begins with several indigenous groups, including the Powhatan. In 1607 the London Company established the Colony of Virginia as the first permanent New World English colony. Slave labor and the land acquired from displaced Native American tribes each played a significant role in the colony's early politics and plantation economy.
Virginia was one of the 13 Colonies in the American Revolution. In the American Civil War, Virginia's Secession Convention resolved to join the Confederacy, Virginia's First Wheeling Convention resolved to remain in the Union. Although the Commonwealth was under one-party rule for nearly a century following Reconstruction, both major national parties are competitive in modern Virginia; the Virginia General Assembly is the oldest continuous law-making body in the New World. The state government was ranked most effective by the Pew Center on the States in both 2005 and 2008, it is unique in how it treats cities and counties manages local roads, prohibits its governors from serving consecutive terms. Virginia's economy has many sectors: agriculture in the Shenandoah Valley. S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency. Virginia has a total area of 42,774.2 square miles, including 3,180.13 square miles of water, making it the 35th-largest state by area. Virginia is bordered by Maryland and Washington, D.
C. to the north and east. Virginia's boundary with Maryland and Washington, D. C. extends to the low-water mark of the south shore of the Potomac River. The southern border is defined as the 36° 30′ parallel north, though surveyor error led to deviations of as much as three arcminutes; the border with Tennessee was not settled until 1893, when their dispute was brought to the U. S. Supreme Court; the Chesapeake Bay separates the contiguous portion of the Commonwealth from the two-county peninsula of Virginia's Eastern Shore. The bay was formed from the drowned river valleys of the James River. Many of Virginia's rivers flow into the Chesapeake Bay, including the Potomac, Rappahannock and James, which create three peninsulas in the bay; the Tidewater is a coastal plain between the fall line. It includes major estuaries of Chesapeake Bay; the Piedmont is a series of sedimentary and igneous rock-based foothills east of the mountains which were formed in the Mesozoic era. The region, known for its heavy clay soil, includes the Southwest Mountains around Charlottesville.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are a physiographic province of the Appalachian Mountains with the highest points in the state, the tallest being Mount Rogers at 5,729 feet. The Ridge and Valley region includes the Great Appalachian Valley; the region includes Massanutten Mountain. The Cumberland Plateau and the Cumberland Mountains are in the southwest corner of Virginia, south of the Allegheny Plateau. In this region, rivers flow northwest, into the Ohio River basin; the Virginia Seismic Zone has not had a history of regular earthquake activity. Earthquakes are above 4.5 in magnitude, because Virginia is located away from the edges of the North American Plate. The largest earthquake, at an estimated 5.9 magnitude, was in 1897 near Blacksburg. A 5.8 magnitude earthquake struck central Virginia on August 2011, near Mineral. The earthquake was felt as far away as Toronto and Florida. 35 million years ago, a bolide impacted. The resulting Chesapeake Bay impact crater may explain what earthquakes and subsidence the region does experience.
Coal mining takes place in the three mountainous regions at 45 distinct coal beds near Mesozoic basins. Over 64 million tons of other non-fuel resources, such as slate, sand, or gravel, were mined in Virginia in 2018; the state's carbonate rock is filled with more than 4,000 caves, ten of which are open for tourism, including the popular Luray Caverns and Skyline Caverns. The climate of Virginia is humid subtropical and becomes warmer and more humid farther south and east. Seasonal extremes vary from average lows of 26 °F in January to average highs of 86 °F in July; the Atlantic Ocean has a strong effect on southeastern coastal areas of the state. Influenced by the Gulf Stream, coastal weather is subject to hurricanes, most pronouncedly near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. In spite of its position adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean the coastal areas have a significant continental influence with quite large temperature differences between summ
Mobile, Alabama
Mobile is the county seat of Mobile County, United States. The population within the city limits was 195,111 as of the 2010 United States Census, making it the third most populous city in Alabama, the most populous in Mobile County, the largest municipality on the Gulf Coast between New Orleans, St. Petersburg, Florida. Alabama's only saltwater port, Mobile is located on the Mobile River at the head of the Mobile Bay and the north-central Gulf Coast; the Port of Mobile has always played a key role in the economic health of the city, beginning with the settlement as an important trading center between the French colonists and Native Americans, down to its current role as the 12th-largest port in the United States. Mobile is the principal municipality of the Mobile metropolitan area; this region of 412,992 residents is composed of Mobile County. Mobile is the largest city in the Mobile-Daphne−Fairhope CSA, with a total population of 604,726, the second largest in the state; as of 2011, the population within a 60-mile radius of Mobile is 1,262,907.
Mobile was established in 1702 by the French as the first capital of colonial La Louisiane. During its first 100 years, Mobile was a colony of France Britain, lastly Spain. Mobile first became a part of the United States of America in 1813, with the annexation by President James Madison of West Florida from Spain. In 1861, Alabama joined the Confederate States of America, which surrendered in 1865. Considered one of the Gulf Coast's cultural centers, Mobile has several art museums, a symphony orchestra, professional opera, professional ballet company, a large concentration of historic architecture. Mobile is known for having the oldest organized Carnival or Mardi Gras celebrations in the United States, its French Catholic colonial settlers celebrated this festival from the first decade of the 18th century. Beginning in 1830, Mobile was host to the first formally organized Carnival mystic society to celebrate with a parade in the United States; the city gained its name from the Mobile tribe that the French colonists encountered living in the area of Mobile Bay.
Although debated by Alabama historians, they may have been descendants of the Native American tribe whose small fortress town, was used to conceal several thousand native warriors before an attack in 1540 on the expedition of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto. About seven years after the founding of the French Mobile settlement, the Mobile tribe, along with the Tohomé, gained permission from the colonists to settle near the fort; the European settlement of Mobile began with French colonists, who in 1702 constructed Fort Louis de la Louisiane, at Twenty-seven Mile Bluff on the Mobile River, as the first capital of the French colony of La Louisiane. It was founded by French Canadian brothers Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, to establish control over France's claims to La Louisiane. Bienville was appointed as royal governor of French Louisiana in 1701. Mobile's Roman Catholic parish was established on July 20, 1703, by Jean-Baptiste de la Croix de Chevrières de Saint-Vallier, Bishop of Quebec.
The parish was the first French Catholic parish established on the Gulf Coast of the United States. In 1704 the ship Pélican delivered 23 French women to the colony. Though most of the "Pélican girls" recovered, numerous colonists and neighboring Native Americans contracted the disease in turn and many died; this early period was the occasion of the importation of the first African slaves, transported aboard a French supply ship from the French colony of Saint-Domingue in the Caribbean, where they had first been held. The population of the colony fluctuated over the next few years, growing to 279 persons by 1708, yet descending to 178 persons two years due to disease; these additional outbreaks of disease and a series of floods resulted in Bienville ordering that the settlement be relocated in 1711 several miles downriver to its present location at the confluence of the Mobile River and Mobile Bay. A new earth-and-palisade Fort Louis was constructed at the new site during this time. By 1712, when Antoine Crozat was appointed to take over administration of the colony, its population had reached 400 persons.
The capital of La Louisiane was moved in 1720 to Biloxi, leaving Mobile to serve as a regional military and trading center. In 1723 the construction of a new brick fort with a stone foundation began and it was renamed Fort Condé in honor of Louis Henri, Duc de Bourbon and prince of Condé. In 1763, the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the Seven Years' War, which Britain won, defeating France. By this treaty, France ceded its territories east of the Mississippi River to Britain; this area was made a part of the expanded British West Florida colony. The British changed the name of Fort Condé to Fort Charlotte, after Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and queen with King George III; the British were eager not to lose any useful inhabitants and promised religious tolerance to the French colonists. The first permanent Jewish settlers came to Mobile in 1763 as a result of the new British rule and religious tolerance. Jews had not been allowed to reside in colonial French Louisiana due to the Code Noir, a decree passed by France's King Louis XIV in 1685 that forbade the exercise of any religion other than Roman Catholicism, ordered all Jews out of France's colonies.
Most of these colonial-era Jews in Mobile were merchants and traders from Sephardic Jewish communities in Savannah, Georgia and Ch
Ohio Company
The Ohio Company, formally known as the Ohio Company of Virginia, was a land speculation company organized for the settlement by Virginians of the Ohio Country and to trade with the Native Americans. The company had a land grant from Britain and a treaty with Indians, but France claimed the area, the conflict helped provoke the outbreak of the French and Indian War. Virginian explorers recognized the potential of the Ohio region for colonization and moved to capitalize on it, as well as to block French expansion into the territory. In 1748, Thomas Lee and brothers Lawrence and Augustine Washington organized the Ohio Company to represent the prospecting and trading interests of Virginian investors. In addition to the mandate and investment of Virginia Royal Governor Robert Dinwiddie, other original members included John Hanbury, Colonel Thomas Cresap, George Mercer, John Mercer, "all of His Majesty's Colony of Virginia." In that same year, George Mercer petitioned King George for land in the Ohio country, in 1749, the British Crown granted the company 500,000 acres in the Ohio Valley between the Kanawha River and the Monongahela.
The grant was in two parts: the first 200,000 acres were promised, the following 300,000 acres were to be granted if the Ohio Company settled one hundred families within seven years. Furthermore, the Ohio Company was required to construct a fort and provide a garrison to protect the settlement at their own expense, but the land grant was tax free for ten years to facilitate settlement. The organizers signed a treaty of friendship and permission at Logstown with the main tribes in the region in 1752. A rival group of land speculators from Virginia, the Loyal Company of Virginia, was organized about the same time, included influential Virginians such as Thomas Walker and Peter Jefferson. In 1752 George Mason to become a major founding father, became treasurer of the Ohio Company, a post he held for forty years until his death in 1792. In 1748–1750, the Ohio Company hired Thomas Cresap who had opened a trading fort and founded Oldtown, Maryland on the foot of the eastern climb up the Cumberland Narrows along what was soon to be called the Nemacolin Trail, one of only three mid-mountain-range crossings of the Appalachian Ridge and Valley system outside the Hudson-Great Lakes route, or southern Georgia-Mississippi-Western Tennessee plains route.
Cresap was given a contract to blaze a small road over the mountains to the Monongahela River, to start widening this road into a wagon road. In 1750, the Ohio Company hired Christopher Gist, a skillful woodsman and surveyor, to explore the Ohio Valley in order to identify lands for potential settlement, he surveyed by estimating the Kanawhan Region and the Ohio Valley tributaries beginning in 1750, 1751 and 1753. His journals provide valuable insights of the Alleghenies. Gist travelled as far west as the Miami Indian village of Pickawillany. Upon the basis of his report, the Ohio Company settled in an area in Western Pennsylvania and present-day West Virginia. In 1752 the company had a pathway blazed between the small fortified posts at Wills Creek, Redstone Old Fort; the settlement efforts were complicated by the conflicting land claims of the time. The Ohio Country ceded by the King through Governor Dinwiddie included, in Dinwiddie's opinion, the "forks of the Monongahela," present-day Pittsburgh.
In addition to the Pennsylvania colonial government claims of this territory, the French were fighting for and occupying much of the Ohio Valley, most notably at Fort Duquesne. Dinwiddie responded by sending a military unit under the command of George Washington to the region, which led to the outbreak of the French and Indian War. In 1763, the Ohio Company sent a representative to petition the British Crown for a grant renewal; the plans for settlement and military development continued, with Henry Bouquet's 1764 plans to construct military posts around prospective western settlements. However, following Pontiac's War, land claims west of the Appalachian Mountains were forfeited to the Native American tribes in the Proclamation of 1763, requiring them to be re-purchased through King George III. In 1768, the British government authorized Sir William Johnson to make the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, purchasing land rights from the Iroquois, in accordance with the Proclamation of 1763. Samuel Wharton and William Trent applied for a "despoiled traders" land grant in 1768, to get approved by the British Crown, they joined with a number of other land speculators to form the Walpole Company, named for Thomas Walpole, a British lawyer involved in the endeavor.
The goal was acquiring 2.5 million acres of Ohio Country land. Benjamin Franklin was one of the seventy-two shareholders, as well as included George Croghan and Sir William Johnson; the Walpole Company, Indiana Company, members of the Ohio Company reorganized, on December 22, 1769, formed the Grand Ohio Company. In 1772, the Grand Ohio Company received from the British government a grant of a large tract lying along the southern bank of the Ohio as far west as the mouth of the Scioto River. A colony to be called "Vandalia" was planned. However, the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War interrupted colonization and nothing was accomplished; the company, based in London, ceased operations in 1776. The Ohio Company of Associates was organized in 1786, composed of New England veterans wh
French colonization of the Americas
The French colonization of the Americas began in the 16th century, continued on into the following centuries as France established a colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere. France founded colonies in much of eastern North America, on a number of Caribbean islands, in South America. Most colonies were developed to export products such as fish, rice and furs; as they colonized the New World, the French established forts and settlements that would become such cities as Quebec and Montreal in Canada. The French first came to the New World as explorers, seeking a route to wealth. Major French exploration of North America began under the rule of King of France. In 1524, Francis sent Italian-born Giovanni da Verrazzano to explore the region between Florida and Newfoundland for a route to the Pacific Ocean. Verrazzano gave the names Francesca and Nova Gallia to that land between New Spain and English Newfoundland, thus promoting French interests. In 1534, Francis I of France sent Jacques Cartier on the first of three voyages to explore the coast of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River.
He founded New France by planting a cross on the shore of the Gaspé Peninsula. The French subsequently tried to establish several colonies throughout North America that failed, due to weather, disease, or conflict with other European powers. Cartier attempted to create the first permanent European settlement in North America at Cap-Rouge in 1541 with 400 settlers but the settlement was abandoned the next year after bad weather and attacks from Native Americans in the area. A small group of French troops were left on Parris Island, South Carolina in 1562 to build Charlesfort, but left after a year when they were not resupplied by France. Fort Caroline established in present-day Jacksonville, Florida, in 1564, lasted only a year before being destroyed by the Spanish from St. Augustine. An attempt to settle convicts on Sable Island off Nova Scotia in 1598 failed after a short time. In 1599, a sixteen-person trading post was established in Tadoussac, of which only five men survived the first winter.
In 1604 Pierre Du Gua de Monts and Samuel de Champlain founded a short-lived French colony, the first in Acadia, on Saint Croix Island, presently part of the state of Maine, much plagued by illness scurvy. The following year the settlement was moved to Port Royal, located in present-day Nova Scotia. Samuel de Champlain explored the Great Lakes. In 1634, Jean Nicolet founded La Baye des Puants, one of the oldest permanent European settlements in America. In 1634, Sieur de Laviolette founded Trois-Rivières. In 1642, Paul de Chomedey, Sieur de Maisonneuve, founded Fort Ville-Marie, now known as Montreal. Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette founded Sault Sainte Marie and Saint Ignace and explored the Mississippi River. At the end of the 17th century, René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle established a network of forts going from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence River. Fort Saint Louis was established in Texas in 1685, but was gone by 1688. Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit in 1701 and Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville founded La Nouvelle Orléans in 1718.
Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville founded Baton Rouge in 1719.. The French were eager to explore North America but New France remained unpopulated. Due to the lack of women, intermarriages between French and Indians were frequent, giving rise to the Métis people. Relations between the French and Indians were peaceful; as the 19th-century historian Francis Parkman stated: "Spanish civilization crushed the Indian. Louis XIV tried to increase the population by sending 800 young women nicknamed the "King's Daughters". However, the low density of population in New France remained a persistent problem. At the beginning of the French and Indian War, the British population in North America outnumbered the French 20 to 1. France fought a total of six colonial wars in North America. In 1562, Charles IX, under the leadership of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny sent Jean Ribault and a group of Huguenot settlers in an attempt to colonize the Atlantic coast and found a colony on a territory which will take the name of the French Florida.
They discovered the probe and Port Royal Island, which will be called by Parris Island in South Carolina, on which he built a fort named Charlesfort. The group, led by René Goulaine de Laudonnière, moved to the south where they founded the Fort Caroline on the Saint John's river in Florida on June 22, 1564; this irritated the Spanish who claimed Florida and
Fur trade
The fur trade is a worldwide industry dealing in the acquisition and sale of animal fur. Since the establishment of a world fur market in the early modern period, furs of boreal and cold temperate mammalian animals have been the most valued; the trade stimulated the exploration and colonization of Siberia, northern North America, the South Shetland and South Sandwich Islands. Today the importance of the fur trade has diminished. Animal rights organizations oppose the fur trade, citing that animals are brutally killed and sometimes skinned alive. Fur has been replaced in some clothing by synthetic imitations, for example, as in ruffs on hoods of parkas. Before the European colonization of the Americas, Russia was a major supplier of fur pelts to Western Europe and parts of Asia, its trade developed in the Early Middle Ages, first through exchanges at posts around the Baltic and Black seas. The main trading market destination was the German city of Leipzig. Kievan Russia, the first Russian State, was the first supplier of the Russian Fur Trade.
Russia exported raw furs, consisting in most cases of the pelts of martens, wolves, foxes and hares. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, Russians began to settle in Siberia, a region rich in many mammal fur species, such as Arctic fox, sable, sea otter and stoat. In a search for the prized sea otter pelts, first used in China, for the northern fur seal, the Russian Empire expanded into North America, notably Alaska. From the 17th through the second half of the 19th century, Russia was the world's largest supplier of fur; the fur trade played a vital role in the development of Siberia, the Russian Far East and the Russian colonization of the Americas. As recognition of the importance of the trade to the Siberian economy, the sable is a regional symbol of the Ural Sverdlovsk Oblast and the Siberian Novosibirsk and Irkutsk Oblasts of Russia; the European discovery of North America, with its vast forests and wildlife the beaver, led to the continent becoming a major supplier in the 17th century of fur pelts for the fur felt hat and fur trimming and garment trades of Europe.
Fur was relied on to make warm clothing, a critical consideration prior to the organization of coal distribution for heating. Portugal and Spain played major roles in fur trading after the 15th century with their business in fur hats. From as early as the 10th century and boyars of Novgorod had exploited the fur resources "beyond the portage", a watershed at the White Lake that represents the door to the entire northwestern part of Eurasia, they began by establishing trading posts along the Volga and Vychegda river networks and requiring the Komi people to give them furs as tribute. Novgorod, the chief fur-trade center prospered as the easternmost trading post of the Hanseatic League. Novgorodians expanded farther east and north, coming into contact with the Pechora people of the Pechora River valley and the Yugra people residing near the Urals. Both of these native tribes offered more resistance than the Komi, killing many Russian tribute-collectors throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries.
As Muscovy gained more power in the 15th century and proceeded in the "gathering of the Russian lands", the Muscovite state began to rival the Novgorodians in the North. During the 15th century Moscow began subjugating many native tribes. One strategy involved exploiting antagonisms between tribes, notably the Komi and Yugra, by recruiting men of one tribe to fight in an army against the other tribe. Campaigns against native tribes in Siberia remained insignificant until they began on a much larger scale in 1483 and 1499. Besides the Novgorodians and the indigenes, Muscovites had to contend with the various Muslim Tatar khanates to the east of Muscovy. In 1552 Ivan IV, the Tsar of All the Russias, took a significant step towards securing Russian hegemony in Siberia when he sent a large army to attack the Kazan Tartars and ended up obtaining the territory from the Volga to the Ural Mountains. At this point the phrase "ruler of Obdor and all Siberian lands" became part of the title of the Tsar in Moscow.
So, problems ensued after 1558 when Ivan IV sent Grigory Stroganov to colonize land on the Kama and to subjugate and enserf the Komi living there. The Stroganov family soon came into conflict with the Khan of Sibir. Ivan told the Stroganovs to hire Cossack mercenaries to protect the new settlement from the Tatars. From ca 1581 the band of Cossacks led by Yermak Timofeyevich fought many battles that culminated in a Tartar victory and the temporary end to Russian occupation in the area. In 1584 Ivan’s son Fyodor sent military governors and soldiers to reclaim Yermak conquests and to annex the land held by the Khanate of Sibir. Similar skirmishes with Tartars took place across Siberia. Russian conquerors treated the natives of Siberia as exploited enemies who were inferior to them; as they penetrated deeper into Siberia, traders built outposts or winter lodges called zimovya where they lived and collected fur tribute from native tribes. By 1620 Russia dominated the land from the Urals eastward to the Yenisey valley and to the Altai Mountains in the south, comprising about 1.25 million square miles of land.
Furs would become Russia's largest source of wealth during the seventeenth centuries. Keeping up with the advances of Western Europe required significant capital and Russia did not have sources of gold and silver, but it did have furs, which became known as "soft gold" and provided Russia with hard cur
New France
Great Britain
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