Louis de Buade de Frontenac
Frontenac was governor of New France twice, from 1672 to 1682 and from 1689 until his death, a ruined courtier of fifty sent out to a colony of seven thousand people, who quarrelled with the intendant, the bishop, the Jesuits and the Sovereign Council until the king recalled him, and who in his second term, at seventy, held the colony through the war with the English and the Iroquois, answered the New England fleet's summons at Quebec in 1690 with the words that he would reply by the mouths of his cannon. He marched against the Iroquois villages at seventy-four. He was a soldier of the Thirty Years' War, wounded in Italy, a brigadier at twenty-four, a friend of Turenne, and by 1672 so deep in debt that the governorship was a refuge from his creditors. In the first term he built Fort Frontenac at the outlet of Lake Ontario, against orders, as a post for the fur trade in which he and the explorer La Salle were partners, backed that explorer's descent of the Mississippi, and fought the intendant Duchesneau and the bishop Laval over the brandy trade with the Indians, which he protected. They fought over precedence in everything. Louis XIV recalled both governor and intendant in 1682. In 1689 the Iroquois destroyed Lachine, the English war began, and the king sent him back with a plan to take New York that came to nothing. He sent three war parties instead against Schenectady, Salmon Falls and Casco Bay in the winter of 1690, with Canadian militia and Indian allies, which set the pattern of the frontier wars for seventy years. In October a New England fleet of thirty-four ships came from Boston to Quebec and was sent away after a week. He rebuilt the fort on Lake Ontario, reopened the western fur trade the court had wanted closed, and in 1696 led two thousand men into the Onondaga country, burning the villages and the corn, which brought the Iroquois to the peace his successor signed in 1701. He died at Quebec in November 1698 at seventy-six and was buried in the Recollet church, reconciled at the end with the intendant who had been his last enemy.
- Lived: 1622 CE – 1698 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: governor, colonial administrator, soldier
