I'm actually 364 years old...but who's counting...
In 1535 the French explorer Jacques Cartier was the first European known to land on Montreal Island. The city of Montreal (at first also called Ville Marie) was founded in May 1642 as a missionary colony. The city's founder and first governor, Paul de Chomedey, sieur de Maisonneuve, settled along the Saint Lawrence with some 40 colonists. After difficult beginnings, the city prospered as the fur-trading center of the French colony of New France and became the gateway to the western interior. By 1760 the city's population of French origin had reached about 4,000.
In 1760 Montreal surrendered to British forces that were completing their conquest of Canada during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). In the wake of the British conquest a small group of enterprising merchants, mostly Scots, took over the fur trade. Their ventures grew into the North West Company, which built a powerful fur-trading empire reaching to the Arctic and Pacific oceans.
Blah, Blah, Blah...
I'm a city, surrounded by water. What more do you want to know. There's a civil war going on between the English and the French. Vive le Quebec! I say bite me! When Quebec seperates, I'm taking my buildings, my trees, and my hump of a mountain and off I go...maybe I'll become a new province, what do you think? All I know is I'll never be a state!
