A settlement of some kind was made at Chicoutimi, on the Saguenay, early in the eighteenth century. A chapel and store, still standing in 1808, bore an inscription that they had been built in 1707. Father Coquart records that in 1750 there was a saw-mill on the River Oupaouétiche, one and a half leagues above Chicoutimi, which worked two saws night and day.
Along my fathers’ dykes I roam again, Among the willows by the river-side. These miles of green I know from hill to tide, And every creek and river’s ruddy stain. Neglected long and shunned, our dead have lain. Here, where a people’s dearest hope has died, Alone of all their children scattered wide, I scan the sad memorials that remain. HERBIN.
Some time about the middle of the seventeenth century, an Acadian, sailing perhaps from Port Royal in search of peltries or of mere adventure, brought his little vessel by great good luck safely through that treacherous channel, guarded at one end by Cape Split and at the other by the frowning crest of Blomidon, and found himself upon the placid waters of the Basin of Minas. Champlain had sailed across the mouth of the basin in 1604, and had called it the Port des Mines, because of certain copper-mines which he had been led to expect there. This Acadian found something better than copper-mines. Safely past Blomidon, he came to a land which nature seemed to have set apart as the home of an industrious and peace-loving people. Somewhere about the mouth of the Gaspereau he built his home. Others followed, and in time a long, straggling village grew up; willows were planted, which stand to-day as a memorial of this Acadian colony; and after years of toil they completed that still more impressive monument of Acadian industry, the "long ramparts of their dykes," by which they fenced out the sea from the rich and fertile lowlands, and turned these once tide-swept flats into green meadows.
The Gaspereau country must have been beautiful enough when the Acadians first came to make their home there, but in the years of their occupation they gave to the landscape, quite unconsciously no doubt, certain subtle touches that turned it into something little less than an earthly paradise. Standing upon the ridge and looking down into the valley of the Gaspereau, one sees a scene that it not very materially changed from the days of the Acadians--after one has eliminated such modern excrescences as railways and bridges. The village of Grand Pré would have to be rearranged, no doubt. There was less of it in the first half of the eighteenth century; it did not cover quite the same ground; but no doubt a traveller who came that way in 1750 would have seen in the vale beneath many such picturesque cottages embowered in the self-same trees, and the rest of the scene would have been much the same as he would see to-day. Charles Roberts, the Canadian poet, novelist, and historian, has made a word-picture of it. "The picture is an exquisite pastoral. Among such deep fields, such billowy groves, and such embosomed farmsteads might Theocritus have wrought his idylls to the hum of the heavy bees. Along the bottom of the sun-brimmed vale sparkles the river, between its banks of wild rose and convolvulus, with here and there a clump of grey-green willows, here and there a red-and-white bridge. As it nears its mouth the Gaspereau changes its aspect. Its complexion of clear amber grows yellow and opaque as it mixes with the uprushing tides of Minas, and its widened channel winds through a riband of dyked marshes."