The Indians called it kebec—(“the narrow place”). There a mighty river, compressed to a width of less than a mile, broke through the mountain barrier, added the weight of another stream flowing from the north, and, spreading out in its great bed, began a four-hundred-mile sweep to the sea. The French adopted the name.

The meeting of the St. Lawrence and St. Charles rivers created a high, triangular promontory whose flat summit would one day be covered by a splendid city. A natural fortress on two sides, the bluff soared steeply upward to a height of 333 feet above the St. Lawrence and extended for miles along the river with few passages to the top. Along the St. Charles the grade was gentler but guarded at the bottom by open mud flats at low water.

Between the St. Lawrence and the cliff a narrow strip of flatland covered with walnut trees provided a landing at the point. From there a rough gully offered a steep—and sole—passageway to the top. Only from the west was the summit accessible once a way had been found to cross the river and scale the heights.

In July 1608 a French ship anchored below the cliff and sent an exploring party ashore. The leader was a forty-one-year-old Frenchman named Samuel de Champlain, taking his first steps along a path that would lead to much disappointment but also a place in history as the father of Canada.

By the 1620s Champlain had erected atop the cliffs a fort and, within its walls, a stone building that served both as quarters for the governor and as an administrative center of New France. The stockade was named Fort St. Louis but over many years came to be known simply as the “chateau” and la citadelle.

When the major European powers became embroiled in the complex struggle known as the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1948), Quebec fell to an English privateering squadron under Sir David Kirke, but was given back to France three years later.

Thereafter, for nearly sixty years, the colony enjoyed relative security while armies marched and countermarched across Europe and England was convulsed in civil war, revolution, and counterrevolution. The most noteworthy event in the history of New France was the arrival in 1672 of the greatest governor the colony ever had: Louis de Buade, the comte de Frontenac. Under Frontenac’s ironfisted leadership the settlement expanded, and France extended its control of the St. Lawrence Valley, the Great Lakes region, and the Mississippi Valley.

Resumption of hostilities between France and England in 1689 caught Quebec’s defenses in poor shape. The town major hastily threw up earthworks and palisades while wily old Count Frontenac bluffed a colonial force under Sir William Phips long enough for reinforcements to arrive. After the failure of one assault, Phips gave up. Frontenac then built two powerful batteries to protect the Lower Town and replaced part of the temporary entrenchments