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Pioneer Life Founded in 1607, some 13 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, Jamestown served as the capital of Virginia throughout the 17th century and saw the establishment of the language, customs, laws and government practiced in our nation today. Today, the National Park Service and APVA Preservation Virginia preserve and interpret our nation's roots at Historic Jamestowne, site of America's first permanent English settlement. France was at the time showing various symptoms of social discontent that should have justified a larger number of refugees fleeing to Canada, whose abundance of resources contrasted with the famine and unemployment among the poorest classes. Although France wasn’t really overpopulated, conditions there were favorable to emigration; these conditions, had they coincided with a real attraction of Canada, would have encouraged the departure of large contingents of settlers for the New World. But few French people migrated, as Canada, a distant, wild, and dangerous country, had a poor reputation. On top of this, the authorities believed that the French population was not as growing quickly as it should be – and, in fact, that it was shrinking due to wars, plagues, and general misery. In response to Intendant Talon, who had asked him to find the means to form a "grand and powerful state" in Canada, which would involve a massive wave of immigrants, Colbert said, in a sentence that was to mark the future of the country, "It would not be prudent [of the king] to depopulate his kingdom as he would have to do to populate Canada." And yet, even had departures been multiplied tenfold, the effects of emigration on the most populous country in Europe would have been imperceptible – and the fate of North America would probably have been quite different. In any case, the result of this small founding population was that the French-Canadian stock grew from a relatively small number of people, about 10,000 immigrants. If we consider the male immigrants, from whom family names were transmitted through the generations, the number is reduced to about 4,500 – the total of immigrants who had at least one son who married.In early North American history, American Indians were already present when European pioneers began to arrive. Thousands of ordinary people kept pushing the frontier of the United States and Canada westward from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. Pioneers faced many hardships and dangers as they struggled to build new lives away from the civilization they had known in the East.
