"East view of Montreal in Canada" by Thomas Patten, 1761.
Founded in 1642 as a missionary settlement, Montreal soon became the main centre for the fur trade, and a military base. The streets, 30 feet wide, were laid out in grid fashion with the houses crowding the wooden sidewalks. This allowed them to have large gardens and orchards at the rear. Along these streets strolled voyageurs returned from the far west, black or grey robed priests and nuns, officers and men of the Troupes de la Marine in their white and blue uniforms, ladies dressed in the previous year's Paris fashions, gentlemen in powdered wigs, bronzed Indians in furs and buckskin and homespun clad farmers bringing their produce to market. Montreal was a frontier town on the edge of the North American wilderness, and its people were regarded as virtual savages by the more sedate citizens of Quebec. Significantly, despite Montreal's smaller population, crimes of violence were two and a half times more frequent than at Quebec, but still less frequent than in Paris, probably because there was little chronic poverty. One of the first British officers to enter the city in 1760 remarked that one would have thought the people all to be millionaires, judging by their expensive dress, their fine carriages and homes.
