These baskets, potato baskets and sewing baskets, made from white ash trees from Ashton, were sold door to door and to local people at the Co— op store in St. Peters. The Native families were also known to get on the train in Ashton, and travel as far as Charlottetown to sell their goods. In addition to baskets, they made axe handles and clothesline poles. Margaret Lewis, who grew up on Ashton, also recalled Native families that lived in Ashton:

At that time there were some houses and about seven camps. There were big pole tents and in the center of the tent there was a fire packed with stone all around. At night the fire was left low and the stones were removed. My sister and I used to go down every evening to play with the children. We always gave them milk, and in return, they would always leave something for us when they left the house. {17)

The lives of the Mi’kmaq were once free and unregulated. They lived along the shoreline at Greenwich and fished the waters of St. Peters Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. With the arrival of the Europeans, their lives were forever changed. The French Settlers who came to St. Peters, settled in close proximity to the Mi’kmaq, and unfortunately, met

with a similar fate.

HAVRE ST. PIERRE: THE COMMERCIAL CAPITAL

“Who build, Who build But who do not enter in. " (18)

The year 1534 marked the first arrival of the French in what they would come to call “Ile St. Jean." Jacques Cartier was the first European to come and leave written accounts, and his diaries indicate that he liked what he saw. After bringing those accounts back to France, however, it was almost two hundred years before the French ventured across the Atlantic again to the little Island in the Gulf. This time they stayed.

Although French fishermen had been coming to fish the waters of Eastern North America for many years, it was not until 1713 that France began to take interest in the little Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In the 1713 treaty of Utrecht, France was granted Ile Royal (Cape Breton) and the undeveloped Ile St. Jean. With their powerful fortress and naval base within sailing reach, France saw the potential for Ile St. Jean to become the ‘breadbasket’ for Louisbourg. (19)

In the early 1700s settlers from France arrived and found themselves co—existing with the Mi‘Kmaq. These early settlers carved out a new life for themselves, considerably different from what they left behind in France. With little help from their homeland, these settlers