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January/February 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Nunavut Feature: Royal Ontario Museum Feature: Hero school The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte

Driving the highways and back roads of rural Quebec, it’s hard not to notice the ubiquitous crosses planted along the way. Known as croix de chemin, nearly 3,000 of these roadside beacons of Roman Catholicism dot the province, some dating back to New France’s infancy.

Ethnologist Jean Simard conducted an exhaustive inventory of 2,863 crosses in the 1970s. “Their main function,” he says, “was to serve as a place to stop, a place of devotion for travellers.” Initially modelled after the simple wooden cross planted by Jacques Cartier at Gaspé in 1534 to claim the land for the King of France, croix de chemin also served as sites for the faithful living far from churches to gather and pray. Colonists erected them to mark their parcels of land, farmers to invoke protection for their crops.

Wayside crosses symbolize the roots of Quebec’s French Catholic tradition, roots that ran perhaps too deep for British officer Thomas Anburey, who lamented in 1776 that coach drivers stopped to pray at every cross along the route, “continually the causes of great delays in travelling, which to persons not quite so superstitiously disposed as the Canadians, are exceedingly unpleasant in cold weather.”

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