According to Barbara Huck in her book on the fur trade routes of North America, the French crown was pursued by people who wanted to make profits in North America, but
“none of the royal suitors really believed that colonizing what was now being called New France was a reasonable prospect. But the profits to made in furs justified signing agreements that demanded the establishment of settlements. And over the next 150 years those two unsuitable partners—fur trade and settlement—would create a pattern of penetration of North America that can still be seen today, in the people who dominate the region that gave its name to Canada in French place names as far west as Oregon and in French spoken as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.”
The French also were very different from the English that settled to the south and later, in Canada after the 7 Years War of 1763. Huck explained their attitudes this way:
“In the main, the French were not interested in colonization. They recognized early that settlement and the fur business were diametrically opposed. Clear the land for agriculture and the animals disappear along with the forests.”
Huck also pointed out how the French also understood as the British did not,
“that North Americans knew how live and travel in their own lands and, were more rapidly than their British counterparts, they adopted the birchbark canoe, the moccasins and snowshoes, the toboggan (from the Mi’Kmaq word tab’agan) and the travelling rations of dried corn and dried buffalo meat or pemmican that North Americans had been manufacturing for millennia. They were also quick to learn new languages and marry into local tribes.”
Marrying into Indigenous families proved problematic. After all, the priests expected their French men to convert North American women into what they thought was a superior religion and culture but “the French found that a large proportion of their young men were instead adopting the ways of the people they called the Huron and Montagnais, or later, the Cree and Ojibwe.”
As a result, the French dominated the North American fur trade until 1763 when they ceded control to the English under the Treaty of Paris. In the meantime, the French penetrated the continent more deeply than the other European powers.
Of course, no one asked the indigenous people what they wanted.