The valley of the Humber, 1615-1913

Preface

One hundred and eight years ago Mr. D’Arcy Boulton put into print his opinion that no period in the history of our own country can be considered uninteresting. Now that the wash of haste and the sponge of materialism are wiping many lines off our first pages, it behooves us to dig, and to dig quickly. Miss Marjory MacMurchy pertinently asks, in one of her reviews, “ Why make a little book if you do not take a few hours to do it?” In preparing a little book of condensation a great many hours can be consumed; and in this sketch of a small tract which has hitherto been not much suspected of owning enough warp or woof out of which one could weave a fabric, a chief hope is that the future historian may find some portions of his work made easier. To gather, condense, and again sift, to reconsider translations and intermediate synopses, is a delightful occupation known to the initiated; there is a pleasant field waiting for the worker who has ability to develop it; and an earnest cartographer might even make a valuable history that would be unburdened by paragraphs.

Mr. Peter Kalm, a learned Gentleman of Sweden who visited Canada in 1750, asks to be excused if no extravagant wonders are related by him; he could not make nature otherwise than he found it, and he chose that in time to come his readers would say lie related things as they were and that all was found to agree with his descriptions, not esteeming him a false relater. So also it is my business to repeat or copy, not to edit ; and to those of my readers who possess the historic sense it will appear fitting that certain orthography is retained according to the time and the whim of my principals, and that it is not censored out of existence.

m iv

PREFACE

George Sand apologizes for subscribing to the patriarchal fashion of prefaces; and one of the wittiest of modern tramps pokes gentle fun at that fashion in Rabelaisian diction. No notes of thanks for help received, from him ; the helper does not want them, and the reader doesn’t care. But I cannot emulate my betters; I must give thanks.

Of a certain French village that delightful tramp says that when the land-folk cannot discover folk-lore they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it. The kind folk who have helped me with many inventions come first in my list, and to them I give thanks.

The maps which accompany this letter-press are in part provided by the courtesy of the Crown Lands Department and the heads of the Surveys Branch for Ontario; some I owe to Dr. Fraser, Provincial Archivist; and some, with many other debts, to Mr. Pardoe, Parliamentary Librarian. The unrestricted use allowed me by Professor Watson Bain of his father’s rare library was a continuation of Dr. James Bain’s kindness extending over many years; and some of my copies, with the Jameson sketches, come from that collection. But the largest proportion, either used herein or provided for my reference portfolio, have come to me through the kindness of Dr. Doughty, Dominion Archivist. To him, and to Mr. H. R. Holmden, who spared me many hours of expert help, I am in large debt; and I have to thank Mr. Parker, the head of the Manuscript Room, for the use of a number of valuable documents.

The ladies of our Public Reference Library have made my research there pleasant; and to Miss Staton I am again obliged, as in the old days under Dr. Bain.

Through the permission obtained for me by the librarian-in-charge at the Canadian Institute I have had the advantage of reading papers of great use to me in my search; and in the lists of authorities given for the statements contained in each section those Papers and Transactions and the copies of the Institute Journal lent me by friends have been acknowledged.

PREFACE v

Mr. H. Phillips, of the Lambton General Stores, has been kind enough to lend me the beautiful photograph of the channel above the Lambton mill, facing page 112.

My sketch owes much originally to Dr. A. H. U. Colquhoun, and afterwards to Dr. Burwash, Dr. J. H. Coyne, Dr. G. H. Needier, and Dr. A. Cosens ; and a patient, longtried man, Mr. E. S. Caswell, has again come to my assistance. Other aid is acknowledged in the body of the book.

I do not mean that these names conclude the list of men and women who have put me in the way of acquiring bits of history, and to each and all I offer my sincere appreciation.

This little tract by Brule’s pathway to the Lake, this Humber of St. John, must have somewhere, perhaps in boxes of letters in garrets, much material for a better history than an outsider can hint at concerning later days; and perhaps an insider will yet write all that should be written. The first step has been taken in the saving of some part of the beauty. When indiscriminate building was imminent and the manufacturer went a-site-seeing, there arose a small band of enthusiasts who mingled their money with their faith, who contrived to buy and to plan, and who had strength in sitting still. A peculiar admixture of romance with their grasp of facts and potentialities made the little Company of Associates a target for many shots; but the immediate development and the apparently inevitable future of their area are proofs that these men have given Toronto a suburb of which Ontario must needs be proud.

To the unthinking, to the underdone, to the ignorant in general, a compilation is dull reading, a thing of shreds of paper and patches of paste, snippets only. I don’t mean that this compilation will not be read by some such people. But always there are others; and to those others I would appeal. The parts contain the whole; and the gathering of material for any compilation, however so humble, teaches one that the parts are sometimes few or sometimes not accepted seriously and that the history of Ontario may i

VI

PREFACE never be a whole. This generation is passing; and the coming one will have to dig deeper still to find all that may yet be written of our beginnings. Dig, chorograpli; monograph, paragraph; compile, compile, and again compile. Paragraph your findings, monograph your district ; and in the future other searchers will arise and bless your industry.

Toronto, September 9, 1913.

Contents

PAGE

Preface iii

I. Discovery 1

II. The First White Man On The Humber

A Canadian historian has very properly put it that no one can know all the history of all his country or of all his Province; hut an intelligent person will wish to know at least the tracings of beginnings.

With Cartier the reachings out after a vague west took a crystallized form. With him began the fever for the discovery of mines and the sources of the St. Lawrence. He was told of the river and large lakes beyond Hochelaga, and “ then is found a fresh water sea, of which no one has seen the end;” and by 1541 he had drawn a map showing “ all the river of Canada,” including the Great Lake. This map disappeared; but those of the Upper St. Lawrence until 1612 are based upon his narrative and possibly the knowledge of his map.

In March, 1603, Cartier’s great successor, the founder of New France, sailed on the first of his several voyages to the country in which he was to play so great a part. In June he made a leisurely effort west on the river, from Tadoussac, his mind full of former travellers’ tales and the stories lately given him by the Indians of the large waters beyond. A river, and lesser lakes, league on league, opened into a lake of indefinite size, meaning Lake Huron ; but the rapids checked this first effort, and in three weeks he was again in Tadoussac. This man, Samuel de Champlain, was the master mind in French exploration and colonization for thirty-two years, and to his qualifications as a captain in the Marine and Geographer to the King we owe his maps and his “ unparalleled journals.”

By the summer of 16130 he knew the full value of a European as an interpreter, and wisely entered into an agreement with the Indians to effect an exchange in young men, actually hostages. This, as a beginning, was suceessful, and Brule was an adept in learning the savage life. But the next young man deposited with the Indians is described by Champlain as the most impudent liar that has been seen for a long time. This Nicholas Vignau, instead of becoming an explorer or useful as an interpreter, was an unscrupulous deceiver. Of Hennepin in after years it was said that the Canadians gave him the name Le Grand Menteur, one who wrote of what he saw in places he never was ; but beside Vignau he was commonplace. Champlain resolved to find Cathay, the land of spicery ; and his mortifying experiences in 1612 caused by the romancer Vignau were in part the reason of his cool reception of the result of Brule’s travels in 1615.

The Indians repeated to him what Cartier had already recorded, but they varied the tale to suit the occasion of each day, and all the accounts became confused and inconsistent, until the “ Great Lake ” was applied indiscriminately to all the great waters of hearsay in the chain. When Brul6 came back in 1611 from his year with the Algonquin chief, Yroquet, he told Champlain of what he had seen and gave minute details of all that he had heard; and Champlain, absorbing statements and suppositions alike, ha£ let the influences of the young man’s first travels be seen in his maps.

One principal reason why so few historians before Butterfield have referred to Brule in his visits to unexplored regions, is the very brief mention usually made of him by the early writers who have given him any place at all. When he is mentioned it is merely incidentally, and usually with a vagueness that has repelled attention. It is, therefore, not a matter of wonder to Butterfield that the three or four modern authors who have recorded any part of his life have expressed themselves with poverty and caution. That earnest historian claims originality for his narrative on the ground that, before it, Brule had not, except in one instance, been credited with being the first to reach any of the countries, lakes or rivers of which he was the real discoverer or explorer. The man himself wrote nothing. Champlain, Sagard and Le Caron have

FIRST WHITE MAN ON THE HUMBER made use of, or set down, his verbal recitals ; but they have not done so in a manner to awaken at once the thought that they border on the marvellous.

Butterfield proves that his research has been exhaustive, and he presents his narrative in a lucid, comprehensive form, supporting his statements by indisputable proof. Brule’s early years among the “ Good Iroquois,” that misnomer for the Hurons of the Lake Huron and Georgian Bay district, are shown to be almost as interesting as his journey later towards the country of the real Iroquois. “ What this daring Frenchman accomplished has not hitherto been given in detail by any historian. Even Parkman forgets the journey of Champlain’s ‘ servant ’ in his heading of Chapter XIII. of his ‘ Pioneers of France in the New World.’ As Father Le Caron and his French escort preceded Champlain and his two white companions some days in reaching, in 1615, Lake Huron, the firstmentioned persons would be entitled to the honour of having been its discoverers, had they not been preceded themselves by Brule and another.”

Lescarbot in writing of Cartier and Champlain deals many little thrusts at the latter, in revenge for slights — mostly fanciful it is true — but opening the question whether so great a man could have been capable of even a little jealousy towards the “ young lad ” who had done so great a labour. Champlain' the large-hearted was also human. A pioneer of the St. Lawrence who had already seen the West Indies, Vera Cruz, the City of Mexico, and who had suggested the Panama Canal, could not push into prominence a youthful interpreter who had all unwittingly made a brilliant discovery, and who, moreover, had stolen his master’s thunder by one small month. Champlain was original in the uses to which he put Brule and hoped to put Vignau and others; but the actual exchange had been anticipated in a sense one hundred years earlier, when a mariner from Dieppe brought home the first specimens of the American Indian.

Although Champlain avoids mention of him by name, calls him his servant or the young man, he describes fully the proposal of exchange, Brule’s alacrity in going with the Algonquin Captain Yroquet, and his own hope that the young man would learn the language so fully that he should also learn the country and be able to give in detail information of the inland seas and the great copper mine.

Brule, not Nicolet in 1634, first saw Lake Huron; no white man before Brule had seen Georgian Bay, the copper mines, or the Sault of Ste. Marie. He was the pioneer of the Ottawa and of our Province of Ontario and the countries of the Hurons and the Neutrals; he was the first in time in the Upper St. Lawrence, and one of the first in performance. It was he who destroyed Champlain’s fondest expectation; for the hoped-for North Sea, Lake Superior, was fresh water. And in September, 1615, “ at the mouth of the Humber, Brule first saw Ontario’s broad expanse.”

Two years in a century are but two drops in Time’s bucket, and it is fitting enough to write now of the tercentenary of the day the first wThite man brought his burden to the Humber.

Three centuries ago, August 12, 1615, Father Le Caron, the great Franciscan, held his first Mass in the Huron country almost directly above the Humber, and in his congregation was Champlain, with his interpreter, Brule. They had visited four of the Huron villages before reaching the town of Carhagouha — (in the present township of Tiny) — a place fortified with a triple palisade of wood thirty-five feet in height. Here they found the missionary priest, who had preceded them by but a few days and who was full of joy and astonishment at their unexpected arrival. The good father, intent on his own work, formally erected a cross as the symbol of it, and celebrated the first Mass in what is now Ontario. The scene can easily be pictured, — the devout priest, the handsome figure of Champlain and the lithe one of the young interpreter, the kneeling worshippers of their little band of soldiers and followers, and squatting near them the painted Hurons, silent, bewildered, and probably contemptuous. Two days later, Champlain and ten men began

FIRST WHITE MAN ON THE HUMBER 7

their journey towards Lake Ontario, via Lake Simcoe, Rice Lake and the Trent, reaching the Great Lake in October.

It had been decided by Champlain and his Indian allies to send Brule with twelve Indians to those tribes of the waters of the Susquehanna who were expected to give five hundred men in the war against the Iroquois. Brule’s mission was to arrange for the junction of the forces, and it is the first portion of his trip that is our concern.

He set out on the eighth of September from the Narrows of Lake Simcoe, following the waters of Lake Simcoe until his gropings in the little watershed farther south discovered a small stream, now crossed by Yonge Street. A little farther on he could have found a swale or shallow morass. The stream was the infant Humber, while the morass was a feeder to the east branch of the Holland. It is at the head of the main stream of the Holland, lying to the west, that the most striking advance between the waters of the two rivers is to be seen.

In the time of La Salle we hear much of missions and routes ; but it is believed that earlier still the course along the north shore to the mouth of the Humber was a welltravelled one. The Humber, Holland, Lake Simcoe, then down the Severn to Georgian Bay was an early track ; but Indians, and little-known fur traders who perhaps had never heard of the lake now Simcoe, went by the Humber to Nottawasaga.

Brule’s tortures at the hands of the tribes he set forth to seek by the Susquehanna and the scarred appearance he presented on his return, have led some writers to suggest that his name was derived from the result of his life ; but there is reason to suppose that it was originally Brule. Any adventurer in those days might easily have earned such a surname. This journey south from the country of the Hurons by the Holland and Humber was an important one in subsequent historical and cartographical mention; but Parkman dismisses it with a few

words on the mere fact that the party, crossing Lake 2

Ontario, pushed forward with all speed, and gives no hint as to how they reached the Lake before crossing it.

Our highway was an easy one and well known to the Hurons. A little later it was frequently travelled in the journey to the St. Lawrence, covering but ten days, and there are written records as early as 1632 that the Hurons told the French it was but a ten days’ journey by that route to the carrying-place on the St. Lawrence.

Brule and his twelve braves felt their way towards the head of the great lake instead of going towards its outlet, for two good reasons; one, that they thought they would save time; and the second, that they wished to avoid a difficult and very dangerous route through the heart of the Iroquois country. Coasting along the Lake, the party reached the mouth of the Niagara; and from there onward until he reached the Susquehanna, and until he began his effort in April, 1616, to regain the St. Lawrence, his life was in his hand. Perils by land and water, torture, miraculous escapes from the Carantouannais (Andastes) to whom he had carried Champlain’s message, he counted as nothing; nor was he daunted by his master’s cool reception of his faithfulness.

Brule’s usefulness is receiving a tardy recognition, and his truthfulness has been proved by sifted evidence. Brebeuf and Sagard speak well of “ poor Brule,” and the views of others of their kind may be accepted rather than those of the French of the time, who accepted the Huron statement that because he had left his own nation and gone over to the English his murder was justified.

The invective indulged in in Champlain’s edition of 1632 was written, not by Champlain himself, but by the alien hand that compiled that book. The interpreterexplorer’s historian proves by all authorities who bear investigation that Brule’s tale is to be believed; and that “ It is quite inconceivable that by selling himself to the English in 1629 it could affect his narrative, as to its reliability, in 1618.”

No Frenchman of any age, surrounded by the romantic unknown, can be commonplace; and Brule was a half-

By Brule Lake Ontario was Discovered; and by Him the Humber was Used as His Pathway to Reach It.

FIRST WHITE MAN ON THE HUMBER naturalized Indian with, possibly, some of his tribe’s power of flowers of speech and imagery. He must have stopped at the point for long enough to listen to the waves that out of a great deep came stealing forth in a quiet hour; or he watched the long lake before him lengthen out its hoary line. To bear messages and thus explore was his profession; seeking adventure was his choice. But with that Mer Douce before him and the little river at his back, he, a Frenchman, surely felt the quickenings of the poet of rivers and lakes. The great and the terrible are easily found in Canada, and there are word painters to give them to us ; but the reaches of the Humber are still looking for their Wordsworth.

In the exordium of the Bookseller to the Reader of La Salle’s successes and trials, are sentences that may apply to both these explorers of the Humber. “ In acknowledgment therefore of the Service done us by these Illustrious Adventurers, and to make them sort of Amends for their Sufferings, let us transmit their Names to Posterity in our Writings; let us applaud their Actions when we read them, and let us commend their Relations. This, here, most certainly deserves to be read and commended, for it is Curious, Extraordinary, and Tragical. It is also ingaging at this Conjuncture, when there is a design of making Settlements in those Countries, the Consequence whereof may be most Honourable and Advantageous to the Nation.”

Brule’s appetite for aboriginal life was unappeasable; and through it, his chief incentive during his life, came his discoveries and also his end. He journeyed much; but he could not keep away from the Hurons. He was with them again in 1627, and returned for the last time in 1632. He had piloted the English to Quebec in 1629 and served them during the occupation of Canada, as a common man earning a livelihood, not as a soldier. But this overturn earned him scepticism as to his narrative, in the years immediately following; and, by indirect reasoning, was the cause of his death. “ Le pauvre Brule devait etre rebrule pour la derniere fois, vers 1634, chez les Hurons.”

Clubbed, and eaten, by the treacherous Hurons at their village Toanche, near Penetanguishene, his end was as wild as his life; but in the Indian way his spirit was avenged. Several years after his death, when the Huron country was half depopulated by an epidemic, the frightened Indians believed that revenge was being taken by the French, and one of their sorcerers declared that a sister of the murdered man had been seen flying over their country, breathing pestilence and death.

The date of the discovery of the Humber as the pathway to the Great Lake is not only of respectable antiquity, but it is worthy of finding a place in the list of great events of its time. “ Brule arrived in the valley of the St. Lawrence the next year after the English first gained a foothold in North America; and he started upon his journey with the savages which resulted in the first expedition ever made westward of the Great River of Canada, and in the discovery of Lake Huron, ten years before the landing of the Plymouth Pilgrims; and six years after Hudson first saw the river that bears his name, Brule stood on the beach at the mouth of the Humber, ‘ the first civilized man to gaze out upon that broad expanse of waters.’ ”

III. Of Cartography

Lahontan gives a summary dismissal to those stay-athome geographers who parcel out the Earth according to their fancy; but without those geographers the study of cartography would lose much of its interest.

A man very wise for two hundred years ago, who foresaw Canada as a nation, is wise enough for to-day. He considers that errors of haste befall, perhaps to the reader, perhaps to the writer ; and his own opinion is, one should be content to repeat the errors of the original authors, whom one must needs follow, without going aside to matters not found in them and wandering beyond the bounds of what they have written ; especially when such wandering serves no good purpose.

Small as is the Humber nowadays, one must wander somewhat to find its cartographical beginnings; and such wandering is to excellent purpose.

Cartier was the first European to gain any actual knowledge of Lake Ontario; and by the hearsay dating from him it was first cartographically sketched in the Molineux map of 1600, where it is spoken of as the Lacke of Tadenac, the bounds whereof are unknown, — merged, however, into a great inland sea, the prototype of the Great Lakes.

By Cartier’s time the westward route to Cathay was an absorbing topic to mariners, and Verrazano in 1521 made an expedition under the French Government for the discovery of the east by the west. A map preserved in the Bodleian Library, of date 1536, shows a dotted line from Europe to Cathay through an open strait north of Newfoundland. We are infinitely beholden to that perpetual day dream, and through it Cartier made his attempts up the great river. His map, showing “all the river of

Canada,” disappeared; but succeeding maps until 1612 are based upon the foundations of the lost one. When Champlain first heard the tale of the great inland sea, the confusing accounts sometimes made out a lake beyond Ontario, or it might be an outlet into the South Sea, or it might be salt water itself. The natives made their answers to suit his eagerness, and placed the salt water in various lakes. Map makers half a century afterwards puzzled later explorers by giving the name Sea Water Lake to Lake St. Clair; and the Algonquin narrator told Champlain of a river route to the Northern Algonquins and to the Nation of the Hurons.

In Champlain’s map of 1612 was the first attempt to outline the country now known as Ontario. In his smaller map, 1613, Lake Ontario receives its name, Lac St. Louis. The map of 1632 was the first attempt to indicate any part of Ontario from actual knowledge, and it may be called the map of Ontario in embryo.

The French fur-traders who preceded the Recollet priest, Joseph Le Caron, to the country of the Hurons had possibly discovered more than one of the four routes that best led into it. But their interest was in peltry, not in missions or geography ; and gradually they sold their pack impartially in Albany or Montreal, keeping most of their geographical knowledge to themselves.

In 1639-41 Brebeuf and Chaumonot made an extended exploration, in the course of which they probably saw the western end of Lake Ontario; and in 1640 Gamier and Jogues established their missions. Ragueneau sent to his Father Superior a map showing the entire Huron-Iroquois country; and, although that map has disappeared, it is supposed to have furnished material for Sanson.

Sanson’s is the first elaborate map of the whole country of the Great Lakes ; and in his of 1650 we find tracings of our river, as one of the important discoveries of the French. Although supposedly based on the Relations of the Jesuits, his work may have had inspiration from the fur-traders who had been seeking peltries for some years previous to those records. He shows a familiarity with the canoe routes via Lac St. Louis, and the guesswork that goes to the making of the maps is peculiar in its accuracy. He names Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence for the first time, and the accuracy of his two maps is striking when compared with the work of some of his successors. Du Creux in 1660 follows him in general, but where he varies from Sanson the changes are for the worse.

Du Creux represents the region of Lake Simcoe as laid down in 1660, its name Lacus Ouentaronius, which may be read elsewhere as Ouen-tarontus. Scadding upholds Du Creux in his Ouentaronius, and thinks it may be the original of Ontario. Leading up to Du Creux, we are referred to Brodhead’s History, where Lake Ontario appears in 1615 as Lac des Entouhonorons, a name used by Champlain. Bressani says that Lake Erie empties by a cascade “ dans un troisieme lac encore plus grand et plus magnifique, nomme lac Ontario ou beau lac; nous l’avons appele lac St. Louis.” Further we have “ lac Ontario ou Lac des Entouhonoronons ;” and, “ D’apres Hennepin les Iroquois Tappelaient Kanadario, beau lac. . . . Vanderdonk Pappelle Lac des Iroquois,” and again we find that others have called it from its eastern end, Lake Catarackoui. The spelling of the last was a stumbling-block, and in 1751 John Bartram is still giving it as Cadarakin, in whose bay “ the famous and unfortunate Mr. de la Sale had two barks, which remain sunk there to this day.”

In 1671 Courcelles derives the Great Lake from the Huron, as iontara, lake, and io, great; and at the same period there is, apart from Bressani, the Iroquois Skannandario. Descriptive words were caught up by the French as proper names, and hence many of the controversies of later date. The description of the portage of the Humber is one of these argued questions.

In maps succeeding, after Du Creux’s efforts in 1660, we might look for physical changes. The great earthquake of 1663 wrought havoc in many parts of Canada, and in the east whole rivers disappeared and others altered their courses. Apparently the Humber was not affected, for in 1679 we find Franquelin leaving it where Sanson had placed it. In the years immediately following Du Creux, map- making moved slowly. The peace between the Iroquois and the French made the north shore valuable enough to be added to the map of the Great Lakes. Galinee shows the south shore and the country as he knew it, and it is possible that Fenelon, in whose hands that map was left for some time, or Trouve, supplemented it from their actual knowledge and marked the details of the north shore. Thus, to the Sulpitians, with their chain of missions, is due the intelligible beginning of the north shore in detail, and by 1669 both banks of the lake had been explored by them and depicted on the first authoritative map.