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C

uré Labelle’s time, 1868 to 1891, was one of great change in Ste Agathe. While the town grew, the forests almost disappeared and along with them went species of wildlife we’ll never know. When Jacques Cartier first visited the St. Lawrence River in the 1500’s, he reported fauna of much greater variety than we find today. His chronicler made particular mention of the large number of seals that lived in the St. Lawrence valley. The horsehead, or grey seal, is mentioned, along with its smaller cousin, the harbour (phoca)or dotar. Farley Mowat, in his book Sea of Slaughter explains that the dotar was also found in fresh water, and that there was a colony of them in Lake Superior as late as 1800. Before our interference, Laurentian rivers flowed all the way to the Ottawa without having to go through dams and mills. When the mills were installed they acted as barriers to the easy circulation of many species up and down the North and other rivers. The indigenous fauna must have been much more varied in those early days, permitting the migration of a great variety of river life.

We get an inkling of this from reports of a monster that inhabited the depths of Lac des Sables. According to eye-witnesses, the monster had “the head of a horse and feet like a stove”. Here is an excerpt from a report in Montreal’s La Minerve, from February 20^th, 1873: Two boys “étant allé à la pêche…avait pris la fuite à la vue de ce qui leur avait paru comme une tête de cheval avec une guele affreuse, se montrant en dessus de l’eau et agitant la surface du lac autour d’eux avec un bruit effrayant.”Further reports, from the adults, confirmed the sighting and added that the monster had feet “la grandeur et de la forme des pattes d’un poële”. Could it have been a seal?

While curious Agathoiswere pondering the monster in Lac des Sables, others were faced with the very real problem of distributing water to the many houses that were being built in the village. In 1878 La compagnie de l’aqueduc de Ste Agathe des Monts was given the right to place pipes in the roads in order to supply water. The directors of the company were Reverend Thibodeau, the curé, who had homesteaded the large peninsula on the lake now known as Greenshield’s Point, Dr. J.O. Lallier, and Edouard St. Aubin. The water source was located on the property of Moïse St. Aubin, currently the location of the Baumgarten condos at 154 Tour de Lac and La Calèche and the pipes were made of wood. (One such wooden pipe was unearthed a few years ago in St. Adolphe. It had been laid between Lac de la Cabane and Lac Ste. Marie in what is now the Reserve Morgan. It consisted of logs laid end to end and wrapped in wire. When the back hoe broke it, water gushed out through the hollow centre.)

The clean, clear water of Lac des Sables, and the excellent fishing found therein, were the first things to attract vacationers. The lake, along with lakes Manitou, Grise, Brume, Rougeaud and Cornu all sit in two parallel valleys that run in a north-west south-east axis. All were exceptionally clean and filled with trout (and monsters) in the 1870’s. The provincial government decided in 1884 that the lakes and rivers were so important to the development of rural Quebec that it passed a law stating that all future letters patent issued to farmers homesteading property would be subject to a reserve in favour of the Crown (represented by the provincial government) for the purpose of allowing game fishermen and hunters to use these properties. The reserve was limited to the first three chains (a chain was a measure 66 feet long) back from all non-navigable waterways. Navigable waterways fell under federal jurisdiction. The difference between navigable and non-navigable waterways was a grey area that allowed some lakes to be defined one way and others in another way. Prior to 1884, there was an advantage to the non-navigable status, since in such circumstances the land under the lake was ceded with the Letters Patent. The base of navigable lakes was the property of the Crown represented by the federal government, and the colonisation was a provincial responsibility.

The farmers in Ste Agathe were much too preoccupied with survival to contemplate this new legal twist. Those who had already obtained their titles were not affected by it and the presence of fishermen and hunters from as far away as the United States was already showing itself to be beneficial. In any case, the winter of 1885-6 brought with it a plague of small-pox that would leave fifty people dead by spring and, following hard on its heels began the first year of a three-year drought that would leave many farms abandoned.

To add to these hardships, in the spring of 1888, the church’s presbytery caught fire and Curé Thibodeau perished in the blaze. Had it not been for the heralded arrival of the train and the economic spinoffs that accompanied it, Ste. Agathe may well have remained a tiny mountain village.

It was into this environment that the first ‘étrangers’ arrived. Ste Agathe and all the villages that resulted from the initiatives of A.N. Morin were peopled virtually exclusively by French Catholics and the ‘étrangers’ were almost everyone else. While there was only a period of 10 to 15 years between the peak of the foresting and the beginning of the recreational period, it was long enough for the rural and Catholic identity of the towns to set in. There were clearly English Protestants involved in the logging and the surveying, however, they tended to see the area more as a chantier than as a destination for any pleasurable or permanent purpose.

Joseph Graham has written a book that features a select number of stories of Laurentian places and how they got their names. To learn more, click here.