Indigenous Stories
This category holds some stories of the people who lived here longest. From the time of the earliest records of the Middle East, there were people already living here in a fantastically different political and social world that is often recorded in what we call oral history. It is a system that was ruptured when the European people overwhelmed it with disease and with a foreign culture and a foreign legal system. Witnessing the desperate state of the survivors, the European invaders concluded that these desperate survivors would eventually disappear or be absorbed, and responded by doing everything possible to speed up that end. As a beacon of hope that we can overcome the calamity caused by the European culture and legal system, they survived. We still have time to learn.
Like the people who arrived from Europe, these people had no single name for all of them other than human beings. Most descendants whom I have talked with tell me that the name Indian is fine, since so many other names feel like recent names made up to sound politically correct. Indigenous is also a possibility if it is understood to include all of the ancient peoples in the world who lived and still struggle to live symbiotically. A term that may eventually gain common usage in North America is Turtle Islanders, from one of the better known North-American creation stories.
I start with a short summary of stories from around the world, describing four creation myths.
Like the people who arrived from Europe, these people had no single name for all of them other than human beings. Most descendants whom I have talked with tell me that the name Indian is fine, since so many other names feel like recent names made up to sound politically correct. Indigenous is also a possibility if it is understood to include all of the ancient peoples in the world who lived and still struggle to live symbiotically. A term that may eventually gain common usage in North America is Turtle Islanders, from one of the better known North-American creation stories.
I start with a short summary of stories from around the world, describing four creation myths.
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Four Creation Stories
The North Star and Our Night Sky Tiowero:Ton, The Doncaster Reserve Beaven Lake The Ottawa River Mont Tremblant Sir John's Lake Petit Lac Nominingue The Iroquois and the Sulpicians The Story behind the Founding of Montreal |
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Four Creation Stories
Stories wire our brains in our formative years, and classic stories are the basis of our social norms. Our value systems and our laws, even for those of us who profess no religion, were established this way, and the reason that one or another system predominates is often seen in terms of the Darwinian explanation of the survival of the fittest, a survival that usually results from peripheral incidents, accidents, and unforeseen consequences, with which group had the strongest arsenal, not necessarily of weapons, but of contagious diseases against which the others had no resistance, or of power based om hierarchical ideology. Survival of the fittest has become a modern justification of power and assumes the corollary that the fittest is also the most enlightened. True enlightenment must challenge this corollary.
Imagine if we could choose our creation stories, those that influence us, our children and our grandchildren. There are different creation stories throughout the world, and many, if not most, act simply as lessons to teach our children to act for the good of all of nature and each other. None of these stories should be considered as unfit, for each is told by a human family, from civilizations that were all at roughly the same point of modernity when they met each other. Each one created and sustained a different environment, and each one is suited for changing circumstances. The only ones that will survive the long term, though, are those that encourage a symbiotic relationship with their world.
An Anishinaabe Creation Story
Kitche Manitou had a dream showing the universe, the stars, the world, the lakes and the woods. Wanting to make the dream real, Manitou created the hills, the lakes, the plants, the fish, the animals, the birds and finally the people. For thousands of years, people have believed in Manitou’s dream, a dream that included rain and wind, sunshine and emotions, birds and insects. Each species, each element, had a special knowledge, and people, created last, were the most dependent and learned from all the others, their elder siblings in the family of life. The people always respected their siblings and it was their responsibility to keep a balance in the forest, with respect for the trees and each of the creatures, including each other. They knew that they all belonged to the forest, to the earth. The people also had one special gift: They knew how to dream.
The Beginning of Life, Northern Territories, Australia
The Rainbow Serpent awoke from the Dreamtime in the desert of Australia. She slithered around making valleys and mountains and realized that everything else was still asleep, deep in the ground in the Dreamtime. She called and called, and slowly they all woke up, each with a story.
The first to come out from the ground were the frogs, and the serpent tickled their chins and made them laugh. Water poured out of their mouths and soon there was water enough for everyone.
All of the stories in the Dreamtime turned into creatures, birds, lizards – even flowers, grasses and trees. Rainbow Serpent identified the most dependable and assigned them the job of becoming large rocks to stand high and protect all of the other life that came up from the ground. One type of creature understood her rules, so she made them over in the form of humans, taught them to sing and gave them responsibility for the harmony of all the stories and creatures, helping them work together.
The Garden of Eden
After creating everything else, the Lord created the first man, Adam. He then obliged the man by putting him to sleep, extracting one of his ribs, and creating from it the first woman, who would be his companion. The Lord placed them in a garden where they could have everything they could want, but commanded them to not eat fruit from one certain tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
A serpent came to the woman, Eve, and told her that if she ate that fruit she would have knowledge, that she would have the same knowledge as the Lord. She ate the fruit, and, telling the man, Adam, what the serpent had said, he also willingly ate it.
When the Lord learned they had broken his rule, the woman was blamed and she, along with all of her daughters, were condemned forever to have children by the sweat of their brow and to fear the serpent. They were all kicked out of the Lord’s private garden and were obliged to lead a difficult life, pleading to the Lord for mercy and forgiveness.
Turtle Island, and the Three Sisters, an Iroquoian beginning
Digging in the roots of a large tree, thinking of the baby she was carrying, Sky Woman saw a light in the soil, but as she looked, the ground fell away, and she fell with it, through a hole and into the blue sky of a different world.
Luckily, some geese saw her falling and they flew under her, creating a cushion on their backs. Below, they saw Mother Turtle, and called to her asking if they could put the woman on her shell.
The animals of the sea had no idea what Sky Woman ate or where she lived. She told them that she lived in the forest and ate the things she grew, the Three Sisters – corn, squash and beans – to feed herself and the baby she was carrying. She needed soil to plant them in.
The water creatures each dove to the bottom of the ocean for soil so that Sky Woman could plant a garden and grow a forest on the turtle’s back, but they all came back to the surface out of breath. "It's too deep!" they all said.
Finally, a small toad who had lived on Mother Turtle’s back, dove in. Everyone laughed. "She's too small!"
All of the creatures, including Sky Woman, were sure Toad had drowned, but in the morning they saw her, exhausted and floating, her mouth full of soil. Sky Woman used the tiny bit to start a garden that turned into a whole continent of trees, lakes, mountains and rivers – all on the back of the turtle.
They all worked together to make life possible and for Sky Woman to live on Turtle Island.
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These are very short summaries of four creation stories, all just as true. There are many more around the world.
The North Star and Our Night Sky
Northern people know that the North Star is the only stable light in the heavens, that everything rotates around this one central point. In our time, while we theoretically know much more about the night sky and the movements of the stars, we live under roofs and even when outside we can see the sky only through a veil of reflected light that does not afford us the same clear view our ancestors had. Stories about our sky come to us from some ancient cultures, and given our country’s predominantly European background, few of us know the stories that were told around the home fires of our First Nations people.
The Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Iroquois, Delaware and Fox all tell sky stories about a bear, stories that relate to the Big Dipper and the North Star. The Mistassini Cree tell how the North Star was set in place during a quarrel. The people of an earlier world had a quarrel with North Star, who was one of them. They plotted to kill him. He fled into the sky, out of their reach. When they saw where he was, and that he was out of their reach, they decided to leave him there as a marker for night travellers.
The Iroquois tell a story about three warriors from the beginning of time who chased the Great Bear, shooting an arrow into its side. They did not kill it, and it has been running across the sky ever since, circling the North Star. As the sky rotates, that constellation tilts, and every autumn, blood spills from the wound, reddening all the leaves.
The Farmer’s Almanac bases its lunar calendar on Algonquin descriptions of the full moon – Algonquin months. June is the Strawberry Moon, followed by the Moon of the Buck because its antlers become apparent. It is also known as the Thunder Moon in recognition of the thunderstorms that we have all experienced during the early part of the summer. The Navaho tell of Revolving Man, the constellation of the Big Dipper, and Revolving Woman, Cassiopeia, both turning around the home fire, the North Star. Thus the stars dictate that only one couple can live around one home fire.
The Algonquin call the Milky Way the Pathway of the Souls and see it as the trail taken by the dead as they travel to a place that we cannot know. Each star of the Pathway of the Souls is a home fire of the departed, and each night, while they sit around it on their long pilgrimage telling stories, they look down upon us and see our home fires.
The Weskerini, like other Algonquin, told stories about the night sky in the Laurentians and shared a mythology associated with the constellations. They called the full moon of January the Wolf Moon because the wolves howled in hunger around their snowy encampments. They told stories of the wise woman Kisisok8e who explained the colours in the sunset and the bear’s head in the sky that indicated the seasons.
Much of this mythology has been lost, and some of the remaining stories have been embellished with myth that has come from Europe, but even the most critical historians acknowledge that there are similarities between the European stories and the American ones. Some of these stories may even have the same origins, and the human presence in the Americas – even in the Laurentians – is so old that a story first told here could have travelled back to Europe and Asia, shared with the circumpolar peoples or in other ways beyond our memory, and inspired some of the classical myths. Evidence of the presence of ancestral Algonquin even in the northern part of our territory predate the classical cultures, dating back to the time of the building of the pyramids, a time before the creation of the alphabet.
Our perspective, inherited from Europe, assumes that there was no exchange between the Americas and the rest of the world before the time of Columbus, or at least before the Vikings, but over thousands of years, it seems improbable that there was no contact, and, if there was contact, ideas would have moved in both directions.
I am not proposing any specific example of contact, but simply as a mental exercise to help myself understand just how old the original American cultures are. It is possible that a story first told in a winter encampment in the Laurentians was repeated and shared, slowly morphing into one of the classics of European mythology. If we can conceive that some of our oldest stories could have originated around an ancient home fire in our own Laurentian back yard, we can more easily incorporate ourselves into the long history of the Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures in these hills. By understanding that we share a common past, we can learn to respect and appreciate a mythology that might otherwise feel wholly alien. This is the land where we live and if we see it as alien, we alienate ourselves. Slowly the land will possess us, and we will come to accept that we are simply a new chapter in the long human history of the Laurentians, that the North Star, which guided Europeans across the Atlantic, has been a constant for all our peoples, and that, in a very real way, it even re-introduced us to each other.
The Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Iroquois, Delaware and Fox all tell sky stories about a bear, stories that relate to the Big Dipper and the North Star. The Mistassini Cree tell how the North Star was set in place during a quarrel. The people of an earlier world had a quarrel with North Star, who was one of them. They plotted to kill him. He fled into the sky, out of their reach. When they saw where he was, and that he was out of their reach, they decided to leave him there as a marker for night travellers.
The Iroquois tell a story about three warriors from the beginning of time who chased the Great Bear, shooting an arrow into its side. They did not kill it, and it has been running across the sky ever since, circling the North Star. As the sky rotates, that constellation tilts, and every autumn, blood spills from the wound, reddening all the leaves.
The Farmer’s Almanac bases its lunar calendar on Algonquin descriptions of the full moon – Algonquin months. June is the Strawberry Moon, followed by the Moon of the Buck because its antlers become apparent. It is also known as the Thunder Moon in recognition of the thunderstorms that we have all experienced during the early part of the summer. The Navaho tell of Revolving Man, the constellation of the Big Dipper, and Revolving Woman, Cassiopeia, both turning around the home fire, the North Star. Thus the stars dictate that only one couple can live around one home fire.
The Algonquin call the Milky Way the Pathway of the Souls and see it as the trail taken by the dead as they travel to a place that we cannot know. Each star of the Pathway of the Souls is a home fire of the departed, and each night, while they sit around it on their long pilgrimage telling stories, they look down upon us and see our home fires.
The Weskerini, like other Algonquin, told stories about the night sky in the Laurentians and shared a mythology associated with the constellations. They called the full moon of January the Wolf Moon because the wolves howled in hunger around their snowy encampments. They told stories of the wise woman Kisisok8e who explained the colours in the sunset and the bear’s head in the sky that indicated the seasons.
Much of this mythology has been lost, and some of the remaining stories have been embellished with myth that has come from Europe, but even the most critical historians acknowledge that there are similarities between the European stories and the American ones. Some of these stories may even have the same origins, and the human presence in the Americas – even in the Laurentians – is so old that a story first told here could have travelled back to Europe and Asia, shared with the circumpolar peoples or in other ways beyond our memory, and inspired some of the classical myths. Evidence of the presence of ancestral Algonquin even in the northern part of our territory predate the classical cultures, dating back to the time of the building of the pyramids, a time before the creation of the alphabet.
Our perspective, inherited from Europe, assumes that there was no exchange between the Americas and the rest of the world before the time of Columbus, or at least before the Vikings, but over thousands of years, it seems improbable that there was no contact, and, if there was contact, ideas would have moved in both directions.
I am not proposing any specific example of contact, but simply as a mental exercise to help myself understand just how old the original American cultures are. It is possible that a story first told in a winter encampment in the Laurentians was repeated and shared, slowly morphing into one of the classics of European mythology. If we can conceive that some of our oldest stories could have originated around an ancient home fire in our own Laurentian back yard, we can more easily incorporate ourselves into the long history of the Algonquian and Iroquoian cultures in these hills. By understanding that we share a common past, we can learn to respect and appreciate a mythology that might otherwise feel wholly alien. This is the land where we live and if we see it as alien, we alienate ourselves. Slowly the land will possess us, and we will come to accept that we are simply a new chapter in the long human history of the Laurentians, that the North Star, which guided Europeans across the Atlantic, has been a constant for all our peoples, and that, in a very real way, it even re-introduced us to each other.
Tiowero:Ton, The Doncaster Reserve
After the signing of The Great Peace in 1701 that established a treaty between the French and a clan of the Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederacy, the Sulpicians set up a mission at Lake of Two Mountains, ostensibly, to maintain peace between the Algonquin and those Mohawks who had become allies of the French. In recognition of this noble and selfless act, the French Crown awarded the Sulpicians exclusive fur-trading rights to the territory. The Sulpicians sold these rights to French entrepreneurs and did their best to convert the Mohawk and Algonquin peoples to Catholicism. Later, in the war with the English that led to the loss of the colony, many of these Mohawks, previously the allies of the English, fought on the French side against other Iroquois.
In 1763 when the colony was transferred, the English administration refused to recognize Jesuit and Récollet titles over large tracts of land. Encouraged by this, a Mohawk resident of Two Mountains decided to sell his house to an English businessman. He hoped to demonstrate in this manner that he owned the property, and gambled that the Sulpicians would fear confiscation of their lands if they challenged the rights of this Englishman to buy. The Sulpicians were more afraid of his strategy than of the English. They appealed to Brigadier Ralph Burton, military head of the colony, who had no real civil authority and was constantly at odds with Governor James Murray. Any action that Burton took in this civil matter may have involved Murray, but Burton, by simply requesting the Sulpicians swear homage to George III, King of England, exercised his military authority, and the Sulpician property rights, being the status quo, were confirmed. The Mohawk/Englishman transaction fell through.
From 1763 to 1936 the Mohawk and Algonquin residents continued to fight this legal battle over their lands. They were very creative in their fights, inviting a Methodist pastor to run their mission in 1852 and threatening to become Protestants. This scheme backfired when the pastor abandoned his mission in the face of Mohawk and Algonquin indifference to his religious ideas. After subsequent attempts, a Methodist temple was built, but the Sulpicians won a judgement and had it dismantled.
The Sulpicians set up Mohawk and Algonquin villages and succeeded in encouraging the two to live in a spirit of cooperation. This was not hard, since they both had similar feelings for the Sulpicians. The sparse populations of these two peoples became centred near Lake of Two Mountains, and the rest of the area began to fall to settlers. There was nothing the Mohawk or Algonquin peoples could do to get the same rights to the land as the settlers were getting. The English seemed to be unwilling to recognize them as anything more than wards, non-citizens who had to be encouraged to move away, somewhere else. There was clearly no interest in their culture, history or political structure, yet, from the Iroquois perspective, it is their unwritten constitution, the Great Law, that was the inspiration for Western democracy. Some people even claim that their symbol, the eagle, and their democratic laws were copied by the 13 American colonies in the creation of the United States. Given the record of treatment of the Six Nations subsequent to the death of Sir William Johnson, it is clear that the average American was taught no reverence for them.
The Iroquois were politically astute but not well informed, being of such a different culture from their adversaries. Their goal had been to try to find a middle position between the French and English colonies, a strategy that suffered after the French colony fell to the English. They were a people of six nations -the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Tuskarora. The sixth was actually adopted by the other five, according to their oral history, around the time the English were first arriving in America.
In 1853 the Crown, through its colonial government, ordained that land should be set aside for the ‘Indians,’ and so the Doncaster Reserve, roughly 36 square miles (93 square kilometres), was created. It is doubtful that Queen Victoria actually chose the name, but then,the Mohawk and Algonquin peoples were not consulted either. More probably the choice of the name had to do with connections of a functionary or with the surveyor who first measured out the township. The original Doncaster, from the Celtic Danu meaning water and Castre meaning fort, is the name of a city in England’s industrial heartland on the Don River. When the Reserve was created, the townships of Beresford, Wolfe and Doncaster were just starting to be surveyed and the Indian land was pretty far away, fulfilling the primary criterion of being ‘somewhere else.’ Another, larger reserve, Maniwaki, having an area of about 225 square miles (582 square kilometres) was also established, and over the next 25 years the Algonquin moved there, having tired of the endless legal battles with the Sulpicians. In spite of their acquisition of Doncaster, though, the Mohawk families soon had to carry their fight to Ste. Lucie as the little parish began to develop and homestead Reserve land in an attempt to drive the Mohawk away.
The Federal Government was forced to buy the farms from these settlers in 1909 and return them to their rightful owners, just to keep the peace.
Today, the name Doncaster is also associated with the township, the Doncaster River – a tributary of the North River – and Doncaster Park in Ste. Adele. However the Mohawk, who use the reserve much the same way that most people use the Laurentians, call it Tiowero:Ton (pronounced more like joe-way-row’-dew. This translates directly as “masses of air that begin engaging themselves as slight breezes whirling into a wind,” or more simply as “where the wind begins.”
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
In 1763 when the colony was transferred, the English administration refused to recognize Jesuit and Récollet titles over large tracts of land. Encouraged by this, a Mohawk resident of Two Mountains decided to sell his house to an English businessman. He hoped to demonstrate in this manner that he owned the property, and gambled that the Sulpicians would fear confiscation of their lands if they challenged the rights of this Englishman to buy. The Sulpicians were more afraid of his strategy than of the English. They appealed to Brigadier Ralph Burton, military head of the colony, who had no real civil authority and was constantly at odds with Governor James Murray. Any action that Burton took in this civil matter may have involved Murray, but Burton, by simply requesting the Sulpicians swear homage to George III, King of England, exercised his military authority, and the Sulpician property rights, being the status quo, were confirmed. The Mohawk/Englishman transaction fell through.
From 1763 to 1936 the Mohawk and Algonquin residents continued to fight this legal battle over their lands. They were very creative in their fights, inviting a Methodist pastor to run their mission in 1852 and threatening to become Protestants. This scheme backfired when the pastor abandoned his mission in the face of Mohawk and Algonquin indifference to his religious ideas. After subsequent attempts, a Methodist temple was built, but the Sulpicians won a judgement and had it dismantled.
The Sulpicians set up Mohawk and Algonquin villages and succeeded in encouraging the two to live in a spirit of cooperation. This was not hard, since they both had similar feelings for the Sulpicians. The sparse populations of these two peoples became centred near Lake of Two Mountains, and the rest of the area began to fall to settlers. There was nothing the Mohawk or Algonquin peoples could do to get the same rights to the land as the settlers were getting. The English seemed to be unwilling to recognize them as anything more than wards, non-citizens who had to be encouraged to move away, somewhere else. There was clearly no interest in their culture, history or political structure, yet, from the Iroquois perspective, it is their unwritten constitution, the Great Law, that was the inspiration for Western democracy. Some people even claim that their symbol, the eagle, and their democratic laws were copied by the 13 American colonies in the creation of the United States. Given the record of treatment of the Six Nations subsequent to the death of Sir William Johnson, it is clear that the average American was taught no reverence for them.
The Iroquois were politically astute but not well informed, being of such a different culture from their adversaries. Their goal had been to try to find a middle position between the French and English colonies, a strategy that suffered after the French colony fell to the English. They were a people of six nations -the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Tuskarora. The sixth was actually adopted by the other five, according to their oral history, around the time the English were first arriving in America.
In 1853 the Crown, through its colonial government, ordained that land should be set aside for the ‘Indians,’ and so the Doncaster Reserve, roughly 36 square miles (93 square kilometres), was created. It is doubtful that Queen Victoria actually chose the name, but then,the Mohawk and Algonquin peoples were not consulted either. More probably the choice of the name had to do with connections of a functionary or with the surveyor who first measured out the township. The original Doncaster, from the Celtic Danu meaning water and Castre meaning fort, is the name of a city in England’s industrial heartland on the Don River. When the Reserve was created, the townships of Beresford, Wolfe and Doncaster were just starting to be surveyed and the Indian land was pretty far away, fulfilling the primary criterion of being ‘somewhere else.’ Another, larger reserve, Maniwaki, having an area of about 225 square miles (582 square kilometres) was also established, and over the next 25 years the Algonquin moved there, having tired of the endless legal battles with the Sulpicians. In spite of their acquisition of Doncaster, though, the Mohawk families soon had to carry their fight to Ste. Lucie as the little parish began to develop and homestead Reserve land in an attempt to drive the Mohawk away.
The Federal Government was forced to buy the farms from these settlers in 1909 and return them to their rightful owners, just to keep the peace.
Today, the name Doncaster is also associated with the township, the Doncaster River – a tributary of the North River – and Doncaster Park in Ste. Adele. However the Mohawk, who use the reserve much the same way that most people use the Laurentians, call it Tiowero:Ton (pronounced more like joe-way-row’-dew. This translates directly as “masses of air that begin engaging themselves as slight breezes whirling into a wind,” or more simply as “where the wind begins.”
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
Beaven Lake
Unlike most immigrants of his time, Stephen Jakes Beaven integrated as much into the Indian world as the colonial one. Born in England in 1799, he and his family came first to Montreal, where his father set up a ropewalk, a business that manufactured rope, so called because of a technique still in use elsewhere today. It involves walking backwards away from a large wheel that feeds the cords out while making sure the strands twine together and the tension is right. Stephen senior was clearly mechanically adept. He was subsequently hired to build a gristmill in Belleville, in Upper Canada, a move that would have a huge impact on his son’s future. Once the mill was finished, he got caught in the mechanism and was killed.
The records do not mention any other children or any of the female side of the Beaven family, and there are no Beavens listed as living in Belleville today. In the early days of Belleville, there was a band of the Mississauga Nation, an Algonquin people, living there. The Mississauga would have represented an important percentage of the population, and Stephen Jakes must have interacted very early in his life with them, learning an Algonkian dialect. He drifted away from the mechanical vocation of his father, and hired on with the Hudson’s Bay Company as an interpreter, quickly learning to appreciate the potential for profits in the fur trade. Before long, he left the company, hunting, trapping and trading for his own account in the Ottawa Valley. He was said to have known every lake and stream, and his best recorded year, working with a partner, he killed 180 deer and 40 beaver.
Beaven (also recorded as Bevin and Bevan), was, according to Cyrus Thomas writing in the 1890s, “…more generally regarded as belonging to the red men than to the Anglo-Saxon race.” At the time that Sidney Bellingham established the Township of Arundel in 1857, this would have been a convenient way of dismissing any title claims from someone like Beaven, who settled before titles had been established. The colonial attitude disinherited virtually all of the First Nations’ claims to their lands, right across the continent, but the Beaven name endured and is present elsewhere in the Arundel township records, suggesting that his family adapted well enough to the changes that settlement brought.
Stephen Jakes was twenty-three when he first established himself on the Rouge River, building a cabin and a storehouse at the stream joining Beaven Lake to the Rouge, well-located below the rapids at a wide turn in the river. The Algonquin came down the Rouge to trade, so he would have had to keep his storehouse supplied with items of exchange. It is intriguing to imagine what the area was like then. Surrounded by tall, quiet forests, dependent on the river for transport and drinking water, the natural bounty could easily have supplied basic needs. From our perspective, it was idyllic. Beaven would have had to return regularly to Lachute and stock up on trade items. Such a trip would be well planned and take a long time. Some supplies would have to be ordered from Montreal, to be delivered to Lachute by boat. Given the distances and the lack of facilities, it is possible that he did not actually live at his idyllic trading post, but arrived with supplies in anticipation of the Algonquin coming down the river. However, if he had really become more of an Algonquin than an Anglo-Saxon, it is plausible that he and his family lived in solitude in that beautiful countryside and that he left on trading trips, leaving his family to fend for themselves until he returned. Even though no mention is made of a spouse, he had five sons and a daughter. It is intriguing to think that his spouse may have been Algonquin, but whatever her origin, she would have had to be as well adapted as he was.
When George Allbright and his team of surveyors began their work in the 1850s, it must have changed the world that Beaven lived in. Thirty-five years of a life of solitude and routine would have been shattered. Questions of title, competition and the company of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ would have seriously altered his relationship, not just with the Algonquin, but with nature itself. Once the first settler, William Thomson, arrived in 1857, the historical record no longer talks about a trading post. Instead, Thomson became the postmaster. More settlers arrived the next year, and the tall, pristine forests fell to the axe.
The name Stephen J. Beaven shows up in the land registry as acquiring a 100-acre lot near Beaven Lake in 1865, but far from where his trading post would have been. He was sixty-six years old then, a little beyond the age of homesteading, and the name Stephen I. Beaven is registered as acquiring the lot next door 10 years later. Cyrus Thomas recorded that Stephen Jakes Beaven died in Arundel while living with his son George in 1886. He was 87 years old.
Whether or not the settlers respected Beaven’s land title, the legends of the man, the trader, and his life on Beaven Creek inspired their respect. His name lives on in Beaven Lake and his memory forms an integral part of Arundel and its history. As Cyrus Thomas put it, “Thus it will be seen, this lake and its outlet form a lasting memorial of the old hunter who lived so long upon their shores.”
The records do not mention any other children or any of the female side of the Beaven family, and there are no Beavens listed as living in Belleville today. In the early days of Belleville, there was a band of the Mississauga Nation, an Algonquin people, living there. The Mississauga would have represented an important percentage of the population, and Stephen Jakes must have interacted very early in his life with them, learning an Algonkian dialect. He drifted away from the mechanical vocation of his father, and hired on with the Hudson’s Bay Company as an interpreter, quickly learning to appreciate the potential for profits in the fur trade. Before long, he left the company, hunting, trapping and trading for his own account in the Ottawa Valley. He was said to have known every lake and stream, and his best recorded year, working with a partner, he killed 180 deer and 40 beaver.
Beaven (also recorded as Bevin and Bevan), was, according to Cyrus Thomas writing in the 1890s, “…more generally regarded as belonging to the red men than to the Anglo-Saxon race.” At the time that Sidney Bellingham established the Township of Arundel in 1857, this would have been a convenient way of dismissing any title claims from someone like Beaven, who settled before titles had been established. The colonial attitude disinherited virtually all of the First Nations’ claims to their lands, right across the continent, but the Beaven name endured and is present elsewhere in the Arundel township records, suggesting that his family adapted well enough to the changes that settlement brought.
Stephen Jakes was twenty-three when he first established himself on the Rouge River, building a cabin and a storehouse at the stream joining Beaven Lake to the Rouge, well-located below the rapids at a wide turn in the river. The Algonquin came down the Rouge to trade, so he would have had to keep his storehouse supplied with items of exchange. It is intriguing to imagine what the area was like then. Surrounded by tall, quiet forests, dependent on the river for transport and drinking water, the natural bounty could easily have supplied basic needs. From our perspective, it was idyllic. Beaven would have had to return regularly to Lachute and stock up on trade items. Such a trip would be well planned and take a long time. Some supplies would have to be ordered from Montreal, to be delivered to Lachute by boat. Given the distances and the lack of facilities, it is possible that he did not actually live at his idyllic trading post, but arrived with supplies in anticipation of the Algonquin coming down the river. However, if he had really become more of an Algonquin than an Anglo-Saxon, it is plausible that he and his family lived in solitude in that beautiful countryside and that he left on trading trips, leaving his family to fend for themselves until he returned. Even though no mention is made of a spouse, he had five sons and a daughter. It is intriguing to think that his spouse may have been Algonquin, but whatever her origin, she would have had to be as well adapted as he was.
When George Allbright and his team of surveyors began their work in the 1850s, it must have changed the world that Beaven lived in. Thirty-five years of a life of solitude and routine would have been shattered. Questions of title, competition and the company of ‘Anglo-Saxons’ would have seriously altered his relationship, not just with the Algonquin, but with nature itself. Once the first settler, William Thomson, arrived in 1857, the historical record no longer talks about a trading post. Instead, Thomson became the postmaster. More settlers arrived the next year, and the tall, pristine forests fell to the axe.
The name Stephen J. Beaven shows up in the land registry as acquiring a 100-acre lot near Beaven Lake in 1865, but far from where his trading post would have been. He was sixty-six years old then, a little beyond the age of homesteading, and the name Stephen I. Beaven is registered as acquiring the lot next door 10 years later. Cyrus Thomas recorded that Stephen Jakes Beaven died in Arundel while living with his son George in 1886. He was 87 years old.
Whether or not the settlers respected Beaven’s land title, the legends of the man, the trader, and his life on Beaven Creek inspired their respect. His name lives on in Beaven Lake and his memory forms an integral part of Arundel and its history. As Cyrus Thomas put it, “Thus it will be seen, this lake and its outlet form a lasting memorial of the old hunter who lived so long upon their shores.”
The Ottawa River
In the early 1600s, when Samuel de Champlain first explored the St Lawrence beyond Hochelaga, the North American continent was peopled with a series of small nations with amorphous borders. These peoples had highly ritualized communications among them and long-standing enemies and trading partners. Champlain could not know that the Algonquin nations that he met were in the middle of border skirmishes with the Iroquois nations to the south, but he realised quickly that he had to choose sides when his meeting party was attacked. He stood with the Algonquin, thereby establishing himself as an ally. Soon he began trading with them on the Kitchisipi River, the name the Kichispirinis and the Weskarinis had for the lower Ottawa.
Among Champlain’s party was an adventuresome Frenchman named Jean Nicollet de Belleborne, and he volunteered to live with the Algonquin on Allumettes Island. Over the next years, he lived with the Hurons and the Nipissing as well, learning their languages and customs. He became a valuable emissary to the French and a legendary character travelling in a brightly coloured Chinese robe. He was not the first Frenchman to choose to live with the Algonquin, nor was he the only one. Etienne Brulé and Nicolas du Vignau were others from around the same time who accepted to be exchanged for an Algonguin chief’s son named Savignon. The chief’s son went to Paris, and upon his return characterized the French as strange people who argue loudly but don’t fight.
With the help of these men the French began to build up the human resources to explore further inland. When they got as far as Lake Huron, Champlain observed a small band that had exceptionally good beaver pelts to offer in exchange. Upon inquiry, he learned that these were the Adawe, or Ottawa, a word that means ‘trader’. Champlain’s curiosity was piqued and he discovered that the Ottawa, who lived on Manitoulin Island, were a small nation that had found a niche for itself as traders along the rivers that joined the Great Lakes and even those ones that were home to the Cree in the Hudson Basin. They carried goods among the peoples of the Great Lakes and were respected everywhere they went. As a result, their influence was way out of proportion to their numbers.
Champlain encouraged trading with the Ottawa, and the French had only to meet the Ottawa at the Huron villages on Lake Huron. With this development, the need of men like Nicollet, Brûlé and Vignau changed. They did not have to explore, and soon the French became reliant upon the Ottawa for their excellent pelts that in many cases came from as far away as Sault Ste. Marie and from the rivers of the Cree.
The Ottawa would pick up French products and trade them for furs, spreading the French goods as far as Sault Ste. Marie and into the Hudson Basin to the Cree. The French remained active partners with the Ottawa, helping and encouraging their trading. They supplied them with steel weapons and hunting equipment, and in one case this caused a serious incident in which the French successfully intervened, avoiding conflict. The Ottawa, being traders, always looked for negotiated solutions to problems, but were willing to turn to war where necessary. When they came up against the Winnebago on the western shores of Lake Michigan, their steel tools were resented and the Winnebago refused to cooperate or to let them trade in their territory. The Ottawa sent negotiators, but these ambassadors were simply eaten. Stunned by the rebuff, the Ottawa reported the incident to the French and prepared for war. The French, concerned that a war would not help trade, sent the legendary Jean Nicollet to meet with the Winnebago. He arrived in 1634, and no doubt he was wearing his famous brightly coloured Chinese robe, and was likely the first European they had ever seen. His novelty probably contributed to saving him from sharing the fate of the Ottawa ambassadors and he succeeded in negotiating a peace between the Ottawa and the Winnebago.
French trading patterns were seriously disturbed by the British capture of New France in 1629, not because of the British directly, but because the British traded with the Iroquois, not with the Algonquin and Huron. As a result, during the three years that they held New France, before the French king negotiated it back, they turned to the Iroquois to bring them furs. Also, the British and the Dutch readily gave firearms in exchange for furs, something that the French had refrained from doing until then. When the French took New France back, they discovered that the Iroquois were not willing to give their newfound territory up. It was inevitable that the Great Lakes tribes, allied with the French, would form an alliance against the Iroquois, and it was inevitable that the French would begin to trade arms with this new alliance. Unlike the Iroquois, which was a federation, the alliance needed leadership and the natural leaders were the Ottawa. As traders, they were known and respected by the other partners. They also provided its greatest single leader in the person of Pontiac.
Had the Iroquois never ventured into the French trade route, the political map of North America might have evolved much differently. The French and the Great Lakes nations grew closer in the face of the Iroquois and the British, but nation after nation was dragged into the conflict on one side or the other. These included the Nipissing, Ojibwe, Shawnee, Miami and Cherokee and involved a total of 20 nations, extending into the Mississippi Valley and out west. During this whole period, the Ottawa maintained a leadership role and the French support was constant. Sadly, though, when the sides were becoming tired of the battle in the 1690′s they discovered that the beaver had recovered to huge numbers and caused a collapse of their price on the French market. By itself this would perhaps have been nothing more than a market correction, except that King Louis XIV decided that the reduced value of the trade would be a good time for him to listen to the advice that he had received from the Jesuits. They had told him that the fur trade had caused great instability in the New World, and so he passed an edict banning it in the Great Lakes region. Of course, this caused greater instability, since the alliance and the economy had become dependant on trade. Even the techniques of tying an arrowhead on a shaft had been forgotten in places and ammunition had become essential, not just for warfare.
Somehow the Ottawa leader Pontiac managed to keep a loyal alliance going in support of the French despite this action of the King, and the alliance maintained after the King’s edict had ended. The damage was done, though, and the French influence was on the wane. Had the French crown been of a different mindset, a large, French-speaking indigenous culture might exist today, stretching into the middle of the continent.
The Ottawa River first began to be called by that name during the Beaver Wars, and was first recorded by the cartographer Bernou in 1680. It is fitting that the river carries the name that the original occupants had used to express the concept of exchange, and that it also commemorates a people who proved themselves in a time of difficulty.
Sources: The Algonquins -Daniel Clement; Ottawa History -Lee Sultzman; Commission de toponymie, Quebec.
Among Champlain’s party was an adventuresome Frenchman named Jean Nicollet de Belleborne, and he volunteered to live with the Algonquin on Allumettes Island. Over the next years, he lived with the Hurons and the Nipissing as well, learning their languages and customs. He became a valuable emissary to the French and a legendary character travelling in a brightly coloured Chinese robe. He was not the first Frenchman to choose to live with the Algonquin, nor was he the only one. Etienne Brulé and Nicolas du Vignau were others from around the same time who accepted to be exchanged for an Algonguin chief’s son named Savignon. The chief’s son went to Paris, and upon his return characterized the French as strange people who argue loudly but don’t fight.
With the help of these men the French began to build up the human resources to explore further inland. When they got as far as Lake Huron, Champlain observed a small band that had exceptionally good beaver pelts to offer in exchange. Upon inquiry, he learned that these were the Adawe, or Ottawa, a word that means ‘trader’. Champlain’s curiosity was piqued and he discovered that the Ottawa, who lived on Manitoulin Island, were a small nation that had found a niche for itself as traders along the rivers that joined the Great Lakes and even those ones that were home to the Cree in the Hudson Basin. They carried goods among the peoples of the Great Lakes and were respected everywhere they went. As a result, their influence was way out of proportion to their numbers.
Champlain encouraged trading with the Ottawa, and the French had only to meet the Ottawa at the Huron villages on Lake Huron. With this development, the need of men like Nicollet, Brûlé and Vignau changed. They did not have to explore, and soon the French became reliant upon the Ottawa for their excellent pelts that in many cases came from as far away as Sault Ste. Marie and from the rivers of the Cree.
The Ottawa would pick up French products and trade them for furs, spreading the French goods as far as Sault Ste. Marie and into the Hudson Basin to the Cree. The French remained active partners with the Ottawa, helping and encouraging their trading. They supplied them with steel weapons and hunting equipment, and in one case this caused a serious incident in which the French successfully intervened, avoiding conflict. The Ottawa, being traders, always looked for negotiated solutions to problems, but were willing to turn to war where necessary. When they came up against the Winnebago on the western shores of Lake Michigan, their steel tools were resented and the Winnebago refused to cooperate or to let them trade in their territory. The Ottawa sent negotiators, but these ambassadors were simply eaten. Stunned by the rebuff, the Ottawa reported the incident to the French and prepared for war. The French, concerned that a war would not help trade, sent the legendary Jean Nicollet to meet with the Winnebago. He arrived in 1634, and no doubt he was wearing his famous brightly coloured Chinese robe, and was likely the first European they had ever seen. His novelty probably contributed to saving him from sharing the fate of the Ottawa ambassadors and he succeeded in negotiating a peace between the Ottawa and the Winnebago.
French trading patterns were seriously disturbed by the British capture of New France in 1629, not because of the British directly, but because the British traded with the Iroquois, not with the Algonquin and Huron. As a result, during the three years that they held New France, before the French king negotiated it back, they turned to the Iroquois to bring them furs. Also, the British and the Dutch readily gave firearms in exchange for furs, something that the French had refrained from doing until then. When the French took New France back, they discovered that the Iroquois were not willing to give their newfound territory up. It was inevitable that the Great Lakes tribes, allied with the French, would form an alliance against the Iroquois, and it was inevitable that the French would begin to trade arms with this new alliance. Unlike the Iroquois, which was a federation, the alliance needed leadership and the natural leaders were the Ottawa. As traders, they were known and respected by the other partners. They also provided its greatest single leader in the person of Pontiac.
Had the Iroquois never ventured into the French trade route, the political map of North America might have evolved much differently. The French and the Great Lakes nations grew closer in the face of the Iroquois and the British, but nation after nation was dragged into the conflict on one side or the other. These included the Nipissing, Ojibwe, Shawnee, Miami and Cherokee and involved a total of 20 nations, extending into the Mississippi Valley and out west. During this whole period, the Ottawa maintained a leadership role and the French support was constant. Sadly, though, when the sides were becoming tired of the battle in the 1690′s they discovered that the beaver had recovered to huge numbers and caused a collapse of their price on the French market. By itself this would perhaps have been nothing more than a market correction, except that King Louis XIV decided that the reduced value of the trade would be a good time for him to listen to the advice that he had received from the Jesuits. They had told him that the fur trade had caused great instability in the New World, and so he passed an edict banning it in the Great Lakes region. Of course, this caused greater instability, since the alliance and the economy had become dependant on trade. Even the techniques of tying an arrowhead on a shaft had been forgotten in places and ammunition had become essential, not just for warfare.
Somehow the Ottawa leader Pontiac managed to keep a loyal alliance going in support of the French despite this action of the King, and the alliance maintained after the King’s edict had ended. The damage was done, though, and the French influence was on the wane. Had the French crown been of a different mindset, a large, French-speaking indigenous culture might exist today, stretching into the middle of the continent.
The Ottawa River first began to be called by that name during the Beaver Wars, and was first recorded by the cartographer Bernou in 1680. It is fitting that the river carries the name that the original occupants had used to express the concept of exchange, and that it also commemorates a people who proved themselves in a time of difficulty.
Sources: The Algonquins -Daniel Clement; Ottawa History -Lee Sultzman; Commission de toponymie, Quebec.
Mont Tremblant
A number of the place-names in the mid- to upper Laurentians have come down to us from the original human inhabitants, the Weskarinis Algonquins. This tribe lived principally along the Ottawa River and its Laurentian tributaries, the Lièvre, the Petite Nation, the Rouge and the North. We can only imagine their lives, small family groups living in a hierarchy dominated by ancient traditions and coloured by myth. The summer must have been a time of plenty and of celebration. Families would gather in large groups, children would run together and the maturing older children and young adults would have the opportunity to meet, to court and to make decisions, marriages, alliances, plans.
The Ottawa was a plentiful source of food in the summer, but come autumn and the frosts, the food supply would dwindle rapidly. The summer harvest would be quickly consumed. Adapting to this seasonal environment, small family groups would travel up the rivers, hunting and spreading over a larger territory. If things went well, a family could find itself back at a winter homestead with a sister’s new husband, her younger siblings, parents, aging grandparents and enough available game to wait out the fierce cold season.
One imagines returning to this wintering site and finding an old uncle who had declined to go down the river the previous spring. The family would have a lot of stories to share and catching up to do. Here, in a cocoon environment, holed up for the winter, there would be time for moral lessons and fanciful tales, spun about the past, about the spirit-beings, the great forces of nature.
The aboriginal culture did not separate spirit from body as we do. The spirit was in all things, in the rocks, the streams, not just in living things. The Manitou was the Great Spirit, but it would be wrong to say that the Manitou was resident in any one place. Their concept of the universe was so different from ours that we can only speculate and project what it really would have felt like to be one of them.
In their mythology was a story, probably repeated on long winter nights over many generations, about a great mountain, and how the Great Spirit was particularly present there. They called it Trembling Mountain, and the elders warned that if humans should upset the natural order, then the Great Spirit would cause this mountain to shake and tremble, demonstrating displeasure or anger.
If we could only get closer to the Weskarinis, maybe we would gain insights into our own ancestors, because the Judeo-Christian-Moslem culture from which most of us come also talks about distant beginnings around a mountain. Mount Sinai, the mountain where the Ten Commandments were given, could well have had a similar hold on our ancestors. Sadly, though, we cannot know more about the Weskarinis because this tribe, living in precarious balance not just with its food supplies, but also with its enemy, the Iroquois, was doomed to extinction thanks to the inadvertent interference of the French and English settlers.
The administration of New France maintained a policy of cooperation with the aboriginals. They could be taught religion, and trade was encouraged, but they should not be given arms. Thus the Algonquin and Huron peoples became fur-trading partners with the French. The English, by contrast, did not have the same philosophy, and settlers traded guns happily with their aboriginal partners, the Iroquois.
The French and English colonies were very different. The French attempted to simply transplant a peasant culture from France to New France, with all of the structures and hierarchies that existed at home. As a result, the French colony was seen as a part of the great French culture. In contrast, England functioned more like a rogue state where brigands set sail on the high seas and brought back their booty. The colonies were simply a place for people to go, or to be sent, who were not well adapted at home. The rules of the game were made up as they went along in a hierarchy where the greatest bandit and pirate on the high seas was recognised at home for his victories abroad. Thus two brothers, the ship’s captains Kirke, captured New France in 1629 causing some diplomatic problems back home. Three years later, the English crown managed to buy their co-operation by giving them Newfoundland instead, and then gave New France back to the French in a treaty that had more to do with Europe than with North America.
In the meantime, though, the English Kirke brothers moved in, bringing their trading partners, the Iroquois, with them. This must have been a terribly difficult period for the Algonquin and Huron peoples, who suddenly discovered that they could no longer trade with the French. They had no guns, so they could not even stand up to the Iroquois. But worse was yet to come when the French regained control of New France in 1632, and the Iroquois did not go away. Instead, they tried to maintain the position that the Kirke brothers had given them, and thus began the French and Indian Wars.
The Iroquois harassed the Algonquin and Huron traders and fought with the French. In an uneven conflict that ended in 1653 the barely armed Weskarinis Algonquin made a last stand on the shores of Petit Lac Nominingue deep inside historic Weskarinis territory, where they were massacred.The French history suggests there were no survivors, but there are Weskarini descendants today who dispute that. Many of their place names survived and have come down to us today, jumping a period of two hundred years when there was supposed to be nobody left. When the first settlers arrived in the 1840s, they are said to have homesteaded vacant property, but they happily accepted some of the place names that the places were called. Is it logical to think the names survived without the presence, however thin, of the original people?
Reference Histoire des Laurentides -Serge Laurin; The Fatal Shore -Robert Hughes
The Ottawa was a plentiful source of food in the summer, but come autumn and the frosts, the food supply would dwindle rapidly. The summer harvest would be quickly consumed. Adapting to this seasonal environment, small family groups would travel up the rivers, hunting and spreading over a larger territory. If things went well, a family could find itself back at a winter homestead with a sister’s new husband, her younger siblings, parents, aging grandparents and enough available game to wait out the fierce cold season.
One imagines returning to this wintering site and finding an old uncle who had declined to go down the river the previous spring. The family would have a lot of stories to share and catching up to do. Here, in a cocoon environment, holed up for the winter, there would be time for moral lessons and fanciful tales, spun about the past, about the spirit-beings, the great forces of nature.
The aboriginal culture did not separate spirit from body as we do. The spirit was in all things, in the rocks, the streams, not just in living things. The Manitou was the Great Spirit, but it would be wrong to say that the Manitou was resident in any one place. Their concept of the universe was so different from ours that we can only speculate and project what it really would have felt like to be one of them.
In their mythology was a story, probably repeated on long winter nights over many generations, about a great mountain, and how the Great Spirit was particularly present there. They called it Trembling Mountain, and the elders warned that if humans should upset the natural order, then the Great Spirit would cause this mountain to shake and tremble, demonstrating displeasure or anger.
If we could only get closer to the Weskarinis, maybe we would gain insights into our own ancestors, because the Judeo-Christian-Moslem culture from which most of us come also talks about distant beginnings around a mountain. Mount Sinai, the mountain where the Ten Commandments were given, could well have had a similar hold on our ancestors. Sadly, though, we cannot know more about the Weskarinis because this tribe, living in precarious balance not just with its food supplies, but also with its enemy, the Iroquois, was doomed to extinction thanks to the inadvertent interference of the French and English settlers.
The administration of New France maintained a policy of cooperation with the aboriginals. They could be taught religion, and trade was encouraged, but they should not be given arms. Thus the Algonquin and Huron peoples became fur-trading partners with the French. The English, by contrast, did not have the same philosophy, and settlers traded guns happily with their aboriginal partners, the Iroquois.
The French and English colonies were very different. The French attempted to simply transplant a peasant culture from France to New France, with all of the structures and hierarchies that existed at home. As a result, the French colony was seen as a part of the great French culture. In contrast, England functioned more like a rogue state where brigands set sail on the high seas and brought back their booty. The colonies were simply a place for people to go, or to be sent, who were not well adapted at home. The rules of the game were made up as they went along in a hierarchy where the greatest bandit and pirate on the high seas was recognised at home for his victories abroad. Thus two brothers, the ship’s captains Kirke, captured New France in 1629 causing some diplomatic problems back home. Three years later, the English crown managed to buy their co-operation by giving them Newfoundland instead, and then gave New France back to the French in a treaty that had more to do with Europe than with North America.
In the meantime, though, the English Kirke brothers moved in, bringing their trading partners, the Iroquois, with them. This must have been a terribly difficult period for the Algonquin and Huron peoples, who suddenly discovered that they could no longer trade with the French. They had no guns, so they could not even stand up to the Iroquois. But worse was yet to come when the French regained control of New France in 1632, and the Iroquois did not go away. Instead, they tried to maintain the position that the Kirke brothers had given them, and thus began the French and Indian Wars.
The Iroquois harassed the Algonquin and Huron traders and fought with the French. In an uneven conflict that ended in 1653 the barely armed Weskarinis Algonquin made a last stand on the shores of Petit Lac Nominingue deep inside historic Weskarinis territory, where they were massacred.The French history suggests there were no survivors, but there are Weskarini descendants today who dispute that. Many of their place names survived and have come down to us today, jumping a period of two hundred years when there was supposed to be nobody left. When the first settlers arrived in the 1840s, they are said to have homesteaded vacant property, but they happily accepted some of the place names that the places were called. Is it logical to think the names survived without the presence, however thin, of the original people?
Reference Histoire des Laurentides -Serge Laurin; The Fatal Shore -Robert Hughes
Sir John’s Lake
Sir William Johnson was the superintendent of northern Indians based in New York in the 1750′s and 60′s and was a significant military leader during the Seven Years’ War. His particular strength was that he had the confidence of the Six Nations of the Iroquois. He was also a shrewd businessman and established one the greatest fortunes in the 13 Colonies prior to the creation of the United States. He brought his son John with him on his military campaigns and John became a respected military leader in his own right. Around 1752 Sir William took a young Mohawk teenager in as his consort. Her name was Konwatsi’tsiaiénni in the Mohawk language but history knows her as Mary, or Molly Brant, elder sister of Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) and head of the Society of Matrons of the Six Nations.
Sir William died leaving his very substantial estate to Sir John Johnson and he and the Brants remained close allies. When the American War of Independence began, they maintained their loyalty to the Crown, a decision that would cost them dearly.
Sir John married Mary Watts and lived peacefully in New York with a son and two daughters. When the war started, he was arrested and released on bail in an attempt to neutralize his influence in the Iroquois community. Shortly afterwards the bail was revoked and, with the help of his Iroquois allies he managed to flee to Canada. He arrived half-starved on the south shore of the St Lawrence, but he quickly recuperated and offered his service in the war against the rebels. Upon his disappearance, Mary Watts was advised that if she did not succeed in stopping her husband she and her children would pay the price.
The brave woman organised the burying of the family valuables including jewellery, silverware and documents and managed to escape the control of the rebels with the help of their black slave named Tony. They abandoned their carriage at a crossroads and made their way through the snow to eventually hire a boat and cross a river between ice floes. Tony carried alternately her son and daughter while Mary carried and nursed the baby. Upon reaching the British camp, the baby succumbed and her elder sister caught a fever and died some days later.
Despite the efforts of Sir John, Joseph Brant and others, eventually the Loyalists had to give up their land and homes in New York and settle in Canada, but during one of his incursions into New York, Johnson recovered the buried valuables of his estate and they were carried back to Canada in the knapsacks of 40 soldiers. From there, they were shipped to England but the ship was lost in the Gulf of St Lawrence.
The Iroquois, under the leadership of Molly and Joseph Brant, were given large land concessions on the Grand River in Upper Canada as a reward for their loyalty to the Crown. They opened up their holdings to white settlement and the town of Brantford remains to commemorate these Loyalists.
Sir John settled in Montreal where he and Mary were blessed with six more sons. Sir John was appointed to command the British Indian Department, a position he held for 46 years. He played a large role in the resettling of Loyalists and was appointed to the Legislative Council of Lower Canada. He fought once more against the Americans, commanding the Six Township Battalions in the War of 1812.
In 1814, he purchased the Seigneury of Argenteuil and Sir John’s Lake was named in his honour upon his death in 1842.
Sir William died leaving his very substantial estate to Sir John Johnson and he and the Brants remained close allies. When the American War of Independence began, they maintained their loyalty to the Crown, a decision that would cost them dearly.
Sir John married Mary Watts and lived peacefully in New York with a son and two daughters. When the war started, he was arrested and released on bail in an attempt to neutralize his influence in the Iroquois community. Shortly afterwards the bail was revoked and, with the help of his Iroquois allies he managed to flee to Canada. He arrived half-starved on the south shore of the St Lawrence, but he quickly recuperated and offered his service in the war against the rebels. Upon his disappearance, Mary Watts was advised that if she did not succeed in stopping her husband she and her children would pay the price.
The brave woman organised the burying of the family valuables including jewellery, silverware and documents and managed to escape the control of the rebels with the help of their black slave named Tony. They abandoned their carriage at a crossroads and made their way through the snow to eventually hire a boat and cross a river between ice floes. Tony carried alternately her son and daughter while Mary carried and nursed the baby. Upon reaching the British camp, the baby succumbed and her elder sister caught a fever and died some days later.
Despite the efforts of Sir John, Joseph Brant and others, eventually the Loyalists had to give up their land and homes in New York and settle in Canada, but during one of his incursions into New York, Johnson recovered the buried valuables of his estate and they were carried back to Canada in the knapsacks of 40 soldiers. From there, they were shipped to England but the ship was lost in the Gulf of St Lawrence.
The Iroquois, under the leadership of Molly and Joseph Brant, were given large land concessions on the Grand River in Upper Canada as a reward for their loyalty to the Crown. They opened up their holdings to white settlement and the town of Brantford remains to commemorate these Loyalists.
Sir John settled in Montreal where he and Mary were blessed with six more sons. Sir John was appointed to command the British Indian Department, a position he held for 46 years. He played a large role in the resettling of Loyalists and was appointed to the Legislative Council of Lower Canada. He fought once more against the Americans, commanding the Six Township Battalions in the War of 1812.
In 1814, he purchased the Seigneury of Argenteuil and Sir John’s Lake was named in his honour upon his death in 1842.
Petit Lac Nominingue
When the Europeans first arrived in the Americas they had very little comprehension of the civilisation that they found here, and, as a result of the contact, the original American civilisation was shattered. Its vulnerability lay in the fact that it was not a herding culture and had domesticated very few animals. They had, however, concentrated their efforts in cultivating plants and vastly surpassed the Europeans in that field. Today, the basic sustenance of our society is based not on the foods of Europe but on the varieties of plants that the indigenous Americans had developed over many thousands of years. Obvious examples of these are potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn and squash, but there are many others including peppers and chocolate. Sadly, the exchange of bacteria and viruses between domestic farm animals and their European owners had created a people that was resistant to a whole series of diseases but that was highly contagious to the people living here. If the original civilisation had been able to protect itself from the European diseases, the Americas may have evolved similarly to the way China or India have, and Europe would have fared very poorly.
The Algonquin were a remote, northern nation far removed from the Central American seat of this civilisation, but they traded goods with the Iroquoian farmers such as the Wendat (Huron) and were dependent upon crops, such as corn, squash and tobacco that had been developed farther south. In exchange they gave dried meat, dried fruit, clothing, canoes and furs. They are thought to have been in the Ottawa Valley since about 2000 BCE and in other parts of the region before that. The Europeans found a people living with an agricultural system so vastly different from anything that they had experienced that they failed to see it as a system at all, and we today are only beginning to realize what was destroyed. Used to grassy hills covered with sheep, they saw vast forests that had to be removed. While the evidence is less available in the studies of the Algonquin, the Iroquoian people were known to burn in a controlled fashion that did not destroy the larger trees, but enriched the soil with ashes and encouraged tender new growth on the forest floor. After that, they could cull the stock of wildlife that grazed it. As a result they created forests that provided their protein and their grains and greens. The Algonquin people lived in and maintained a vast pine forest managing their resources by dividing territories up among families, and they respected each other’s ‘titles’ to their hunting areas. They had rules that said that one could not trap in a neighbour’s territory, but that if faced with need such as hunger, then a neighbour could not stop you from taking game to survive. The animals were not ‘hiding’ from the Algonquin hunter, but simply co-existing. The Algonquin understood, way better than we do today, that their role was as stewards of this co-existence.
The word Algonquin comes from Algoumequin, first used by Champlain to describe the people who came from the Ottawa River in 1603. He was likely influenced by the Montagnais word Algoumekuots, meaning those who paint themselves red. Champlain noted that the Algonquin painted their faces red, or crimson. He attributed the colour to a dye extracted from a root found in a sandy soil. The people he met could have been the Weskarinis Algonquins, the people who lived here before us but who perished in the French and Indian Wars. They called themselves Anichinabe, which means ‘people’. The Weskarinis were one of many clans, including the Kichespirini, the Matouweskarini and the Ononchataronon who all occupied contiguous territories on both sides of the Ottawa River at the beginning of the 17th century. They were all Algonquins, or Anichinabe, and they all spoke dialects of the same language. Although their language is different from the Cree, Micmac, Abenaki and Montagnais (Innu) they all form part of a cultural and linguistic family called Algonquian, leading to some confusion between the names. These same Algonquin people, either the Weskarinis or the Kichesperinis, named Lac Nominingue. The word itself, Nominingue, or Onamani, refers to the red clay found in the lake, and it may have also given rise to the name of the Rivière Rouge. The two lakes, Lac Nominingue and Petit Lac Nominingue were tucked away at the source of the river and were probably the most secure location in the vast territory of the Weskarinis. Here, their closest neighbours were their closest kin and their enemies were on distant rivers, days of paddling downstream. The clay was used in body painting ceremonies and it is possible that the dye that Champlain saw on the bodies of the Algonquin actually came from the Lac Nominingue area.
There is a legend that may have been inspired by the lake, called The Colours of Sunset. This is the story of a boy who cries each evening as the sun goes down, and his family cannot console him. Kisisokôe, the Sun Woman, explains to his family that the boy is saddened to see the colours go out of the sky at the end of the day. She tells them that they must retrieve the colours of the sunset from a certain lake where the colours can be found on the lake bottom. The legend does not name Lac Nominingue, but it could have been the lake imagined, given its vermilion clay. In the story, the father sets off to the lake and finds it heavily guarded. One of the guards is a pollywog named Podonch, and he manages to catch it and glue its lips together so that it cannot warn the other guards. Then he dives into the lake and retrieves the powdered colours of the sunset for his son. The story goes on to explain that Podonch was punished by having to breathe through gills after that, and concludes that since that time, pollywogs have been born with gills and small, puckered mouths.
Whatever lake inspired the story, Lac Nominingue figured in the life of the people who lived here before us and, tucked securely into the furthest, safest reaches of their world, it must have seemed the safest place in their thousands of years of presence. It was on the shores of Petit Lac Nominingue that the Weskarinis suffered their worst defeat in 1651, having been continuously pushed back by the well-armed Iroquois.
Thanks to Laura Redish of Native Languages of the Americas. Other references include Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford, La Langue geographique de Cartier et Champlain by Christian Mouressonneau and The Algonquins edited by Daniel Clement.
The Algonquin were a remote, northern nation far removed from the Central American seat of this civilisation, but they traded goods with the Iroquoian farmers such as the Wendat (Huron) and were dependent upon crops, such as corn, squash and tobacco that had been developed farther south. In exchange they gave dried meat, dried fruit, clothing, canoes and furs. They are thought to have been in the Ottawa Valley since about 2000 BCE and in other parts of the region before that. The Europeans found a people living with an agricultural system so vastly different from anything that they had experienced that they failed to see it as a system at all, and we today are only beginning to realize what was destroyed. Used to grassy hills covered with sheep, they saw vast forests that had to be removed. While the evidence is less available in the studies of the Algonquin, the Iroquoian people were known to burn in a controlled fashion that did not destroy the larger trees, but enriched the soil with ashes and encouraged tender new growth on the forest floor. After that, they could cull the stock of wildlife that grazed it. As a result they created forests that provided their protein and their grains and greens. The Algonquin people lived in and maintained a vast pine forest managing their resources by dividing territories up among families, and they respected each other’s ‘titles’ to their hunting areas. They had rules that said that one could not trap in a neighbour’s territory, but that if faced with need such as hunger, then a neighbour could not stop you from taking game to survive. The animals were not ‘hiding’ from the Algonquin hunter, but simply co-existing. The Algonquin understood, way better than we do today, that their role was as stewards of this co-existence.
The word Algonquin comes from Algoumequin, first used by Champlain to describe the people who came from the Ottawa River in 1603. He was likely influenced by the Montagnais word Algoumekuots, meaning those who paint themselves red. Champlain noted that the Algonquin painted their faces red, or crimson. He attributed the colour to a dye extracted from a root found in a sandy soil. The people he met could have been the Weskarinis Algonquins, the people who lived here before us but who perished in the French and Indian Wars. They called themselves Anichinabe, which means ‘people’. The Weskarinis were one of many clans, including the Kichespirini, the Matouweskarini and the Ononchataronon who all occupied contiguous territories on both sides of the Ottawa River at the beginning of the 17th century. They were all Algonquins, or Anichinabe, and they all spoke dialects of the same language. Although their language is different from the Cree, Micmac, Abenaki and Montagnais (Innu) they all form part of a cultural and linguistic family called Algonquian, leading to some confusion between the names. These same Algonquin people, either the Weskarinis or the Kichesperinis, named Lac Nominingue. The word itself, Nominingue, or Onamani, refers to the red clay found in the lake, and it may have also given rise to the name of the Rivière Rouge. The two lakes, Lac Nominingue and Petit Lac Nominingue were tucked away at the source of the river and were probably the most secure location in the vast territory of the Weskarinis. Here, their closest neighbours were their closest kin and their enemies were on distant rivers, days of paddling downstream. The clay was used in body painting ceremonies and it is possible that the dye that Champlain saw on the bodies of the Algonquin actually came from the Lac Nominingue area.
There is a legend that may have been inspired by the lake, called The Colours of Sunset. This is the story of a boy who cries each evening as the sun goes down, and his family cannot console him. Kisisokôe, the Sun Woman, explains to his family that the boy is saddened to see the colours go out of the sky at the end of the day. She tells them that they must retrieve the colours of the sunset from a certain lake where the colours can be found on the lake bottom. The legend does not name Lac Nominingue, but it could have been the lake imagined, given its vermilion clay. In the story, the father sets off to the lake and finds it heavily guarded. One of the guards is a pollywog named Podonch, and he manages to catch it and glue its lips together so that it cannot warn the other guards. Then he dives into the lake and retrieves the powdered colours of the sunset for his son. The story goes on to explain that Podonch was punished by having to breathe through gills after that, and concludes that since that time, pollywogs have been born with gills and small, puckered mouths.
Whatever lake inspired the story, Lac Nominingue figured in the life of the people who lived here before us and, tucked securely into the furthest, safest reaches of their world, it must have seemed the safest place in their thousands of years of presence. It was on the shores of Petit Lac Nominingue that the Weskarinis suffered their worst defeat in 1651, having been continuously pushed back by the well-armed Iroquois.
Thanks to Laura Redish of Native Languages of the Americas. Other references include Indian Givers by Jack Weatherford, La Langue geographique de Cartier et Champlain by Christian Mouressonneau and The Algonquins edited by Daniel Clement.
The Iroquois and the Sulpicians
The signing of La Grande Paix by the Iroquois and the French in Montreal in 1701 brought to an end the wild days of the French-Indian Wars. These wars reflected the European conflicts: the French fought the Iroquois who were allied with the British, while the Huron, Nipissing and Algonquin were either neutral or took the side of the French. As we saw last time, the Weskarinis, who were the indiginous people of our Laurentian area, were casualties of these wars, having been massacred by the Iroquois on the shores of Petit Lac Nominingue in 1751.
The Ste Agathe area did not figure much in events that followed. While the occasional Algonquin party probably trapped furs here, the events that would allow our area to be settled were unfolding further south. The Sulpicians set up a mission at Lake of Two Mountains in the early 1700′s and maintained the peace between the Iroquois and the French in exchange for fur-trading rights to the territory. The Sulpicians sold off these rights to French entrepreneurs and did their best to convert the Iroquois and Algonquin to Catholicism. In the war with the English that led to the loss of the colony, many of these Iroquois actually fought for the French.
In 1763 when the colony was transferred, the English king refused to recognise Jesuit and Récollet titles over large tracts of land. Encouraged by this, an Iroquois at Deux Montagnes decided to sell his house to an English businessman. He hoped to demonstrate in this manner that the Iroquois owned their property, and gambled that the Sulpicians would fear confiscation of their lands if they challenged the rights of this Englishman to buy. The Sulpicians were more afraid of the Iroquois strategy than of the English. They petitioned Governer Burton to recognise their clear title. Burton accepted to respect the Sulpician property rights if the latter would swear hommage to George III, King of England, which of course they did. Thus the Iroquois\Englishman sale fell through and Sulpician titles were recognised.
From 1763 to 1936 the Iroquois and Sulpicians continued to fight this legal battle over their lands. The Iroquois were very creative in their fights. They invited a Methodist pastor to run their mission in 1852, thereby threatening to convert to Protestantism rather than Catholicism. This scheme back-fired when the pastor fled in the face of the utter religious apathy of the Iroquois, Algonquin and Nipissing. After subsequent attempts, they built a Methodist temple, but the Sulpicians got a judgement and had it dismantled. Over this period many Iroquois became Methodists and their attempts to break the Sulpician hold over their land can be credited for the creation in 1877 of Montreal’s Civil Rights Association to promote religious freedom.
The Sulpicians set up villages for the Iroquois and for the Algonquin and succeeded in encouraging them to live in a spirit of cooperation. The sparse populations of these two peoples became centred around Lake of Two Mountains, and the rest of the area began to fall to settlers. Over time, there was nothing the Iroquois could do to get the same rights to the land as the settlers were getting. Neither the French nor the English crown seemed to be willing to recognise them as anything more than wards, non-citizens who had to be encouraged to move away. There was clearly no interest in their culture, history or political structure, yet, from the Iroquois perspective, it is their great unwritten constitution, the Great Law of Peace, that was the inspiration for Western democracy. Their symbol, the Eagle, and their democratic laws were copied by the 13 American colonies in the creation of the United States. Their goal was always to try to find a middle position between the French and English colonists. They were a people of six nations, the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onandaga, Oneida and Tuskororas. The sixth was actually adopted by the other five, according to their oral history, around the time the Europeans were first arriving in America. I had occasion to have a long discussion with Tom Morris of Kanawake, and was fascinated to learn the Iroquois perspective. It lends credence to George Woodcock’s statement that our salvation will be found in the philosophies of the indiginous peoples.
Most of the Ste Agathe area was being logged during the mid part of the 19th century. The British Empire’s appetite for wood devoured forests over a period of 500 years, and most of our area fell under the axe even while the first three homesteaders were arriving in 1849. While they were traveling overland from St. Jerome, the logging was following the river systems that drain into the Ottawa, following the same routes as the Weskarinis had followed for so many centuries. Logging reached its peak in our area in the 1860′s, long before the influence of Curé Labelle was felt.
In 1853 Queen Victoria ordained that 250,000 acres should be set aside for the ‘Indians’, and so the Doncaster Reserve, a square of land six miles on a side, was created. At that time the townships of Beresford, Wolfe and Doncaster were just starting to be surveyed and the Indian land was pretty far away from the Iroquois and Algonquin who were at Lake of Two Mountains. Another, larger reserve, Maniwaki, having an area of 58,975 hectares (over 150,000 acres) was also established, and over the next 25 years the Algonquin moved to it, having tired of the endless legal battle that the Iroquois were having with the Sulpicians.
In the meantime, a social revolution was taking place in the Canadas that would create our democracy. The Chateau Clique here and the Family Compact in Upper Canada were struggling to protect their historical privileges.
The Ste Agathe area did not figure much in events that followed. While the occasional Algonquin party probably trapped furs here, the events that would allow our area to be settled were unfolding further south. The Sulpicians set up a mission at Lake of Two Mountains in the early 1700′s and maintained the peace between the Iroquois and the French in exchange for fur-trading rights to the territory. The Sulpicians sold off these rights to French entrepreneurs and did their best to convert the Iroquois and Algonquin to Catholicism. In the war with the English that led to the loss of the colony, many of these Iroquois actually fought for the French.
In 1763 when the colony was transferred, the English king refused to recognise Jesuit and Récollet titles over large tracts of land. Encouraged by this, an Iroquois at Deux Montagnes decided to sell his house to an English businessman. He hoped to demonstrate in this manner that the Iroquois owned their property, and gambled that the Sulpicians would fear confiscation of their lands if they challenged the rights of this Englishman to buy. The Sulpicians were more afraid of the Iroquois strategy than of the English. They petitioned Governer Burton to recognise their clear title. Burton accepted to respect the Sulpician property rights if the latter would swear hommage to George III, King of England, which of course they did. Thus the Iroquois\Englishman sale fell through and Sulpician titles were recognised.
From 1763 to 1936 the Iroquois and Sulpicians continued to fight this legal battle over their lands. The Iroquois were very creative in their fights. They invited a Methodist pastor to run their mission in 1852, thereby threatening to convert to Protestantism rather than Catholicism. This scheme back-fired when the pastor fled in the face of the utter religious apathy of the Iroquois, Algonquin and Nipissing. After subsequent attempts, they built a Methodist temple, but the Sulpicians got a judgement and had it dismantled. Over this period many Iroquois became Methodists and their attempts to break the Sulpician hold over their land can be credited for the creation in 1877 of Montreal’s Civil Rights Association to promote religious freedom.
The Sulpicians set up villages for the Iroquois and for the Algonquin and succeeded in encouraging them to live in a spirit of cooperation. The sparse populations of these two peoples became centred around Lake of Two Mountains, and the rest of the area began to fall to settlers. Over time, there was nothing the Iroquois could do to get the same rights to the land as the settlers were getting. Neither the French nor the English crown seemed to be willing to recognise them as anything more than wards, non-citizens who had to be encouraged to move away. There was clearly no interest in their culture, history or political structure, yet, from the Iroquois perspective, it is their great unwritten constitution, the Great Law of Peace, that was the inspiration for Western democracy. Their symbol, the Eagle, and their democratic laws were copied by the 13 American colonies in the creation of the United States. Their goal was always to try to find a middle position between the French and English colonists. They were a people of six nations, the Mohawk, Seneca, Cayuga, Onandaga, Oneida and Tuskororas. The sixth was actually adopted by the other five, according to their oral history, around the time the Europeans were first arriving in America. I had occasion to have a long discussion with Tom Morris of Kanawake, and was fascinated to learn the Iroquois perspective. It lends credence to George Woodcock’s statement that our salvation will be found in the philosophies of the indiginous peoples.
Most of the Ste Agathe area was being logged during the mid part of the 19th century. The British Empire’s appetite for wood devoured forests over a period of 500 years, and most of our area fell under the axe even while the first three homesteaders were arriving in 1849. While they were traveling overland from St. Jerome, the logging was following the river systems that drain into the Ottawa, following the same routes as the Weskarinis had followed for so many centuries. Logging reached its peak in our area in the 1860′s, long before the influence of Curé Labelle was felt.
In 1853 Queen Victoria ordained that 250,000 acres should be set aside for the ‘Indians’, and so the Doncaster Reserve, a square of land six miles on a side, was created. At that time the townships of Beresford, Wolfe and Doncaster were just starting to be surveyed and the Indian land was pretty far away from the Iroquois and Algonquin who were at Lake of Two Mountains. Another, larger reserve, Maniwaki, having an area of 58,975 hectares (over 150,000 acres) was also established, and over the next 25 years the Algonquin moved to it, having tired of the endless legal battle that the Iroquois were having with the Sulpicians.
In the meantime, a social revolution was taking place in the Canadas that would create our democracy. The Chateau Clique here and the Family Compact in Upper Canada were struggling to protect their historical privileges.
The story behind the founding of Montreal
At the limit of his westerly journey, Jacques Cartier described a mountain rising from an island above the town of Hochelaga sitting in a wide, flowing river of drinkable water. He called it Mons realis – Latin for Mount Royal. Forty years later, in 1575, in the modestly titled Cosmographie universelle de tout le monde, François de Belleforest recorded it as Montréal.
In the early 1600s the French began settling in the St. Lawrence valley, establishing a colony at Quebec. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu established the Company of 100 Associates to settle and develop trade in the colony. Champlain was one of its members, as well as the Commander of New France, while Jean de Lauson became intendant, or director, in France, acting for Richelieu in the latter’s absence.
Over the course of the century, the French hold on the colony was tenuous and they were faced with very hostile neighbours to the south. The Iroquoian people that Cartier had met were gone – absorbed into the ranks of the Iroquois Confederacy, according to the Mohawks. Like the Iroquois, they had farmed and hunted, trading their corn with the northern tribes. The Iroquois were the dominant people before the arrival of the Europeans, the ones most likely to recognize the threat these new traders posed. The French settlers had to be armed and on guard at all times to keep their hosts at bay as war canoes moved up and down the river with impunity.
They also had to fear pirates and privateers, and the small colony was claimed by the Kirke brothers in the name of England in 1629, but was given back to the French through negotiations three years later.
Jean de Lauson, the shrewd director of the Company of 100 Associates, after negotiating the colony back from the British in 1632, staked claim to most of the territory in the names of himself or his sons. In the process, he became the first French owner of the island of Montreal. While he was acquiring property up and down the river, the Iroquois were in the ascendance, effectively masters of the river. As their power increased, threatening the very existence of the colony, an unlikely series of events was unfolding in France. A tax collector named Jerome Le Royer de la Dauversière had a spiritual experience in which he heard a voice instructing him to acquire the island of Montreal and set up a hospital there to minister to the local heathen population. Absurd as the notion sounds – and to be sure, his spiritual advisor, Father Chauveau, dismissed it as a pious chimera – he could not get it out of his head.
Le Royer had inherited responsibilities that he did not seek. He wished to become a Jesuit, but when his father died unexpectedly, he took over his father’s role as tax collector and supported his family. He soon married, and eventually had five children. By 1639, when he experienced his vision, he had already entertained another spiritual request in which a voice instructed him to set up a mission of hospital workers, sisters dedicated to helping those in need. While Chauveau also dismissed this more feasible undertaking, Jerome Le Royer did manage to establish les Filles Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph in La Flèche, France in 1636.
To augment his income, Le Royer rented out a room in his home to a wealthy student named Pierre Chevrier, Baron de Fancamp. Chevrier became absorbed by Le Royer’s religious obsession to create a hospital on an unexplored island on the other side of the world, inhabited, to the best of their knowledge, by a hostile band of what they considered uncivilised savages. Somehow this seemed like a good idea. Together, they began to solicit support for their project, calling themselves the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, or the Société des Messieurs et Dames de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des Sauvages de Nouvelle-France, but soon the adherents became known simply as the Montréalists. When they approached Jean de Lauson to buy the island, the businessman is reputed to have quoted the astronomical sum of 150,000 livres. With the help of the influential priest and Montréalist Father Charles Lalemant, they managed to acquire the island in 1640. Soon a group of Montréalists led by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, and including Jeanne Mance and other historical notables, headed off on their missionary quest.
Arriving in separate ships and weeks apart, the party’s plans were delayed until the spring of 1642. De Maisonneuve met an elderly man, Pierre de Puiseaux de Montrénault, the owner of two seigneuries, whom he convinced not only to house their party for the winter, but also to donate his seigneuries and join their expedition in the spring. Throughout the winter, though, they were encouraged to stay put – in fact they were told that they did not have permission to proceed upriver, that the colony did not have the means to protect them. The governor, Montmagny, even offered them Île d’Orléans if they would abandon their irresponsible mission, but de Maisonneuve, speaking on their behalf, declined the offer. The intrepid and determined missionaries ignored all advice to the contrary and paddled upriver to their destiny in the spring of 1642, landing at the place we now call Pointe à Callières, where they established the mission of Ville Marie.
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The intrepid and determined missionaries ignored all advice to the contrary and paddled upriver to their destiny in the spring of 1642, landing at the place we now call Pointe à Callières, where they established the mission of Ville Marie.
That first summer was the easiest one they would have. Somehow the Iroquois did not know they were there. Among their greatest challenges, once a fort was built, was not losing courage completely when floodwaters threatened to wash them away towards the end of their first year. As the waters rose up towards their settlement, splashing against the gates of their fort, de Maisonneuve exercised leadership by declaring that if the floodwaters resided, he would carry a large cross to the summit of the mountain and erect it there. His faith in this appeal gave the others courage and once the waters subsided he fulfilled his promise.
Eventually the Iroquois did find them. They were as few as about 70 men and women, and the Iroquois warriors numbered in the hundreds. De Maisonneuve wisely forbade his men from going on the offensive, limiting their strategy to defence, holing up in their fort when necessary. Jeanne Mance tended to the wounded. On one occasion, de Maisonneuve authorized a foray against their painted opponents, discovering rapidly how ill equipped the colonists were. De Maisonneuve was forced to call for a quick retreat, holding off the enemy himself to allow the others to get to safety inside the fort. Grabbed by a powerful Iroquois chief, he managed to push his musket into the chief’s naked chest and fire it, killing the man. This was hardly the mission that Jerome Le Royer had described in his vision. There was no ministering to hundreds of angry, taunting warriors, although between skirmishes they did receive visits from the mountain people, the Algonquin and Innu. Their supporters in France faithfully kept them supplied, responding to their needs and even finding other Montréalists to join them.
The names of these early missionaries and their supporters live on in place names, street names and institutions in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec. Among them, Lambert Closse who became Chomedey’s right-hand man, Marguerite Bourgeoys who followed in Jeanne Mance’s path, Mme Claude de Bullion in France who silently backed Mance and the hospital she founded, as well as Father Jean de Brébeuf, captured among the Hurons, who was killed by the Iroquois, Mme de Peltrie who joined them from her mission in Quebec for awhile but returned, and of course Jerome Le Royer himself. One other that is less recognizable is Jean-Jacques Olier, the effective founder of what would become the most influential and powerful force in New France and is still very influential to this day. Vincent de Paul, Jean Eudes and Olier, all resident in France, began the Concile de Trente, their goal being to retrain French priests and to give meaning back to the priesthood of their time. Only priests could benefit from their retreats and training programmes. There was no congregation and there were no initiates from the lay community. Their role was pivotal in rebuilding the community and self-image of priests and through it they gained enormous influence. Their initiative soon came to be known as the Company of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, more commonly known as the Sulpicians. Olier was also a Montréalist.
By the mid 1650s, in spite of their great faith in the efforts of the missionaries in far-away Montreal, the members of the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal in France were aging and not being replaced with younger benefactors. Even though they found men to send to the defence of the mission, their fundraising efforts were producing less fruit. The Iroquois still dominated the river, and even Lauson, by then Governor of New France and living in Quebec, declined to stand up to them. In one telling incident in May 1656, three hundred Iroquois attacked a Huron village allied with the French on Île d’Orléans, burning it and taking the survivors prisoner. As they paddled their war canoes back past Quebec, they hurled insults at the French, who stayed put, incapable of an adequate military response.
In this atmosphere, the missionaries in Montreal, even less well defended than Quebec, held on as their backers in France melted away and French colonists further down the river contemplated abandoning the colony and returning en masse to France. Responding to a plea from Jeanne Mance, by this time an older woman with a disabled arm, Olier, who was himself nearing the end of his life, committed the Sulpicians to supporting the missionaries.
It is hard to understand to what extent the Montréalists and Sulpicians in France understood that Ville Marie was not capable of fulfilling its mission of ministering to the infidels. There were certainly Indians in their care, but their major task was to fight for survival against a superior military force, and the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital that Jeanne Mance founded to care for the heathens of this far-away island, was busy with the sick and wounded French soldiers. Jerome Le Royer was also nearing the end of his life, and soon support for the missionaries fell almost completely to the Sulpicians. In 1657 the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal donated their title of the seigneurie to the Sulpicians, and the European colonization of the island picked up its pace. Finally, at the beginning of the 1700s, the Iroquois and French signed a peace treaty, and a number of years later the Sulpicians, still mindful of the mission they had inherited, petitioned the French king to give them a new seigneurie, relocating some of their new allies further from Montreal to present-day Oka.
Over time, the mission of Ville Marie grew into a colony of French immigrants and the name of the mission became eclipsed by the name of the place, Montreal.
References available upon request
In the early 1600s the French began settling in the St. Lawrence valley, establishing a colony at Quebec. In 1627, Cardinal Richelieu established the Company of 100 Associates to settle and develop trade in the colony. Champlain was one of its members, as well as the Commander of New France, while Jean de Lauson became intendant, or director, in France, acting for Richelieu in the latter’s absence.
Over the course of the century, the French hold on the colony was tenuous and they were faced with very hostile neighbours to the south. The Iroquoian people that Cartier had met were gone – absorbed into the ranks of the Iroquois Confederacy, according to the Mohawks. Like the Iroquois, they had farmed and hunted, trading their corn with the northern tribes. The Iroquois were the dominant people before the arrival of the Europeans, the ones most likely to recognize the threat these new traders posed. The French settlers had to be armed and on guard at all times to keep their hosts at bay as war canoes moved up and down the river with impunity.
They also had to fear pirates and privateers, and the small colony was claimed by the Kirke brothers in the name of England in 1629, but was given back to the French through negotiations three years later.
Jean de Lauson, the shrewd director of the Company of 100 Associates, after negotiating the colony back from the British in 1632, staked claim to most of the territory in the names of himself or his sons. In the process, he became the first French owner of the island of Montreal. While he was acquiring property up and down the river, the Iroquois were in the ascendance, effectively masters of the river. As their power increased, threatening the very existence of the colony, an unlikely series of events was unfolding in France. A tax collector named Jerome Le Royer de la Dauversière had a spiritual experience in which he heard a voice instructing him to acquire the island of Montreal and set up a hospital there to minister to the local heathen population. Absurd as the notion sounds – and to be sure, his spiritual advisor, Father Chauveau, dismissed it as a pious chimera – he could not get it out of his head.
Le Royer had inherited responsibilities that he did not seek. He wished to become a Jesuit, but when his father died unexpectedly, he took over his father’s role as tax collector and supported his family. He soon married, and eventually had five children. By 1639, when he experienced his vision, he had already entertained another spiritual request in which a voice instructed him to set up a mission of hospital workers, sisters dedicated to helping those in need. While Chauveau also dismissed this more feasible undertaking, Jerome Le Royer did manage to establish les Filles Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph in La Flèche, France in 1636.
To augment his income, Le Royer rented out a room in his home to a wealthy student named Pierre Chevrier, Baron de Fancamp. Chevrier became absorbed by Le Royer’s religious obsession to create a hospital on an unexplored island on the other side of the world, inhabited, to the best of their knowledge, by a hostile band of what they considered uncivilised savages. Somehow this seemed like a good idea. Together, they began to solicit support for their project, calling themselves the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal, or the Société des Messieurs et Dames de Notre-Dame de Montréal pour la conversion des Sauvages de Nouvelle-France, but soon the adherents became known simply as the Montréalists. When they approached Jean de Lauson to buy the island, the businessman is reputed to have quoted the astronomical sum of 150,000 livres. With the help of the influential priest and Montréalist Father Charles Lalemant, they managed to acquire the island in 1640. Soon a group of Montréalists led by Paul de Chomedey de Maisonneuve, and including Jeanne Mance and other historical notables, headed off on their missionary quest.
Arriving in separate ships and weeks apart, the party’s plans were delayed until the spring of 1642. De Maisonneuve met an elderly man, Pierre de Puiseaux de Montrénault, the owner of two seigneuries, whom he convinced not only to house their party for the winter, but also to donate his seigneuries and join their expedition in the spring. Throughout the winter, though, they were encouraged to stay put – in fact they were told that they did not have permission to proceed upriver, that the colony did not have the means to protect them. The governor, Montmagny, even offered them Île d’Orléans if they would abandon their irresponsible mission, but de Maisonneuve, speaking on their behalf, declined the offer. The intrepid and determined missionaries ignored all advice to the contrary and paddled upriver to their destiny in the spring of 1642, landing at the place we now call Pointe à Callières, where they established the mission of Ville Marie.
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The intrepid and determined missionaries ignored all advice to the contrary and paddled upriver to their destiny in the spring of 1642, landing at the place we now call Pointe à Callières, where they established the mission of Ville Marie.
That first summer was the easiest one they would have. Somehow the Iroquois did not know they were there. Among their greatest challenges, once a fort was built, was not losing courage completely when floodwaters threatened to wash them away towards the end of their first year. As the waters rose up towards their settlement, splashing against the gates of their fort, de Maisonneuve exercised leadership by declaring that if the floodwaters resided, he would carry a large cross to the summit of the mountain and erect it there. His faith in this appeal gave the others courage and once the waters subsided he fulfilled his promise.
Eventually the Iroquois did find them. They were as few as about 70 men and women, and the Iroquois warriors numbered in the hundreds. De Maisonneuve wisely forbade his men from going on the offensive, limiting their strategy to defence, holing up in their fort when necessary. Jeanne Mance tended to the wounded. On one occasion, de Maisonneuve authorized a foray against their painted opponents, discovering rapidly how ill equipped the colonists were. De Maisonneuve was forced to call for a quick retreat, holding off the enemy himself to allow the others to get to safety inside the fort. Grabbed by a powerful Iroquois chief, he managed to push his musket into the chief’s naked chest and fire it, killing the man. This was hardly the mission that Jerome Le Royer had described in his vision. There was no ministering to hundreds of angry, taunting warriors, although between skirmishes they did receive visits from the mountain people, the Algonquin and Innu. Their supporters in France faithfully kept them supplied, responding to their needs and even finding other Montréalists to join them.
The names of these early missionaries and their supporters live on in place names, street names and institutions in Montreal and elsewhere in Quebec. Among them, Lambert Closse who became Chomedey’s right-hand man, Marguerite Bourgeoys who followed in Jeanne Mance’s path, Mme Claude de Bullion in France who silently backed Mance and the hospital she founded, as well as Father Jean de Brébeuf, captured among the Hurons, who was killed by the Iroquois, Mme de Peltrie who joined them from her mission in Quebec for awhile but returned, and of course Jerome Le Royer himself. One other that is less recognizable is Jean-Jacques Olier, the effective founder of what would become the most influential and powerful force in New France and is still very influential to this day. Vincent de Paul, Jean Eudes and Olier, all resident in France, began the Concile de Trente, their goal being to retrain French priests and to give meaning back to the priesthood of their time. Only priests could benefit from their retreats and training programmes. There was no congregation and there were no initiates from the lay community. Their role was pivotal in rebuilding the community and self-image of priests and through it they gained enormous influence. Their initiative soon came to be known as the Company of the Seminary of Saint Sulpice, more commonly known as the Sulpicians. Olier was also a Montréalist.
By the mid 1650s, in spite of their great faith in the efforts of the missionaries in far-away Montreal, the members of the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal in France were aging and not being replaced with younger benefactors. Even though they found men to send to the defence of the mission, their fundraising efforts were producing less fruit. The Iroquois still dominated the river, and even Lauson, by then Governor of New France and living in Quebec, declined to stand up to them. In one telling incident in May 1656, three hundred Iroquois attacked a Huron village allied with the French on Île d’Orléans, burning it and taking the survivors prisoner. As they paddled their war canoes back past Quebec, they hurled insults at the French, who stayed put, incapable of an adequate military response.
In this atmosphere, the missionaries in Montreal, even less well defended than Quebec, held on as their backers in France melted away and French colonists further down the river contemplated abandoning the colony and returning en masse to France. Responding to a plea from Jeanne Mance, by this time an older woman with a disabled arm, Olier, who was himself nearing the end of his life, committed the Sulpicians to supporting the missionaries.
It is hard to understand to what extent the Montréalists and Sulpicians in France understood that Ville Marie was not capable of fulfilling its mission of ministering to the infidels. There were certainly Indians in their care, but their major task was to fight for survival against a superior military force, and the Hôtel Dieu, the hospital that Jeanne Mance founded to care for the heathens of this far-away island, was busy with the sick and wounded French soldiers. Jerome Le Royer was also nearing the end of his life, and soon support for the missionaries fell almost completely to the Sulpicians. In 1657 the Société Notre-Dame de Montréal donated their title of the seigneurie to the Sulpicians, and the European colonization of the island picked up its pace. Finally, at the beginning of the 1700s, the Iroquois and French signed a peace treaty, and a number of years later the Sulpicians, still mindful of the mission they had inherited, petitioned the French king to give them a new seigneurie, relocating some of their new allies further from Montreal to present-day Oka.
Over time, the mission of Ville Marie grew into a colony of French immigrants and the name of the mission became eclipsed by the name of the place, Montreal.
References available upon request