Natural History
The rivers and mountains record their history for us to read. Slowly we are learning to interpret it and to understand our distant past. As the glaciers retreated around ten thousand years ago, people began to move in. Their descendants, the Anishinabe, were an Algonquin people.
They lived in a forest of white pine, maple and cedar, along with many other tree types. We still like to suppose that they were just primitive, ignorant nomads, but the supposition shows our own ignorance. It can be argued that they cultivated the forest – that they lived in ruthless harmony with the other species. They respected their natural environment and their system of living stood the test of time.
The people of our time had no comprehension of the ecosystem and exploited it rapaciously, starting with the furs, then when that resource was exhausted, they devoured the trees and the fish, and then began rooting around in the ground for other resources.
They lived in a forest of white pine, maple and cedar, along with many other tree types. We still like to suppose that they were just primitive, ignorant nomads, but the supposition shows our own ignorance. It can be argued that they cultivated the forest – that they lived in ruthless harmony with the other species. They respected their natural environment and their system of living stood the test of time.
The people of our time had no comprehension of the ecosystem and exploited it rapaciously, starting with the furs, then when that resource was exhausted, they devoured the trees and the fish, and then began rooting around in the ground for other resources.
The Devil River
Pine Tree Road, Echo Lake/Lac Écho, Morin Heights
Cyanobacteria
Beresford Township
Grenville Geological Province, The Rocks Beneath Our Feet
In The Beginning
The North River
Pine Tree Road, Echo Lake/Lac Écho, Morin Heights
Cyanobacteria
Beresford Township
Grenville Geological Province, The Rocks Beneath Our Feet
In The Beginning
The North River
The Devil River
The Devil River, Rivière du Diable, runs for about 70 kilometres from the northeast to the southwest through a valley that lies just north of the St. Narcisse Moraine. It was formed by the same glacial action that formed the moraine, that huge bank created by the recurring freezing and thawing of the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet, separating the Rouge and Nord river basins. The Devil, a tributary to the Rouge, is far below the moraine, running more or less west through the valley that must once have been a very unstable lake, alternately fed and starved at the whim of the glacier.
This glacier stood as much as three to five thousand feet high, some estimate even higher, an almost unimaginable wall of ice that would crush a city like Montreal to its elements and leave its traces buried under ice many times the height of its highest buildings. The weight of the glacier was so great that the compressed ground under it is still rebounding today from the release of its departure ten thousand years ago. If a couple had stood in a coniferous forest on the hilly plateau that we call St. Faustin Lac Carré, rather than feeling themselves on the high ground, as they would today, they would have looked way up into the icy mountains to the north, mountains that dwarfed even the mighty Tremblant and hid it in a frozen cast. In the spring, for spring would have come even then, the torrents of water rushing off the glacier would have thundered to the southwest along the edge of the icy mountains, pulling trees and rocks in the river’s rage. In winter, frozen along the surface, the glacier would have seemed to creep up over the hills, convincing the observers that it intended to grow to the south and tear down the tentatively advancing forest. Still, spring would come and the ice would retreat under the glare of an ever-hotter sun.
Glaciers grow by gathering snow on their cold surfaces and piling it so high that the bottom layers get crushed into ice and squeezed out the sides. In this way, they move along the ground, slowly crushing and pushing any obstacle in their paths, forward for a while and then melting back leaving gigantic deposits behind. This was the state of affairs for five centuries, twenty generations of humans, in the valley of the Devil River and the St. Narcisse Moraine. Ice, pushing steadily from the north, would carry stone and sediment in its frozen clutches, then it would melt back leaving an ever-greater pile along the south ridge. During the melt, a huge volume of fresh water would flood to the southwest, probably a lot of it under the ice sheet, carving wide valleys as it flowed. Slowly, as the ice age came to an end and an age of warmer summers began, the front of the glacial mountains retreated ever further to the north, sending its runoff down between the hills, but each year, each successive decade, losing force to the longer summers.
When spring comes now, the melt of the winter snows re-enacts these scenes and the rivers pour forth their once-captured waters, overflow their banks and deposit sand and stones as high up their sides as they can. Soon, though, as the calm of summer advances, the rivers meander as though inspecting the base of their once great holdings, sometimes turning back upon themselves and cutting corners leaving small, disconnected lakes, and other times gathering in a depression, then flowing out around some forgotten rocks, cascading down the valley. The once tentative forest of conifers has spread around these tamed rivers and a mighty forest, a green veil, has grown on either side of the flowing water.
The first humans to venture through these hills may have seen the last of the glaciers. Were they Innu? Algonquin? They left us no clear record. Later, they used the tame rivers for transport and fishing, but the Devil may well have been used only for recreation, as it is today. Certainly they would not have called it by that name, since their animist world had no concept of pure good and evil, but they may have called it by a name that evoked a trickster, a name to evoke the way it twists and turns. Even the first loggers and surveyors who named the river did not see it as Lucifer’s property, as the commission du toponymie informs us: Its name, having nothing to do with Lucifer, is explained by the fact that the river is very agitated, filled with tortuous rapids, that made logging perilous and surveying difficult, and, at certain locations it emitted, they say, a noise so deafening that no sound of the world could be heard, a phenomenon suggesting the expression of the devil, signifying ‘very strong’. (Son nom, n’ayant rien à voir avec Lucifer, s’explique par le fait que la rivière est très agitée, parsemée de tortueux rapides qui rendaient périlleuses les activités de drave ou d’arpentage et que, à certains endroits, elle émet, dit-on, un bruit tellement assourdissant qu’aucun son au monde ne pourrait être entendu, phénomène à rapprocher de l’expression en diable, qui signifie très fort.) Perhaps the name we use was the closest translation we could find to what the Algonquin called it. According to the Commission, the surveyor G. E. McMartin first recorded the name in a report in 1887.
Today, the same mechanisms that once fed mighty glaciers still provide us with enough precipitation to continue to feed these rivers, lakes and streams, and every spring, as the thaw comes out, the river rushes with an energy reminiscent of its youth for only a few weeks until the supply of melting snows dwindles down under the stern eye of the summer sun.
References: Commission du Toponymie; Study of the Narcisse Moraine –Derek Anderson
This glacier stood as much as three to five thousand feet high, some estimate even higher, an almost unimaginable wall of ice that would crush a city like Montreal to its elements and leave its traces buried under ice many times the height of its highest buildings. The weight of the glacier was so great that the compressed ground under it is still rebounding today from the release of its departure ten thousand years ago. If a couple had stood in a coniferous forest on the hilly plateau that we call St. Faustin Lac Carré, rather than feeling themselves on the high ground, as they would today, they would have looked way up into the icy mountains to the north, mountains that dwarfed even the mighty Tremblant and hid it in a frozen cast. In the spring, for spring would have come even then, the torrents of water rushing off the glacier would have thundered to the southwest along the edge of the icy mountains, pulling trees and rocks in the river’s rage. In winter, frozen along the surface, the glacier would have seemed to creep up over the hills, convincing the observers that it intended to grow to the south and tear down the tentatively advancing forest. Still, spring would come and the ice would retreat under the glare of an ever-hotter sun.
Glaciers grow by gathering snow on their cold surfaces and piling it so high that the bottom layers get crushed into ice and squeezed out the sides. In this way, they move along the ground, slowly crushing and pushing any obstacle in their paths, forward for a while and then melting back leaving gigantic deposits behind. This was the state of affairs for five centuries, twenty generations of humans, in the valley of the Devil River and the St. Narcisse Moraine. Ice, pushing steadily from the north, would carry stone and sediment in its frozen clutches, then it would melt back leaving an ever-greater pile along the south ridge. During the melt, a huge volume of fresh water would flood to the southwest, probably a lot of it under the ice sheet, carving wide valleys as it flowed. Slowly, as the ice age came to an end and an age of warmer summers began, the front of the glacial mountains retreated ever further to the north, sending its runoff down between the hills, but each year, each successive decade, losing force to the longer summers.
When spring comes now, the melt of the winter snows re-enacts these scenes and the rivers pour forth their once-captured waters, overflow their banks and deposit sand and stones as high up their sides as they can. Soon, though, as the calm of summer advances, the rivers meander as though inspecting the base of their once great holdings, sometimes turning back upon themselves and cutting corners leaving small, disconnected lakes, and other times gathering in a depression, then flowing out around some forgotten rocks, cascading down the valley. The once tentative forest of conifers has spread around these tamed rivers and a mighty forest, a green veil, has grown on either side of the flowing water.
The first humans to venture through these hills may have seen the last of the glaciers. Were they Innu? Algonquin? They left us no clear record. Later, they used the tame rivers for transport and fishing, but the Devil may well have been used only for recreation, as it is today. Certainly they would not have called it by that name, since their animist world had no concept of pure good and evil, but they may have called it by a name that evoked a trickster, a name to evoke the way it twists and turns. Even the first loggers and surveyors who named the river did not see it as Lucifer’s property, as the commission du toponymie informs us: Its name, having nothing to do with Lucifer, is explained by the fact that the river is very agitated, filled with tortuous rapids, that made logging perilous and surveying difficult, and, at certain locations it emitted, they say, a noise so deafening that no sound of the world could be heard, a phenomenon suggesting the expression of the devil, signifying ‘very strong’. (Son nom, n’ayant rien à voir avec Lucifer, s’explique par le fait que la rivière est très agitée, parsemée de tortueux rapides qui rendaient périlleuses les activités de drave ou d’arpentage et que, à certains endroits, elle émet, dit-on, un bruit tellement assourdissant qu’aucun son au monde ne pourrait être entendu, phénomène à rapprocher de l’expression en diable, qui signifie très fort.) Perhaps the name we use was the closest translation we could find to what the Algonquin called it. According to the Commission, the surveyor G. E. McMartin first recorded the name in a report in 1887.
Today, the same mechanisms that once fed mighty glaciers still provide us with enough precipitation to continue to feed these rivers, lakes and streams, and every spring, as the thaw comes out, the river rushes with an energy reminiscent of its youth for only a few weeks until the supply of melting snows dwindles down under the stern eye of the summer sun.
References: Commission du Toponymie; Study of the Narcisse Moraine –Derek Anderson
Pine Tree Road, Echo Lake/Lac Écho, Morin Heights
When George Binns built his Log Village at Echo Lake in the 1920′s, his homes nostalgically recalled an earlier period when the pine tree was the driving force behind our whole economy. We have never fully appreciated that the First Nations of the northeast were a woodland people. Their civilization lived in a huge pine forest and they farmed it in a way that was, and still is, unrecognizable to us. They burned carefully under the canopy, encouraging new growth to attract grazing animals, and controlled what would seem to us wild herds of deer, culling out the weak. They did not stand a chance against the Europeans, because their society was not based on domestic animals. They had not acquired a tolerance for the diseases, as had the Europeans through their symbiotic relationships with their herds. Whole communities of the First Nations perished, leaving empty forests with the remnants of great nations looking on in awe and fear at these invaders, human and animal.
There had not always been a pine forest. The limits of the great forests oscillated back and forth from the end of the last Ice Age, eleven thousand years ago. Over the centuries, one or another species of would dominate. For a long time it had been the hemlock. The one constant, though, when the ice left, was the forest.
When the first Europeans arrived they were confronted with a pine forest that stretched as far as they could imagine, in fact probably a lot farther. It reached from the East Coast to the Great Lakes, an almost unbroken covering. The forest reached 90 to 150 feet high, with some areas as high as 250 feet. To put it in perspective, consider that it was a 9 to 15-storey high forest, in some places as high as 25 storeys. By contrast, most of our forests today are 4 to 6 storeys high. Our ancestors saw this magnificent forest as overgrown fields. Susanna Moodie, the author of Roughing It In the Bush, sailing up the St. Lawrence in 1832, is quoted as having seen only “.a great portion of forest which it will take years of labour to remove.” This attitude was the first reaction of the newcomers, right back to the 1500′s.
Some, such as Captain George Weymouth of the British Royal Navy, saw the great potential of the wood for masts and spars. In 1605, he sent back samples and seeds to England, where it was discovered to be superior to the Scotch pine being used at the time, but the American white pine refused to grow in Europe. The British had already eliminated the forests of England, Scotland and Wales and they were dependent on imports to support what would become the greatest navy under sail in all of history. Robert Hughes, in The Fatal Shore, the story of Australia’s founding, described one English ship, a man-o’-war: “The mainmast of a 74-gun first-rater was three feet thick at the base, and rose 108 feet from keelson to truck – a single tree, dead straight and flawlessly solid. Such a vessel needed some 22 masts and yards as well.”
England’s rival on the sea was Denmark, and it was strategically placed to keep the British out of the Baltic, the only remaining European source of pine trees. The English rapidly became dependant upon the trees they found in North America, and all white pines of a certain size were reserved for the navy. They would be identified with the mark of the broad arrow, pointing straight up along the trunk, and once marked it became a criminal offence to take those trees. Naturally the colonists resented this kind of expropriation and it became as volatile an issue for the northern states as the Stamp Tax was. According to Sam Cox, author of The Story of White Pine, American Revolution, Lumberjacks, and Grizzly Bears, “The Massachusetts Minutemen who fired the first shots of the American Revolution at Lexington in April 1775, carried a flag of red with a green pine tree emblem on a field of white with them into battle at Bunker Hill in June 1775.” The Americans were supplying the French Navy with their masts throughout their war of independence. After the war, the New England supply was no longer at the disposal of the English navy, and the British looked far and wide to replace them. The early explorations of Australia were prompted in part by the discovery of Norfolk Island off the Australian east cost. The island was covered with tall, straight pines and it would take years before they were discovered to be worthless for masts and spars. Unlike the white pine, their resin dried brittle and inflexible. Under sail, the mast would snap like a stressed carrot.
The French tried to keep the British out of the Baltic, but Napoleon was more successful than his predecessors. He made treaties with the small German states, and together they blocked the access, putting increased pressure on the pine trees in the Canadas and in New Brunswick. There was less resentment in the Ottawa Valley to the mark of the broad arrow, because the pine forest was the impetus for development, and while the need for masts and spars got things going, Napoleon was soon defeated and the British Royal Navy, secure in its control of the seas, became the guarantor for the export of squared timber. Soon huge rafts of timber were being floated down the Ottawa to Quebec via Rivière des Prairies and exported to England. These rafts were as large as fields and they were sailed down with crews living on-board for months at a time. Each raft could be made out of twenty cribs attached together in such a way that they could be detached to race separately through river rapids and be re-attached below. In this way, lumber exports began to displace furs as the economic engine of the colonies. From 1802 to 1819 the export of timber soared from 21,700 tons to 340,500 tons. In the meantime, the American pine forests were falling to the lumberjacks’ axes and regions that had once been magnificent woodlands were becoming farms and towns.
While the growth of exports continued, the squaring of pine logs and the early mills were wasteful. Trees were felled and the trunks hauled away, leaving huge residues on the forest floor and exposing the land to erosion. Fires could rage out of control on the waste wood and on more than one occasion, lumbering towns were consumed. In the worst fire in the United States, 1200 people perished in the obliteration of the logging town of Peshtigo, WI.
By 1900, the pine was becoming rare. In a disastrous attempt to protect it, the American government encouraged the planting of seedlings. To keep pace with the demand, seeds were exported to Europe to be grown into seedlings and re-imported, unwittingly bringing back with them the devastating white pine blister rust. This fungus spread across the remaining white pine stands and dealt them a near-fatal blow: We had discovered why white pines do not grow in Europe.
While the pines are slowly recovering, they are more striking in our time for their dead, jagged tops. The virus causes the top of the tree to die and new branches slowly try to replace the top, leaving large, wide trees sometimes without crowns and sometimes with more than one.
Pine Tree Road is far from the only place-name that commemorates this great forest of the past. Every Laurentian town and village has an Avenue des pins or a Pine road, but today the pine is a rare tree in the Laurentian forest. Sometime while you are driving you might spot one, a large, wide tree pushing above the canopy on the top of a mountain, a jagged, gnarled silhouette standing alone against the sky.
Additional references: Hurling Down the Pine by John W. Hughson and Courtney C.J. Bond, The Historical Society of the Gatineau, -1964. Special thanks to Sandra Stock of the Morin Heights Historical Association
There had not always been a pine forest. The limits of the great forests oscillated back and forth from the end of the last Ice Age, eleven thousand years ago. Over the centuries, one or another species of would dominate. For a long time it had been the hemlock. The one constant, though, when the ice left, was the forest.
When the first Europeans arrived they were confronted with a pine forest that stretched as far as they could imagine, in fact probably a lot farther. It reached from the East Coast to the Great Lakes, an almost unbroken covering. The forest reached 90 to 150 feet high, with some areas as high as 250 feet. To put it in perspective, consider that it was a 9 to 15-storey high forest, in some places as high as 25 storeys. By contrast, most of our forests today are 4 to 6 storeys high. Our ancestors saw this magnificent forest as overgrown fields. Susanna Moodie, the author of Roughing It In the Bush, sailing up the St. Lawrence in 1832, is quoted as having seen only “.a great portion of forest which it will take years of labour to remove.” This attitude was the first reaction of the newcomers, right back to the 1500′s.
Some, such as Captain George Weymouth of the British Royal Navy, saw the great potential of the wood for masts and spars. In 1605, he sent back samples and seeds to England, where it was discovered to be superior to the Scotch pine being used at the time, but the American white pine refused to grow in Europe. The British had already eliminated the forests of England, Scotland and Wales and they were dependent on imports to support what would become the greatest navy under sail in all of history. Robert Hughes, in The Fatal Shore, the story of Australia’s founding, described one English ship, a man-o’-war: “The mainmast of a 74-gun first-rater was three feet thick at the base, and rose 108 feet from keelson to truck – a single tree, dead straight and flawlessly solid. Such a vessel needed some 22 masts and yards as well.”
England’s rival on the sea was Denmark, and it was strategically placed to keep the British out of the Baltic, the only remaining European source of pine trees. The English rapidly became dependant upon the trees they found in North America, and all white pines of a certain size were reserved for the navy. They would be identified with the mark of the broad arrow, pointing straight up along the trunk, and once marked it became a criminal offence to take those trees. Naturally the colonists resented this kind of expropriation and it became as volatile an issue for the northern states as the Stamp Tax was. According to Sam Cox, author of The Story of White Pine, American Revolution, Lumberjacks, and Grizzly Bears, “The Massachusetts Minutemen who fired the first shots of the American Revolution at Lexington in April 1775, carried a flag of red with a green pine tree emblem on a field of white with them into battle at Bunker Hill in June 1775.” The Americans were supplying the French Navy with their masts throughout their war of independence. After the war, the New England supply was no longer at the disposal of the English navy, and the British looked far and wide to replace them. The early explorations of Australia were prompted in part by the discovery of Norfolk Island off the Australian east cost. The island was covered with tall, straight pines and it would take years before they were discovered to be worthless for masts and spars. Unlike the white pine, their resin dried brittle and inflexible. Under sail, the mast would snap like a stressed carrot.
The French tried to keep the British out of the Baltic, but Napoleon was more successful than his predecessors. He made treaties with the small German states, and together they blocked the access, putting increased pressure on the pine trees in the Canadas and in New Brunswick. There was less resentment in the Ottawa Valley to the mark of the broad arrow, because the pine forest was the impetus for development, and while the need for masts and spars got things going, Napoleon was soon defeated and the British Royal Navy, secure in its control of the seas, became the guarantor for the export of squared timber. Soon huge rafts of timber were being floated down the Ottawa to Quebec via Rivière des Prairies and exported to England. These rafts were as large as fields and they were sailed down with crews living on-board for months at a time. Each raft could be made out of twenty cribs attached together in such a way that they could be detached to race separately through river rapids and be re-attached below. In this way, lumber exports began to displace furs as the economic engine of the colonies. From 1802 to 1819 the export of timber soared from 21,700 tons to 340,500 tons. In the meantime, the American pine forests were falling to the lumberjacks’ axes and regions that had once been magnificent woodlands were becoming farms and towns.
While the growth of exports continued, the squaring of pine logs and the early mills were wasteful. Trees were felled and the trunks hauled away, leaving huge residues on the forest floor and exposing the land to erosion. Fires could rage out of control on the waste wood and on more than one occasion, lumbering towns were consumed. In the worst fire in the United States, 1200 people perished in the obliteration of the logging town of Peshtigo, WI.
By 1900, the pine was becoming rare. In a disastrous attempt to protect it, the American government encouraged the planting of seedlings. To keep pace with the demand, seeds were exported to Europe to be grown into seedlings and re-imported, unwittingly bringing back with them the devastating white pine blister rust. This fungus spread across the remaining white pine stands and dealt them a near-fatal blow: We had discovered why white pines do not grow in Europe.
While the pines are slowly recovering, they are more striking in our time for their dead, jagged tops. The virus causes the top of the tree to die and new branches slowly try to replace the top, leaving large, wide trees sometimes without crowns and sometimes with more than one.
Pine Tree Road is far from the only place-name that commemorates this great forest of the past. Every Laurentian town and village has an Avenue des pins or a Pine road, but today the pine is a rare tree in the Laurentian forest. Sometime while you are driving you might spot one, a large, wide tree pushing above the canopy on the top of a mountain, a jagged, gnarled silhouette standing alone against the sky.
Additional references: Hurling Down the Pine by John W. Hughson and Courtney C.J. Bond, The Historical Society of the Gatineau, -1964. Special thanks to Sandra Stock of the Morin Heights Historical Association
Cyanobacteria
We live at the whim of the immortals and they created our very atmosphere. This is not a religious statement, but simple fact. Today’s news stories are peppered with concerns about cyanobacteria. It is treated as a poison that we have created and must figure how to eliminate. The truth seems to be the opposite. Cyanobacteria are doing what they have always done, and their impact upon our lives is merely incidental in their long history.
Earth is assumed to be some five billion years old, and has been colonized by life for most of that time. The first forms of life that dominated our planet were prokaryotes, single-celled creatures that absorbed nutrients and excreted waste through their surfaces. They could not be separated into genders because they were all the same. They did not mate to produce children, nor did they live for a fixed number of years. Their ideal size was determined by a ratio between volume and surface area, so if they grew too large, they split in two. Most people know the numbers that can be reached by simply doubling in that way, and, over time, different ones adapted bit by bit to specific environments. These prokaryotes are the immortals. While they can die, those that haven’t died have existed for billions of years – since the beginning.
Three billion five hundred million years ago, one of these prokaryotes modified its diet, adapting to a new environment. Today we call it cyanobacteria. Back then, this branch of prokaryotes began using light from the sun to absorb carbon and excrete a toxic substance into their ocean environment. In small quantities, that toxic substance was fairly harmless, but these little beggars just kept excreting it, filling their environment with a toxic gas that obliged them to deal with their own excrement. They found many creative methods of doing so – including hiding – but they kept on excreting until the ocean surfaces were saturated and began out-gassing into the atmosphere. Other prokaryotes, also at risk from this new poison, moved deeper into the water where they still reside, moving up or down together below the toxin.
That toxic gas was, of course, pure oxygen. It was volatile and could recombine in surprising ways to form oxides such as iron oxide and the carbon dioxide that it had been released from in many cases.
Among the systems that the prokaryotes used to hide from the toxin was the formation of little colonies of cells that specialized, forming a resistant shield. These colonies became so specialized that they soon began to become co-dependent. If a part of the colony died, the rest could not survive. The prokaryotes, in more or less original form, continued to exist inside these strange colonies, growing and separating as they had always done in an oxygen-free environment. Some colonies began to adapt into systems for survival and discovered a volatile substance – oxygen – that could be used as a fuel, excreting carbon dioxide, among other things, in its place. Others, including some of the cyanobacteria, moved into colonies that protected them from the toxic effects of oxygen where they could continue doing what they had always done: create more oxygen. The other members of these colonies used the resulting carbon to build large structures that could help them compete for other chemicals and for sunlight. Neither the oxygen-consuming colonies nor the oxygen-producing ones lasted forever, though, and so they had to create complicated methods for starting over – for having children – for reproduction. Together, these different colonies ultimately became recognizable as animals and plants, both creating ideal housing for the immortal prokaryotes inside them and helping each other by sharing oxygen back and forth. They rebuilt the world in the process of cleaning up their own mess.
Other prokaryotes developed in different ways, some consuming specific chemicals such as phosphorous and nitrogen and excreting trace chemicals into the atmosphere. One of these, also a cyanobacteria, created a toxic substance that can have deleterious neurological effects on animals. It has been in the news a lot lately as this group casually deals with our negligence, but without much regard for us. They create neurotoxins as they starve – once the quick meals we carelessly supply have become exhausted. Of course, there is very little of this neurotoxin around, so no-one has to hide from it – yet. But my, whatever will happen next?
Ref: The Wonderful World of Stromatolytes, (1999) Maggie Currie for the Hooper Museum, Carleton University, Ottawa; Life, Death and the Carbon Cycle, (1992) Joseph Graham, Thomas More Institute
Earth is assumed to be some five billion years old, and has been colonized by life for most of that time. The first forms of life that dominated our planet were prokaryotes, single-celled creatures that absorbed nutrients and excreted waste through their surfaces. They could not be separated into genders because they were all the same. They did not mate to produce children, nor did they live for a fixed number of years. Their ideal size was determined by a ratio between volume and surface area, so if they grew too large, they split in two. Most people know the numbers that can be reached by simply doubling in that way, and, over time, different ones adapted bit by bit to specific environments. These prokaryotes are the immortals. While they can die, those that haven’t died have existed for billions of years – since the beginning.
Three billion five hundred million years ago, one of these prokaryotes modified its diet, adapting to a new environment. Today we call it cyanobacteria. Back then, this branch of prokaryotes began using light from the sun to absorb carbon and excrete a toxic substance into their ocean environment. In small quantities, that toxic substance was fairly harmless, but these little beggars just kept excreting it, filling their environment with a toxic gas that obliged them to deal with their own excrement. They found many creative methods of doing so – including hiding – but they kept on excreting until the ocean surfaces were saturated and began out-gassing into the atmosphere. Other prokaryotes, also at risk from this new poison, moved deeper into the water where they still reside, moving up or down together below the toxin.
That toxic gas was, of course, pure oxygen. It was volatile and could recombine in surprising ways to form oxides such as iron oxide and the carbon dioxide that it had been released from in many cases.
Among the systems that the prokaryotes used to hide from the toxin was the formation of little colonies of cells that specialized, forming a resistant shield. These colonies became so specialized that they soon began to become co-dependent. If a part of the colony died, the rest could not survive. The prokaryotes, in more or less original form, continued to exist inside these strange colonies, growing and separating as they had always done in an oxygen-free environment. Some colonies began to adapt into systems for survival and discovered a volatile substance – oxygen – that could be used as a fuel, excreting carbon dioxide, among other things, in its place. Others, including some of the cyanobacteria, moved into colonies that protected them from the toxic effects of oxygen where they could continue doing what they had always done: create more oxygen. The other members of these colonies used the resulting carbon to build large structures that could help them compete for other chemicals and for sunlight. Neither the oxygen-consuming colonies nor the oxygen-producing ones lasted forever, though, and so they had to create complicated methods for starting over – for having children – for reproduction. Together, these different colonies ultimately became recognizable as animals and plants, both creating ideal housing for the immortal prokaryotes inside them and helping each other by sharing oxygen back and forth. They rebuilt the world in the process of cleaning up their own mess.
Other prokaryotes developed in different ways, some consuming specific chemicals such as phosphorous and nitrogen and excreting trace chemicals into the atmosphere. One of these, also a cyanobacteria, created a toxic substance that can have deleterious neurological effects on animals. It has been in the news a lot lately as this group casually deals with our negligence, but without much regard for us. They create neurotoxins as they starve – once the quick meals we carelessly supply have become exhausted. Of course, there is very little of this neurotoxin around, so no-one has to hide from it – yet. But my, whatever will happen next?
Ref: The Wonderful World of Stromatolytes, (1999) Maggie Currie for the Hooper Museum, Carleton University, Ottawa; Life, Death and the Carbon Cycle, (1992) Joseph Graham, Thomas More Institute
Beresford Township
Beresford Township, originally settled by peaceful French-Canadian farmers, was named for a British war hero, a major general who fought Napoleon throughout his career and never set foot in the Canadas.
Encompassing Ste. Agathe, it sits on a high plateau south of the St. Narcisse Moraine and includes a part of the headwaters of the North River. Although the Weskerini Algonquin hunted in the area, there is little to no evidence of permanent settlement in this small territory from the last ice age until Augustin-Norbert Morin’s first pioneers began arriving in the 1850s. Coupled with the lack of navigable rivers and the very thin layer of soil that remained after the passage of the glaciers, it has a higher elevation than its neighbours to the west and south, and the frost-free season is much shorter than in those other areas.
The first settlers found an undisturbed forest rich in pine and maple and discovered clean, clear lakes teeming with trout. They brought with them a farming culture that was ill suited to the thin soil and short seasons. However, they doggedly perceived themselves as farmers and stripped the forest away, burning it and selling the residue as
potash for a few cents a hundredweight until all that was left was the barren soil and the fishing season. Since these hardy, independent people were Catholics, their own name for their settlement owed more to the parish and the priests than to the distant bureaucratic authority that had called it Beresford, and it became known as the Paroisse de Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. Rarely would they have thought of the man for whom the township had been named, or of his legacy, even as the fields were abandoned and the forests began their slow return.
Major General William Carr of Beresford was 84 years old when Beresford Township was named in his honour in 1852. He died two years later, never having seen the ill-fated forest. The illegitimate son of Lord George De La Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford, in Ireland, and of an unrecorded woman, William joined the British Army at 17 years of age. Lord George fathered two children by different women prior to marrying and fathering seven legitimate children.
It was customary for less advantaged members of titled families to be given a commission in the army, where they were basically on their own. These commissions were not merit based, but were purchased by those who could afford them, and it is possible that it was the Marquess who paid for William Carr’s commission. The evidence in favour of this conclusion is that William Carr’s elder half-brother, born in the same circumstances, also obtained a title in his lifetime after having proven himself as an officer in the navy.
Beresford first showed his capabilities in a battle in Toulon in
1793, a battle that saw Napoleon rise from captain to general in his victory over the British. As Napoleon rose to power, the British sought ever further afield for the trees that would maintain their navy, beginning the long process that would eventually contribute to the demise of the forests of Beresford Township.
Beresford was among those determined career soldiers who, despite injuries (he had lost an eye) and setbacks, would dog Napoleon to the end of his career. He served in Nova Scotia, India, Egypt, and Cape Town, South Africa. He rose to the rank of general, captured Buenos Aires, was forced to surrender it, escaped from prison there and returned to England. His major military contribution was during the Peninsular War against Napoleon, in Spain and Portugal. He earned the title of Marquis de Campo Maior from the King of Portugal for his services and was an intimate of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Viscount Wellington. He is also credited with retraining the Portuguese army while in Wellington’s service.
Despite his vital contributions to the defeat of Napoleon, the early bureaucrats of the Canadas who chose his name may have had a different reason to commemorate this great general, a reason that would seem to tie him more closely to the township. Beresford is best remembered for the work that he began during his retirement. On his property called Bedgebury in Goudhurst, Kent, England, he began a conservatory of pine tree species that has grown into the largest coniferous preserve in the world with “over 10,000 tree specimens growing in 320 acres, including rare, historically important and endangered trees and is home to some 91 vulnerable or critically endangered species….” (from The Friends of Bedgebury Pinetum web site).
Our ancient woodlands were lost during 150 years of peaceful history, but we can celebrate the legacy of General Beresford while witnessing the occasional crown of a white pine breaking through the canopy of our young second-growth forest. Had our earliest farmers known him, perhaps they could have set aside a small portion of our virgin pine forest in his honour. Perhaps we can still do something. The residents of Lac Brûlé in Ste. Agathe have been protecting their forest for almost 100 years, and the white pines are now standing head-and-shoulders over the forest canopy.
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
Encompassing Ste. Agathe, it sits on a high plateau south of the St. Narcisse Moraine and includes a part of the headwaters of the North River. Although the Weskerini Algonquin hunted in the area, there is little to no evidence of permanent settlement in this small territory from the last ice age until Augustin-Norbert Morin’s first pioneers began arriving in the 1850s. Coupled with the lack of navigable rivers and the very thin layer of soil that remained after the passage of the glaciers, it has a higher elevation than its neighbours to the west and south, and the frost-free season is much shorter than in those other areas.
The first settlers found an undisturbed forest rich in pine and maple and discovered clean, clear lakes teeming with trout. They brought with them a farming culture that was ill suited to the thin soil and short seasons. However, they doggedly perceived themselves as farmers and stripped the forest away, burning it and selling the residue as
potash for a few cents a hundredweight until all that was left was the barren soil and the fishing season. Since these hardy, independent people were Catholics, their own name for their settlement owed more to the parish and the priests than to the distant bureaucratic authority that had called it Beresford, and it became known as the Paroisse de Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts. Rarely would they have thought of the man for whom the township had been named, or of his legacy, even as the fields were abandoned and the forests began their slow return.
Major General William Carr of Beresford was 84 years old when Beresford Township was named in his honour in 1852. He died two years later, never having seen the ill-fated forest. The illegitimate son of Lord George De La Poer Beresford, 1st Marquess of Waterford, in Ireland, and of an unrecorded woman, William joined the British Army at 17 years of age. Lord George fathered two children by different women prior to marrying and fathering seven legitimate children.
It was customary for less advantaged members of titled families to be given a commission in the army, where they were basically on their own. These commissions were not merit based, but were purchased by those who could afford them, and it is possible that it was the Marquess who paid for William Carr’s commission. The evidence in favour of this conclusion is that William Carr’s elder half-brother, born in the same circumstances, also obtained a title in his lifetime after having proven himself as an officer in the navy.
Beresford first showed his capabilities in a battle in Toulon in
1793, a battle that saw Napoleon rise from captain to general in his victory over the British. As Napoleon rose to power, the British sought ever further afield for the trees that would maintain their navy, beginning the long process that would eventually contribute to the demise of the forests of Beresford Township.
Beresford was among those determined career soldiers who, despite injuries (he had lost an eye) and setbacks, would dog Napoleon to the end of his career. He served in Nova Scotia, India, Egypt, and Cape Town, South Africa. He rose to the rank of general, captured Buenos Aires, was forced to surrender it, escaped from prison there and returned to England. His major military contribution was during the Peninsular War against Napoleon, in Spain and Portugal. He earned the title of Marquis de Campo Maior from the King of Portugal for his services and was an intimate of Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Viscount Wellington. He is also credited with retraining the Portuguese army while in Wellington’s service.
Despite his vital contributions to the defeat of Napoleon, the early bureaucrats of the Canadas who chose his name may have had a different reason to commemorate this great general, a reason that would seem to tie him more closely to the township. Beresford is best remembered for the work that he began during his retirement. On his property called Bedgebury in Goudhurst, Kent, England, he began a conservatory of pine tree species that has grown into the largest coniferous preserve in the world with “over 10,000 tree specimens growing in 320 acres, including rare, historically important and endangered trees and is home to some 91 vulnerable or critically endangered species….” (from The Friends of Bedgebury Pinetum web site).
Our ancient woodlands were lost during 150 years of peaceful history, but we can celebrate the legacy of General Beresford while witnessing the occasional crown of a white pine breaking through the canopy of our young second-growth forest. Had our earliest farmers known him, perhaps they could have set aside a small portion of our virgin pine forest in his honour. Perhaps we can still do something. The residents of Lac Brûlé in Ste. Agathe have been protecting their forest for almost 100 years, and the white pines are now standing head-and-shoulders over the forest canopy.
Excerpted from Naming the Laurentians
Grenville Geological Province, The Rocks Beneath Our Feet
We have often been told that we live on the oldest mountains in the world, but what does that mean? How old are these hills? Aren’t all rocks and stone just a part of the world? Apparently not. The rocky surface of our world is made up of a number of large plates that actually float on a molten interior. These plates are always moving and leaving gaps between or banging into and slipping under each other. This has been going on for so long that all surfaces are eventually pushed underground. The particular part of the plate that we live on has been on the surface for the longest time, and it is therefore the oldest. Our specific neighbourhood is called the Grenville Geological Province.
The Canadian Shield is composed of seven of these provinces. Ours runs along the north of the St. Lawrence Valley roughly parallel to the river from north of Goose Bay on the Labrador coast to around Sudbury northwest of the Great Lakes. It also extends south into the eastern central states. The Canadian Shield it is called Precambrian. Scientists have classified rock according to the fossil record, and the three oldest classifications are, from youngest to oldest, Devonian, Silurian and Cambrian. Any rock that formed before the fossil record is simply classified as pre-Cambrian.
To try to understand how old our mountains are, I took an adding machine roll and unrolled the whole thing along a corridor. With some coloured pencils I marked off the different eras of the past. The roll was 23 feet or 276 inches long (app 7 metres). I discovered that the Precambrian geological period, measured from when the world began until the Cambrian, when fossils first became readily evident, ended a bit after 20 feet or 242 inches (6.1 m) leaving me only about 3 feet (1 m) for the balance of the history of the world. The balance, to the present, was divided into eleven periods, including the Cambrian, Jurassic, Cretaceous and so on. At 22 feet 8 inches or 272 inches (6.9 m) there was still no sign of humans. I had four inches to go. Each inch (2.5 cm) of the roll represented 16,666,667 years, and humans only appeared in their most primitive form 2,000,000 years ago, or an eighth of an inch (3 mm) before the end of the roll. Considering that written history began about 5,000 years ago, I could not find a pencil sharp enough to note it at the edge. These hills are old.
The name Grenville grew out of the naming of a specific band of marble found near Grenville in the Ottawa Valley in the 1860′s. Sir William Logan first used the term, and soon extended it to include a variety of rock types. His choice of the name was thereby extended to cover the whole area that has the same basic rock type. To follow back further, the Commission du Toponymie tells us that Grenville, the town, was named for the British prime minister, Lord George Grenville (1712-1770). Grenville was never a popular man and made enemies throughout his political career. He seems to have been the most surprised when he was asked to take over as Prime Minister after his predecessor had named most of the Cabinet. Perhaps he was being set up for a fall during a very difficult time; the Seven Years’ War had drained the government coffers. He was Prime Minister of England from the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 until 1765. During those two years he had John Wilkes arrested for criticising the King’s speech at the Peace of Paris; was forced to let him go, thereby providing a major precedent to the British right to freedom of speech; introduced the Sugar Tax; extended the Stamp Tax to the Colonies and generally created the conditions for the American War of Independence. He was dismissed by King George III, who did not like him because he tried to keep the books balanced, depriving the King of some of his pleasures. It is interesting to see how the costs of winning one war, and acquiring Canada from France, led so quickly to the next, the American War of Independence.
Considering that a very large part of the Grenville Province is in the United States, it may be one of those professional oversights that American geologists accepted that it bear the name of a man who was identified with the hated Stamp Act. Best we look to the man who chose the name.
Sir William Logan, born in Montreal in 1798, managed a mining company in South Wales and developed a system for locating coal deposits. The Geological Society of Great Britain adopted his techniques, establishing his reputation as a geologist. He was subsequently hired as the geologist for Canada in the hope of assessing the colony’s coal deposits. His studies predicted that none would be found, but in the course of his work, he also predicted that large copper deposits would be found on the north shore of Lake Superior and he mapped and charted the colony. As a result of his work he became the first Canadian inducted into the Royal Society of London, was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour in France and received a knighthood. He was Canada’s first geologist and the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada.
References: The Canadian Encyclopedia; Encyclopedia Britannica copyright 1946; www.ucmp.berkeley.edu ; The Victorian Web; Toponymie Quebec; Special thanks to Lawrence Anna, USGS and to Sheila Eskenazi
The Canadian Shield is composed of seven of these provinces. Ours runs along the north of the St. Lawrence Valley roughly parallel to the river from north of Goose Bay on the Labrador coast to around Sudbury northwest of the Great Lakes. It also extends south into the eastern central states. The Canadian Shield it is called Precambrian. Scientists have classified rock according to the fossil record, and the three oldest classifications are, from youngest to oldest, Devonian, Silurian and Cambrian. Any rock that formed before the fossil record is simply classified as pre-Cambrian.
To try to understand how old our mountains are, I took an adding machine roll and unrolled the whole thing along a corridor. With some coloured pencils I marked off the different eras of the past. The roll was 23 feet or 276 inches long (app 7 metres). I discovered that the Precambrian geological period, measured from when the world began until the Cambrian, when fossils first became readily evident, ended a bit after 20 feet or 242 inches (6.1 m) leaving me only about 3 feet (1 m) for the balance of the history of the world. The balance, to the present, was divided into eleven periods, including the Cambrian, Jurassic, Cretaceous and so on. At 22 feet 8 inches or 272 inches (6.9 m) there was still no sign of humans. I had four inches to go. Each inch (2.5 cm) of the roll represented 16,666,667 years, and humans only appeared in their most primitive form 2,000,000 years ago, or an eighth of an inch (3 mm) before the end of the roll. Considering that written history began about 5,000 years ago, I could not find a pencil sharp enough to note it at the edge. These hills are old.
The name Grenville grew out of the naming of a specific band of marble found near Grenville in the Ottawa Valley in the 1860′s. Sir William Logan first used the term, and soon extended it to include a variety of rock types. His choice of the name was thereby extended to cover the whole area that has the same basic rock type. To follow back further, the Commission du Toponymie tells us that Grenville, the town, was named for the British prime minister, Lord George Grenville (1712-1770). Grenville was never a popular man and made enemies throughout his political career. He seems to have been the most surprised when he was asked to take over as Prime Minister after his predecessor had named most of the Cabinet. Perhaps he was being set up for a fall during a very difficult time; the Seven Years’ War had drained the government coffers. He was Prime Minister of England from the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 until 1765. During those two years he had John Wilkes arrested for criticising the King’s speech at the Peace of Paris; was forced to let him go, thereby providing a major precedent to the British right to freedom of speech; introduced the Sugar Tax; extended the Stamp Tax to the Colonies and generally created the conditions for the American War of Independence. He was dismissed by King George III, who did not like him because he tried to keep the books balanced, depriving the King of some of his pleasures. It is interesting to see how the costs of winning one war, and acquiring Canada from France, led so quickly to the next, the American War of Independence.
Considering that a very large part of the Grenville Province is in the United States, it may be one of those professional oversights that American geologists accepted that it bear the name of a man who was identified with the hated Stamp Act. Best we look to the man who chose the name.
Sir William Logan, born in Montreal in 1798, managed a mining company in South Wales and developed a system for locating coal deposits. The Geological Society of Great Britain adopted his techniques, establishing his reputation as a geologist. He was subsequently hired as the geologist for Canada in the hope of assessing the colony’s coal deposits. His studies predicted that none would be found, but in the course of his work, he also predicted that large copper deposits would be found on the north shore of Lake Superior and he mapped and charted the colony. As a result of his work he became the first Canadian inducted into the Royal Society of London, was awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour in France and received a knighthood. He was Canada’s first geologist and the first director of the Geological Survey of Canada.
References: The Canadian Encyclopedia; Encyclopedia Britannica copyright 1946; www.ucmp.berkeley.edu ; The Victorian Web; Toponymie Quebec; Special thanks to Lawrence Anna, USGS and to Sheila Eskenazi
In The Beginning
The Laurentians are situated in the Grenville geological province, a slowly moving land mass that collided with the Canadian Shield a billion years ago. It is precambrian. That means that is it was formed before there were any signs of animal life. The cambrian period began with the first signs of animal life only 650,000,000 years ago.
About half way through its history, our whole area was at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea and at different times, the most recent being only fourteen thousand years ago, it was scraped and gouged by glaciers. The path of this most recent glacier, the Laurentide sheet, can be seen vividly from the air. The lakes Cornu, Manitou and des Sables all sit in two roughly parallel long valleys that run from the northwest to the southeast.
Despite its age, it is hard to find old fossils, since our area was scraped clean and presumably the millions of years of accumulated soils and detritus were pushed off to the southeast. If you find an outcropping of the underlying metamorphic rock, though, you may find evidence of fossils hardened into the stone. Large parts of the Grenville province may have been covered by igneous rock that spilled over its surface from volcanoes, and this rock will have no fossils.
As the ice receded, large and rocky mounds and exposed rock were left to bear witness to the tremendous forces that had been at work. Our forests slowly replaced the receding ice sheet and a lot of our recent history can be read right off the hills, especially in the fall when the leaves change. The soil on our forest floor contains the seeds of many kinds of trees, each waiting patiently for its signal to germinate. The relatively undisturbed forests that the fur traders found consisted of large straight white pines. These trees are ‘tolerant’, ones that can grow well in the shade. They can begin their lives in a shady birch forest but will grow eventually to rob the birches of their sunlight. The maple is another tolerant tree, and together these giants dominated the forests. The intolerant species must wait for some kind of disaster to clear the ground. Then they spring to life and grow quickly. One variety, the jackpine, must wait in the ground for its seed to be cracked open by fire. Only then can it begin to grow. Over the thousands of years since the ice left, there must have been fires and storms that devastated the forests and left the jackpines, birches, spruce and fir the task of repairing the damage. A hundred years after a disaster, the pines would be slowly dominating the canopy again. We can still see the occasional pine standing above the forest on the top of a hill. These trees can grow way beyond the size of most of the trees we have become used to. Under this canopy, eventually the ceiling of the forest could become very high, and the spaces between the trees, very large. What an inviting forest it must have been for the first humans. There must have been a sense of order and wellbeing that we can only speculate about. Despite the high ceiling of the forest and the tall trees, the waterfront would have been walled off by cedars or other water-loving species, and their branches, exposed to the sun, would have grown from stump to crown. Possibly the bottom branches would have been eaten or broken by the deer or moose that grazed there in winter. This would have allowed light to penetrate the forest all along the water’s edge. This effect is visible around Lac Tremblant where the deer have left a well trimmed line of branches that are just out of their reach, and it forms the illusion of a second shoreline, just above the waterline and parallel to it.
The lakes themselves, teeming with fish in the clear water, must have been the most beautiful scene of all.
The first humans, the Algonquin or Anisinapek entered this territory more than a thousand years before Europeans first arrived. Probably they shared it at different times with other people such as the Montagnais and Nippising. Their legends and myths have left their mark on our area in many ways. The name Manitou meant ‘mysterious being’, or ‘mystery’ and they believed that the Manitou lived on Mont Tremblant and would shake the mountain in anger if humans disrupted the natural order. They used birch bark canoes to travel over the lakes and lived in the area mostly as nomads, ranging from the Ottawa river valley. They, too, seemed to have used the Laurentians for recreational purposes. With the arrival of the first Europeans, the Algonquin used our area principally to satisfy the large European demand for furs.
It is hard to find any area that still reflects the majesty of those early Laurentian forests and lakes, and as we shall see, the arrival of the Europeans wrought many other changes.
About half way through its history, our whole area was at the bottom of a warm, shallow sea and at different times, the most recent being only fourteen thousand years ago, it was scraped and gouged by glaciers. The path of this most recent glacier, the Laurentide sheet, can be seen vividly from the air. The lakes Cornu, Manitou and des Sables all sit in two roughly parallel long valleys that run from the northwest to the southeast.
Despite its age, it is hard to find old fossils, since our area was scraped clean and presumably the millions of years of accumulated soils and detritus were pushed off to the southeast. If you find an outcropping of the underlying metamorphic rock, though, you may find evidence of fossils hardened into the stone. Large parts of the Grenville province may have been covered by igneous rock that spilled over its surface from volcanoes, and this rock will have no fossils.
As the ice receded, large and rocky mounds and exposed rock were left to bear witness to the tremendous forces that had been at work. Our forests slowly replaced the receding ice sheet and a lot of our recent history can be read right off the hills, especially in the fall when the leaves change. The soil on our forest floor contains the seeds of many kinds of trees, each waiting patiently for its signal to germinate. The relatively undisturbed forests that the fur traders found consisted of large straight white pines. These trees are ‘tolerant’, ones that can grow well in the shade. They can begin their lives in a shady birch forest but will grow eventually to rob the birches of their sunlight. The maple is another tolerant tree, and together these giants dominated the forests. The intolerant species must wait for some kind of disaster to clear the ground. Then they spring to life and grow quickly. One variety, the jackpine, must wait in the ground for its seed to be cracked open by fire. Only then can it begin to grow. Over the thousands of years since the ice left, there must have been fires and storms that devastated the forests and left the jackpines, birches, spruce and fir the task of repairing the damage. A hundred years after a disaster, the pines would be slowly dominating the canopy again. We can still see the occasional pine standing above the forest on the top of a hill. These trees can grow way beyond the size of most of the trees we have become used to. Under this canopy, eventually the ceiling of the forest could become very high, and the spaces between the trees, very large. What an inviting forest it must have been for the first humans. There must have been a sense of order and wellbeing that we can only speculate about. Despite the high ceiling of the forest and the tall trees, the waterfront would have been walled off by cedars or other water-loving species, and their branches, exposed to the sun, would have grown from stump to crown. Possibly the bottom branches would have been eaten or broken by the deer or moose that grazed there in winter. This would have allowed light to penetrate the forest all along the water’s edge. This effect is visible around Lac Tremblant where the deer have left a well trimmed line of branches that are just out of their reach, and it forms the illusion of a second shoreline, just above the waterline and parallel to it.
The lakes themselves, teeming with fish in the clear water, must have been the most beautiful scene of all.
The first humans, the Algonquin or Anisinapek entered this territory more than a thousand years before Europeans first arrived. Probably they shared it at different times with other people such as the Montagnais and Nippising. Their legends and myths have left their mark on our area in many ways. The name Manitou meant ‘mysterious being’, or ‘mystery’ and they believed that the Manitou lived on Mont Tremblant and would shake the mountain in anger if humans disrupted the natural order. They used birch bark canoes to travel over the lakes and lived in the area mostly as nomads, ranging from the Ottawa river valley. They, too, seemed to have used the Laurentians for recreational purposes. With the arrival of the first Europeans, the Algonquin used our area principally to satisfy the large European demand for furs.
It is hard to find any area that still reflects the majesty of those early Laurentian forests and lakes, and as we shall see, the arrival of the Europeans wrought many other changes.
The North River
Thousands of tributaries, streams, springs and small lakes contribute to the headwaters of the North River system. Most of them seem to bubble right out of the ground as though the Laurentian Mountains were a place where water itself was created. This extraordinary system ties the whole lower Laurentians together in its sustaining web, belying the arbitrary-sounding name that it bears. Ironically the North is the southernmost river in the Laurentians. It is also the least navigable and generally runs at a higher elevation. The most common approach to the river’s basin today is from Montreal and Laval. Crossing the flat plain of the St. Lawrence Valley the Laurentian mountains look like a wall in the distance. Once you climb out of the plain, you cross the North River and move ever higher, past St. Jerome, to Ste. Adele, but never far from the river. As you continue northwest, you climb another 600 feet to reach the elevation of Ste. Agathe where you will find that the river has formed many lakes. Another 300 feet will get you to St. Faustin where the river is gone and all you can find are creeks running into large clean lakes. At that point you will be on a ridge known as the St. Narcisse Moraine that runs from above the Red River basin all the way to Québec City.
Beyond the ridge, you descend rapidly into the valley of the Red and Devil Rivers. Within a very few miles, you are in St. Jovite, and you have dropped 900 feet, finding yourself at the same elevation as Ste. Adele. You have crossed the divide between the North River basin and the Red River basin. From the top of this ridge, the waters run in two directions, one through the mountain lakes that form the headwaters of the North, and the other, quickly down to the Devil and Red River valleys.
For well over sixty thousand years the Laurentide Ice Sheet pushed and scraped the hilltops of the Laurentians towards the southeast leaving the higher peaks polished and rounded beneath one mile and a half (2 km) of ice. Eleven thousand years ago, this glacier was in retreat and most of the lower Laurentians was free of ice, but then the ice sheet rallied and for a 500 year period it oscillated indecisively south of the Red River Valley until finally melting back and leaving the St. Narcisse Moraine, a wall sitting on the hilltops above the valley. Water held behind that ridge had to find a different route to the Ottawa River and in the process was captured in rocky basins as it meandered through the hills towards the southwest. The high mountain ridge that so clearly marks the southern wall of the Red River Valley also forms a barrier to the northwest wind forcing the weather systems to climb into the hills as they follow their course to the southeast, dumping precipitation onto the rocky upper reaches of the North River basin.
Clear mountain lakes spill from one to the other through the rounded rocky hills. Running through Val Morin to Ste. Adele it forms exciting waterfalls and whirlpools, skirting around mountain ridges then joining the Doncaster River in Mont Rolland and pushing on towards St. Jerome.
When humans, the Weskarinis of the Algonquin people, moved into the area vacated by the ice, they came from the northwest, along the Ottawa and up its tributaries. Confronted by the St. Narcisse Moraine, they only rarely climbed through it into the hills. Instead they returned each summer to the teeming plenty of the Ottawa, and whereas they met the Iroquois who came up from the St. Lawrence, they left a large no-man’s land between them.
The mouth of the river, the place where all of its tributaries join and flow into the Ottawa, was the first part of the system to develop, and although we think of the North River basin as being dotted with communities, crisscrossed by bridges and flowing through old dams, evidence of abandoned mills, in fact the first Europeans to see it came from the Ottawa. To them, it was just a fairly average sized river that they had occasion to follow a little ways until they found a waterfall. These early visitors, most likely engaged by Charles Joseph d’Ailleboust of Argenteuil near Paris, surveyed the newly created seigneury in the early part of the 18th century. It is doubtful they could have done it before the Great Peace that was signed between the Iroquois and French in 1701, even though the Argenteuil seigneury was created in 1685. Arriving from the Ottawa, these surveyors made their way along the river to Iles aux Chats and found that the next five miles of river ran practically straight towards the north- east. They came to a great waterfall and dutifully marked this feature on their map, calling it La Chute. A little further up, they found another tributary that joined the river from the west. Thus the long stretch became the North River and the new tributary, the West River. Over the next hundred years, as mills grew, powered by the flow of the river, milling lumber and grinding grain, each new community adopted this name and no-one ever challenged or changed it.
Ref: A History of Lachute by G. R. Rigby with special thanks to Derek Anderson for pointing out the St. Narcisse Moraine.
Beyond the ridge, you descend rapidly into the valley of the Red and Devil Rivers. Within a very few miles, you are in St. Jovite, and you have dropped 900 feet, finding yourself at the same elevation as Ste. Adele. You have crossed the divide between the North River basin and the Red River basin. From the top of this ridge, the waters run in two directions, one through the mountain lakes that form the headwaters of the North, and the other, quickly down to the Devil and Red River valleys.
For well over sixty thousand years the Laurentide Ice Sheet pushed and scraped the hilltops of the Laurentians towards the southeast leaving the higher peaks polished and rounded beneath one mile and a half (2 km) of ice. Eleven thousand years ago, this glacier was in retreat and most of the lower Laurentians was free of ice, but then the ice sheet rallied and for a 500 year period it oscillated indecisively south of the Red River Valley until finally melting back and leaving the St. Narcisse Moraine, a wall sitting on the hilltops above the valley. Water held behind that ridge had to find a different route to the Ottawa River and in the process was captured in rocky basins as it meandered through the hills towards the southwest. The high mountain ridge that so clearly marks the southern wall of the Red River Valley also forms a barrier to the northwest wind forcing the weather systems to climb into the hills as they follow their course to the southeast, dumping precipitation onto the rocky upper reaches of the North River basin.
Clear mountain lakes spill from one to the other through the rounded rocky hills. Running through Val Morin to Ste. Adele it forms exciting waterfalls and whirlpools, skirting around mountain ridges then joining the Doncaster River in Mont Rolland and pushing on towards St. Jerome.
When humans, the Weskarinis of the Algonquin people, moved into the area vacated by the ice, they came from the northwest, along the Ottawa and up its tributaries. Confronted by the St. Narcisse Moraine, they only rarely climbed through it into the hills. Instead they returned each summer to the teeming plenty of the Ottawa, and whereas they met the Iroquois who came up from the St. Lawrence, they left a large no-man’s land between them.
The mouth of the river, the place where all of its tributaries join and flow into the Ottawa, was the first part of the system to develop, and although we think of the North River basin as being dotted with communities, crisscrossed by bridges and flowing through old dams, evidence of abandoned mills, in fact the first Europeans to see it came from the Ottawa. To them, it was just a fairly average sized river that they had occasion to follow a little ways until they found a waterfall. These early visitors, most likely engaged by Charles Joseph d’Ailleboust of Argenteuil near Paris, surveyed the newly created seigneury in the early part of the 18th century. It is doubtful they could have done it before the Great Peace that was signed between the Iroquois and French in 1701, even though the Argenteuil seigneury was created in 1685. Arriving from the Ottawa, these surveyors made their way along the river to Iles aux Chats and found that the next five miles of river ran practically straight towards the north- east. They came to a great waterfall and dutifully marked this feature on their map, calling it La Chute. A little further up, they found another tributary that joined the river from the west. Thus the long stretch became the North River and the new tributary, the West River. Over the next hundred years, as mills grew, powered by the flow of the river, milling lumber and grinding grain, each new community adopted this name and no-one ever challenged or changed it.
Ref: A History of Lachute by G. R. Rigby with special thanks to Derek Anderson for pointing out the St. Narcisse Moraine.