Toronto

Biography of a City

Allan Levine

• Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781771000222
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771620437
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

With the same eye for character, anecdote and circumstance that made Peter Ackroyd’s London and Colin Jones’s Paris so successful, Levine’s captivating prose integrates the sights, sounds and feel of Toronto with a broad historical perspective, linking the city’s present with its past through themes such as politics, transportation, public health, ethnic diversity and sports. Toronto invites readers to discover the city’s lively spirit over four centuries and to wander purposefully through the city’s many unique neighborhoods, where they can encounter the striking and peculiar characters who have inhabited them: the powerful and powerless, the entrepreneurs and the entertainers, and the moral and the corrupt, all of whom have contributed to Toronto’s collective identity.

Chapter One
THE CARRYING PLACE

Étienne Brûlé, the young French adventurer and interpreter, may have been the first European to explore the Toronto area in early September 1615. Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1970-99

My people have survived for thousands of years on this continent and will continue to do so.

— BRYAN LAFORME, CHIEF OF THE MISSISSAUGA OF NEW CREDIT FIRST NATION, 2012

Not far from the corner of Jane Street and Bloor Street West is a quiet and family-friendly green space on the rolling land alongside the Humber River. It is called Étienne Brûlé Park and is named for the young French adventurer and interpreter who may have been the first European to explore the Toronto area in early September 1615.

The French referred to the Humber as Rivière Taronto or the Toronto River. The name was likely derived from the Mohawk term tkaronto, which probably meant “where there are trees standing in the water” and which was connected to the stakes the First Nations put into the water to catch fish. For a time, the French called Lake Simcoe, 80 kilometres north, Lac de Taronto. The name was then used to describe the whole region down to Lake Ontario and eventually, more specifically, the area where the Humber meets the lake—present-day Toronto.

Étienne Brûlé was no more than sixteen years old when he arrived in Quebec in 1608 as an indentured servant or engagé, who had little say in his own fate. He was among the colonists accompanying Samuel de Champlain on the founder of New France’s first voyage to the New World. Daring and spirited, Brûlé gladly complied with Champlain’s request that he spend time with the local aboriginal tribes to learn their language and customs. For more than two years, from about 1610 to 1612, Brûlé lived with the Montagnais and then with the Algonquin (or Algonkin) under the leadership of Chief Iroquet, an ally of the Huron. In exchange, Champlain took in a young Huron named Savignon.

After many months had passed, Champlain saw Brûlé again. He commented that his “French boy” now “dressed like an Indian.” Brûlé had mastered the local aboriginal language and gained an important insight into aboriginal culture and daily routines. A devout Catholic, however, he definitely was not. “It is clear that Brulé was a bad man and guilty of every vice and crime,” wrote Father Du Creux in his history of New France, written in Latin and published in Paris in 1664. That critical assessment was partly based on a report left by Champlain. “Brûlé was unfortunately guilty of reprehensible actions that have sullied his memory,” Champlain recorded. “In espousing the customs of the Indians, he had also adopted their morals . . . This man was recognized as being very vicious in character, and much addicted to women.” Then a rugged man in his early twenties, Brûlé might indeed have been the womanizer Champlain claimed he was. Or, like other young Frenchmen who transformed themselves into coureurs de bois (runners of the woods), Brûlé may simply have been attracted to the freedom of the North American aboriginal way of life.

Questionable morals or not, Brûlé remained valuable to Champlain in his efforts to maintain his alliance with the Huron against their bitter enemies, the Iroquois or Five Nations Confederacy: the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations (the confederacy expanded to six nations with the addition of the Tuscarora in 1722). In time, the Iroquois tribes aligned themselves with the British and against the French in the war the two European powers waged over North America.

In September 1615, Champlain sent Brûlé on an expedition with a dozen Huron warriors to secure the military support of the Susquehannahs in an area that is now western New York state and northern Pennsylvania. To get there, Brûlé and his group probably navigated the Humber River, which included a forty-five-kilometre portage between Lake Simoce and Lake Ontario known as the Toronto Carrying Place or Toronto Passage. This ancient trail or portage, which Aboriginals had likely used for thousands of years, may well have taken Brûlé along the banks of the Humber through Brûlé Park and along present-day Riverside Drive straight under the Gardiner Express­­way to the mouth of the Humber at Lake Ontario. Then and later, the Carrying Place had a certain mystique. As historian Percy Robinson wrote in his early account of Toronto during the French regime, it “possessed a permanence very different from casual paths through the forest. It was as old as human life in America.”

Was Brûlé the first European to see the present-day site of Toronto? The best answer might be perhaps. Some historians now believe that Brûlé and his party took a more westerly route to Lake Erie and then crossed the Niagara River on their way south to avoid running into the Iroquois. Still, with Brûlé Park named after him, his legacy—however dubious—as the first non-aboriginal to gaze across the Humber remains intact.

The problem is that Brûlé left no written record of his experience traversing the Carrying Place. The English fur trader Alexander Henry did. He made the trip in 1764 and was accompanied by (unfriendly) Ojibwa warriors on their way to a British–Indian peace conference at Old Fort Niagara, near Youngstown, New York, during the time of Ottawa chief Pontiac’s fight against the British. In his memoir Travels and Adventures in Canada and the Indian Territories, Between the Years 1760 and 1776, published in 1809, Henry recalled the harrowing journey: “The day was very hot, and the woods and marshes abounded with mosquitoes; but, the Indians walked at a quick pace, and I could by no means see myself left behind. The whole country was a thick forest, through which our only road was a foot-path, or such as, in America, is exclusively termed an Indian path. Next morning, at ten o’clock, we reached the shore of Lake Ontario.”

As it turned out, Brûlé’s mission was futile. Though he did enlist the support of the Susquehannahs, the warriors arrived too late to assist Champlain and the Huron, who had already suffered a defeat at the hands of the Iroquois. Brûlé continued his explorations to Chesapeake Bay, though on his return trip he was captured by the Senecas. They tortured him, a sign of respect from the Iroquois’ point of view. He managed to win his release by convincing them that a thunderstorm was a symbol of a higher power watching over him; or perhaps the Senecas hoped that he would help them make peace with the French. Either way, in the years that followed, as he journeyed to other parts of the continent, he gained a well-deserved reputation as a skilled interpreter.

In 1628, on one of several voyages Brûlé made between France and Canada, the ship he was travelling on was apprehended by the English Kirke brothers, who were in a fierce competition with Champlain for control of the lucrative fur trade in the region around the St. Lawrence River. Brûlé later claimed that the Kirkes compelled him to work for them, yet he was paid handsomely for his services. Needless to say, Champlain was furious when he discovered this treachery, accusing Brûlé of abandoning his faith and selling out his people. Brûlé soon sought refuge with the Huron. But some of them turned against him, possibly because of his relations with aboriginal women or perhaps because he was perceived as a threat to their trading operations. Whatever the reason, Brûlé was killed in 1633 and reportedly eaten—an act which the Hurons involved later declared they deeply regretted.

THOUSANDS OF YEARS before Étienne Brûlé explored the area around Toronto, the Great Lakes region was home to nomadic hunters whose lives were governed by the seasons and the supply of animals. Though these hunting and gathering societies were primitive, they had developed their own traditions, culture, and spiritual beliefs that dictated the routine of daily life as well as trading, war, and death rituals. As far back as ad 500, for instance, rules over territorial rights were established, as well as the permission and gifts that had to be presented to the chief in order to venture into another tribe’s land. Over the years, ancient animal bones, spear heads, and stone tools belonging to these earliest inhabitants of Toronto have been uncovered in excavations, including at the construction site of the Eaton store at College and Yonge Streets in 1910. Around the same time, a burial site, probably dating back three thousand years, was found close to Grenadier Pond in High Park. More recently, entire Huron villages containing thousands of artifacts have been discovered in archaeological digs undertaken near York University as well as on the Alexandra site at L’Amoreaux Park in Scarborough.

By the time Jacques Cartier reached the St. Lawrence in 1535, the area around Toronto in and around Lakes Ontario and Erie and north to Georgian Bay was populated by the Huron, Petun, Neutral, and several Algonquian tribes. In all, they totalled about 65,000 people, with their Iroquois enemies located not too far away, south of the lakes, in what is today the state of New York. The arrival of the Europeans in this wilderness, with their iron pots, guns, alcohol, and disease, altered forever the aboriginal way of life. Both the Europeans and the aboriginals initially embraced the contact, with each side generally seeing more positives than negatives. Almost immediately the French allied themselves with the Huron, and in the late 1670s the English formed a similar alliance with the Iroquois, reshaping the fur trade and the art of war.

In time, however, smallpox and other diseases the Europeans inadvertently brought with them to the New World wiped out half of the aboriginal population in southern Ontario. This high death rate took its toll on the Huron, hurt the lucrative French fur trade, and allowed the Iroquois to extend their territory north beyond the Great Lakes. In 1649 the Iroquois destroyed the Huron village of Ataratiri, as well as the Jesuit missionary settlement of Sainte-Marie, near present-day Midland, Ontario. More than three hundred years later, Toronto politicians would reluctantly use the name Ataratiri—suggested by aboriginal studies specialist John Steckley of Humber College—for a massive residential redevelopment proposed for the industrial West Don Lands, at the bottom of the Don Valley just north of Gardiner Expressway. (Steckley recalls that there was some opposition to using that name, and at least one civic official believed it sounded too much like the popular video game Atari.) Alas, that project crumbled due to the extensive costs. But another soon replaced it, and a section of the area is a village once more, built for athletes participating in the 2015 Pan-Am Games held in Toronto.

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the Seneca had established a village along the Toronto Carrying Place in the vicinity of the corner of Jane Street and Baby Point Road, six blocks or so from Étienne Brûlé Park. They called it Teiaiagon. It had easy access to the Humber River and hence north to the hunting region where beaver was plentiful, but was also accessible for the French from the east and the British to the south. “The site was a natural stopping place for canoeists, as they could ford the river at this spot,” notes University of Toronto anthropologist Ronald Williamson, “and it was not navigable much farther upstream, even for small canoes.”

Teiaiagon does not figure largely in the historical record, though it is clearly indicated as “Toioiugon” on a globe dating from 1683 that belonged to Louis xiv. Father Louis Hennepin, a Recollect missionary and adventurer based at Fort Frontenac (near what is now Kingston, Ontario), visited the village for three weeks in late 1678, as did the great French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle in 1680 and possibly in 1681. (Some of La Salle’s men might have travelled to Teiaiagon in the mid-1670s, causing serious trouble with a keg of brandy they brought with them.)

The Europeans likely found a typical Iroquois village, protected by palisade walls, with as many as fifty longhouses and nearby agricultural fields. In those days, the Humber was abundant with salmon, another source of food. Estimates suggest Teiaiagon’s population was about two thousand people. In 1701, the Seneca were either pushed out of the village or voluntarily left it to the Ojibwa, known to the French and English as the Mississauga, who were based on the north shore of Lake Ontario. The Mississauga became the “masters of the Great Lakes region” (to use historian Peter Schmalz’s term) for the next six decades. But the Ojibwa wisely made peace with the Iroquois so they could take advantage of the goods supplied by both French and English and could control the trade farther north. (Another theory suggests that negotiation led to the Seneca abandoning the village and the Ojibwa replacing them as part of a larger Iroquois plan to expand their trading interests.)

Throughout this period, the French, from their main base in the region at Fort Frontenac, did whatever they could to thwart the English, who were based at Albany. The English were attracting the trade along the St. Lawrence River and in and around Lakes Ontario and Erie. Bothersome, too, were the coureurs de bois, or free traders, whose “illicit” dealings with the Indians were beyond the control of the French authorities in Montreal. In 1720, under the direction of twenty-two-year-old Captain Alexandre Dagneau, Sieur de Douville, a tiny outpost or magasin royale (King’s Store) was erected near Baby Point beside the Humber. It was not much more than a small two-storey log building with room for only a few soldiers to live and an attic to keep the supplies, trading goods—everything from buttons and ribbons to powder and shot—and furs acquired. Nonetheless, for a few years it diverted sufficient trade away from the English at New York. Unhappy with this reduction in their profits, they countered in 1726 with the construction of a stone fort at Oswego, New York, on the southeast shore of Lake Ontario. That soon spelled the end of Douville’s Toronto trading post.

As the French and British warred over North America from 1697 to 1763, with occasional periods of peace, each side persistently sought strategic and geographic military and trading advantages. In 1750, the French again built a storehouse near the mouth of the Humber River with the intention of diverting aboriginals using the Toronto Carrying Place from proceeding to the British at Fort Oswego. In charge of this operation was Pierre Robinau de Portneuf, a young French officer from Fort Frontenac. The small post was opened in the early summer and was an immediate success; by mid-July, a shipment of furs valued at 18,000 livres (with purchasing power equivalent to about $400,000 in 2011 dollars) had been forwarded to Montreal. Aboriginal demand outstripped the supply of European goods (and, it must be said, of alcohol) on hand. Not wanting to lose a profitable opportunity, and with an eye on consolidating French territory in the Ohio region, the governor general of New France, Jacques-Pierre de Taffanel de La Jonquière, ordered Sieur de Portneuf to supervise the construction of a larger fort, with more trading capacity and military potential, approximately five kilometres east at the foot of present-day Dufferin Street, where the Canadian National Exhibition (cne) grounds are now located.

Fort Rouillé, named after the French Minister of the Marine, Antoine-Louis Rouillé, comte de Jouy—and also more colloquially called Fort Toronto or le fort royal de Toronto—was completed by the spring of 1751. After another successful trading season was finished, Sieur de Portneuf returned to Fort Frontenac in the fall, and Thomas Robutel de La Noue, forty-nine years old, was made commander at Toronto.

Governor La Jonquière had high hopes for the economic future of the fort, which was built of squared oak timbers and entirely enclosed. The trade with the Indians “cannot but increase in future,” he reassured Minister Rouillé back in France in early October. “In fact, the tribes in the regions about Toronto who hitherto had resorted only to the English, have not been at [Oswego] at all; they have preferred to barter the...

Table of contents

• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• Introduction YONGE AND BLOOR
• Chapter One THE CARRYING PLACE
• Chapter Two BRITISH MUDDY YORK
• Chapter Three THE REBELLION
• Chapter Four A CITY OF ORANGE AND GREEN
• Chapter Five HOGTOWN THE GOOD
• Chapter Six THE WARD
• Chapter Seven TORONTO THE DULL
• Chapter Eight SUBWAYS, SUBURBIA, AND PAESANI
• Chapter Nine THE FASTEST-GROWING CITY IN NORTH AMERICA
• Chapter Ten JANE’S DISCIPLES
• Chapter Eleven THIS IS WHERE IT’S AT
• Chapter Twelve MULTICULTURALISM, MERGER AND MEL
• Chapter Thirteen MEGACITY MACHINATIONS (OR MADNESS)
• Conclusion TIGER CITY, ALPHA CITY
• PHOTOS
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• NOTES