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None will deny that the geography of the Province of Ontario was first put into scientific shape by men of the French tongue; that its most interesting and entertaining pages of history were written in the French language; that the Jesuit “Relations” set down before Ontario was carved out of Quebec, contains geographical and ethnological information of the land between the Ottawa and the Great Lakes, as necessary to the modern geographer and historian as foundation stones to the builder. They are, in fact, invaluable records of the province, were often written, as Thwaites reminds us, “in the midst of a chaos of distractions, immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation by men overcome by fatigue and improper sustenance, suffering from wounds and disease and maltreated by their hosts, who were often their jailors.” “I do not know,” says one of the apostles—who, by the way, as we are reminded, was writing from Canada an epistle to the Romans—“whether your Paternity will recognise the letter of a poor cripple who formerly, when in perfect health, was well-known to you. The letter is badly written, and quite soiled because, in addition to other inconveniences, he who writes it has only one whole finger on his right hand; and it is difficult to avoid staining the paper with blood which flows from his wounds, not yet healed: he uses arquebus powder for ink, and the earth for a table.”

While Roundheads and Cavaliers were fighting it out in England, Frenchmen were mapping the Great Lakes of Canada. According to Parkman, the map of Galinée was made nearly a hundred years before the British conquered Canada, and it “gives the course of the Upper St. Lawrence and the shores of Lake Ontario, the River Niagara, the north shore of Lake Erie, the Strait of Detroit, and the Eastern and Northern shores of Lake Huron.” This map professed only to represent the country actually visited by the Sulpician missionaries, Dolier and Galinée. Three years later, according to the same authority, another map “indicating a greatly increased knowledge of the country, was made by some person whose name does not appear. This map, which is somewhat more than four feet long and about two feet and a half wide, has no title. All the Great Lakes, through their entire extent, are laid down on it with considerable accuracy.”

The Ottawa River was traced to its source, and travelled over and over again; the French River, [Rivière-des-François] and Lake Nipissing, the Kaministikiwa River, Rainy River [Rivière-à-la Pluie], the Lake-of-the-Woods [Lac des Bois], and the great chain of waterways that just missed connecting the plains of the West with the Inland Seas, were put on the map by French-Canadian geographers. During the days of the French Régime, Canadians paddled the Winnipeg River to Lake Winnipeg. They explored the Red River and the Assiniboine. They discovered Lakes Manitoba, Winnipegosis, and Dauphin, and travelled the Saskatchewan as well, tracing its branches to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. The Ontario that lies between James Bay and the Great Lakes they knew as well, almost better than it is known to-day; and, to the pride of Canada, the greatest name in Canadian exploration is that of the native-born Pierre La Vérendrye, born at Three Rivers in the year 1685. Lawrence Burpee in his “Search for the Western Sea,” pays this tribute to the “natural rights” of Canadians who speak French:

“The cause of North American exploration owes much to the men of New France and to none does it owe more than to Pierre Gaultier de La Vérendrye. No explorer ever accomplished so much under such extraordinary difficulties. His story is the story of a man who having set himself a gigantic task, not for his own profit but for the glory of his native land, followed it unflinchingly in spite of obstacles of every kind, in spite of wearing discouragements, in spite of misrepresentation and calumny, until at last death intervened, the task incomplete, but notable in its incompleteness. His name must always remain one of the most honored names in Canadian exploration.”

Before me lies a map of the Province of Upper Canada, made in the days when His Excellency, John Graves Simcoe was Lieutenant-Governor, and over it French names are thickly strewn. Let me mention some of them at random: River Petite Nation, Lesmilles Roch, Long Sault, Rapid Rolat, River Rideau, Gannanocui, Frontenac, Pt. Travers, Presque Isle de Quinté, River Trent, River Tonty, Point aux Pins, Pt. Pelé, Cedre River, River Canard, Isle au Bois, Lac St. Clair, River aux Sables, Maisonvilles Mill, Chenaile Escarté, and—but why continue? The extent of the French hand is not recognisable in the map of to-day, for in later years many of the early French names have been replaced by those of English construction. In the plan which I am reading, Toronto’s summer playground is named Lac la Clie, but the name was afterwards changed to Simcoe, in honour of a lieutenant-governor, who also gave to three of its bordering townships the names of Tiny, Tay, and Floss, names borrowed, it is said, I think, by John Ross Robertson, from Lady Simcoe’s pet poodle dogs.

The failure to concentrate population along the shores of the St. Lawrence, has been set down by historians as a fatal weakness in French colonial policy. Weakness then, it is strength to-day. The plain truth is that the Government was unable to restrain the Canadians from moving up the waters of the Ottawa and up the waters of the St. Lawrence, into the land that lay beside the Great Lakes. Nor was the policy of the home Government consistent as to the desirability of concentration; there were governors who saw clearly that if the claims to the vast territories within New France were to be recognised by the Powers, occupation of a sort was necessary, and efforts were made to plant settlements in various parts of the country, even at the cost of the safety of the first and main colony on the St. Lawrence. But no matter what the Government’s policy, the Canadians were carried by a spirit of wanderlust into the wilderness.

As a result of an impression that there were no French-Canadian settlements at the coming of the British in the lands which are now called Ontario, some have refused to acknowledge the lien of French culture upon this province. The force of the argument is lost in the fact that the Quebec Act was applied to certain definite tracts of land, the boundaries of which were set forth. The direct and implied promises contained in the Quebec Act and given in the British Parliament at its passing, had essentially a regional basis. There was then no Ontario, no Manitoba, only Quebec. But the records show that the French-Canadians have also a sound claim based on settlement; for there was settlement—considerable for the period—in what is now Ontario, before the division into provinces. Lacking an exact basic figure, we cannot make an exact mathematical calculation; but all the knowledge available shows that there was then a sufficient population west of the Ottawa to account for the present number of French-Canadians in Ontario. Of course, there has been migration into Ontario from Quebec, but there has been a balancing migration from Ontario to Quebec, to other parts of Canada and to the United States. We know that the sixty odd thousand French who were in Canada at the time of the British Conquest, with a few thousand Acadians, have grown to something like three million French-Canadians in Canada and the United States to-day. Accepting these figures as the natural rate of increase by birth, only a few thousand men and women would be required then to account for the 250 thousand French-Canadians now in Ontario.

It is significant that in the sections where there were settlements before the British Conquest, there are French-Canadian settlements to-day. In Northern Ontario there are French-Canadians at the various points where the missionaries built their first churches and cleared the land for the agricultural support of the community. There are French-Canadians to-day wherever voyageurs made their trading-posts and French soldiers built their log fortresses. Settlers have come and gone, but the stream of population has for several centuries constantly flowed into the Hinterland. After Upper Canada, and later Ontario, had been taken from the side of Quebec, the English-Canadians for many years neglected the north country—they had what seemed to them fairer fields in the western prairies—and, as a result, the population on the Lower Ottawa was left free to move into unoccupied lands on the tributaries of the Upper Ottawa and the waters that, rising north of the divide, flow into Hudson Bay.

In South Western Ontario, Essex was first settled by the French. Early in the eighteenth century, a colony of French-Canadians was planted along the banks of the Detroit River—the colonists being soldiers from a disbanded French regiment. “In 1752 was born the first white child in the future county, Jean Dufour, by name.” The country appealed to the French. Says the historian: “Every farmer had his yoke of oxen for ploughing, his calash for summer, and his cariole for winter driving, whilst everywhere were to be seen blossoming shrubs and fine fruit-trees. In fact,

“ ‘Many a thrifty Mission pear

Yet o’erlooks the blue St. Clair,

Like a veteran faithful warden;

On their branches gnarled and olden,

Still each year the blossoms dance,

Scent and bloom of sunny France.’ ”

It was not until 1788, when the French settlement had grown strong in numbers, that English-speaking men and women came from the United States to the Detroit River settlement.

In Eastern Ontario it was natural that there should have been settlement. It came up the St. Lawrence by easy stages in the centuries of French occupation; and, in the subsequent division of the country into provinces, the eastern boundary of Ontario was fixed scarcely more than 30 miles from the heart of the old St. Lawrence settlement at Montreal, and necessarily left many old French-Canadian families on the Ontario side. For more than three decades of British government, the lands in what is now Ontario were held under the French system of tenure, and the people’s rights regulated by the French code of laws, and during those years the French-Canadians, knowing no boundary lines, continued to settle where they pleased east or west of the Ottawa River. And they carried with them, under Britain’s principle of freedom, their cultural rights.

The extent of the numbers of the minor nationality cannot always be gauged by parliamentary representation—as a rule they are proportionately greater than the number of members they are able to elect. In 1796, just after a boundary-line had been fixed at the Ottawa River, fourteen members constituted the House of Assembly of Upper Canada—and the French-Canadians had one-fourteenth of the representation, comparable with what they have to-day in the Ontario Legislature. The French-Canadian member was Francis Baby, whom the late Dr. C. C. James has identified as the Francis Baby who “lived on the east side of the Detroit River in, or on the borders of, the present town of Sandwich.” The Baby family was prominent in the West, and its name continually appears in the early history of the country. When General Hull invaded Canada, he established his headquarters in the partially completed house of Francis Baby. When Quebec was taken in 1759, and Montreal capitulated in 1760, Major Rogers was sent by General Amherst to proceed westward and take over the posts of Michigan. The negotiations between Rogers and Bellestre, Commander of Detroit, were carried on through M. “Babée” for the French, and Mr. Brehme for the British. This member of the family is identified by Dr. James as “Jacques Duperon Baby, the son of Raymond Baby and grandson of Jacques Baby de Rainville, who came to Canada from Guienne, France, with the Carignan Regiment.” Another member of the Baby family, Jean Baptiste, represented Kent County in the Fifth Parliament (1809-12).

That the influence of the old French Régime in the early life of the country now called Ontario, is not fully realised by the present generation, is easily explained. The truth is that much of the evidence was destroyed. A paragraph from the Proclamation dividing the Province of Upper Canada into counties, shows the means, and indicates the extent of destruction:

“That the seventh of the said counties be hereafter called by the name of County of Ontario, which county is to consist of the following islands, an Island at present known by the name of Isle Tonti (to be called Amherst Island) an island known by the name of Isle au Fôret (to be called Gage Island), an island known by the name of Grande Isle (to be called Wolfe Island) and an island known by the name of Isle Chuchois (to be called Howe Island), and to comprehend all the islands between the mouth of the Garanoque [a misprint for Gananoque] to the Eastermost extremity of the late Township of Marysburg, called Point Pleasant.”

I complain not of the change of names, but of the conclusion that is drawn: that the French had not much to do with the geography of the Province, and little to do with its settlement, since its names are now so largely English, instead of French. Such reasoning is unsportsmanlike.

As I write, Le Petit Côté Creek flows at my feet—at least it would if its bed were not dry—and when the drought is over this autumn it will flow into Outer Frenchman’s Bay, marked Baie des Français on the old maps. If I rise in time to catch the morning train for town, I shall take it at a station a stone’s throw from the mouth of the River Rouge—and for miles around there are no French families! There is more than a tradition that years before the days of the United Empire Loyalists, a little French school was planted on the shores of the Inner Bay. What a stirring tragedy of clerical intrigue and racial extermination could be written if only the names were English and the countryside in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, instead of in the County of Ontario scarcely twenty miles from the City of Toronto! But then, as John Ross Robertson reminds us in his interesting “Landmarks of Toronto,” “the dawn of civilised life on the shores of Toronto Bay” came when Frenchmen erected old Fort Rouille, and “made the rough clearance in the primitive forest of an area of about 300 acres immediately around its palisades.” But, for that matter, practically all the old French trading-posts have been converted into cities and towns, and the old trails and portages of the voyageurs made over into highways.

Before the English came, the means of navigation had all but run their course,—the canoes were followed by the flat-bottom bateaux, and they in their turn by sailing craft of the schooner type. Men of the French tongue built the first ship on the Great Lakes; men of the French tongue first sailed across Lake Erie, up through the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers into Lake Huron, through the Straits of Michipotcoten to Lake Michigan; and when the “Griffon,” with her cargo of valuable furs, was wrecked on the return voyage, men of the French tongue paid with their lives the first toll exacted of those who carry commerce by vessel on the great inland seas of Canada.

The missionaries who went forth into the wilderness carrying the story of the Gethsemane to the savages along the shores of the Georgian Bay and up into the Hinterland, gave to the world an imperishable example of devotion and sacrifice. Some will find fault with the way the message was delivered; but, after all, the criticism is of details, the mere manner of telling, not of the story itself; and in these days the emphasis is being placed on the likenesses, not the differences, of the several phases of the Christian belief. Men of all religions, and men of none, are forced into a whole-hearted admiration for the unselfish devotion of the early Canadian missionaries. Between 1615, when Leçaron first visited the Georgian Bay, and 1650, when the dispersion of the Hurons was complete, twenty-nine missionaries had laboured among the Hurons; and of these, seven had suffered violent deaths.

The mangled, charred bodies of Bréboeuf and Lalement were buried at Ste. Marie beside the waters of the Georgian Bay. The memory of their heroism is the treasured possession of all men who admire sacrifice for conscience’s sake.

Of Bréboeuf, the historian tells us: “All forms of torture were devised—his flesh was cut out bit by bit, they lifted the skin of his head in the form of a crown, and bored his eyes out with hot irons. Then they mocked him, saying: ‘You told us the more we suffered here the greater would be our reward in Heaven. So you see we are preparing you for a happy home!’ They surrounded the priest’s body with bark covered with resin and set it on fire. Throughout all this monstrous, horrible ordeal Bréboeuf stood impassive. He could not speak, he could not see, but his face showed no twinge of pain and his giant form towered erect and unfaltering.”

And of Lalement, “weak from childhood and slender almost to emaciation,” we are told, “he was unequal to a display of fortitude like that of his colleague. When Bréboeuf died, he was led back to the house whence he had been taken, and tortured there all night, until, in the morning, one of the Iroquois, growing tired of the protracted entertainment, killed him with a hatchet. It was said that, at times, he seemed beside himself; then, rallying, with hands uplifted, he offered his suffering to Heaven as a sacrifice.”

The safety of their converts was the first consideration of these pioneer ministers; their own, a matter of inconsequence, compared with duty. “Fly!” screamed the priest, as the hostile legions broke into the palisades, driving his flock before him. “I will stay here. We shall meet again in Heaven.”

The ashes of French-Canadian martyrs mingle with the earth of Old Ontario; yet there are men who wantonly scoff at the “natural rights” of the descendants of the Old Régime within the Province! The soil of Ontario is a veritable sanctuary to the French-Canadian people.

The exploits of the coureurs-des-bois extended over the vast land between the Ottawa River and the Great Lakes and beyond to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Their wanderings have impressed the imagination of every race; many who know nothing of Canada’s mundane wheat crops and railways, admire its coureurs-des-bois. Their memoirs of travel serve as guide-books to engineers who nearly three hundred years later were to follow their practically undisturbed footsteps and lay out railways for the opening-up of the country to a new civilisation. “Not all paths have evolved into railways,” writes John Finley, President of the University of the State of New York, “but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths—paths of the coureurs-des-bois, instinctively searching for mountain passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades.”

The names of these frontiersmen of civilisation are too little known within the land of their achievements. It is not only prophets that are denied fame in their own land. Etienne Brulé, the guide of missionaries, ventured into streams and forests against the advice of his neighbours and, in the end, paid the usual penalty of the men who wrested Canada for civilization—death at the stake. Jean Nicolet was taken half-way across the Continent by the spirit of wanderlust. Dulutte and his cousin, the intrepid Tonty, spent practically a lifetime in the outposts which the most hardy visited only after consigning their souls to God. Hennepin, the first white man to see and describe Niagara Falls and tell of the buffalo, although wearing the frock of a priest and writing with the pen of a Fenimore Cooper, possessed the soul of a coureur-des-bois, and his name will live in their annals. La Salle was more than a coureur-des-bois, although intimately associated with their travels; he was an explorer, and his achievements are among the world’s greatest records of exploration.

The shores of Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay are marked with many an historic battle-field, witnesses to the bravery and perseverance of French-Canadians. The wars which raged between the French and the Indians from the banks of the St. Lawrence to the plains of the Great West, their sieges and, unhappily, their massacres, are indelible pages of heroism and tragedy, which cannot be erased from the records of the Province of Ontario. It is impossible, as it is unnecessary, to describe even the more important battles which the French-Canadians fought with the Indians to make this country “safe for civilisation.” No greater heroism is recorded in the wonderful pages of Greek history than the action in which Dollard and his handful of French-Canadians went at the Long Sault to certain destruction by a horde of savages, that the colony might be saved. But that is only one of the many instances of self-sacrifice in the days of the Old Régime. Professor Colby, referring to Wellington’s boast, that during the Peninsular War the English captured more than one strong place in Spain without any provision of bullets, save those fired at them by their enemies, having trusted to this chance when they formed the siege, says that while “this is a good story, one could undertake to match it from the exploits of the Canadians who followed François Hertel, Hertel de Rouville, Le Moyne de Sainte-Hélène, and Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville.”

When I was a boy, the history of Canada before the coming of the English was dismissed with a few cursory lessons. I admired the patient toil of the English pioneers who hewed their farms out of the forest, but down in my heart I envied the boys of Scotch, English, and Irish descent who could repeat tales of the days when knighthood was in flower in the shires of their forefathers. Childish? Of course it was; I was a child. Foolish? Perhaps; but we must remember the words of Byron:

“Parent of golden dreams, Romance!

Auspicious queen of childish joys,

Who leads’t along, in airy dance,

The votive train of girls and boys.”

And then I read in Parkman, and later, in “Les Relations,” page after page, book after book, the wonderful tales in which knights, voyageurs, missionaries, and soldiers, lived again their lives of adventure in this country of my birth. Their exploits rivalled those of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and, having been performed in my homeland, stimulated my youthful patriotism.

The French-Canadians are justly proud of the achievements of their forefathers, for they bespeak the soundness of the national foundation stock; and bitter is their regret that these things may no longer be told in school to their children and their children’s children in the French language; for they are either geography or history, and Regulation 17 proscribes French as the language of instruction.

“Ontario is not a bi-lingual province” said a Minister of the Crown from the hustings, and his words are echoed in the press of the province, “Ontario is not a bi-lingual province.” Well, there are men foolish enough to say the world is not round; but their say-so does not make it flat.

Books of Reference

C. W. Colby, Canadian Types of the Old Régime.Holt.

Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, and other books of the series.Little, Brown Company.

H. E. Egerton and W. L. Grant, Canadian Constitutional Documents.Musson.

C. C. James, The First Legislation of Upper Canada, (pamphlet)Hope, Ottawa.

Edward Channing and Marion Lansing, The Story of the Great Lakes.Macmillan.

Lawrence J. Burpee, The Search for the Western Sea.Musson.

John Ross Robertson, The Landmarks of Toronto.Robertson.

Emily P. Weaver, The Counties of Ontario.Bell & Cockburn.

John Finley, The French in the Heart of America.Scribners.