Jeff RubinCharla Jones/The Globe and Mail
My own personal journey into a smaller, more local world this summer was to rediscover my city by biking through its ravines and watersheds. Along with my old friend and fishing buddy, Harvey Bradley, we set out to explore the headwaters of Toronto's major rivers. But what started out as a geographic voyage of discovery ended as a historical voyage that casts my city's past in a new light.
Beginning at the river's mouth at Lake Ontario, our weekly bike ride would push farther up the paths and roadways that follow the course of the Humber River. It wasn't long before we were biking in the Oak Ridges Moraine and eventually right onto the Niagara Escarpment as we reached the river's source, 100 kilometres inland, at two spring-fed pools at Glen Harvey Conservation Park just south of Mono Mills.
The remnants of many abandoned mills along the way told us that the Humber River valley had been a settlement site for some time. But it wasn't until I obtained an obscure and out-of-print copy of the early history of the region that I came to realize just how far back that history went.
Percy Robinson's Toronto During the French Regime 1615-1793, first published in 1933 by the University of Chicago Press, is a treasure chest of historical detail that richly chronicles almost two centuries of French settlement and trade in the Toronto area. That's approximately two centuries more than I, and I suspect most of my fellow Torontonians, was aware of. And that history was centred precisely on the very trails we pedalled - only the French and Indian traders who had portaged them were hauling 100-pound loads on their backs, while Harv and I were spinning our 21-gear bikes.
Some 180 years before Lord Simcoe and the British established Fort York on the north shore of Lake Ontario, French traders had traversed the ancient aboriginal trading trails whose southern terminus lay at the mouth of the Humber. In 1614, Etienne Brulé, a renegade coureur du bois, was the first European explorer to set eyes on the Toronto shoreline, following what the natives called the Toronto carrying trail - a network of waterways and portages that connected the upper Great Lakes to Lake Ontario through the Humber River and Lake Simcoe (which was initially called Lake Toronto).
From as far north as Lake Superior to as far south as Virginia, the area covered by Brulé's travels were nothing short of remarkable. But renowned explorer that he was, Brulé was an outcast from French society. In the eyes of both the Jesuit missionaries and his commander, Samuel de Champlain, Brulé had gone native - think Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's classic, The Heart of Darkness. No doubt the primeval first-growth Carolinian forest that Brulé explored along the 17th-century Humber River must have seemed every bit as remote and threatening as Conrad's Congo of the 19th century.
The church disavowed him, Champlain disavowed him, and in the end even his Huron hosts disavowed him. After Brulé sided with the British, piloting British warships up the St. Lawrence to Tadoussac, he suddenly became an unwelcome guest of his Huron hosts when the tide turned in France's favour. The Hurons murdered him and purportedly ate him afterwards.
Brulé's blood was neither the first nor the last to be spilled along what today are genteel bike paths. What we call the GTA was the scene of at least two wholesale ethnic-cleansing operations in less than a century of the fur trade.
The first saw the displacement of the original Huron villages by invading Iroquois, who sought the rich hunting grounds north of Lake Ontario. But Toronto, given its strategic location over the carrying trail, was a highly coveted and hence a dangerous place to settle. Less than a century after the Iroquois had expelled the Hurons, the Marquis de Denonville, commanding a war party of over 400 canoes, paddled up the Humber River from Lake Ontario and laid waste to the Seneca Iroquois village of Teiaiagon. All traces of Iroquois settlement on the north shore of Lake Ontario vanished after that campaign, and the Missisaugas, an Algonquin tribe, occupied the land until they sold it to the British in 1787. Needless to say, the Humber's tea-stained waters often ran red in the past.
Over 400 years separate Brulé's footsteps along the Humber from my bike pedals across the same terrain. But the journey, along with the history that it contains, brought me a new perspective on a place where I have lived all my life.
Boring, staid, British-bred Toronto was discovered by a Kurtz-like renegade explorer who was cannibalized by his native hosts. And the carrying trail that occupies much of today's placid Humber Valley was a no-man's land frequently travelled by war parties set on deadly ethnic-cleansing missions.
But what stands out the most is that, for almost two centuries before Lord Simcoe set foot on the city's shore, Toronto was a French trading post and later a French fort.
Like Brulé's bones, that history seems to have gotten hopelessly lost.
Jeff Rubin is the author of Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller .