Hosted by Cherelle Parent of Vibrez au km², there was a range of speakers representing the Indigenous communities, and the towns and organizations where the first points of interest are located, three of which are already open with the next two scheduled soon. The purpose, or objective, of the press conference is captured well in the MRC des Laurentides’ title for it, À la rencontre des Premiers Peuples, Meeting the First Peoples.

Kevin Deer of Kahnawake spoke first in Kanien’kéha (Mohawk) and then in English. His words evoked the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, Greetings to the Natural World, an acknowledgment of the land. This was not a settler’s land acknowledgement, but what the Haudenosaunee have always done to introduce important community events. He did not do the whole Address – it was not the place – but for those of us who know it, the message was clear. Importantly, his message closed with an urgent call for all of us to find our way, before it is too late.

Take the time to read the Address. Just enter Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, Greetings to the Natural World in your browser or click on this link.

The speakers and the other people involved that I talked with afterwords encourage us to not assume that because we talked with one of them, we know them. They described themselves, after all, as First Peoples, not First People. There are many facets, Nations, language groups, and ways of living, but what makes the First Peoples a nameable group, then? Are there any general observations that can be made about First Peoples?

Before that question can be asked, perhaps we should start with who is asking it. The First Peoples generally accept the term Indigenous in that they all “came out of the ground” here, and everyone else did not. I put the term in quotes, because I first learned it from when Chief Canassatego, leader of the Onondaga Nation, addressed Thomas Bladen, the Governor of Maryland, at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1774. He was encouraging the governor and his confreres to accept that the Onondaga were their Elder Siblings, a weighted and meaningful term, and should be deferred to, listened to. The First Peoples, the Indigenous peoples, have a knowledge of the land and how it must be cared for that they offered to share. Their ethic was as a part of Mother Earth’s plan and they co-existed with their sister species, animal, plant and spirit. They have invited the non-Indigenous peoples to listen to them many times since Contact.

We, the non-Indigenous peoples, did not listen then. Why would we listen now? Many of the non-Indigenous people’s ancestors have been here for centuries. What differentiates the First Peoples? Why have they not joined the melting pot of Canada, the United States and other countries?

If we look at ourselves, know ourselves and what makes us different, we will find that our foundational ethic involves a concept of ownership, of property.

Indigenous Peoples have belonged here for millennia. They belong – they do not own. Many Indigenous Peoples throughout the world have always belonged, as a keystone species in a family of sibling species. The role has been to belong, praise, share and maintain.

Contrast that with ownership, with property as personal possession. It is simply the opposite.

That does not mean that non-Indigenous people cannot be good stewards. It does not mean any one is bad and the other good. Nor does it mean that people who see themselves as belonging cannot be radical and destructive.

I believe that indigeneity in some form was the way people were during the longest part of human existence, that during that time humans understood their place in the family of life and worked to fulfill our role, not as good stewards, a term that implies a separation, but as a keystone species. During a long period of our past, humans fulfilled a role that reinforced an understanding of belonging to a greater whole. I question whether what we have come to think of as progress and civilization is necessarily a higher form. It is just a different form, and it is also one that cannot find its place in the family of life but sees everything through a lens of property. There was a break with the past that probably happened many times and likely failed many times.

The largest break, the one that we are a part of, may have come with the herding cultures. Anke Becker of Harvard University makes the argument that herding was the origin of male dominance. Herding led to the protection of a mobile asset, the herd, and that led to property, to ownership. Anke Becker’s focus is on how it led to seeing women as the property of their men.

It also was a huge source of zoonotic diseases, illnesses that crossed the species barrier between the herded animals and their human herders. The diseases would lead to die-off among the herding peoples until their surviving descendants could co-exist with the diseases. They then became the carriers of those diseases. Through contact, their enemies and neighbours across Europe and Asia also experienced the die-off at contact with the herders, becoming culturally influenced by the victors of wars, but eventually their surviving descendants also followed suit, subsisting with the diseases and carrying the contagion. The process could have taken tens of thousands of years and involved huge population reductions over time, but eventually the resistance would be complete bringing with it new social norms that would have developed during those long periods.

When the descendants of these people met the non-herding peoples that we call Indigenous, cultures that had no sense of property – ownership – the spread of these new diseases in their communities was rapid and destructive. Most of the Americas was peopled by non-herding cultures but while they had no resistance to the diseases, their ethical foundation was ancient and unshakable.

These two conflicting value systems are both present, and to achieve reconciliation they need to find their balance point, to establish a new normal. We can only do so if we can learn to listen.

We are once again being invited to listen, and as Kevin Deer warns, time is short. Belonging to the land has existed since time immemorial whereas the concept of property ownership is relatively recent and, as we can see in our contemporary society, it leads to an unsustainable future. If we continue along this path we will experience a crash, a correction, possibly of huge magnitude.

On June 9, the Indigenous presentation included the introduction of Kina8at Ensemble, a non-profit that offers training, awareness-raising, and wellness programs inspired by First Nations philosophy and traditions. Dominique Rankin, an Anishinaabe Elder born in the bush of Northwestern Quebec and founder of Kina8at Ensemble, spoke to us in French and Anishinaabemowin on their vision: working together. As a survivor of the residential schools, he struggled to maintain his culture, and he explained to us that the word Anishinaabe simply means human being. As human beings all of our challenges are shared, and we can learn that we are all Anishinaabe. Rankin, the founder of Kina8at Ensemble invited all Anishinaabe – all human beings – to face our challenges together -- ensemble. He invited all Anishinaabe to join him at a future event, to climb Mont Tremblant together.

This press conference was only the most recent call out to us. Will we listen? Will we resolve to find that new balance point together, to climb that mountain together?

Are salmon a part of our heritage, our history? Was there once a salmon run up the North River? If the North, then they would have also run up the Rouge, the Lièvre, Petite Nation, as well as those many rivers that empty into the St. Lawrence. The salmon are what Mr. Clark’s drowning had illustrated in my mind. His story survived the mill itself, because of the salmon.

Those to whom we owe the forests, the rich soil found beneath it and the river carrying salmon are the people who lived in their huge pine and maple forests. Their very existence is and was the human manifestation of their ancient stewarding culture that comprised all life, including the rivers, the wind and the spirits. Their forests boasted white pine trees over a dozen stories high, reminiscent of British Columbia’s rain forests. The first white settlers did not see this as a heritage, but as something that could be turned into money to pay their livelihood. Before those settlers, there were traders who came to exchange for furs with the people here. The Maison Rouge, located west of St. Andrew’s, was a part of the Hudson’s Bay company. Its location could still be identified in the 1930s. Earlier still, before the Dutch and English gave the Mohawk guns in trade, the Algonquian and Iroquoian people co-existed along these forest paths and shorelines. This broad Indigenous neighbourhood was also where Radisson and des Groseilliers discovered the remnants of the battle made famous in the story of Dollard des Ormeaux in 1650. It was also along the Ottawa where Champlain travelled to meet Tessouat at Isle aux Allumettes, and where he said he released the young Vignau to his unknown fate in 1613.

The seigneurie of Argenteuil was first granted to Charles Joseph d’Ailleboust on June 15, 1682, long before it could realistically be considered as a part of New France. That did not stop Count Frontenac, the governor, from making the grant. The region was then solidly in the hands of the Mohawk and Oneida, who also controlled the waterways. They were at war with New France. The Haudenosaunee, of whom the Mohawk and Oneida were members, had organised the Covenant Chain to protect Indigenous Nations through trade. The French opposed it. The Covenant Chain grew out of a treaty made with the Dutch over 400 years ago. Originally it was called Kaswentha by the Mohawk and the Two Row Wampum by the Europeans. It still exists and is protected by our laws, although lawyers and governments often must be reminded.

Once Louis-Hector de Callières became the governor of New France, things began to change. Everyone could see that. Algonquian allies of the Wendat got together with the Haudenosaunee because they could see a chance to reach an understanding that would include de Callières. They succeeded with the Great Peace of 1701 in Montreal. The English, who were already partners in the Covenant Chain, had opposed the meeting and refused to come. Their enmity of the French was too strong.

It was that treaty that would enable the French expansion into Deux Montagnes and, eventually, Argenteuil. The seigneury began active development under a new seigneur, the young Pierre Louis Panet, in 1781, eighteen years after the end of the Seven Years’ War, and a century after the original grant had been made. Like the Catholic Church before him, he swore allegiance to the long-serving King George III of Great Britain.

By 1785, English-speaking colonists began to arrive, departing from the newly independent country to the south. The first to arrive were Loyalists, people who could not abide the idea of abandoning Britain, and they acquired some of the excellent farmland in the seigneurie, but the larger group were people who sought stability and opportunity that was not available in the young country they had left.

Jedediah Lane saw the potential. He had the money so he acquired a parcel of land on both sides of the North River surrounding the falls, or La Chute. He was a developer. He sold to rugged mountain people from Jericho, Vermont, who came for the trees, for potash and quick money. They cut and burned the forest for a dozen years. The Indigenous people must have been crushed by the devastation. It was their ancient heritage, being turned into money.

Mr. Clark fished for salmon, like many others probably did. The mill is long gone, as is Mr. Clark’s first name and the salmon. The memories are ours, though, to share, and to remind us that our rivers could again carry salmon and our forests could grow back. Without awareness of those memories, without knowledge of our history, we lose it all.

Steamboats were coming into more common usage. The first Canadian one, put into service by the Molsons, was the Accommodation, travelling between Montreal and Quebec City. Even the engine parts were homemade, coming from the Forges du St. Maurice near Trois Rivières, the oldest blast furnace in North America, dating back to the French regime. The engine was only 6 horsepower and the boat was a business failure, but that did not stop the age of steam in Canada, or the Molsons. Their next boat, the Swiftsure, had a much more powerful engine built by Boulton and Watt in Great Britain; most of the boats built in Montreal during the decade ending in 1820 used imported engines.

Thomas Mears and his partners did not import their engine but instead relied on one of their partners, Joseph Lough, to build it. They started by helping Lough set up a proper furnace. Over the next three years, Lough proved incapable of managing his business and several of the partners withdrew. Mears, who had moved to Montreal, returned to Hawkesbury and all but abandoned the project. By 1819, though, Lough had lost his stake and a new controlling partner resurrected the project, bringing Lough back in on the basis of a strict contract. He also made a deal with John Bruce, a shipbuilder who had worked for the Molsons, building their first steamboat in 1809. One of the new partner’s conditions was that the boat itself be built under the auspices of Mears in Hawkesbury. Dubbed the Ottawa, the boat was finished on schedule and floated down to Montreal to be outfitted with Lough’s steam engine. True to form, Lough fell so far behind schedule that they lost the first summer and had only enough time to try the boat out in the autumn, just before winter set in. The trial, held on Lake St. Louis in mid-October, caused a sensation. The side-wheeler was considered attractive, the engine was Canadian-built, and the boat ran at around 10 miles per hour. Things looked promising for the Ottawa for the1820 season, but there was a concern. With her engine onboard, she had a draft of three and a half feet, which would make it unlikely she would ever be able to climb the rapids. She might never make it back to Hawkesbury.

Sure enough, even during the high water of spring, the Ottawa was beaten by the Ottawa. Seventy feet long, twenty wide and with a hold of four and a half feet, she sat three and a half feet below the waterline. Her captain, William McMaster, took her out on an unrecorded spring day to find her way up into Lake of Two Mountains but discovered there was only a depth of three feet for a long portion of the passage between the lakes. Still, she became the toast of Lake St. Louis that summer, proudly running a circuit from Lachine to the Cascades and transferring passengers to more suitable batteaux and Durham boats, large, sturdy, flat-bottomed boats with a bow-like point at both ends as though inspired by canoes. If the boat turned around, it made little difference. They could be poled or towed up the rapids to calm water or float high on the current going down or they could hoist a sail to travel along a stretch of river.

While the summer proved exciting for passengers and even for sightseers, and real estate promoters began to claim that the steamboat made up-river property much more valuable, the owners saw things differently. The Ottawa was not paying her way. When Captain McMaster “jumped ship” in the fall to partner in the building of a rival boat better designed to climb between the lakes, the partners saw their Ottawa as a liability and put her up for sale. The auction took place in May of 1821, but after the bidding, one of the backers, Alexander Allison, ended up as the sole owner and continued to offer the boat for sale until his untimely death in December. His estate took over the next spring and sold the boat in parts, leaving only the hull on the shore at the entrance to the Lachine Canal. She sat on the river bottom in the spring but broke the surface as the summer water level dropped, suffering the indignity of serving as a dock.

Meanwhile, the Perseverance, the new boat in which Captain McMaster had partnered, succeeded in getting up the rapids at Vaudreuil. She did so only once, at great expense, then returned to Lake St. Louis, where she basked in the glory of her defeated rival’s old routes.

Thomas Mears did not let go of his dream of having a steamboat on the Ottawa, though. He had quietly acquired the steam engine from the Allison estate and had it carried up to Hawkesbury and installed in the Union, the first steamboat to offer regular service on the Ottawa River. She first sailed in the spring of 1823 between Grenville and Gatineau.

A few years later, in 1827, a heavily laden Durham boat, the Louisa, heading down the St. Lawrence from Kingston and riding high on the spring flood, mastered all the shallows and rapids including the legendary 82-foot drop between Lake St. Francis and Lake St. Louis. Approaching the Lachine Canal, all her worries behind her, a vindictive old ghost ripped her apart as she glided serenely over the abandoned hull of the Ottawa.

While it was a setback for the Hamiltons, the spring had brought with it a large supply of logs for their mill’s 40 saws and 80 employees. They took comfort in what they had achieved – some people claimed theirs was the largest operation of its kind in the world. George Hamilton’s ambition, to be the effective squire of the Hawkesbury region, was coming to fruition with an ever-increasing number of local families dependent upon his businesses. The next election was only three years away, and his star was rising. He would have to tread carefully, maybe completely abandon the illegal cutting his men were doing on Crown land, but their supply store had worked well in giving smaller loggers merchandise in exchange for their logs. His brother John ran their huge installation near Quebec City, dubbed New Liverpool Cove. It comprised over 2,000 feet of beaches, 450 acres of land and three houses, as well as work sheds, yards and wharves. His brother Robert presided over the firm Robert Hamilton, Brothers and Company in Liverpool, and they had become the recognized St. Lawrence River representative for underwriters in London, Aberdeen, Dundee and Liverpool. None of them had yet reached forty. They anticipated a great future.

In the meantime, the summer and autumn proved to be difficult as they learned that the British timber market was oversupplied. Robert made new arrangements, mortgaging all their properties to Gillespie, Moffatt and Company whose principal partners were in Montreal and London. They just had to sell their wood into a soft market, take their losses, and ride out the downturn. One year could change everything.

The following spring, 1822, also brought a large new supply of logs and the millpond was again full, ready to start the new season. There was even evidence that demand was picking up. George waited impatiently for the unusually heavy floodwaters to subside and for the first mail to arrive, giving him news from his brothers. As the spring brought its burden of ice water downstream towards his operations, the river rose to unprecedented levels and, breaking its customary banks, it carried away the millpond dam as he and his men watched, helpless. All their logs broke muddily into the main river and were gone.

This disaster was followed shortly by the arrival of the first mail boat, bringing the sad news to George that his brother Robert in Liverpool had passed away. The impact of the loss of the logs must quickly have faded in the face of this news, but George, father of three young children and one of the largest employers on the Ottawa River, had also to anticipate that their creditors would soon come, asking for full payment of the Hamilton mortgage, just as they, in their turn, had come to Thomas Mears and David Pattee only ten years earlier, confiscating their mill.

Among George’s closest friends was the reverend Joseph Abbott, father of the future prime minister, Sir John Abbott. The reverend told the story of the Hamilton trials and tribulations, comparing George to the biblical Job. While it is possible that his own vocation predisposed him to a certain exaggeration, the facts remain. He recounted the arrival of the mortgage demand and “[s]hortly after this, so immediately indeed, that I might almost literally say, ‘while the messenger was yet speaking,’ another arrived to tell him that his other brother [William] was dead.”

Showing a strength that seems the stuff of legends, George explained to his wife Susannah that they should prepare to move to Montreal with their three young children while he and his brother John negotiated a settlement. They would soon return, but even before they could finish packing up, their house caught fire. They had time to save themselves and watch. It also was a total loss.

On the day of their departure, the three children, living in a bubble of reassurances and comfort, laughing and playing, were seated with their parents in a large transport canoe guided stern and bow by capable Canadien canoeists. Reverend Abbott was present to see them off. He described the paddling songs echoing over the water as the canoe headed across and down the calm river to the first rapids. Getting through rapids, canoeists look for the deepest channel, sometimes breaking around rocks, sometimes spilling down over sudden drops. The river was a transport corridor and had been one for thousands of years. The men were experienced. They had done this many times themselves. This time, though, the bow canoeist, guiding them through the fast water, misjudged his paddle, which caught in a rock, and the canoe was immediately flipped into the rushing current.

In the water, George saw his 18-month-old son, whom he saved, just as they were both pulled tumbling through the rapids to the calm below. When he finally gathered his senses, he discovered he was no longer clutching the boy, who was gone. He spotted the two canoeists, clinging to the upside-down canoe, but no one else. Suzannah and the children were gone.

George swam towards the canoe and they slowly hauled it from the water. Underneath they discovered Suzannah, unconscious, clinging to a strut, but there was no sign of the children.

The good reverend Abbott told more: “‘All things shall work together for good for them that love God.’ And so they did in this instance; for my friend Hamilton was afterwards blessed with as fine a family of children as I ever saw…”

During the last days of the election, he had promoted a story that Pattee had been accused of forgery in New Hampshire 17 years earlier. As one of the largest employers in the area, he had also put a lot of pressure on voters to come out for his brother William. If you were an employee of the Hamilton Brothers and you had the right to vote, they would be watching how you voted. There was no secret ballot as we have today. Your vote was public and visible.

Cornwallis Joseph Fortune was the returning officer. Son of an Irish Loyalist from South Carolina for whom Pointe Fortune is named, he fought in the War of 1812. He served in the militia with George Hamilton and was a part of the elite associated with the Family Compact. Like many members of this group, he must have felt very conflicted at the idea that an American immigrant could be elected to the Assembly of Upper Canada. Worse yet, Pattee argued that the people should have power through their elected officials, a radical, republican notion.

It is hard to imagine today, but there were two very different types of immigrants from the Thirteen Colonies. Many British Loyalists, like the Fortunes, had first gone to the rebelling colonies in the decade leading up to the war. Cornwallis Joseph’s family arrived in South Carolina in 1766 and he was born there in 1773. Most of these Loyalists moved to the remaining British colonies during the American War of Independence, rejecting their new American home because it was fighting with the mother country, a place that was still very much a part of their lives. A second wave, economic immigrants, arrived well after the war was over. Their formative years had been spent in the newly-created United States. David Pattee was a classic example. Only five years younger than Joseph Fortune, he spent the first 25 years of his life in New Hampshire, steeped in the democratic notion that the people elected a government.

The two sets of immigrants, Loyalist and economic, had little reason to get along. Even the atmosphere during the 1820 election was still filled with figurative smoke from the War of 1812, during which immigrants like Pattee and Thomas Mears had to declare their loyalty to the King – and were not believed.

Fortune had risen to the rank of colonel fighting the Americans during the War of 1812. Many influences predisposed him to see Pattee as someone who had to be stopped in order to protect Upper Canada. The executive government, taking its orders from Great Britain, was the proper way to govern – not the Assembly, taking its orders from the people. The British Colonial Office had inherited the assembly structure from the Virginia Company that created the concept simply to control a rowdy bunch of employees and settlers centuries earlier. It was never intended to be the government.

Fortune destroyed and miscounted enough ballots to prove William Hamilton the winner, and George Hamilton sent a messenger to Goffston, New Hampshire to get proof of the documents that showed Pattee had been accused of forgery.

It is a credit to Attorney General John Beverley Robinson that Pattee received a fair hearing. Robinson was among the staunchest conservatives in the Family Compact and he had little use for the likes of Pattee and others whom he described as forming the “scum” and “the rascals of the province.” Ultimately fair-minded, he dismissed much of the slander generated by the Hamiltons, leaving only the charge of “forgery and uttering counterfeit banknotes.” Pattee, a modest and sincere man, wrote in his own defence that a felon who was bargaining his own terms with the State of New Hampshire had falsely accused him. Pattee also added that he was not guaranteed any kind of immunity to return to clear his name. Even so, he showed that he had made good on the debts he had incurred in New Hampshire and he promised to resign immediately if the Assembly found fault in what he had done. He further asked, though, that the Assembly not “gratify the Spirit of Revenge and persecution” that he perceived as driving his opponents in their slander of him and his supporters.

For their part, the Hamiltons needed all the influence they could muster to keep their business afloat. They had built a much larger mill than their predecessors had left them and they were seriously extended on all fronts. Their illegal cutting operations on Crown Land was an offence that, should he stand accused, would have to be heard in the very court where George Hamilton sat as a judge. Simultaneously, they were painfully aware that their brother Robert, charged with finding the investments to keep them afloat, had signed guarantees against their property with Gillespie, Moffatt and Company, a firm with branches in both London and Montreal.

The Assembly’s decision is recorded as a rebuke of George Hamilton. It rejected his claims about Pattee and stated that Hamilton’s argument did not demonstrate “…such Proof of Guilt of the Charge of forgery as to weigh against or outweigh eighteen years of irreproachable Conduct in this Province as certified by so many respectable Inhabitants.” The seat was awarded to Pattee, Joseph Fortune slipped discretely into Argenteuil Township and George Hamilton’s bad luck was only just beginning.

From the Hamilton perspective, Mears and Pattee were up-country lumberers, naïve country boys. The Hamiltons, with their operations in Liverpool and London, were more aware of the changing circumstances in the main British market and thought themselves to be socially superior. Smaller operators like Pattee and Mears would often depend upon financing that was based on the supply of a certain product by a certain date, although not necessarily from the client they were supplying. The creditor might capitalize on late delivery by insisting on a penalty but would not want to suffocate the supplier by actually taking possession of his business. After all, everyone has his own expertise. It came as a cold, hard punch to learn that the Hamiltons were not interested in a penalty but would exercise their mortgage. It was business, and even banks still do it in our time where they see a profit to be made. Pattee and Mears watched as their years of effort and risk were stolen.

The British government introduced preferential duties, protecting the timber trade in the colonies in 1808, in large part because they had become more dependent upon their colonies and needed to assure their supply. France had successfully threatened the British navy by blockading the Baltic where the pines used for shipbuilding grew. A worldwide search for other sources led to the remaining forests of their North American colonies.

The Hamiltons saw the advantages of the preferential duty and capitalized on it. They could not have wished for a better outcome than the default of small players like Pattee and Mears. The mill closed for the winter of 1811-12 and nothing changed in Snye Carty until April 20, when the river was running ice-free again. Then a suspicious fire wiped out the mill and all the stock. The Hamiltons would have to start again from the beginning, just as their upcountry predecessors had done.

There is no proof that the fire was set deliberately other than the insinuation that it was suspicious. While a loyal employee of Pattee and Mears might have been more zealous than negligent, it is unlikely Pattee or Mears would have been involved. They had too much to lose. In 1812, Thomas Mears was elected to represent Prescott in the Upper Canada Assembly and Pattee went back to his successful farm. He did not venture into lumbering again, but Mears, from his new mill in Grenville, remained a serious competitor to the Hamiltons, who faced a large financial and technical challenge to rebuild the mill. William Hamilton came out to Snye Carty first, but he wanted to retire, and his brother George soon took his place. They had two other brothers, one, John, who stayed at the wharf in Quebec; the other, Robert, was head of their firm in Liverpool, and it was through him that their operations were financed. In Snye Carty, there was no love lost between the two factions, Hamiltons on the one side and Mears-Pattee on the other.

In 1816, Pattee was named a Justice of the Peace and a Surrogate Court judge, while Mears became District Sheriff. Simultaneously, George Hamilton was also named a Justice of the Peace and an Ottawa Court Judge as well as co-commissioner with the seigneur, Joseph Papineau, for the improvement of water communications on the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers.

The two factions represented very different backgrounds. The Hamiltons, whose friends included some of the staunchest members of the Family Compact, saw themselves as overlords, seigneurs – a class above the commoners. Most of the population was either French Canadian or American, with some Scottish farmers and Irish working-class people. To the Hamiltons, democracy was a radical, even distasteful, idea. The upper class was the only one capable of guiding society and should benefit from the responsibility of class. The Assembly was a place for controlling patronage, but its power should remain advisory only, deferring to the governor and his appointed executive council.

The two Americans were from the republican, democratic United States. Most of these Americans were highly suspect given the tensions that brought about the War of 1812. An oath of allegiance would not suffice to reassure people like George Hamilton.

With the approach of the Assembly election of 1820, Mears backed the nomination of his highly respected friend, David Pattee, while George Hamilton convinced his brother William to come out of retirement to be honoured as their member. Pattee was much more popular. He would carry the whole American immigrant community as well as much of the working-class. At the same time, the Hamiltons were still in desperate financial shape. Their plans had not included rebuilding the mill and they were facing their own creditors. To keep afloat, they were illegally cutting trees in Crown timber reserves, an action that left them vulnerable to Mears, the sheriff. George had his work cut out.

George leaned heavily on his friend Joseph Fortune, the returning officer. He also began a campaign of intimidation, threats and even violence to assure himself the necessary votes to see his brother win over Pattee. There was no secret ballot, and the voting took place publicly over several weeks. Down and dirty, George dug up an old accusation dating back to 1803 in New Hampshire. Pattee had been charged with forging banknotes in a case that was never resolved. Even with the mudslinging, Pattee received the majority of votes and would have been declared the winner if Joseph Fortune had not been the one counting them.

Mears had had a chance to explore, but even knowing that he should settle down, start a farm, do things for himself, he could not resist the flow of the Ottawa River that ran around an island just off the west bank, the side recently named Upper Canada. The whole area was in unexplored, unsubscribed territory. By 1805 he had acquired land along the shore of a passageway called the Chenail écarté (remote channel), a name that evoked the isolation of the area. Colonization was only beginning. He met another expat, David Pattee, who was starting to homestead. Mears figured that a mill could span the channel with a foundation on each side of the fast-moving current. Watching the unwieldy Columbo, Philemon Wright’s log raft, drift by on the Ottawa River, piloted to the extent it could be controlled in 1806, he saw the added advantage of not being exposed to the broad river’s often drifting traffic. He knew the British needed the Algonquin forest to build ships and masts – oak and pine – for their warships, but he did not have a great quantity of standing massive timber to send off. A sawmill, however, could cash in on the bonanza. Napoleon had blocked the British from the Baltic Sea and Russia while the Americans had sided with France. Searching the world, this was one of the factors that brought the British Navy to Australia where they discovered an island with tall, straight pine trees. Called Norfolk Island today, it looked to be the answer to the blockade. The mainmast of a Man-o’-war stood straight – 100 feet high, three feet in diameter at its base. Such a pine mast had to bend in the wind…but the Norfolk Island pines snapped.

Each ship required 20 smaller pines for masts and spars. The ships were made from oak, dense and heavy, that had to be floated down from the ancient, cultivated Algonquin forests to Quebec City, carried by the pine. Huge rafts floated past on the main part of the river but the island protected Chenail écarté from these dominant, inhabited wooden floating islands.

Mears told Pattee about the channel and how they could harness the flow. To build the mill, he had to acquire two islands to anchor their structure on either side of the racing current. They bought the islands from the seigneury and leased them from the Nipissing and Algonquin. Both seigniorial and Indigenous jurisdictions had to be respected. Indigenous Nations could lease their land, but many colonists who signed leases with them had chosen to ignore Indigenous rights, and eventually the leases, too, were ignored. Mears figured he would need to build footings on the islands. He offered to help set up a lease, and the Indigenous parties accepted. Mears and Pattee respected the lease, but they were among the minority. Most colonists who signed leases later defaulted without justification. The colonists resented having to pay the “Indians” for usage of the land.

Mears felt that the flow could support a sawmill, but he knew they would have to start with a gristmill for the homesteaders establishing in Prescott County.

Their mill was a success and the English-speaking workers and settlers that used it called the area Snye Carty, in their attempts to pronounce the French name, but the term snye spread into the English language to describe a channel. The colloquial name might have stuck as a placename in some form if the colonial authorities had not seen fit to honour Baron Hawkesbury, Earl of Liverpool instead. Since farmers coming to a gristmill were usually short of currency to pay for the service, the miller would often accept payment in other forms. This did not help the miller pay for machinery manufactured and imported from Great Britain and elsewhere. For Pattee and Mears, real success was not to be achieved in operating the gristmill but in the more ambitious sawmill where they could trade in the big leagues and be paid in some form of one of the currencies in use. We have become so comfortable with our monetary system that we have trouble imagining the problems confronting a couple of entrepreneurs like Pattee and Mears. There was no paper money — the most common coins in the United States were still the Spanish and Spanish-American dollars. These round, almost pure silver disks could be broken into 8 bits and had been the closest thing to an international currency for two centuries, but in the Ottawa Valley in the early 1800s there was competition from the pound sterling and the Louis remaining from the French regime. It would not be until after the War of 1812, when the British government conscientiously redeemed army bills at full face-value, that people began to have confidence in paper currency, giving rise to banking and credit. All these changes came too late for Pattee and Mears. Short of funds and lacking credit or other backing, they negotiated with the Hamilton brothers who had recently acquired a wharf in the Seigneurie of Lauzon, near Quebec, which they dubbed New Liverpool Cove. The Hamilton brothers, Scots-Irish, relied on one family member established in Liverpool, and traded wines, nails, Baltic timber and other products. As brokers and underwriters, they had contacts in London and Aberdeen as well. Having been shut out of the Baltic by the Napoleonic blockade, they realized that the Royal Navy would become increasingly dependent upon timber coming to Quebec City from outlying areas like the Ottawa Valley. Ruthless British businessmen with excellent contacts, they happily advanced Pattee and Mears payment in anticipation of delivery of timber and ‘deals,’ the word used for certain sawn lumber needed in shipbuilding. They also insisted the mill owners sign an obligation against their mill if they failed to deliver.

Some texts say that the Hamiltons bought the large sawmill and generously describe the rise of the Hamilton dynasty. Others describe the antagonism that existed between the parties over the following decades. In 1811, the war with Napoleon was still driving up the value of timber, but that did not facilitate credit. At the same time, the Americans were sabre-rattling and the local American community in the British colonies was suspect, especially in the eyes of the Tory elite. George and William Hamilton, with their financial connections in Liverpool, had been quickly welcomed into this upper-crust society, but Pattee and Mears were part of the republican-tainted American immigrant community. These expatriates were members of a large group of rough, working-class colonists with their own understanding of loyalty and justice. The Hamiltons saw them as expendable, and when they missed a delivery, they had a legal argument to foreclose. Justice and fairness could be expressed in many ways: Shortly after the Hamiltons took possession of the Mears and Pattee mill at Snye Carty, it burned to the ground. The partners were never blamed for it, but one of their employees was suspected.

The British navy, at war with Napoleon, paid well for lumber. Starting with over 600 warships in 1792, their losses were phenomenal. They needed the white pine for masts and spars, and the hulls of their warships were made of oak, also available from the ancient Algonquin forests. A heavier wood, it needed to be carried downriver by the more buoyant pine. Wright and his sons learned to float rafts of wood down the Ottawa River to the mighty St. Lawrence and on to Quebec City right from the beginning of that war-driven lumber boom, acquiring most of the lumber from other landowners. In so doing, he no doubt helped them establish prosperous farms, but in time, as their wood ran out, he began to harvest his own vast holdings. He also owned and controlled industries including brickworks, cement manufacture and even a mining company. He built chutes along the river and eventually he partnered in the building of a steamship, the Union of Ottawa, to control his huge lumber rafts.

Lumber was tied into cribs of 20 logs, round in the early days, but eventually squared, and the cribs were then assembled into rafts that could join as many as seventy cribs. Their crew could be 35 to 60 men, depending on the size of the raft, and included cabins, cookhouses, sails and steering oars. When arriving at the rapids, the cribs would be separated and run down individually over rapids or, once they were built, through the chutes. They were reassembled below. Living on a raft became a way of life, as it floated slowly under the power of the currents to Quebec City. Sails and the steering oars could only serve to urge or cajole the large, floating islands this way or that and with enough planning, it was usually possible to tie up to the shore or to the long docks that would be built for them.

Ruggles and Tiberius, Philemon’s two sons, were early captains of these large, unwieldy craft, but Philemon himself captained the very first one, dubbed the Columbo, in 1806. It consisted of 700 logs and 9000 boards along with thousands of staves, those oak planks that would eventually be curved into shape for shipbuilding. His were white oak and he set them on the cribs of logs. Trying to float them would have been difficult, since they were not buoyant and may have dragged too deeply in the water. The staves were his guaranteed cash product, and he had negotiated a good price should he be able to deliver before the end of July of that first year.

He set off on June 11, floating 20 cribs, each about 24 feet wide, and a crew of five that included his son Tiberius – the first logging raft to attempt the Ottawa. They broke the cribs apart at Long Sault and again at Carillon, losing one crib in the process of floating them through the rapids. The cribs had to be reassembled afterwards, and Wright’s judgment was that the missing crib would have to be replaced. Historians don’t know whether this was a sign of Wright’s extravagant pride or whether it was really necessary for the stability of the raft, but it caused delays. Next, he chose Rivière des Prairies to avoid the Lachine rapids and once he won his way into the St. Lawrence he discovered that his craft could not withstand the strong currents, causing further delays and hardships.

He failed to respect the contract, arriving on August 12, and it took him until the end of November to sell his lumber to new buyers. After that, he took the long journey home through the early winter countryside.

Years later, a large raft Ruggles captained – there were up to 8 a year – just about took out the British Merchant Marine stationed at Quebec as it caught an outgoing tide, hurling past the port. It turned around on the incoming tide and had a second run at the fleet, the whole incident caricaturing the chaotic management of the Wright family as they pioneered this new, cumbersome delivery technique.

Philemon preached the stability of agriculture whenever his finances threatened to topple his empire. He had offered £600 for three-and-a-half townships in 1796 but he was paying £2,000 a year for supplies by 1819. By 1826, he had committed to a mortgage of £12,000 just to secure a part of his debt. The bucolic life of the farmer carried great appeal to Wright and his sons, and they did maintain their farming operations, even introducing Hereford cattle from England, but their debts grew faster than their crops.

Their adventures were compounded and complicated with the arrival of Colonel John By across the river, and they lost good employees to the interloper. They learned that By was a tough taskmaster when they were contracted to build diversion dams and a bridge for his Rideau Canal project. Having a new presence across the river in Upper Canada also caused jurisdictional problems, and in 1825 the deputy sheriff of Bathurst district seized a raft that Tiberius was captaining. To pull off the seizure, fearing that the Lower Canadians would resist with canon and other arms, they rounded up 50 ‘ruffians’ and armed them with every gun on By’s side of the river, including two the Wrights had left there for safe-keeping. The raft was confiscated, but, while the records refer to bloodshed, Wright and his crew never resorted to their cannon as had been feared. They were never compensated for the raft either.

Wright was elected to the Assembly and held every other important position; he secured the first school in Hull, built roads and even captained the Argenteuil militia, but he never succeeded in achieving financial stability, and his empire was on bankruptcy’s doorstep at the time of his death in 1839. He built Wrightstown, and it was named for him, but he is credited with encouraging the town to adopt its official name from the township of Hull.

Another difference between the two men was that, while they both arrived in the 1790s, Lane acquired a parcel of land in a seigneury and Wright thought he was buying four townships, Harrington, Namur, Grandisson and half of Hull. In Lane’s case the title was clear, even though he did not seem to understand the seigneurial system. Wright’s case was completely different. Having contracted to pay Jonathan Fassett of Bennington, Vermont, six hundred pounds sterling for his land grant, Wright experienced his first setback. Fassett’s grant had been revoked.

Another man may have gone after the seller and spent angry years recriminating, but not Wright. He had become hooked on the Algonquin forests and rivers. He saw good agricultural prospects. Wright had to demonstrate to the government of Lower Canada that he was part of a large group wishing to establish a community – a colony. Without abandoning his ambition to own a large parcel of land, he focussed on acquiring the half-lot of the projected township of Hull, a fraction of his original dream. His settlement would comprise 37 men, 5 women and 21 children, virtually all sponsored by him, who agreed to repay his sponsorship by returning to him the major portions of the land they were granted. In that way, of the 13,200 acres they acquired for their settlement, Wright recovered all but 1,000 acres. The whole process took ten years, from 1796 to 1806.

At the same time, he accepted to pay a lease to the Anishinaabe, in this case the descendants of the powerful Kichesipirini, and Weskarini and others who had been guaranteed the land in the Proclamation of 1763, not all that long before. These Indigenous Nations welcomed him. They visited one of his early worksites with gifts of maple syrup and sought an interpreter who could translate for them. Why, they wanted to know, was he cutting down the very trees that provided this wonderful gift of nature.

The Algonquin forest was a human artifact that had been nurtured by these same people for millennia. They had blocked Samuel de Champlain from travelling freely on the Ottawa River and had been the keystone species of these forests. Wright met only a small remnant of their once-great nations. Struggling to recover from the many new European diseases that had destroyed their communities and their culture, they had become like refugees in their own forests. They lacked both the numbers and the convictions of their ancestors. Disease had taken the elderly and the children. The elderly were the repository of their cultural knowledge. The people Wright met were the survivors. They could not resist the incursions of colonists because they lacked the numbers necessary. Wright, treating them as one would treat children, suggested that they should have more confidence in the wisdom of their wise father, the King. Eventually, even the charade of a lease was abandoned and these Nations moved further north to avoid starvation. They lost the great wealth their ancestors had stewarded since time immemorial, an injustice that has never been properly acknowledged. Even today, some of their descendants are treated as squatters on their traditional land, unrecognised by our provincial and federal governments.

Lane and his settlers, having had no delays like those Wright experienced, proceeded to exploit the new-found wealth in a difficult market period. He was exploiting the same Algonquin forests, but the reduced demand for logs and the costs of transporting them meant that it was more worthwhile to burn the trees and sell by-products such as potash and lye that they could make from the ashes. They saw the forests as a quickly harvestable cash crop, but because they lacked farming experience, they became dependent upon others for food. By 1810, those who had earned cash could leave with their profits, but the remaining community succumbed to famine and collapsed. It was Thomas Barron and a group of fellow Scots with a strong farming background who rescued the agricultural land and set Lachute on its path to prosperity. Meanwhile, Wright had thought himself a farmer from the outset.

Wright’s determination to farm meant that his small community, called Wright’s Town, gave priority to producing the food needed to sustain it, and this, coupled with his 10-year delay in starting, meant that the Algonquin forests in Hull Township were still standing when Napoleon effectively blocked British access to the Baltic Sea and its supply of pine.

The British Empire boasted the largest navy under sail in the history of the world. Aside from countless merchant ships, there were hundreds of battle ships patrolling the ports and seas, all in constant need of repair or replacement. A ship of the line could be 170 feet long, its hull and solid wood superstructure built to withstand the forces, not just of the sea, but also of the 74 cannons mounted on its two decks. The mainmast itself was made from a single timber 11 storeys high, with a base diameter of three feet and little tapering to the crown. One boat required over twenty masts and spars, each a unique timber, and the forests of the British Isles had long been exhausted.

As well as size, masts and spars had to be able to flex under sail. The desperate need for these forests had driven the British as far as Australia where they discovered Norfolk Island, just off the coast of Australia, covered in a forest of ideal-looking pines. These perfectly tapering trees, they learned, would “snap like a carrot” under load, according to Robert Hughes, author of The Fatal Shore, the story of the British colonization of Australia.

Philemon Wright had fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill during the American War of Independence, and in that war the British had lost access to the huge pine forests of New England. He would have known that an early flag of the newly independent America featured a white pine. He may have recognized the white pine along the shore when he first sailed up the Ottawa River to take possession of his new settlement. Still, he saw himself first and foremost as a farmer.

In the early decades of the 19^th century, wheat was vying with furs as Lower Canada’s major trade product. The lumber market was growing and would surpass the other two, but Wright saw wheat as the backbone of the economy of his small settlement. By 1810, he had erected gristmills, and he was producing potatoes, oats, corn, hemp and wheat. His wheat crop alone rose from 3,000 bushels in 1813 to over 35,000 in 1820 and 76,000 three years later. He also maintained prize herds of cattle. By 1817, of the 135 labourers hired in the township, 120 worked directly for him, but he could not resist the British navy’s demand for wood. The profit from that kept him afloat, as will be described in Wright’s Rafts next week.

Pierre Panet, the seigneur who sold to Murray, accepted to defer a part of the purchase price. While the repayment schedule was reasonable, Murray lacked the necessary experience to develop the property and soon faced insolvency. His son, James, who some sources claim rescued the seigneurie from creditors in 1803, was influential in its subsequent development but while the seigneurie developed rapidly, their tenure was never stable. They named the village of St. Andrews, reflecting their Scottish influences, and worked hard to develop it, while up the North River a ways they sold a large parcel to Jedediah Lane of Jericho, Vermont, compromising their seigneurial rights over that parcel for a quick payment.

Needing to improve services to his tenant farmers and assure their trade, Murray sought expertise in New England to help him harness the North River and build a gristmill in St. Andrews. The new United States was not the land of opportunity that we are told it was. This was the period of Shay’s Rebellion, when thousands of Massachusetts farmers, many of whom were forced to become soldiers and then never paid for their services, rebelled because the wealthy Boston elite was taking their farms for back taxes. The army crushed the resistance, and the courts showed no mercy. One of the Founding Fathers, Samuel Adams, a willing participant in the suspension of habeas corpus in this event, declared, “In monarchy, the crime of treason may admit to being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death.” By contrast, the Ottawa Valley, opening for settlement in the wealthy, powerful British Empire, attracted many young New Englanders.

Murray found Thomas Mears, a hydraulics engineer and willing emigrant, who dammed the North River and helped him design and build the mill in 1794. Stories of Mears’s work brought more young Americans to St. Andrews. Headed by Walter Ware, whose father operated a mill in Massachusetts, they negotiated a lease with the seigneur and built another mill almost directly across the river from the gristmill. It would become Canada’s first paper mill.

In order to make the mill viable, Ware contracted with James Brown, a bookbinder and printer in Montreal, to sell the mill’s paper products. By 1806, only a year after the mill had begun producing, Brown, whose properties would grow to include the Montreal Gazette, became a minor shareholder in the mill. He was a man who initiated an uncountable number of litigations as though he cultivated the law to bulldoze his way forward. After taking Ware to court for not respecting their contract, he bought out the balance of the shares in 1810 and moved to St. Andrews to run the mill himself.

The balance of Brown’s working career became more focussed on the mill and, in spite of his Montreal operations’ apparent success, by 1822 he had sold both the Gazette and his Montreal business to concentrate on the mill. He moved into an expanding area of hard-working, risk-taking immigrants. Village-sized rafts of logs floated down the Ottawa, guided by the currents and the efforts of the crews who lived on board, as gangs of Irish, Canadiens, Maritimers and Scots, some farmers and others desperate for any kind of employment, chopped away uncomprehendingly at the ancient Algonquin forests, cultivated and celebrated by a civilization that had lived in harmony with its environment. The Ottawa River, once called the Grand, that for centuries had accommodated the meeting, gifting, fishing and hunting communities of the Indigenous cultures, was deteriorating into a sewer, converted into a new kind of commercial-industrial culture whose relationship was one of exploitation, of taking but not of sustaining. The new paradigm was not the rotation of the seasons but the status of the individual. Fortunes were won and lost, and anyone could be the winner or the loser.

In 1807, the Murrays once again faced insolvency and lost the seigneurie through a sheriff’s sale. Sir John Johnson, legendary for his family’s relationships with the Indigenous communities, acquired the seigneurie, and the Murrays seem to have faded from the historical record. The impact of this change on Brown was the Johnsons’ refusal to renew the litigious Walter Ware’s original lease when it came due in 1834, building a mill for the farmers across the river during that same period.

Although not necessarily the best adapted to the farming that was developing along the valleys on both sides of the river, entrepreneurial American immigrants were becoming the most numerous of the new arrivals. Equipped with Yankee know-how and nerve, they brought new ideas and techniques into the valley. Thomas Mears, among the better educated, and not needed in St. Andrews once the mills were built, followed the pattern of acquiring land for farming but, transfixed by a fast-flowing channel on the far side of the river identified on the old French map as Chennail écarté, he had other things in mind.

When Pierre d’Ailleboust d’Argenteuil escorted the Ottawa chief Le Pésant into Governor Cadillac’s custody in Detroit in 1707, he must have wondered what would happen to the heavy old man. Le Pésant was in his seventies and overweight; he hardly looked like a man who could have been involved in an ambush where seven chiefs and a priest were killed. Le Pésant’s story itself gives an amazing insight into the times, the misunderstandings and the unexpected consequences. Officially, Le Pésant was supposed to be executed for whatever role he had had, but the overweight elderly chief managed to climb the defensive palisade and escape, which turned out to be convenient for Cadillac.

D’Argenteuil had fulfilled his military obligation in making the arrest but was probably more interested in bringing furs back to trade in Montreal. He and Cadillac had made a lot more money in trading furs than in their professional capacities.

D’Argenteuil was born Pierre D’Ailleboust, son of Charles d’Ailleboust de Muceaux and Catherine Legardeur de Repentigny. He was one of 14 children and he and his younger brother, both soldiers, were acquainted with men in the highest ranks. While they used their status to make money in the fur trade, Nicholas had fought the Seneca on Lake of Two Mountains, watched the destruction of Fort Cataracoui before it was rebuilt as Fort Frontenac, sacked Schenectady, fought the Mohawk outside of Albany and died fighting the British in Hudson’s Bay. Both brothers had acted as diplomatic agents to their Indigenous allies, and while Pierre had seen his share of action, including an assault against Fort St. John’s in Newfoundland, his role had been more frequently diplomatic.

Charles d’Ailleboust, their father, had served in the first Flying Column, a company of 40 soldiers who formed part of the defenses of the mission of the Montréalistes in the early days. He was born in France and developed close relations with the Sulpicians, who eventually became the seigneurs of Montreal. Louis had gone on to become the Governor of New France and his wife, Marie-Barbe Boullougne, learned Algonquin and taught it to the first Sulpicians who took over the Montréaliste mission. It was they who convinced Charles to come to New France.

In 1666, Charles saw his last action against the Five Nations. He survived being mauled by a bear, and thereafter his only official task was to act as the civil and criminal judge for the Sulpicians, continuing to try his hand in business to supplement his income. He was awarded the seigneuries of Île Bourdon in 1657 and of Argenteuil in 1682, both named for sites in the d’Ailleboust family’s home province of Burgundy. The seigneur was expected to develop the property, surveying and distributing homesteads, but in the case of Argenteuil in 1682, the title was more wishful thinking. The Five Nations were resident there. The Argenteuil seigneury was placed into the custody of Pierre Legardeur de Repentigny, Charles’s father-in-law, probably because of financial setbacks that Charles experienced in the early 1680s. Both seigneuries were eventually sold to Charles’s son, Pierre d’Argenteuil.

Pierre prospered in his relationships with Cadillac and encouraged the Ottawa and other Indigenous nations to have confidence in the governor of Detroit, but Antoine Lamothe Cadillac was probably one of the worst scoundrels of New France. His actions always led to questions of his judgment, but he just as often managed to convince his superiors of their wisdom, as in the case of Le Pésant’s escape. When Governor Vaudreuil questioned how an overweight 70-year-old man could have accomplished such a feat unaided, Cadillac explained that it was better to let him go. He argued that the arrest was necessary to appease the Miami, but the escape was necessary to appease the Ottawa. Cadillac had relied on men like d’Argenteuil to encourage the different Nations to have confidence in him, but he was failing to achieve the objectives of bringing together the Miami, Ottawa and others to present a united front against the Five Nations. The Miami soon attacked the stockade in retribution for the escape of Le Pésant.

Cadillac continuously abused his friends and subordinates but managed to send 27 times his annual salary home to France. Unknown to d’Argenteuil, his judgment in maintaining a relationship with Cadillac was one of the question marks on his military record. When Cadillac was finally transferred to the unenviable post of Governor of Louisiana in 1710, d’Argenteuil’s star began to rise. He was given the task of leading the western Nations against the English and the Five Nations, a role that he was well suited to, but sadly he died, probably of a stroke, in 1711, before the campaign got under way.

D’Argenteuil had married Marie-Louise Denys de La Ronde in the 1690s and together they had 11 children, some of whom followed their father into the fur trade. They built a manor house in Argenteuil in 1721, but it was subsequently destroyed by fire. Marie-Louise passed away in 1747 leaving the seigneury to, among others, her son Jean d’Ailleboust, heir to the title Argenteuil, and some of his siblings. The family owned the seigneury until 1781, when Judge Pierre-Louis Panet acquired it from the six remaining heirs. In his turn he sold it to the Murray family only 12 years later and they developed it and encouraged immigrants from Scotland, Ireland and New England to homestead. Murray named their first settlement St. Andrews, strengthening and celebrating their growing Scottish community. Eventually it was called St. Andrews East, distinguishing it from St. Andrews West in Ontario, only an hour’s drive to the southwest.

La Mère Ménard came north with her two sons and her daughter Flavie Dufrense, the very first colonists in the area. The men and women, along with the head of their family, La Mère Ménard, carried their worldly goods and walked the fifty-odd kilometres from St. Benoit to their new homestead north of everyone they knew. There were no real roads above Shawbridge, and a canoe and some portaging up the North River would have been a better way to get as far as Ste. Adèle but above that the ground rose too fast to use the river. There was a trail, however, cared for by the large Anishinaabe Commandant family identified with Mont Sauvage.

Ste. Adèle was 600 feet above sea level, but the elevation of the valleys between the hills where they were going was twice as high.

That was in 1850. The men had gone up the summer before to build some log cabins to receive them. They were homesteaders, families that could earn title to farms on condition they developed the fields, owned animals and built a home. Over the years, other colonists, young families, joined them and many had lots of reason to call the old lady ‘mother.’ She delivered a lot of their children. Her own children, of course, were grown up and so she had more time for the sick and for the poor. She was really the matriarch of the rough-hewn town that grew around her and she commanded the respect of a chief.

Doctors arrived eventually. The first was Dr. Luc-Eusèble Larocque, the oldest practicing doctor in St. Jerome. He had spent some crucial years in California, right in the middle of the gold rush. Doctors were needed there, too, and he came home with a tidy sum, determined to live a genteel life. He came up to Ste. Agathe in 1853 and bought half the land around Trout Lake. He wasn’t a homesteader. He prepared the farms and rented them out to people, hoping to live off the rent. The weakness in his plan was his big heart. He came out each year to collect from his tenants but spent the whole summer ministering to the sick instead. He collected so little rent that his many children inherited nothing but the beautiful poems he sent back to his wife to convince her to join him. She never did, though. Instead, she painted sweeping landscapes inspired by his poetry, which she showed him upon his return. Early records assure us that the poetry and art are preserved, but no one seems to know where they are today.

The Ménards, Dufresnes and other farmers worked hard cutting down the trees, hoping to work the soil beneath. The trees themselves, tall pines and maples, could have fetched a fair price but there was no way of getting them to a sawmill in the early days. The North River was too shallow and rough to float them. Instead, they burned them and sieved and washed the ashes to get potash or lye, depending on the tree and the process. Carried on their backs to St. Jerome, it fetched pennies per sack. Ashes were their only currency-producing crop and paid for the tools needed for the farm. As children, they would have grown up on the seigneuries in the rich, fertile St. Lawrence Valley where the farmers were tenants who paid their way in the world with wheat. It was Quebec’s major export until the mid 1830s when the crops were devastated by disease. Wheat never recovered as a significant crop, but the seigneuries had produced a prodigious number of farmers who could not imagine any other life.

When the fields were cleared, there were no more ashes to sell. Farmers hired out as lumberjacks, sometimes going as far as Illinois for the winter, just to make enough money to keep on farming. They also discovered that four to five days of hot summer sun could dry out the thin layer of soil on their hilly fields and bring on drought conditions. Watering before powered pumps meant all people could do was hope for rain. Curé Labelle, the promoter of colonization, arrived on the scene about this time. He began his mission in 1868. He told their children to travel north where they could homestead, cut down the trees and set up farms. It sounded pointless to the farming lumberjacks, just an invitation to repeat their own mistakes, but the curé was right. Further north, along the Rouge River, the soil was deep and the elevation was as low as Ste. Adèle. It was ideal farmland. Many went.

La Mère Ménard wasn’t affected by any of this. She had graduated to the title of La Vieille Ménard and lived in a small house on a lake south-east of Trout Lake that you can still find on some maps. It was called Lac de la Vielle Ménard (Old Lady Ménard’s Lake). She was kind, but it was best to do what she said. She kept a garden and she also kept some holes open through the ice on her lake where, during the long, hard winters she could catch trout when she needed to. As Flavie warned, though, no one messed with her, at least not after the story of one unfortunate fellow she spotted early one morning pulling trout out of her lake. She quickly left her house in little more than her nightie and grabbed the man. Folding him easily over her knee she gave him a good sound spanking.

The doctor’s second visit was the year my grandfather, his fifth child, was born. Doctor Paré had been called up with the 65^th Militia in that extraordinary year, 1885, the year of the Métis uprising, Louis Riel, and the smallpox plague that caused Montreal to be quarantined. He was asked to go west because his militia superior had been begged to lead the fight against smallpox in Montreal. Doctor Paré and the militia took the train to Calgary where they met General Thomas Bland Strange and his other militia units. They marched up to Edmonton, then followed the North Saskatchewan River to stand up to Big Bear, Mistahimaskwa, a Plains Cree chief. Both forces, General Strange’s and Big Bear’s Cree, were careful about the safety of their men when they engaged at Frenchman’s Butte in late May 1885. Towards the end of their last skirmish, General Strange discovered that his men had withdrawn so quickly that they had left an injured man still in range of the Cree guns. He was shocked that they had left a fellow soldier to die because they feared for their own safety. He looked for volunteers to accompany him, Dr. Paré and the chaplain to rescue the injured man. The rescue crew found the man and needed to carry him back under fire. Dr. Paré checked him over and made sure he was comfortably installed on a stretcher, but the chaplain took so long with the Last Rites that the general lost patience and told them to get on with the rescue. Halfway up the hill, the rear carrier lost his nerve and the general himself took over that role. War was different in those days; people mattered. They carried the injured man to safety, and they ultimately lost only one soldier, and that was to illness. The battle ended in a draw.

When Dr. Paré returned to Lachine, he discovered that his wife, Josephine, was ill with tuberculosis. Dr. Paré was a modern man, an agnostic, who could have been comfortable in conversations today. He had likely heard of Hermann Brehmner’s rest cure for tuberculosis and determined to move Josephine to the clean air of the countryside to take the cure in the cool country air. He applied to become a doctor with the North-West Mounted Police, and by 1888 had moved to the Prairies with his wife and children. It was too late, though, and Josephine soon died.

Dr. Paré sent two of his daughters back to their aunts, both religious sisters, in Lachine. His eldest daughter and son as well as the baby, my grandfather, became a part of his brother Theophile and Angélique Nolan’s family. Dr. Paré could not really parent his children with the demands of his work. As a doctor, his schedule was not predictable. The children must have come to see him more as a doting visitor while his own parenting skills were directed toward his responsibilities to the policemen. Indigenous families who came to see him were not a part of his obligations as a police doctor but were a part of his medical oath. The NWMP records compared him to the Oblate priest, Father Albert Lacombe, one of the most important missionaries of the region, but Louis Paré always saw himself as a modern man.

My grandfather and his older brother Alfred grew up with Angélique, their cousin Marie and their eldest sister Noémie. Alphonse was by far the youngest, growing up learning Cree and Ojibwa with no memories of Lachine. His friends were Indigenous and their deeply Catholic life involved schooling, canoeing and horseback riding. It was the horseback riding that helped him gain admission to the Royal Military College.

Most of the foregoing was not common knowledge in the family when my uncle received his father’s visit at the Jesuit college. My grandmother, Lucy, told the story in her memoirs.

“An elderly Jesuit arrived because he had heard Alphonse was visiting. Father

Richard, S.J. was 100 years old and blind. He had been a missionary priest among the Indians in his younger days, travelling mostly throughout Northwest Canada and in the Yukon. He greeted Alphonse in English and my husband responded in French. This delighted the old man, and for a joke he said a few words in the Ojibway Indian dialect. (It seems that he had even published a dictionary of the Indian language.) Alphonse answered immediately in Cree which he had learned in his youth. The old man was so excited he threw his arms around my husband and embraced him. They talked away together for three whole hours comparing notes of their experiences in the Far North of Canada and discovered that they had often crossed each other’s paths in the wilderness over the years without ever meeting one another.”

This incident was eventually shared in my grandmother’s memoir, The Seeds, published in 1984. We were all impressed. We did not know Alphonse spoke two Indigenous languages. No doubt my grandfather was proud of this Indigenous connection in his past, but it was in his past and he had died nearly 30 years before the book appeared. Until then, the family had never learned about it, but it did show how, despite his own father’s lack of religious observance, Alphonse was a deeply believing Catholic who proudly visited his own son, a Jesuit in training. Alphonse’s cousin Marie, Angélique Nolan’s daughter, became a nun, and after Angélique died Théophile finally joined the priesthood.

Like many other people who influenced our town and left us a placename, the Préfontaines were Montrealers. They chose to vacation in Ste. Agathe and in the process became involved in the community. Joseph Raymond Fournier Préfontaine was born into a farming family in Lower Canada, or Canada East, in 1850. He attended Collège Ste-Marie and later studied law at McGill College. At 23, he was elected Mayor of Hochelaga, and two years later, in 1875, he ran and won a seat in the provincial Legislative Assembly for Chambly. Ambitious and active in many different areas, it is hard to imagine that he could adapt to the slow pace of the countryside.

Préfontaine married Hermantine Rolland in 1876, and they suffered the loss of several children at birth. Only three of their children survived into adulthood. Driven by hard work, perhaps in part by these tragedies, he won a seat in the House of Commons in 1886 while maintaining an active law practice and serving the town of Hochelaga. Once Hochelaga was annexed, he served on the Montreal municipal council and subsequently became Mayor of Montreal in 1898. He also maintained seats in each federal election until 1905. He was a very popular federal politician, one of the favoured sons of French Canada, and someone who people felt was destined to become our prime minister.

From 1900 to 1902, Raymond Préfontaine, the Mayor of Montreal, was also the Member of Parliament for both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve ridings. He simultaneously held three political posts, any one of which would be perceived as a full-time responsibility today. Running for two or more seats in the House of Commons was not illegal until 1919. There was a House rule that said if a member won more than one seat, he should resign the extra seat or seats. But there was also a law that stated if your seat was being contested after the election, you could not resign until the challenge was resolved. In this way, MPs sometimes found themselves forbidden from resigning the seat that they did not want to keep. For a party leader, running in more than one riding made sense, but any candidate could do it.

In 1893, the year after the train first arrived in Ste. Agathe, Préfontaine’s brother-in-law, Octavien Rolland, purchased the property known for the next 25 years as Rolland’s Point but now as Greenshields Point. Rolland, whose father founded Rolland Paper, and for whom Mont Rolland was named, must have received his sister and brother-in-law as houseguests many times. By 1899, Mr. Préfontaine had acquired a parcel of the Chalifoux farm and built a lovely summer house on Lac des Sables. It featured a tower and eyebrow dormers and was accessed through an ornate gate sporting the words ‘Les Sapins’ in a light arch of woven sticks above the entry. Located at 182 Tour du Lac, it has been renovated and restored many times and has always been the home of influential Montrealers. It evoked ease and relaxation, belying the lives of its occupants.

It did not take long for the Préfontaine family to get involved in the life of their adopted town. A year after the house was built, Rolland Préfontaine, an engineering student and the eldest son of Raymond and Hermantine, helped the Compagnie d’Aqueduc et de la force motrice des Laurentides design a hydroelectric facility on the North River in the area that we have called Préfontaine ever since. A year after that, around the time Préfontaine became the MP for Terrebonne, the village council decided to name various streets and install proper road signs. For the main entrance to the village, the road that ran from the location of the original railroad station up to Tour du Lac, they chose the name Rue Préfontaine. Virtually everyone coming to Ste. Agathe had to arrive by train, and their action served to remind all visitors of their affection for the honourable J.R.F. Préfontaine.

Aside from his legal practice and political responsibilities, Préfontaine sat on both the Catholic School Commission and the Harbour Commission of Montreal, was a director of the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste, and a member of the Chamber of Commerce, the St. James Club and the Canadian Club of Montreal.

In 1902, he resigned both Terrebonne and Maisonneuve seats, as well as his post as Mayor of Montreal, and assumed the role of Minister of Marine and Fisheries. He was subsequently re-elected in Maisonneuve in a by-election and named to the Privy Council. In his role as minister, he travelled to France to negotiate a marine agreement. He also undertook the delicate mission of acquiring a wedding ring for his eldest son, Rolland, to bestow upon his future bride. Sadly, he suffered a heart attack in early December and died in Paris on Christmas Day, 1905. He was fifty-five. His funeral, held in Montreal late in January after his remains were returned on Queen Victoria’s private yacht, was one of the largest funerals Montreal had seen.

In 1771, the year Francis Rawdon enlisted as an ensign in the 15^th Foot Regiment of the British Army, a famine devastated Bengal (present-day Bangladesh and West Bengal) killing one sixth of the population and seriously draining the British administration’s resources. As a corrective measure, the British government introduced the Tea Act, a tax that would effectively subsidise the East India Company. While it may have succeeded to some degree there, it also led to the Boston Tea Party, contributing to the colonists’ alienation and the American War of Independence.

Rawdon, a 17-year-old recruit, and his regiment were shipped out to fight in the American colonies. There, he distinguished himself in the Battle of Bunker Hill and fought in the Battle of Brooklyn and Whitehall. By 1778, at age 24, he had risen through the ranks to become a lieutenant colonel and was assigned the post of Adjutant-General to the British Forces in America. The role of adjutant-general could be described as the executive officer to the commander-in-chief. He raised a corps called the “Volunteers of Ireland” and his conduct in the battle of Monmouth earned him command of the left wing in the battle of Camden in 1780. He was the commander of the British garrison in the Battle of Hobkirk’s Hill in 1781 in which he defeated the superior forces of General Greene.

Whether it was because of poor judgement in his ordering the execution of the American colonel Isaac Hayne or because of failing health from exhaustion, he was called back to England. Before his departure, though, he helped establish many loyal British subjects, including perhaps many of his “Volunteers of Ireland,” in both Nova Scotia and Quebec.

Captured by the French on his return trip and subsequently released from detention in Brest, Rawdon arrived home to be honoured with a peerage in 1783. In 1789 his mother succeeded to the Barony of Hastings, and in 1793, upon the death of his father, he became the Earl of Moira, County Down, Northern Ireland.

In 1794, Rawdon was again in the service of the Crown, leading 7,000 troops in Flanders in the war against the French, serving with distinction under the Duke of York. As he proved in America, he was always concerned for his men, and despite his heavy responsibilities, he is on record as having objected to the eviction of Catholic tenants from one of the districts of Moira in 1796, and is credited as a champion of the Catholics in Northern Ireland for his efforts to publicize their plight. It is intriguing to imagine that some of the evicted Irish tenants of Moira may have made their way to Canada and been among some mysterious Irish immigrants who are reported to have illegally homesteaded in Rawdon, Quebec. There would be continuity in this, connecting the Irish estate of the Rawdon family with the Quebec township that bears his name. Perhaps some link exists, but the official lists have not been able to establish a connection and the mysterious Irish immigrants moved on, fading out of history in the face of land grants made to the Volunteers of Ireland.

In the meantime, Rawdon was named Commander-in-Chief in Scotland in 1804, where he married Flora Mure Campbell, Countess of Loudoun, and the following year he was named Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In 1806, as a member of the governing side in the House of Lords, he introduced the Debtor and Creditor Bill for relief of poor debtors.

Sir Francis and Lady Flora had three daughters and one son, but as per custom, she did not travel on assignment with him. In 1813, the next phase of Lord Rawdon’s life began with his appointment as Governor-General of Bengal and commander-in-chief of the forces in India. His first challenge in this new posting was to secure the border with the Gurkhas and establish a treaty with the government of Nepal. In 1814, he declared war against the Gurkhas who had been rebuffed by the Chinese and had chosen instead to expand into territory controlled by the East India Company. Rawdon boldly opened up a six-hundred-mile-long battlefront. This was a crucial period in British India, because, had he failed, many of the other peoples of the regions would have joined forces against the British. Initially, the British experienced setbacks, but by 1816, with the help of General David Ochterlony, they obtained a peace with the Gurkhas and the following year with the government of Nepal. In recognition, General Ochterlony was named to the peerage and Lord Rawdon, Earl of Moira, was made Marquis of Hastings. Even so, during the next two years, Rawdon had to contend with two large foes, numbering 200,000 fighting men, before he established a peaceful administration in India. Subsequently, in the process of securing the Eastern trading route, he encouraged and approved the acquisition of the port of Singapore in the South China Sea.

Rawdon proved to be less well suited to peacetime. Perhaps because of his introduction of native education and freedom of the press, Rawdon fell victim to accusations of appropriation of public funds and, embittered, he resigned and returned to England. He was completely exonerated, but his reputation and position had suffered in the process, and he had not the means to retire. As a result, he accepted a lesser posting as Governor of Malta in 1824 where he finished his career, dying on board a ship bound for Naples in 1826.

Although he had promised his wife that they should lie in the same grave, Rawdon was buried in Malta. Since at that time it was impossible to transport a body that distance, he had instructed that his right hand be amputated at his death and sent home, that it might eventually be buried with her. His wish was respected.

The 1840s was a period of growth for the region, and Lemuel, young, dynamic and cautious, was well positioned to appreciate it and take full advantage of the opportunities. He was a councillor, mayor of the township and county warden as well as a very successful merchant and businessman. He was probably among the first to recognise the potential and importance of tourism, and acquired Caledonia Springs, a natural salt-water source in Prescott County, across the Ottawa River west of Hawkesbury. He built a hotel there, which he subsequently sold to William Parker. The original hotel was destroyed by fire soon after, and Parker built a larger one with the same name. Some years later, the property was acquired by the Caledonia Springs Hotel Company, of which Cushing was the most important shareholder. Caledonia Springs was a destination of choice during this period, and the developer counted among his clients Peter McGill and John Sandfield MacDonald, the lawyer who would become premier of the province of Ontario, as well as members of the Legislative Assemblies of both Lower and Upper Canada.

Lemuel Cushing bought and sold goods, maintaining a dock on the Ottawa River, probably at Carillon, and a home on Metcalfe Street in Montreal, in order to give himself the best access to the markets. Goods and products coming in and going out of the Chatham area were transported by water when the river was not frozen. That meant it was hard to get goods, not just to and from Chatham, but also to and from Montreal. Rail was the future. Cushing and his investments had already grown beyond Chatham, and he watched rail development closely, not just for Chatham, but for new opportunities.

Like Chatham’s, Montreal’s shipping stopped when the St. Lawrence froze over. Montreal had grown to become an extremely important city, the largest British port in North America after the United States seceded. The Montreal Board of Trade in the 1840s entertained proposals from a number of coastal cities hoping to find a partner that could become Montreal’s winter port. Among the contenders was a group that proposed a rail line from Quebec City to Halifax and two American groups, one from Portland, Maine and the other from Boston, Massachusetts. The eastern colonies offered free land and petitioned the British Government to build their rail link entirely in the British territories, but the British could not see the importance, so the real rivalry rapidly fell to Boston and Portland. In fact, Boston was on the verge of signing an understanding when an enterprising lawyer named John Poor, who was promoting the Portland route, heard that the decision would be taken at the Board of Trade meeting in Montreal on Monday, February 10, 1845. He was in Portland in the middle of a blizzard on Tuesday evening the 4^th, and he knew that his venture and the economy of Portland depended upon his presenting his option to the Board. In ideal conditions, he could have hired a sleigh and, with changes of horses, made it to Montreal in 30 hours, but under the circumstances, he had difficulty even finding a driver. He ventured out on his own to evaluate the possibility of making the trip and discovered fierce winds, hail and huge drifts of snow interspaced with glare ice. Undaunted, before sunrise he had found a driver, and they ventured north. The story of his trip is one of the great snow stories of the time. He lost his way 5 times in the storm-ravaged countryside, changed horses, drivers and sleighs, climbed 45-degree snowbanks with the assistance of local young men and teams of horses in towns that he passed through, and successfully covered the distance in 5 days, or 123 hours, instead of the usual day-and-a-half. Arriving in Montreal at 5:30 a.m. Monday the 10^th, he slept for 3 hours before meeting with the Board of Trade and convincing them to postpone their decision to sign with his rivals.

An agreement was forged whereby a steamer would drop mail at Portland and Boston, for transfer overland to Montreal. Teams were set up along the route to assist both couriers, but the mail arrived from Portland in 12 hours less time than the mail from Boston. The distance from Portland was 246 miles, and from Boston, 351. Mr. Poor’s proposal carried the day, and the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railway was established, leasing its services to the Grand Trunk in 1853.

One of the biggest challenges in the building of this link to a winter port was the need to cross the St. Lawrence River. The Victoria Bridge, a tubular structure, was completed in 1859 and the last stone was ceremonially placed by the Prince of Wales in 1860. The first trains had already travelled across the bridge from December 1859.

The Grand Trunk was incorporated in 1852. Lemuel Cushing was deeply involved in Portland, and by 1859 he had acquired a large island in Casco Bay, Portland, called Bangs Island. It had once belonged to Ezekiel Cushing, a distant ancestor, who sold the island to Joshua Bangs in 1760. Cushing changed its name, and today it is called Cushing Island. Following through with his interest in tourism, he built the Ottawa House Hostel on the island. His son, Francis Cushing, converted the island to a vacation colony, hiring Frederick Law Olmstead, the same man who designed Mount Royal Park in Montreal and Central Park in New York, to landscape it. He also rebuilt the Ottawa House in 1888.

Each of the Cushings’ sons had notable careers, mostly in Montreal, and his daughters married into the same economic milieu as their brothers. Three of the siblings moved beyond our borders and two settled elsewhere in Canada. Only seven of their children survived their father.

On May 18, 1875, just a few weeks after his sixty-ninth birthday Lemuel Cushing took a nap at the end of the day and never woke up. He and Catherine were living in the home on Metcalfe but following instructions, he was buried in Chatham. His obituary in the Montreal Herald covered his life accurately and praised him as being respected and esteemed by all.

As was customary, Catherine was praised as his lifelong companion but no further information in the records describes her own departure.

Elmer Cushing sought out Stephen Sewell to tell him about David Mc’Lane’s claim that he was an agent of a plan through which France would take back the colony from the British, and that the Americans were helping in the plot. Sewell took the story very seriously. Sewell’s older brother Jonathan, the Attorney General, was also the chief prosecutor. While his legal work has been highly praised in most cases, and he is credited with reducing the incidence of capital punishment, in the case of Mc’Lane, he acted vigorously, not simply to get a conviction, but to make a public example of the would-be traitor. Leading up to the trial in Quebec City in July 1797, Sewell and the authorities were dealing with riots over a law that obliged the Canadiens to contribute their time, equipment and teams of horses towards the construction of roads. Also, they were refusing to join militias for fear of being posted far from home. The riots were non-violent and probably would be considered more as strike protests today. The prosecutor collected evidence that Mc’Lane had a connection to Citizen Adet, a minister assigned by the new revolutionary government of France to develop relationships with the United States with a view to rebuilding Franco-American relations. That Revolutionary France may have been plotting to retake their New France colony struck fear into the hearts of the British and could not be ignored. With these tensions and talk of spies and an imminent invasion, someone like Mc’Lane, with no family or community to rally to his cause locally, was the perfect scapegoat. A conviction would allow the authorities to demonstrate what they could do if people did not fall into line.

William Barnard and John Black came forward as witnesses for the Crown. Barnard testified under oath that he had met Mc’Lane in Vermont, and later in Montreal, and that Mc’Lane had admitted that he wanted to promote revolution in Canada. Black, a ship’s carpenter who was also a member of the House of Assembly, arranged for the authorities to arrest Mc’Lane at Black’s house, and testified that Mc’Lane had solicited him to join in a coup.

No associated rebels were found. Two novice lawyers were appointed to defend Mc’Lane, one who was articling in Stephen Sewell’s office and living in his house. They pled Mc’Lane’s innocence, and when he was found guilty of high treason, they petitioned the court to have the ruling overturned because he was not a citizen, and therefore could not be a traitor, but they failed to use appropriate precedent. Chief Justice William Osgoode rejected the petition and sentenced Mc’Lane to be publicly disembowelled while still alive and hung until dead. Luckily for Mc’Lane, he was hung first.

The action sent a chill through society and was written up in the United States as an example of British cruelty and injustice, but the American government did not protest. In discreet recognition of their loyalty, John Black was awarded 53,000 acres in Dorset Township, William Barnard, 40,200 acres in Brompton, and Elmer Cushing 58,692 acres in Shipton Township, all three in the Eastern Townships. Today, Shipton is a part of Danville.

The records show that Black and Barnard participated in the arrest and condemnation of David Mc’Lane, but Cushing was the one who came forward to denounce him, and in doing so Cushing started something that he spent the next almost thirty years desperately trying to justify to himself. His biggest mistake might simply have been that he started a process that went way beyond his expectations and control. He unwittingly supplied the British governing elite with a perfect man to make an example of, to scare the public into line.

Twenty-nine years after the event, Elmer Cushing felt the need to publicly explain what had happened. The document exists still, under the title An appeal, addressed to a candid public and to the feelings of those whose upright sentiments and discerning minds, enable them to “Weigh it in the balance of the sanctuary.”

The long title is followed with a plea to be exonerated

TO a candid Public I address this ‘‘Appeal,” not doubting but they will do me justice as soon as they possess data sufficient to form an opinion. I rest with confidence on the evidence, which I shall here exhibit, for a final decision concerning the rectitude of my moral conduct thro’ life generally, and more particularly concerning my transactions as a witness in the cause of David M’Lane (sic), in the year 1797, who was then tried for high treason, convicted and executed.

It is with no small degree of pain and mortification that I find myself driven to the alternative of making this appeal. – I thereby feel myself, in some measure, degraded from that proud station, to which innocence and unsullied conduct ever entitle us. We have a just claim, without question, to an untarnished reputation, until: some proof or at least some colour of suspicion of improper conduct, should exist against us. I am forced to make my defence against the envenomed tongue of slander—against accusations which are unsupported by one suspicious event—one colour of evidence—Yet, no other resource presenting itself to my view, I here offer my unvarnished tale to the candid, the feeling and sensible part of my brethren of the human family ; fully persuaded that they will do justice to the subject. Fully persuaded that they will try the various instances of my proceedings by the feelings of their own heart, and, by that criterion, determine whether I merit the approbation or frowns of the virtuous part of society

From there he retells the story over 90 pages and the only message that I can take from it is that of a devastated soul. According to his records, he seems to have been continually beaten down for the actions he took, blamed for accepting the reward, and harassed by the ‘Gentlemen of the City,’ who squeezed him for the money he owed them until he had nothing left. History shows, though, that he overcame all of these challenges. He is credited with bringing the first mills to Shipton and he served in important posts. He never seems to have been a happy person, but he did contribute to the creation of a community and should be remembered for his successes.

Elmer and Job Cushing began to work together on the Shipton project, the huge parcel that should have been enough for themselves and their progeny. Job left it to Elmer, to whom it had been awarded, and moved to Trois Rivières where he lived comfortably and raised a family. It is possible that with Elmer’s debts to the Gentlemen of the City there was no room left for Job. Job’s elder son Hezekiel established himself as a successful farmer in Rigaud and his younger son Lemuel’s fortunes rose in Chatham, on the Ottawa River west of Lachute. Both had put Shipton behind them and moved forward. Elmer Cushing died in Stanstead, Quebec in 1835. He was sixty-seven.

When Lemuel Cushing acquired the right to have a post office called Chatham East in his store in 1841, he was 35 years old, and he and Catherine Hutchins, originally of Lachute, had yet to celebrate their 5^th wedding anniversary. Eventually they would have 13 children, including five daughters and eight sons. He stayed on as postmaster until 1854 and without him, the post office closed. It was James Brock Cushing who took over the position of postman in 1860. If he were their oldest child, he would have been 23 years old. He next succeeded in becoming the postmaster, reopening the post office in 1864, at which time it became Cushing Post Office. He remained the postmaster until 1893 and the hamlet that had grown around it became commonly known as Cushing.

Lemuel Cushing arrived in Chatham in 1822. He was 16 years old and looking for work. He grew up in Trois Rivières and Montreal, but his first work experience was a short apprenticeship with cousins in Peacham, Vermont. Years before, while living in Trois Rivières, his elder brother Hezekiel had been given a horse and $5.00 and told to find his relatives in Peacham, travelling in some cases through trackless forest. Hezekiel, who was only twelve, had accomplished this task before Lemuel was born. He had gone on to serve the British in the War of 1812, and he became a successful farmer in Rigaud. He was an inspiration and a hard act to follow for the young Lemuel.

Lemuel’s father, Job, moved his family to Montreal when Lemuel was eight, and the story of his brother faded into the background as he learned his new life. It was not until his father died seven years later that he considered following his brother’s path. He travelled to Peacham to learn the lessons that had served his brother so well. His stay was short because many young men were leaving Vermont to find work in the rapidly developing Ottawa Valley. Within a year, he was headed back north and facing a new challenge.

In Chatham, Lemuel soon found work in lumbering, and within a short time saw an angle that would allow him to work as a middleman. He managed to parlay his profits into a stable business and was among the most important citizens in Chatham by the time he was 25 years old. To accomplish this task, he traded in shillings, louis, dollars, promissory notes and barter, purchasing and selling in Montreal and wherever else he could while keeping inventory in those pre-electronic days with well organized, hand-written ledgers. His store, built in stone somewhere between the late 1820s and the mid 1830s, survives today. Lemuel married Catherine Hutchins of Lachute in 1836, just before the ‘Troubles.’ The Troubles of 1837 and 1838, also called the Patriot Rebellion and the 1837 Insurrection, are much romanticized today, but at the time they tore society apart, especially in rural areas where the issues were often interpreted around local divisions, pitting the French inhabitants of the seigneuries against English and other immigrant homesteaders. Cushing supplied arms for a militia and led a party of men to St. Eustache, where they saw action in the aftermath of the uprising, stopping rowdy armed men from pillaging, and saving the local records at St. Benoit. Dependent upon good, clear ledgers, it is not surprising that Cushing could appreciate the value of the registry of those documents.

The Cushing family boasted a military tradition on both sides of the border. His grandfather, Job Cushing Sr., rose to the rank of Colonel in the American War of Independence, and fortuitously passed away before his grandson, Lemuel’s much older brother, fought the Americans in the War of 1812. Lemuel’s role in the Patriot Rebellion would have given him pause. The patriots, after all, were inspired in large part by Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the United States. Colonel Job Cushing had served with Benedict Arnold, but he had not joined Arnold when the latter changed sides. In fact, it must have been difficult for an American war hero of that time to see two of his sons move to a British colony. We can speculate on why Lemuel’s father had left the United States. His uncle Elmer, the most colourful family member at the time, could well have been the cause.

The Cushing family, including 5 children, moved from Hingham, Norfolk, England in 1638, and all ended their lives in Hingham, Plymouth, Massachusetts. The coincidence of the Hingham placenames suggests they had a strong influence, and the Cushing name has risen to prominence many times throughout American history. Lemuel Cushing, for whom Cushing, Quebec is named, was one of these Cushings of stature. He acquired the famous Caledonia Springs resort in Ontario, some 20 km west of Hawkesbury and bought an island in Portland, Maine, where he built the Ottawa House. He held important civic positions in Chatham and his son, also Lemuel Cushing, a respected lawyer, served briefly as member for Argenteuil in the federal parliament. But how his branch of the family became Canadian is a story that leads to another, much different placename story.

Elmer Cushing came to Montreal not as a Loyalist, but more as a young man seeking opportunity. Montreal was a boomtown in the period after American independence. This was the time that Molson’s Brewery and other all-Canadian enterprises began, and the city, flooded with immigrants, many from the United States, was rapidly growing and changing to fulfill its new role as the largest British city in North America. Elmer set up a hostel called the American Coffee House. While he had some success with it, he soon found that he had grown too fast and was in debt to what he called the ‘Gentlemen of the City.’ Around this same time, he received a visitor. David Mc’Lane was an American who solicited Elmer Cushing’s cooperation to set up a safe house for an advance party who declared that they intended to recapture the colony for France.

From Mc’Lane’s point of view, Cushing must have looked like a fair bet. He was an American, son of a hero of the American Revolutionary War, and could have been judged a sympathizer with such an American-French plot. He was down on his luck, being seriously in debt to members of the British elite, and owned an establishment called the American Coffee House. Mc’Lane was wrong. Was David Mc’Lane really a spy, sent to prepare for an invasion, or was he just a big talker? The invasion never happened. Is it because the colonial authorities were tipped off? Was it nipped in the bud, or did Mc’Lane fall victim to a very nervous and paranoid administration?

Cushing lost the American Coffee House to his creditors, but in a peculiar twist the colonial authority awarded him Shipton Township, an area of 58,692 acres. Was it compensation for service to the Crown in turning a spy in?

The English business elite at that time had no idea how the Canadiens would react to such an invasion, and they lived in an atmosphere of fear and insecurity. The rebels who led the American War of Independence had already tried to capture Canada, and that without the French flag waving at the head of their troops. To add to their concerns, the French were actively trying to get Louisiana back from the Spanish and were supporting Jefferson for president with the understanding that the Americans would help them invade and retake New France. Stephen Sewell, the younger brother of the Attorney General, Jonathan Sewell, was convinced that Citizen Pierre-Auguste Adet, the French representative to the American government, had already secretly visited Montreal in preparation for the eventual invasion.

Looking back, it is possible that Mc’Lane was associated with people who were planning an invasion, but it is also possible that he was just a braggart. In his memoirs published in Stanstead in 1826, Elmer Cushing went to great lengths to explain that he would not participate in any such scheme and declared that he told Mc’Lane so right up front. He records a long, chiding speech that he made to Mc’Lane, pointed enough to warn Mc’Lane to get out of the colony if he really was an agent of an organised movement.

To be continued…

Most Canadians are familiar with the story of Wolfe and Montcalm, the two generals who died in the battle of the Plains of Abraham. In the Laurentians, though, Montcalm didn’t die but lived on to defeat…Weir. It is this second, less well-known debacle that has brought us back to re-examine the history of the naming of Weir and Montcalm.

The names of towns and villages come from many different sources, including the names of mill owners and post offices, but there are also the names that the Ministry of Colonisation assigned to different regions as they developed. In the Laurentians, these regions, called cantons in French and townships in English, often carry names that commemorate Great Britain and its colonies in the nineteenth century. Beresford, Abercrombie, Howard and Rawdon come to mind, as well as the townships of Montcalm and Wolfe, sitting side by side but originally accessible by totally different routes. Imagine a little committee choosing these names. What guided them? Did they wish to re-enact old battles? The name Wolfe was given to a region settled originally by French Catholics, while Montcalm started off with both English-speaking Protestants and French Catholics. Wolfe had the little village of La Repousse, and Montcalm had …Weir. La Repousse’s name described an action, to push you back. It came from the steep hill that one had to climb to perhaps the highest elevation of any settlement in the Laurentians. Had English Protestants settled the region, they may have been comfortable with the township’s name, but French Catholics were unlikely to have embraced the name of the man who had defeated Montcalm so instead, they listened to what the place did. It pushed back. The Church didn’t think much of that name, so they named the new parish after a forgotten Christian martyr from Roman times, St. Faustin. It has recently returned to something the place also does and is now called Mont Blanc, for its ski-hill.

The origins of the name of Weir may not have represented an English Protestant challenge to the prospect of living in Montcalm but who knows the secret motivations of the person or committee that chose it? In a long-ago discussion with a resident expert on the history of Weir, Claudette Smith-Pilon, she told me that she believed the name Weir originated back somewhere in the last half of the 1800s. In her searches, she met a fellow named Stéphane Sigouin who owned a house that once belonged to the Duncan family, and that he had found building material in his walls with the stamped name and date: Weir, 1857, or 1887; the print was smudged. The Duncan family owned a mill and at one time they were the major employers in the region. It is possible that they made materials for use in housing, although Smith-Pilon suggested that the stamp should more likely be associated with Northland Lumber, another company that had established itself the area. Whoever created the stamp, the name Weir associated with such early dates has brought people living there to ask who Weir was.

Most people seem to agree that Weir’s name came from William Alexander Weir, MLA for Argenteuil and also Superior Court judge for the district of Pontiac. He was born in Montreal in 1858. Obviously if the stamp actually dates from 1857 – or even 1887 – there would have had to be another, older Weir. The judge would have turned 29 when the building material Stéphane Sigouin found was originally stamped. Neither the Duncan Mill nor the village called Weir even existed in 1857.

According to the Commission de Toponymie, the township of Montcalm received settlers as early as 1853 and was proclaimed in 1857. It had several different villages, including Weir, which began to be settled in the mid 1870s. It could be argued that the Weir stamp commemorates the year that the township was proclaimed, but Weir was not the township’s name. Let’s suppose that the date on the stamp was 1887. They would have to find a different, older Weir, and modern amateur historians have accommodated by proposing one. According to Basil Kerr and Bevan Jones, in The History of Weir, Judge Weir was the son of a general who had served in the War of 1812 and was subsequently asked to open up the Weir territory for settlement. I could not find a general named Weir associated with the War of 1812. Judge Weir’s father, however, arrived from Scotland in 1852, so a General Weir would have had to be, at best, a more distant relative. In any case, we have found no records of this older Weir, but Kerr and Jones also mention that it had a previous name, Saginaw.

To further muddy the water, C. Thomas’s history of Argenteuil, published in 1896, states under the heading Montcalm, “This Township, which is of recent formation is not mentioned in the list of Municipalities in the Province of Quebec, published by the Government in 1886.” That would suggest that it may have been considered a part of another region and may have even been proclaimed under another name. Thomas makes no reference at all to a settlement called Weir, and Thomas was writing in English for a local English readership.

We know that there was a Municipality of the Township of Montcalm, and that there was a village, a hamlet named Weir in the township. The Commission de Toponymie also tells us that the municipality of the township was first called Harrington and Union and that the township changed its name officially to the Municipality of the Township of Montcalm in 1907. The township was huge, and it comprised a few little settlements, but Weir was only one of them, and while Weir was mostly English speaking, there were a lot of French Catholics up and down the range roads. The Montfort Colonization Railroad ran through Weir in 1897, and they helped things out by calling the station Weir. The post office in the village of Weir was established with that name in 1904, and the post office that originally serviced Montcalm changed its name to Sixteen Island Lake in 1898.

One can imagine that the residents of this township would begin to feel a little confused, losing their Montcalm post office to Sixteen Island Lake, then getting a new one named Weir in a small hamlet where there was already a train station with the same name, then establishing the name Montcalm for the municipality of the township. Since the township was a political entity and Weir was only a post office and a railroad station, both beyond local control, a lot of residents of Weir began to feel under siege after 1907. Should the railroad station or the post office close, the importance of the name Weir would be reduced. Already there was no political justification for the name, and the old English families were not replenishing themselves. In 1962, the worst happened; CN, which had purchased the line in 1924, closed the Weir station.

We have to go back a few steps and look at Weir’s earlier name, Saginaw. This is a name with the same root as Saguenay and Saguay, both referring to the outlets of rivers and a place to install a … fishing weir. There is only a three-foot elevation difference between Lac Rond and Beaven Lake, but Lac Rond is surrounded by high hills and is fed from another small mountain lake as well as streams, so the winding stream leading to Beaven Lake may have been an excellent place for a fishing weir. Stephen Jakes Beaven, for whom Beaven Lake is named, set himself up on the outlet of Beaven Lake in order to trade with the Weskarinis Algonquin who would regularly travel along the Rouge River where Beaven Lake ultimately drains. It is a longish detour to visit a trader, but a reliable fish supply on the slow-moving creek at the inlet from Lac Rond may have been an incentive and a good reason for Beaven to have located there instead of on the Rouge River. Maybe the name is much older than the English settlers could have imagined. Maybe that fish supply had reliably fed people for a thousand years.

Weir held out for a further thirty years but was finally overwhelmed in 1992 when the municipal council voted to change the name from the Municipality of the Township of Montcalm to simply ‘Municipality of Montcalm.’ It took a further 12 years for Canada Post to change the name of the post office from Weir to Montcalm.

The weary warriors of Weir have all but capitulated, but they should take heart that they held out for a lot longer than General Montcalm and his forces did in 1759, and that they lost to a formidable bureaucratic adversary that could have stymied General Wolfe. If their name choice was taken from the Algonquin usage of their waterway, though, they could have just kept the name Saginaw and saved themselves a lot of questions about the Weirs.

Special thanks to Claudette Smith-Pilon of Weir, (or Montcalm, or Saginaw).

Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine trudged through the mud of a spring thaw on a March day in 1841. He and his supporters were in good spirits. Lafontaine had been their Terrebonne member in the Assembly for two terms before the rebellion. He had rejected violence and had broken with his Patriote party over it, but it mattered little when the Assembly was dismissed in 1837.

The new governor, Charles Edward Poulett Thomson, had won no-one’s affection. The story going around was that he had been sent to force the two colonies, Lower and Upper Canada, to unite by whatever means he deemed necessary as long as he followed the recommendations of Lord Durham and went through the motions of respecting the constitutional rights the Crown had accorded both colonies. In Lower Canada he named a special council of 100 men to vote on the motion that he knew would be unpopular, and he worried that even this select group might object. He chose an early winter storm in 1839 to convoke them, giving little notice. Only fifteen braved the weather.

He chose well. He could bully and threaten a small group. The idea of uniting the two colonies was not new and it had been resisted since it was first raised in the 1820s. Few people understood Lord Durham’s reasoning when he presented his report to the government in London. Nicknamed Radical Jack, he hoped to solve the local problems by showing people that they could stand up to the elite British controllers known as the Family Compact in Upper Canada and the Chateau Clique in Lower Canada. These groups did what they could to get Durham recalled – he was not on their side. He had the time, though, to study the situation. He had to get some of the leaders of the rebellion out of the colony before they called for their hanging. He succeeded in saving them, but he had enemies back in England too, who got him recalled on the grounds that he overstepped his jurisdiction in sending them to Jamaica and other British colonies.

Durham saw that the two colonies were distinct. Upper Canada was much smaller and the elites and the middle class were largely of British or British-American descent.

Lower Canada was much larger. He summed up his observation of Lower Canada this way. “I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state. I found a struggle, not of principles, but of races; and I perceived that it would be idle to attempt any amelioration of laws or institutions, until we could first succeed in terminating the deadly animosity that now separates the inhabitants of Lower Canada into the hostile divisions of French and English.” He saw that Upper Canada had an experienced middle class, but in Lower Canada, the differences had become defined around ethnicity. Even though there were wealthy, successful French businessmen, the Chateau Clique didn’t want them. The British and British-Americans among the middle class were a minority and they broke down into two groups, one that made common cause with the Patriotes and other reformers and one that assumed it was part of the elite because it wasn’t French. It was not a healthy situation.

Thomson was promised a lordship if he could get Durham’s recommendations through – though he didn’t need to understand their intent. Once he was finished getting his stormy night endorsement from Lower Canada, he moved on to York (Toronto) to get the same endorsement from Upper Canada. He did not expect them to bargain, but their terms would still allow him to show he had united the two colonies. The deal he accepted was that Upper Canada would have the same weight, the same number of seats in the new assembly as Lower Canada would have. The two colonies would become the Province of Canada, or the province of Canada East and Canada West and Thomson would get his title. His next task was to hold an election that would show that the majority of the newly elected assembly supported his executive council. He knew what to do.

As Lafontaine and his supporters trudged through the mud to the small English settlement of New Glasgow, they confronted a gang of English thugs blocking their passage. Lafontaine understood. Elections were not all held on the same day and there were no secret ballots. It was a rowdy affair, and Lafontaine knew that even an appeal to the military to disperse them would be ignored as it had been elsewhere. Lafontaine knew that this was another trick of Thomson’s. He saw his supporters sizing up the thugs and preparing for a fight. He knew some would be killed and he knew the court would not be with them.

Lafontaine withdrew his candidacy and led his supporters away.

The news carried the story that Lafontaine had been defeated in Terrebonne.

Lafontaine, though, had been working with Robert Baldwin in Canada West. Baldwin led a party of reformers who had reached out to Lafontaine and his party to stand together against the elites.

A generation earlier, two great men had seen and understood the rule of law that was embedded in the constitution of 1791. They saw that it gave them rights, but that they were going to have to fight for them. One of these men was Pierre Stanslaus Bédard, a lawyer, founder of the Parti Canadien and the newspaper that carried the same name. The other was William Warren Baldwin, a medical doctor and lawyer who had arrived in York in 1799 with his family. Bédard’s political party became le Parti des Patriotes, and Baldwin groomed his son Robert to pursue the values that could challenge the Family Compact. Robert Baldwin and Lafontaine had opted to work together against Thomson and his plans to hold the assembly to a consultative body only, reporting to his executive council. The two men consulted with William Warren who offered to stand aside and propose that Lafontaine run in his York riding.

Thomson had accepted to fulfil Durham’s recommendations that included the possibility that the assembly, acting in majority, could form a responsible government. Accepting did not mean that he believed, and he needed the Tories, those conservative members who would accept their advisory role to the Executive Council, confirming the governor’s dominant position in the colony.

The assembly represented the people and were the ones responsible for raising taxes to finance the running of the colony. They, like the Patriotes before them, objected to collecting the taxes with only an advisory role in the government. Responsible government meant that they should administer too. If the Assembly were to elect a majority of members who agreed with them, then they would form not just an advisory group but a government responsible for administering the taxes they collected. Lafontaine’s and Baldwin’s joint objective was to obtain that majority.

Charles Edward Poulett Thomson achieved his goal and became Lord Sydenham, but even with illegal, heavy, sometimes violent interference with the 1841 election, he created a stormy, unstable assembly that he could not control. Compounded by an unsustainable pace of trying to manipulate the assembly, he had a riding accident that left him with an infection leading to lockjaw and he died in mid September.

From his defeat in Terrebonne in 1841 at the hands of Thomson’s bullies, it took Lafontaine along with Baldwin seven years to achieve their goal of responsible government. Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine became our first prime minister in 1848 in what was then called the Province of Canada.