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.

When I was young, I visited the pollywog pond, looked for caves and followed tracks in the woods. I also followed the Bell linemen whenever I found one working on the telephone lines around our house in Val Morin. I asked questions and watched. They almost always assumed the role of friendly uncle, answering and explaining.

In those days, we could set our clock to the train leaving the station or passing by, originally trailing steam and smoke, at the same time every day.

Years later, working with a group of volunteers trying to save the CP rail line, I met some of the men, CP engineers and planners – yes, they were all men back then. Friendly young men, not much older than I was. They reminded me of the Bell linemen from my youth. They explained that they could not compete with trucking or cars. The rail infrastructure needed rebuilding, but there was not enough business to justify the costs. At every election some politician declared that your support of their party would mean better roads – trains were not controlled the same way because the government at the time they were set up did not have the vision to understand public infrastructure on such a scale. I was told that there were some busier train lines near cities that needed the rails and the quality of the steel in our rails from St. Jerome to Ste. Agathe was first class. They could serve the private owner better somewhere else. The steel north of Ste. Agathe was eventually sold to Gillette to make razor blades. One could argue that the railway lines should have belonged to the government, but you would have had to make that argument back in the 1870s.

Canada once had the most advanced telephone system in the world. We had copper lines running to every house in the countryside. Our governments gave monopoly rights to the telephone company provided that it supplied every house, every voter. It worked for a long time.

Then car phones, followed by cellphones, entered the marketplace. Next came VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol. The quality and reliability of these new services varied. The clear, simple reliability of a copper wire connection is hard to beat. Since it is powered from a central place, it works even if the power goes off. In a prolonged power failure, it remained generally reliable. It was low voltage direct current, two thin copper lines going to each phone, and they were bundled tightly with all the neighbours’ lines, so it was very resistant to those storms that can take out our electricity. They were available allowing us to tell the electric company that their lines were down. The power lines could not be bundled the same way because they risked shorting out. The high voltage lines travel at a distance, and that also lets them shed heat more easily.

There was something that bugged us about this old copper phone system though. We perceived it as basic and we couldn’t understand why it was so expensive. It was old technology, rugged and reliable, but it needed to be maintained, and it couldn’t compete financially with the cheap new wireless cell and internet options. It couldn’t even support a whole lot of extra features.

But if you dialed 911, said nothing and dropped the receiver, the emergency services would find you.

With fewer people in the neighbourhood using land lines, the price had to rise to maintain those who did or the service had to erode. We don’t want to pay for it any more than we want to pay the rates that would allow the railroad to rebuild its infrastructure.

There is a strong element of Joni Mitchell’s not knowing what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. Bell’s copper phone lines cannot be maintained for a tiny minority – the costs per user are too high. The system was not being renewed, and the existing lines were failing. The linemen were as amazing as they always had been, keeping a dying system functioning through sheer determination and their local knowledge.

When it became too unreliable, our options were limited. The cell signal worked only with a booster on the roof. VoIP was a possibility, but its quality was still not up to scratch. It worked with clear images because a lot of our comprehension is enhanced by seeing the face of the person talking. Both systems are useless in a power failure, though. We were dependent on electricity to run the booster and the computer, and if the power failure is long enough, even the cell tower’s backup power will fail. Copper lines didn’t.

For most power failures, a good electrical backup system could carry us. Our computer, and even our UPS (uninterrupted power supply) battery, will either refuse to work or be damaged by electricity from a generator, and additional battery packs are generally based on ‘rare earth’ minerals, lithium, and so on, meaning that they are not very ‘green.’ Yes, that is correct: Electric cars are not ‘green.’ Cars are not ‘green.’ Electric ones might be better than petroleum ones, but the best action is to keep the old car going for as long as possible.

The only option to replace the copper lines that Bell can no longer service is to install a good quality UPS. Clean and sort of green – and rechargeable from the generator, remembering that the generators mostly run on gas. We could also use solar cells to recharge them, but we have come to depend upon the cellphone option for emergencies.

In the meantime, we lost our rugged, reliable old systems based on steel rails, copper lines and low tech. Don’t blame the companies or the government. It’s the consumers’ fault. We do not value what we have, and advertisers play on that, so we convince ourselves that we need the latest thing. We no longer appreciate the solid technology that carried us through the 20^th century, and no doubt the children would prefer to play Minecraft or some other computer game than to explore caves or visit the pollywog pond. I can’t blame them. Our pond was filled in to improve the road.

Alter and Sima Levine arrived in Montreal in 1903 along with their seven children. They met others here who, like them, had fled the pogroms in Russia. Their new country was full of hope and freedom. There was no dark authoritarian presence watching their moves. There were no pogroms, random massacres of Jews, and the immigrants could freely share their stories, hopes and fears. Almost drunk with a sense of freedom, a number of these new Canadians decided to establish a commune off in the countryside where they could farm and reorganise their world. In Russia, it was illegal for Jews to be farmers. Many lived in the Pale of Settlement, rural territories where their security was always at risk from any powerful group that happened by looking for young men to serve in the military, or just to see what they could take.

What could challenge their vision in this new land where only hard work stood between them and their ideals? Small groups in our society were beginning to experiment with the ideas of Karl Marx and intellectuals everywhere believed that we could achieve utopia simply with a social system. One of these groups decided to test the concepts of Marx and Engels on a farm they could reach from the railroad in Ste. Agathe.

The family names of these social pioneers are still with us today: Ofner, Gillitz, Corn, Shuldiner, Smith, and a family by the name of Levine who were too numerous to join the commune but managed to acquire a separate farm nearby. These communists believed that they could create a new society in Les Cantons du Nord, the great north, where functioning farms with open, grazed fields could be purchased reasonably. The purchase price of the farms in Ste. Agathe should have been warning enough that their project was ill starred. Unlike the Canadiens, who had walked through almost uncharted woodlands and hacked down and burned the forest, these new pioneers arrived by train and beheld rolling, green fields, fenced pastures and roads.

Bucolic and practically free, the stony fields soon revealed their dark secrets. The soil is generally nutrient-poor and very thin, sitting on glacially compacted rocky gravel leaving crops vulnerable to drought even while small lakes and brooks shimmered in the hot sun. The frost-free season was short: It was unlikely to freeze between the 12^th of June and the 1^st of September, a period of only 80 days, but it had seen flurries in late August. While they could not rely on the weather in summer, watching helplessly as crops baked in dry fields or froze before they could be harvested, they could count on being stranded for days at a time in the heavy snows of mid- to late winter and would watch the thaw turn to torrents in the spring, cutting through roads as the snows rushed away for the season. The commune lasted less than five years.

Sir Mortimer Davis, a successful Jewish tobacco magnate whose own family came from England and who had a large private estate in Ste. Agathe, had extended interest-free credit to the commune through the Baron de Hirsh Institute. He ended up with the unpleasant task of taking the farm over when the young communists failed to repay their loan. Most of them had abandoned the commune, and Davis turned it over to a doctor, helping him set up Mount Sinai Hospital for the treatment of tuberculosis. Alter Levine, who was older than the commune members, had acquired his own farm on a lake nearby. He could not leave so easily. While he had wanted to be near the commune, he had a whole family to feed. Now with eight children, they must have practically formed a commune themselves. Alter and Sima had fled Russia to protect one of their children from the authorities. Either he was fleeing the death-sentence of military service or he had joined an illegal organisation that was protesting the Czar’s government. The latter could explain the family’s desire to live near the commune. Alter fell into a deep depression after the commune’s failure. Instead of heading the family and diligently farming, he became a suicidal burden. Sima, his wife, assigned her sixteen-year-old son Leo the task of checking up on his father to make sure that, in his depressed state, he did himself no harm. One day, Leo cut his father down from the rafters of the barn where the elder Levine had tried to hang himself. Another time he found his father bleeding in the woods and dragged him home, helping his mother nurse him back to health. Leo always remembered what his father told him while he was healing: “Next time you won’t find me.”

Sophie Levine Gross, the youngest and their only child born in Canada, remembered the hardships of those early days. She had no memory of her father. He made good on his promise and his body was never found. Her mother, Sima Levine, was left with 8 children ranging in age from 25 to 2 who, with her, were learning the local languages. They had fifteen acres of field under cultivation, a barn, a horse, a small herd of cattle and 50 chickens. Sophie’s earliest memories included receiving a new birth certificate because the farmhouse burned down and all their papers were lost.

Sima Levine of Trout Lake, the widow of Alter, must have been built of iron. After her husband had made good on his promise to kill himself somewhere around 1910, she carried on with her 8 children, farming their small holding. Leo, a tough, tiny man, was heavily burdened by his failure to stop his father’s suicide. He became distant from his family even though Sima did her best to encourage him. She entrusted him with the funds to cover their fire insurance, but we will never really know what he did with that money. Fire was a constant danger in those days. There was no safe heating source, and the structures were made from wood that dried thoroughly in walls that let the wind through during the long, cold winters. Everyone had experience with fires. Chimneys, stoves and fuels were not standardised, and daily chores occupied all of people’s time.

Never fully forgiven for the fire, Leo struck out on his own, farming next door to his mother and siblings. Sima, with her other children, slowly rebuilt the house. She also began to take in boarders, people who were visiting family at Mount Sinai Hospital, or others who had come to Ste. Agathe for the tuberculosis rest cure and could not find room at the hospital. Over time, their home evolved into the Trout Lake Inn and her sons ran it together with their mother. The inn was on the north side of the lake and became a popular destination, finally bringing the family some prosperity.

As Sima’s other children grew up, they found other ways of making a living. Ste. Agathe had become a prosperous destination and there was work in different services and willing employers. It is likely that the Inn could not support them all, in any case, and the Trout Lake Inn closed. What happened to Sima as she aged is not recorded.

Leo was the only one to continue farming. He built some cabins for rental to enhance his income, too. The town was booming from tourism. He met a woman a little smaller than he was and fell in love. She, who had the same name as Leo’s youngest sister Sophie, was one of the Eidlows, a Montreal family who holidayed in the area. Sophie Eidlow was forbidden from seeing Leo. He was certainly looked down upon, a small-time farmer from the sticks. She deserved better. Her parents found her a successful Montreal dentist who would be able to look after her every need. Feigning acquiescence, she accepted to marry the man her parents chose and asked for their honeymoon to be at Trout Lake. According to stories revolving around them, when the groom picked her up to carry her over the threshold of their honeymoon cabin, he shoved the door open with his foot and there found Leo sitting with a shotgun on his lap.

Leo and Sophie, both blackballed, made up in determination what they lacked in resources. They provided farm produce and rooms for guests, many who first came simply to visit family members at the hospital. Over time, they created Sun Valley Lodge, a popular resort, and found other opportunities to make money. When Sir Mortimer Davis died in 1927, his estate was liquidated, and Leo purchased a number of the outbuildings, dragging them behind a team of horses around Lac des Sables and over the hill to set them on foundations on his farm. These houses were rented to his guests for longer periods and in time were sold to them as summer cottages. Because the road ran along the lakeshore, they were placed up the hill, overlooking the lake, and the Levines kept a very deep setback of land between the road and the cottages. Rumours were rife that the government was going to widen the road and they wanted to receive the expropriation money. Thwarting their plans, a new road was built behind the mountain, eventually becoming the Route 117 that we know today.

Unfortunately for the Levines the fields could no longer produce, being filled with cottages, and, with most of their customers preferring the idea of renting or buying a small cottage, the hotel became redundant. Undaunted, the Levines set up a summer camp for the many children. They themselves had one son whom Sophie home-schooled, telling everyone that her ‘Sonny’ would one day become a brain surgeon.

The Levine farm grew into the small Jewish country community that still exists around Trout Lake. While all of the other Levines moved away, establishing careers in the town or further, Leo and Sophie persisted. Eventually they sold the balance of the mountain, the grazing area above their once-productive fields, to the Gentemens who created Chanteclair Estates, a development based on Swiss chalets, all with views looking over Leo’s fields, and all sharing his beach on the lake. Leo told anyone who would listen that the mountain had been stolen from him. Predeceased by Sophie, Leo passed away in 1989 at the Mount Sinai Hospital, a tough little man to the end of his ninety-nine years. He and Sophie were survived by their son, Dr. Mark (Sonny) Levine, a neurologist having fulfilled his mother’s ambition. Together with his wife, three children and nine grandchildren, they lived in California.

The community that grew up on their farm consists largely of city people who came to Trout Lake for a variety of reasons, the dream of a commune long forgotten.

The Township of Abercrombie encompasses the municipalities of Ste. Adele, Ste. Marguerite Station and Mont Rolland. Touching both St. Hippolyte and Shawbridge (now part of Prévost), it was originally named to commemorate General James Abercromby. Exactly why he should have been so honoured is a bit of a mystery. It could be simply someone’s sense of humour, an encrypted message to the future inviting us to look back and see that men credited as being among the victors in war are not always winners.

Abercromby, who spelled his name with a ‘y,’ as found on some older maps, was one of the slew of British generals who played their parts during the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763, considered by some historians as the first global conflict. One of the sparks that exploded into combustion was friction between the French and the English in the Ohio Valley when a young George Washington, interloping in French territory, surprised a French party under the command of the Sieur de Jumonville. Jumonville had been sent from Fort Du Quesne to admonish Washington for violating the Peace Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen 1748). When Washington’s men saw the surprised French going for their guns, Jumonville managed to make his presence felt and bring a calm over the confrontation. Through his translator, he successfully communicated that he and his party were messengers for the French authorities, and then he began to read a proclamation. As his translator repeated it in English, a member of the English party, a Seneca chieftain remembered as Half-King, shot Jumonville in the head at point-blank range. This was followed by the assassination of nine other members of the French party and the rest, except for one, were taken prisoner.

The sole escapee returned to Fort Du Quesne, and the French responded by overwhelming Washington at his hastily erected Fort Necessity and serving him with a humiliating defeat, allowing him and his men to return to British territory unarmed and on foot. The humiliation cannot be overstated because the Indigenous Nations in the Ohio Valley were crucial allies to both European powers, and they, lacking any other means of evaluating these two sets of warring Whites, tended to back the stronger side. In fact, Half-King had been wooed by the French but had adjudged the English to be a stronger force. While he had been let into the French confidence and knew, according to the French, that Jumonville’s was not a war party, he seems to have concluded either that the French desire for peace and discussion was a sign of weakness or that it was in the interest of his own people for the French and English to fight. As a result, after advising the French of Washington’s presence, he led Washington to the small French party coming to advise them they were on French-claimed territory, instigating confrontation. His action helped start the largest global war that the world had yet seen, but he was equally disappointed in both parties after the French overwhelmed Fort Necessity and then let their captives go.

This remote skirmish inflated into a world conflict when the British Crown decided to retaliate. Even though they had been at peace since the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, they were trade rivals who were incapable of sharing territory. Their differences were not limited to the Ohio Valley, but France was England’s major rival for a worldwide commercial empire, and the ensuing war would be one of European, and thus world, hegemony, the beginning of the English world hegemony that we lived with until the 1940s. The first objective of the British was to eliminate French naval power. The adversaries, who rapidly lined up against each other, were the British, Prussians and Hanoverians against the French, Austrians, Swedish, Saxons, Russians and eventually the Spanish. General Abercromby, who had achieved his status through political connections and had little field experience, was dispatched to oversee the English military operations in the colonies. The French sent more troops under the command of General Montcalm.

One of the first objectives of the English was to capture Fort Carillon (Fort Ticonderoga) situated at the southern end of Lake Champlain. Abercromby, appointed at the request of King George II, was told to rely on one of his most experienced generals, George Howe, to plan and execute the attack. Montcalm, the defender, had 4000 troops; Howe had 15,000. They would have to travel up Lake George and then along five miles of river and portages to Lake Champlain. Along the river they could easily root out the advance parties and capture the small settlements of the French. The first confrontation was with troops trying to return to Fort Carillon. In the ensuing skirmish, Howe was killed.

The death of this crucial leader left Abercromby at a loss for what to do. He dallied so long that his troops nicknamed him Mrs. Nambie-Crombie. By the time he finally resumed the advance, Montcalm had had ample time to receive reinforcements and surround Fort Carillon with barriers of brush and fallen trees. Abercromby ordered the storming of these barricades but neglected to use his superior artillery. As the battle progressed, the British troops were bogged down and slaughtered, and when the dust settled, they had lost 2000 men and were forced to retreat. The French losses were 350 killed and wounded. Abercromby, overwrought and panic-stricken, ordered a retreat and withdrew, not only along the five miles of portages that they had captured, but to the far end of Lake George.

When word of the catastrophe got back to England, Abercromby was recalled and General Jeffrey Amherst, named by the British-Huguenot general Jean-Louis Ligonier, was sent out in his place. Amherst would successfully push all the way to Montreal, taking it in 1760, the year after Wolfe, also endorsed by Ligonier, had taken Quebec City.

Abercromby found himself a safe seat in Parliament from which he became a staunch supporter of the Stamp Tax and opponent of any opinion that favoured the colonists in their bid for independence. The Cantons du nord (Northern Townships) were created to encourage the Canadiens to stay with the British in the early 1800s rather than leave for the new American republic that Ambercromby had so viscerally opposed. This township still carries his name, but today, only notaries and surveyors seeking to confirm chains of title in that early township will see it in old forgotten archives as a goading reminder of a loser in the roster of Great Britain’s victorious generals of the Seven Years’ War.

Mom had been a downhill and giant slalom ski champion in her late teens and early twenties. She won the Dominion Ladies’ Championship downhill race

at Banff, Alberta in 1937 and two years later she was the first woman to win the Kandahar, the first year that women could participate, but she learned how to ski only after that, when Hermann Gadner asked her if she wanted to learn to ski. She knew better than to walk away from the offer with a haughty rejection and so became the first woman to teach skiing in Canada. Thanks to him, her ski passion became teaching and she stopped racing.

In 1961, Mom landed a job in skiing. Andy Hamilton, a semi-retired insurance broker, knew her by reputation and asked her to manage Summit Sauvage. It was a ski hill that was very close by – about a mile’s walk from where we lived at Lac Raymond.

Judging from the condition of the lift and the hill groomer, Summit Sauvage had been operating for years, and from 1961, skiing would become the focus of our lives. For those of us who grew up in the Laurentians during the 1950s and ’60s, there was always a small local ski hill nearby. It had begun a generation earlier when Alex Foster and Moïse Paquette independently invented the rope tow, one in Shawbridge and the other in Ste. Agathe. In her younger days, my mother skied up the hills before skiing down again and Jackrabbit Johannsen deplored the opportunity lost by being pulled up the hill.

Our school bus stopped not far from the ski hill. My new school, an English Catholic afterthought in the front of a chapel in Ste. Adele, had four classrooms, seven grades, and four intrepid Acadienne lay missionary teachers. The ski hill was much more interesting.

Mont Sauvage is an unusually high peak. It is in the south part of Val Morin and back then it had a fire tower up top. The tower was unmanned and climbing it was not for the queasy, but the view was magnificent, way above the treetops. We were told that our hill was the second-highest peak in the Laurentians, but people have also made the same claim about a few other hills. From the fire tower to the bottom of the slope represented only 60% of the height above the valley floor. Just across the old, meandering Route 11, now called Rue Morin, was Mont Belair, built by Alcide Belair when he saw that the chalet owners were coming for the winter holidays. He had a rope tow at first – boy did it go fast! To maintain his privacy in the summer, he left his bull to graze alone on the slopes.

My mother had advised her employer that Summit Sauvage needed a beginner’s trail. He authorized her to cut one. She did. It was narrow, safe-ish and a mile long. She didn’t actually run the machines, but she walked, marked the trail’s path and oversaw the work. We were often with her on that project, a wonderful life for an eleven-year-old. I learned about the narrowness and safeness the following winter because it was the only place I ever caught my pole while going as fast as I could. That hurt, but no-one ever knew because there was no-one else around. A real beginner, though, would never have had the opportunity to pick up speed on that run.

There was a T-bar and grooming equipment, probably things that a more mechanical person would have considered as important. My Mom was going to learn fast.

When the season began, we had the hill to ourselves – us and our cousins and friends. There was some marketing, but it was not a high-profile place and there were many small competing ski hills. We all had to be available if Mom needed us though, like the day a major storm dumped over a foot of new snow and the grooming equipment groaned, coughed and stopped. It promised to be an excellent ski weekend if the trails could be groomed.

Mom called on her kids, a slew of nieces and nephews, and friends. She had taught most of us how to ski. The lift was fine, so our job was to go up to the top, form lines and pack the trails all the way down. It was one of the most exciting ski days of my youth. The conditions were incredible. After packing for a bit, we each skied down, caught the lift back up, skied to where we had packed, and continued work. I suspect that all of us who were there that weekend still remember. By eleven, the hill was a skier’s dream – lightly packed powder. Mom knew skiing.

In the course of time, we met the mechanical guy, Pete Gilmore. He was huge and always greasy but that didn’t help things work. He taught us all we needed to know about guiding clients into the right position and putting the T-bar under their bums while he puzzled away to keep the machines going or took the groomer apart trying to get it started.

We all have stories of our early days of skiing, regardless of the hill. Our ski equipment was minimal. I had low-profile lace boots and wooden skis with a harness that trapped the toe-end of my boot in and relied on a cable behind my ankle to keep it there. I skied so far forward that I didn’t really need the cable. I remember once skiing at Mont Castor, a similar-sized hill in Ste. Agathe. I flew over the wooden jump and, landing flat on my skis watched as both harnesses popped open. It made no difference. I skied to the bottom before even bothering to check them. Those same skis and harnesses could be used for cross-country by releasing the cable from a clip on the side of the boot.

For me, and many like me, those were the magic years of downhill skiing. To get an extra run in on a good day, we would forfeit our lifts home and ski along back roads, sliding along snowbanks, sometimes for miles, depending on which ski hill we were leaving. When the taller boots came, I felt like I was in a cast instead of a ski boot. I gave it up and stuck to trails through the woods.

Binns, an engineer, used his convalescence to build a log home on a parcel of land he acquired from the Seale family. While he may not originally have intended his home to be a business project, in 1934, in the thick of the Depression he sold it, bought the adjacent parcel of land and built another one. That was how the Log Village of Lake Echo began. His round log homes nostalgically recall an earlier period when the forest was a driving force behind our economy. Their appeal was so great that even today they are cherished and prized.

When the first Europeans arrived, they were confronted with a woodland that stretched from the East Coast to the Great Lakes. The forest reached 90 to 150 feet high, with trees in some areas as high as 250 feet. To put it in perspective, it was a 9 to 15-storey high forest, and in some places as high as 25 storeys. By contrast, most of our local forests today are 4 to 6 storeys high. Our ancestors saw this magnificent forest as overgrown fields. Catharine Parr Traill, the author of The Backwoods of Canada, sailing up the St. Lawrence in 1832, is quoted as having seen only “…a great portion of forest which it will take years of labour to remove.” This attitude was the first reaction of the newcomers, right back to the 1500s.

We have never fully appreciated that the First Nations of the northeast were a woodland people. Their civilization lived in a huge pine forest, and they guided it in a way that was, and still is, unrecognizable to us. They burned carefully under the canopy, encouraging new growth to attract grazing animals, and controlled what would seem to us wild herds of deer, culling out the weak. They did not stand a chance against the Europeans because a basic understanding in their society was seeing themselves in a family of plants, animals and spirits and accepting their role as the youngest sibling. The concept of ownership ran contrary to this. As a result, they had not acquired a tolerance for the diseases, as had the Europeans through their proprietary relationships with their herds of sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. Whole communities succumbed to these diseases, leaving empty forests with the remnants of great nations looking on in awe and fear at the European invaders, human and animal.

Some, such as Captain George Weymouth of the British Royal Navy, saw the great potential of the wood for masts and spars. In 1605, he sent back samples and seeds to England where it was discovered to be superior to the Scotch pine being used at the time, but the American white pine refused to grow in Europe. The British had already exhausted the forests of England, Scotland and Wales and they were dependent on imports to support what would become the greatest navy under sail in all of history. Robert Hughes, in The Fatal Shore, the story of Australia’s founding, described one English ship, a man-o’-war: “The mainmast of a 74-gun first-rater was three feet thick at the base, and rose 108 feet from keelson to truck — a single tree, dead straight and flawlessly solid. Such a vessel needed some 22 masts and yards as well.”

One of England’s rivals on the sea was Denmark, and it was strategically placed to keep the British out of the Baltic, the only remaining European source of pine trees. The English rapidly became dependant upon the trees they found in North America, and all white pines of a certain size were reserved for the navy. They would be identified with the mark of the broad arrow, pointing straight up along the trunk, and once marked it became a criminal offence to take those trees. Naturally the colonists resented this kind of expropriation, and it became as volatile an issue for the northern states as the Stamp Tax was. According to Sam Cox, author of The Story of White Pine, American Revolution, Lumberjacks, and Grizzly Bears, “The Massachusetts Minutemen who fired the first shots of the American Revolution at Lexington in April 1775, carried a flag of red with a green pine tree emblem on a field of white with them into battle at Bunker Hill in June 1775…” The Americans were supplying the French Navy with their masts throughout their war of independence. After the war, the New England supply was no longer at the disposal of the English navy, and the British looked far and wide to replace it. The early explorations of Australia were prompted in part by the discovery of Norfolk Island off the Australian east coast. The island was covered with tall, straight pines, but they were discovered to be worthless for masts and spars. Unlike the white pine, their resin dried brittle and inflexible. Under sail, the mast would snap like a stressed carrot.

The French also tried to keep the British out of the Baltic, but Napoleon was more successful than his predecessors. He made treaties with the small German states and together they blocked the access, putting increased pressure on the pine trees in the Canadas and in New Brunswick. There was less resentment in the Ottawa Valley to the mark of the broad arrow because the pine forest was the impetus for development, and while the need for masts and spars got things going, Napoleon was soon defeated and the British Royal Navy, secure in its control of the seas, became the guarantor for the export of squared logs. Soon huge rafts of timber were being floated down the Ottawa to Quebec via Rivière des Prairies and exported to England. These rafts were as large as fields, and they were sailed down with crews living onboard for months at a time. Each raft could be made out of twenty cribs attached together in such a way that they could be detached to race separately through river rapids and be re-attached below. In this way, lumber exports began to displace furs as the economic engine of the colonies. From 1802 to 1819 the export of timber soared from 21,700 tons to 340,500 tons. In the meantime, the American pine forests were falling to the lumberjacks’ axes, and regions that had once been magnificent woodlands were becoming farms and towns.

The growth of exports continued, but logging was a wasteful practice. Trees were felled and the trunks hauled away, leaving huge residues on the forest floor and exposing the land to erosion. Fires could rage out of control on the waste wood and on more than one occasion, lumbering towns were consumed. In the worst fire in the United States, 1200 people perished in the obliteration of the logging town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin.

By 1900, the pine was becoming rare. In a disastrous attempt to protect it, the American government encouraged the planting of seedlings. To keep pace with the demand, seeds were exported to Europe to be grown into seedlings and re-imported, unwittingly bringing back with them the devastating white pine blister rust. This fungus spread across the remaining white pine stands and dealt them a near-fatal blow: We had discovered why white pines do not grow in Europe.

The pines are slowly recovering. They are more striking in our time for their dead, jagged tops. The virus causes the top of the tree to die as new branches slowly try to replace the crown, leaving large, wide trees sometimes without crowns and sometimes with more than one. If you are travelling towards St. Sauveur from the north along the Laurentian Autoroute, you can see one spectacular example of a crownless pine on the horizon in the distance. You will note that the breadth of the branches at the surviving top of the tree is as wide as some trees are high. Even so, it stands above the canopy. Sketch a mental triangle up to the departed crown and you will have an impression of the tree’s potential.

George Binns never had the opportunity to work with the huge original pines. I am sure he would be pleased to see how many tall pines and spruce tower over his little cottages at Lake Echo today. One summer around 1978, the residents named the streets in the little development where Binns had built his log homes, and one of them is Pine Tree Road.

Pine Tree Road is far from the only placename that commemorates this great Indigenous-guided forest that we have lost. Every Laurentian town and village has an Avenue des Pins or a Pine Road, but today the pine is a rare tree in the Laurentian forest. Sometime while you are driving you might spot one, a large, wide tree pushing above the canopy on the top of a mountain, a jagged, gnarled silhouette standing alone against the sky.

This is not an online event, but if you are in the neighbourhood, it would be great to see you.

Ste-Anne-du-Bout-de-l’Île Historical Society

Reminder for Wednesday, February 25, 2026 1:30 pm George-McLeish Community Centre (GMCC)

Website bihs.neocities.org

Our February meeting will be a very thought provoking talk by one of our regular speakers, Joseph Graham.

Speaker : Joseph Graham

Topic : Insatiable Hunger -The early encounters between the culture of the First Nations and that of the European countries that arrived from 1534 to 1812.

An exploration of the world views that underpinned settler colonialism. The sixteenth-century European wars of religion set the stage for mass migration to the New World. Of course, there was nothing new about the New World to Indigenous peoples who had lived there for millennia.

Everyone is welcome but please let us know you are coming so we can prepare. hist.soc.steanne@gmail.com
Joseph will have copies of his books available for purchase.

Société historique de Ste-Anne-du-Bout-de-l’Île

Rappel pour le mercredi 25 février 2026 à 13h30 Centre communautaire George-McLeish (GMCC)

Site web bihs.neocities.org

Notre réunion de février sera l’occasion d’une conférence très stimulante donnée par l’un de nos intervenants habituels, Joseph Graham.

Conférencier : Joseph Graham

Sujet : Faim insatiable - Les premières rencontres entre la culture des Premières Nations et celle des pays européens arrivés de 1534 à 1812.

Une exploration des visions du monde qui ont sous-tendu le colonialisme de peuplement. Les guerres de religion européennes du XVIe siècle ont préparé le terrain pour la migration en masse vers le Nouveau Monde. Bien sûr, le Nouveau Monde n’avait rien de nouveau pour les peuples autochtones qui y vivaient depuis des millénaires.

Tout le monde est le bienvenu, mais merci de nous prévenir de votre venue afin que nous puissions nous organiser. hist.soc.steanne@gmail.com
Des exemplaires des livres de Joseph seront disponibles.

You are also invited to join the historical society:

La Société historique Sainte-Anne-du-Bout-de-l’Île - Formulaire d’inscription:

Sainte-Anne-du-Bout-de-l’Île Historical Society - Membership Registration:

Tous sont les bienvenus.

Nous nous réunissons habituellement le 4e mercredi du mois, de septembre à novembre 2025 et de janvier à mai 2026, à 13 h 30, au Centre communautaire George-McLeish, 20, Morningside dans le parc Senneville.

Veuillez envoyer votre chèque ou virement électronique à la trésorière, Jean Foster (voir détails ci-dessous). S.V.P. PAS D’ARGENT LIQUIDE

Everyone is welcome.

We usually meet on the 4th Wednesday of the month, September to November, 2025 and January to May, 2026, at 1:30 pm, at the George-McLeish Community Centre at 20 Morningside in Senneville Park.

Please send your cheque or e-transfer to the treasurer, Jean Foster (see details below). PLEASE NO CASH

Total $________________________ $25 par personne/per person

Nom(s)/Name(s) __________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

Adresse/Address ___________________________________________________

Ville/City ____________________________________________________

Code postal/Postal Code __________________________________________

Téléphone/Telephone ______________________________________________

Adresse courriel/email address _________________________________________

e-transfer to hist.soc.steanne@gmail.com

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N.B. Les chèques doivent être libellés à l’ordre de / Please make cheques payable to:- Sainte-Anne-du-Bout-de-l’île Historical Society

FAIRE PARVENIR À / PLEASE SEND TO:

Jean Foster,

37 Elmwood,

Senneville, QC H9X 1T6

Reverend Théophile Thibodeau was not a typical priest. He assumed responsibility for the parish of Ste. Agathe des Monts in 1878 and, while he was loved and respected in his parish and is credited with the colonisation of Archambault township and the construction of a chapel, his real passion was his homestead. It consisted of a large portion of a peninsula in Ste. Agathe’s Lac des Sables known today as Greenshields Point. Four years after assuming his parish responsibilities, he managed to resign and to move to his homestead.

His parishioners were not ready to let him off that easily, however, and some years later he succumbed and accepted the responsibility of parish priest. He assumed the mantle of spiritual leader on time to establish himself and be there for Ste. Agathe’s bleakest period, 1885 to 1888. A man who appreciated his comforts, he had just raised enough money to have a more suitable presbytery built, and it was from this new building that he guided his flock through a year of a plague of smallpox. While a vaccine had been developed and even administered years before, the Catholic community of Montreal, and therefore of most of Quebec, feared that the vaccine was a plot to destroy the French and discouraged vaccinations. The result was a plague that ran rampant through the city and outlying communities, forcing the whole region to be quarantined. In the small village of Ste. Agathe, fifty people died from it. Following hard on the plague, the region experienced three years of drought so severe that by the end, farmers’ seed stocks were gone and many farmers simply left. Finally on April 9, 1888, the new presbytery caught fire and the good parish priest lost his life trying to save the building. Some residents of Greenshields Point still remember being told the story of how the wind whistling through the trees on the point is the song of the departed parish priest.

In 1893, Octavien Rolland, son of Jean-Baptiste Rolland, founder of Rolland Paper, acquired the point from the estate of the parish priest. The Rollands built there and were among the very first people to acquire a vacation property in Ste. Agathe. As a private owner, his 20-year stewardship was longer than the parish priest’s and one year longer than that of the Greenshields family, who acquired it from him in 1913. By that time, it was called Rolland’s Point and, given the importance of Rolland’s family across the Laurentians, it is strange that it began to be called Greenshields Point.

The peninsula consisted of 80 to 100 acres of land under a canopy of white pines, with over 12,000 feet of lake frontage. At the time, many wealthy, influential people had acquired property on Lac des Sables and had built large, impressive country villas. There is no remaining evidence of any such building being undertaken by James Greenshields, One reason given for his acquisition was to occupy his son while he took the cure for tuberculosis at the Laurentian Sanitarium. The son built a golf course under the white pine canopy, but it was not a commercial or public enterprise. Yet it remained Greenshields Point. The Greenshields family held the property for 19 years until 1932 and eventually sold it to developers under the name of the Mitawanga Company.

Once the redevelopment was completed, the Mitawanga Association of property owners replaced the Mitawanga Company, but ninety-four years later people still refer to it as Greenshields Point.

James Naismith Greenshields was born in Danville, Quebec on August 7, 1852. He studied law and was called to the bar in 1877. He was hired as the third lawyer in the defence of Louis Riel in 1885. According to George Goulet, author of The Trial of Louis Riel, the defence team of Fitzpatrick, Lemieux and Greenshields began by vigorously challenging the authority of Magistrate Richardson, and when their challenge was summarily dismissed, they proposed a plea of insanity, a decision that was opposed by their client. They attributed their decision to information obtained from certain undisclosed parties and most likely were referring to Riel’s period of confinement in two insane asylums in Quebec from 1876 to 1878. In spite of his involvement in this high-profile case, Greenshields turned to commercial and corporate legal matters. This brought him to be involved in Shawinigan Water and Power and Wabasso Cottons. He encouraged two of his sons in the creation of Greenshields & Company, later Greenshields Incorporated, and subsequently Richardson Greenshields. It is a curious circle that brings names together this way. While the Richardson name relates to a Winnipeg entrepreneur, there seems to have been no connection between him and Magistrate Richardson of the Riel trial, except to the extent that Greenshields had also been involved with that Richardson. One of Greenshields’ sons died during the First World War and a second died later, presumably of tuberculosis. The third became the owner of Greenshields Point who sold it in 1932.

Locally, so few people know the history of the Greenshields family that it is hard to understand how the name survived. In 1998, a member of our heritage committee, Erik Wang, a resident of Greenshields Point, sent a letter to the Quebec Commission de toponymie hoping to find the meaning of the word the developers had used, Mitawanga, and he discovered from them that Mitawanga came from the Algonquin word Mitanhwang, meaning “on the sand” or “sandy shore.” They even implied that it would be a more colorful name for the peninsula than Greenshield (sic), a name that seemed without foundation.

Wang, diplomat that he was, thanked them and shared the colorful role of James Greenshields in the defence of Louis Riel, and encouraged them to standardize the spelling to Greenshields Point. The Commission de toponymie was in the process of updating the placenames of Ste. Agathe and obliged him.

The name became more permanent, but many of us wondered about the discovery and usage of the name Mitawanga. Did the developers know that the name they had chosen may have been the source of the name of the lake itself, Lac des Sables, or as it was also called back then, Sandy Lake? Is it possible that some Algonquin terms were familiar at that time? Could there have been a familiar presence of Algonquian – Weskarinis people who were simply not recorded any other way?

Is this where we came from? Is it any wonder that we are where we are today? Is this all there is?

When I compare it to what Europeans found when they arrived in the Americas, civilizations as old as others in the world, one great tragedy is how little they learned from their hosts. The ancient civilization they found here had never developed weapons that were comparable to those of the Europeans, because they didn’t need them. Sure they had wars, but war was not the norm. Instead of observing the truth of that and trying to learn from it, the Europeans concluded that this ancient civilization that could not compete militarily was simply primitive.

I think we still don’t get it. Their agriculture was superior, they lived longer and they towered over the newcomers. The French, who took the most time to observe, noted that they were very affectionate among themselves and discussions held with any of them showed an intellectual development that was pretty universal among them. There was no hierarchy to compare with the European societies. Decisions had to include everyone, and their society was not gender focused, but focused on the animate, the living world around them.

The most insightful observation of the difference that I have found comes from Anke Becker’s study, not of the civilizations of the Americas, but of the Eurasian societies’ male dominance and its probable origin. Her original paper was called Herding and Male Dominance, and while she was looking for the roots of female genital mutilation, what struck me was the aspect that concerned herding. She showed in her study that male dominance was not an innate aspect of human society – a discovery that others have made as well – but that there were large areas of human society that did not herd. Those societies, in the Americas, central Africa and Australia, were generally not gender-based hierarchies. The other realization that this led me to was that we have always placed herding in with agriculture, but the primary agriculturalists, the ones who gave us half of the vegetables we commonly eat today, did not herd.

Herding needs a separate category – hunter-gatherer (including agroforestry and aquaculture), herdsmen, and agriculturalist. (Becker does not include animal husbandry with herding, so it also may need to be seen separately.)

Aside from gender hierarchy, herding led to the absorption of zoonotic diseases that made the survivors into carriers, causing them to unwittingly become the dominant hierarchy through contagion. It also led to social hierarchy, and that led to a concept of movable property and the development of a military hierarchy to protect it from other military hierarchies.

In the civilization that the philosopher Georges Sioui calls the Nadowek-Algonquian Civilization, the hierarchies of Europe are not found, and there are ethics that trace back to an understanding of belonging-to, rather than owning. Belonging to Mother Earth, they fit into a family of which humans are the youngest sibling, the one who learns from the elders, and belonging-to is the opposite to owning. Their ethic regarding their siblings would not lead to ownership. Instead, it led to an ethic of respect for the space and the rights of their elder siblings and to an ethic of deep respect for Mother Earth herself.

People wonder why the Indigenous people can’t simply join the melting pot and put their past behind as a part of their historic identity. Virtually all the newcomers share a value system based on the dominance of herding, even if just through their disease resistance that herding developed in the herders. The Indigenous people, who have maintained their ethic of respect, at first treated the European people as needing their help, and some saw the newcomers as an elder sibling whose ideas and beliefs had to be deeply considered. But as the Europeans quickly demonstrated their inability to share, some saw them as the windigo. Simultaneously, as many as 90% of members of the Indigenous societies succumbed to zoonotic diseases introduced from the herders or the immigrants the herders had contaminated in Europe

By our time, their survivors have mostly become as immune as the European-descended people, but they have maintained their very different ethical guidelines. Today, we talk about reconciliation, but to achieve it we have to consider all of this, to learn to share, – and we have to do it all together. If we do, we will not need to build better forts.

There was dew in the grass. He picked up some hay that he had cut the day before. ‘By about eleven,’ he estimated. By then the morning sun would dry it out enough to allow him to bale. A small flock of blackbirds lifted from the field as he tossed the hay back down. They settled a little farther away. He looked up at the clear blue sky. The rooster crowed. Birds chirped in the background, darting through the trees along the road.

He walked down to the barn where Maybe was waiting to be milked and on the way in he gave Sugar a flake of hay. Sugar snapped her head over the stall door and tried to grab his hat. “Buzz off, Sugar,” he gruffed. “Bloody quarter horse. Some kinda mean streak; always after my hat.” Maybe swished her tail indifferently and gummed the hay he gave her. She was pretty full. He placed the bucket under her udder and pulled the little bench over and sat down to the task of milking. Maybe was a permanent fixture in their lives. He had acquired her from McCauley’s older brother who had assured him she was so close to freshening that she might calve before he got her home. Maybe it would only be next week. It became a joke over the next few months until she finally dropped the calf, and after that, the name stuck.

When Maybe’s udder was soft and flabby he got up and carried the milk off towards the house, patting Maybe on the flank like he always did. Outside it was already warmer, but something was wrong. Sugar’s stall door was open and she was gone. “How the hell did she do that?” he muttered, knowing it was his fault, not hers. His eyes drifted across the field and up the road where he saw Sugar cantering proudly away, her head held high and her mane and tail blowing behind her. Even from the distance he could see that gleam in her eye. “Bitch!” He carried the milk to the house and called in, “Sugar’s out. Got to go get her,” and walked back to the stable, putting his left arm through her halter and squeezed a little grain into his left palm at the same time. He began the long walk up to the road, his pace unhurried. The blackbirds lifted out of the hay and moved further down the field ahead of him. ‘At least she didn’t charge across the field,’ he thought. He looked at the hay drying in neat rows where he had raked it the day before. He would have been upset if she had trampled those rows of hay, not that she would have done much harm. “Come on Sugar, here Sugar, come on Sugar,” he sang. The horse belonged to Gus Williams’s daughter, and he got paid to board her. He resented the food she ate because she did nothing, but he appreciated the boarding fee. “Here, Sugar, come on Sugar,” he crooned as he walked towards her, remembering that he had to woo her back, that he could never catch her if she ran. She was already slowing down or stopped, examining some fresh grass on the side of the road, pretending she didn’t see him. He walked calmly on, still singing. They were both over half a mile from the stable. “Here girl, got a present, here girl.” She looked up pretending to be surprised and cantered off. ‘Should throw this grain away, that’d teach her,’ he cursed, but he knew it wouldn’t. She would have no reason to wait for him if he had no grain. He held it up to his nose and sniffed it as though he could convey its sweet smell by enjoying it himself. She lolled by the side of the road munching some flowers. “Come on girl, that’s enough. I got work to do.” He felt like giving her a good swift kick, but he knew better than that. He circled around so that he was farther from the stables than she was and then quietly approached her, singing his irritation. He placed his right hand upon her shoulder and reached his left up towards her snout so she could smell the grain. She nuzzled his closed fist, cajoling him to open it and as he did, he slipped the halter over her head and pulled the bit into her open mouth. She whinnied in resentment as though complaining that he hadn’t played fair. He didn’t care. He could only think of how much time she had wasted. He took the reins to lead her back. She refused to move, raising her head.

‘Oh, the bitch,’ he thought. “Come on, Sugar, if you’re not going to cooperate, you are going to have to carry me back.” He considered it a form of exploitation to ride a horse, and he felt the horse was somehow diminished by allowing itself to be ridden. “Come on!” he said, walking purposefully back with the reins in his hand. She followed for a few paces and then stopped again. “Stubborn mule,” he muttered. “Okay, you’re going to carry me back, then.” He placed the reins on either side of her neck and swung himself up onto her wide bare back. She began to walk immediately, before he was ready. He couldn’t understand why people liked riding and had never bothered to learn. His legs were splayed wide to wrap around her torso and he could feel the muscles strain in his thighs. He lifted himself gently by pressing his knees into her side. She began to move faster, slowly approaching a canter. He became more dependent on his knees as her body twisted and rolled under him. Her neck was sleek with sweat and shone as her shoulder muscles rippled with her pace. She was well into a canter now, and it was all he could do to pull the reins a bit to the left to indicate to her to turn. ‘I never did this without a saddle,’ he realised. At least they were almost back and he could get to work. Bloody horse. How was he going to punish her for this stunt? What would she understand? He was bouncing almost out of control on her wide back, marvelling at the strength of her shoulders. “Gawdammit,” he yelled as he bounced from side to side. Sugar broke her pace and the extra, unpredicted manoeuvre sent him down hard onto the ground. A sharp pain in his thigh emanated through his body, restricting his breathing. He couldn’t move. The pain coursed down his leg. He had landed on a rock. He thought of nothing, just the pain, even his arms were frozen. Sugar looked at him and made a guilty beeline for the stables.

He lay still for a while waiting patiently for the pain to subside. When his breath returned, he released a long moan. Soon he got control of his arm and felt his thigh. It was still numb, but if he moved a bit, he would no longer be on the rock. Soon after, his thoughts began to return. ‘She knew,’ he thought. She knew he had been hurt. She felt guilty. “Bugger!” he mumbled. Slowly he staggered to his feet and walked with weak menace towards the barn. Sugar stood innocently in her stall. She let out a loud welcoming whinny. “Bugger you!” he hollered at her and closed the stall door. She leaned over and snapped at his bare head. “My hat!” he called. “My hat. Where’s my hat?” He stumbled out of the stable and looked up the long road.

The story has been retold many times, and I will try to do honour to the tellings here.

Deganwidah was born a Wendat on the Bay of Quinte to the north of Lake Ontario. He felt he had to bring a message of peace to the warring Nations, so he crossed the waters and happened upon Aiewáhtha who was approaching his home, dragging a dead enemy. Deganwidah climbed carefully up onto the roof of Aiewáhtha’s home and peered down through the smoke hole. As Aiewáhtha prepared his cooking pot, he saw Deganwidah’s reflection in the pot full of water.

Thinking the peaceful face was his own reflection, he smiled with pleasure, and Deganwidah, sensing that he had an opportunity to approach the warrior, climbed back down and came to talk with him. After a long discussion, Deganwidah offered to conduct a condolence ceremony for Aiewáhtha’s losses. His family had been killed in the violence that surrounded them. Aiewáhtha accepted.

Deganwidah told him of his message, his wish to help stop the wars and to help the Nations unite in peace. Deganwidah explained that he had consulted Jigonsaseh, leader of the Neutral/Kahqua, a greatly respected sister Nation and part of the Iroquoian maize culture, and that she told Deganwidah that the women must be acknowledged as the farmers and that families would descend through the mother’s line and continue to live in the mother’s home. Deganwidah accepted her wisdom. He further encouraged Aiewáhtha to stop eating human flesh and to substitute deer in its place. The three of them, Jigonsaseh, Aiewáhtha, and Deganwidah, shared their vision with the people. There was a custom among the women to make sure all the warriors were fed outside of the villages, regardless of whose side they were on. The women would feed them to keep the fighting away from the villages. Jigonsaseh told the women not simply to feed them, but also to talk with the warriors, to encourage them to join Deganwidah and Aiewáhtha. Deganwidah elaborated the Great Law of Peace, including matrilineal descent, women’s collective responsibility for agricultural land, the condolence ceremonies to mourn the loss of family members and leaders as well as the political structure of the Five Nations Confederacy. Deganwidah envisioned fifty worthy men, chosen by the clan mothers, making decisions at the Council Fire, a governing body. He even gave them their names, which he decreed would return to the clan mothers when they died so that the women could give the same name to a worthy successor, as long as it was not that man’s son. The women could also recall a leader if they lost confidence in him. Their political structure contrasts sharply with the male-dominated early European democracies. It acknowledged different, equal jurisdictions of men and women. Among the important agreements formalized in the law with Wampum Belts and other symbolic items was the concept of “A Dish with One Spoon,” meaning that in times of need, resources would be shared and no people would take more from nature than could be sustained. This was a concept that was not unique to the Great Law of Peace but was evident in many treaties among other Nations. In this telling, it started in the agricultural period, the time when the women began growing corn/maize in the Three Sisters companion planting method and were able to feed the people from their crops.

The events surrounding the establishment of the Great Law of Peace are dated to the time of a solar eclipse that Barbara Mann and Jerry Fields calculate happened on August 31, 1142. Once the warriors decided to support the Great Law of Peace, they all approached Adodaroh together peacefully and, with Aiewáhtha as the spokesperson, asked him to join them as their leader, to accept the Great Law of Peace that Deganwidah proposed. Aiewáhtha is said to have combed the snakes out of Adodaroh’s hair, untangling it, bringing him calm and reason and allowing him the space to make the decision to join—and lead—them. It is remarkable that in this foundational story, the murderous

dictator is not killed but rehabilitated.

The Great Law of Peace established a governance system that had never existed in the world, one beyond anything in European history. If we have attained what we call democracy, it was not because of European brilliance, but because it was seen among the people who thrived here. It has never been matched as a governance system, and it came out of the ground here.

Paul Krugman, Robert Reich and others have a point. Perhaps Minnesota is the crucible, perhaps we can all be a part of it as it arises, peacefully, out of the ground. Perhaps we can confront our Adodaroh – and perhaps we can learn from our Elders who came out of this ground so long ago.

The first people to claim a lot in the township that would eventually become the Parish of Ste. Agathe arrived in 1849, and only three years later, in 1852, the elderly doctor in St. Jerome decided that he, too, wanted some land there. He had found wealth and adventure in far-away California where he experienced the gold rush.

In 1848, the American government annexed California from Mexico in an act of aggression that brought the American army into Mexico City. Mexico’s failure to respond to an offer to purchase presented three years earlier was followed by American sabre-rattling and “the most unjust war ever undertaken by a stronger nation against a weaker one.” [General Ulysses S. Grant speaking to American Press, early 1850s. His claim has more competition today.] Mexico was forced to accept a lower offer, bringing the coveted territory into American possession. Having acquired California and New Mexico for the Union at great cost, President James Polk was faced with a large, viable coastal region that could become a thorn in America’s side. It was a wealthy territory, and he used that wealth to his advantage when he announced the discovery of gold on December 5, 1848, setting off a veritable invasion of fortune-seekers, a mob of people that overwhelmed any political resistance that the current residents could have mustered against the unjust war.

The newcomers were dubbed the Forty-Niners.

The Gold Rush was the catalyst that grew California rapidly into statehood. Between 1848 and 1855, three hundred thousand people arrived there, coming by land and by sea. Even residents of San Francisco, a town of about a thousand souls, took to the hills in search of the gold, but the new population squatted where they could, including in newly arrived ships. The town grew to a population of 25,000 in only two years. The timing of the gold rush is reminiscent of a classic American bubble, coming as it did towards the end of a recession. People arrived from all parts of the world, half of them via the sea.

We don’t know how or why Dr. Luc Eusèbe Larocque had travelled, but he was likely already there in 1848. Imagine the stories he would have had to share. If he was a Forty-Niner, he would have had to travel either along the California Trail, a journey by foot or horse over 3,000 km, or via ship around the southern tip of South America, onboard for five months, or possibly even through the jungle of Panama for a week with the hope of catching a ship on the west side.

Whenever Larocque arrived, as a doctor his services were in high demand. There was no shortage of patients. It is estimated that one in twelve of the miners died violently or through accidents as the countryside descended into lawlessness. Successful miners would have bid high for his services, pressing gold nuggets gratefully into his hands.

The mob turned on the visible minority immigrant communities, and bandits ruled. The native American population, one of the richest, most diverse in North America, fell victim to this lawlessness and racism as its population plummeted from 150,000 to 30,000 by 1870.

Success became known as the California Dream, and many see this period as the time of the birth of what we have come to call the American Dream. The rapid expansion set the United States into a new gear, gaining speed ever since. Before Larocque left, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in the United States, and black slaves were finding security in the British colonies. The United States was looking a lot like it does now. In 1854, a compromise to deal with racism called the Kansas-Nebraska Act turned violent and Kansas became known as Bleeding Kansas. The tension grew and by 1860 the secessions started. The concept of a Canadian federation to stand against the chaos soon began to form as slaves found their way to freedom here.

Somehow, Dr. Larocque got home safely to St. Jerome where he could afford to retire. He decided to buy land in the new township of Beresford, now called Ste. Agathe, and to rent it out to farmers. It was not a well-conceived business plan since the neighbouring farms were available directly from the government and could be acquired simply through homesteading. Even so, Larocque pursued his dream of living quietly from his imagined farm revenues. He did what he knew best how to do – he treated the sick. When his tenants failed to pay, he recognized that the stress was unhealthy and he did not insist. His patients produced no gold nuggets, but even so he responded positively to a request to donate a parcel of his land for a church. Slowly, lovingly, Dr. Larocque’s California Dream was spent on the welfare of the souls in his care in the hills around Ste. Agathe.

Mrs. Larocque, Louise De Montigny, did not share his passion for the remote, rocky hills that could be reached only by a long march over trails. The good doctor did his best to convince her, coming up every summer and sending her poems describing the beauty that he discovered, but she skilfully parried with oil paintings that she claimed were inspired by his verse. When they passed away, his heirs sold the balance of his holdings and their daughter became the custodian of their art and poetry, but neither that legacy nor any of his own stories of his experiences in California can be found.

All that is left is the quiet street running between the church and the cemetery in Ste. Agathe.

The family-name Brant first came into our historical records in 1753, when Colonel William Johnson attended a Militia Day event in New York. He came across his friend Nickus Brant, a Dutch-Mohawk trader, among the spectators. Brant was accompanying a recent widow and her children, all returning from Ohio and they were watching a horse race between British officers and Mohawk riders when one of the officers challenged Margaret’s daughter Molly to take his horse into the race. When Johnson saw Molly leap gracefully onto the horse, he was stricken with love, beginning an epic period of American colonial history.

William Johnson was an Irishman sent off to the colonies by his uncle after he was expelled from college. His uncle, Peter Warren, had married into the Huguenot-Dutch De Lancy family where Johnson found fun-loving kindred spirits. Soon, though, he moved out on his own, setting up a farm in the Mohawk Valley. An independent attitude caused him to be shunned by Albany society, and he rapidly became more connected to the Mohawk (Kanien’kehà:ka). He learned the language, wrestled with the young men and generally added to his alienation from Albany, but his business skills helped him establish a strong brand, trading with both the people of Albany and the Mohawk with equal ease and fairness. His relationship with Molly Brant, whose Mohawk name was Konwatsi’tsiaiénni, became the last straw, but they still needed him for his skills and trade. Johnson and Brant would become a power couple easily bridging the divide, with Molly’s status rising in her culture as quickly as Johnson’s was being sullied in his.

The Mohawk were the face, the Eastern Door, of the Six (originally five) Nations of the Haudenosaunee, the ones who first met the Dutch and English, and were a power to be reckoned with, but the colonial leaders failed to gain the respect that the Dutch had earned a century before them. During those same years their differences became insurmountable, and the Six Nations broke their long-standing relationship, called the Covenant Chain, putting them effectively in a state of war.

The British Crown could see that it would be just a matter of time before the powerful Six Nations would ally themselves with the French. Action had to be taken immediately. The British named Johnson Superintendent of Northern Indian Affairs, reporting directly to Great Britain, and the Mohawk accepted him as their ambassador to the British, both bypassing the governors.

The Covenant Chain was repaired, the status of the power couple grew and Johnson took on Molly Brant’s younger brother Joseph (Thayendanegea) as a protégé, seeing to his education in both Indigenous and British ways. Soon, Johnson’s military prowess became an essential tool for the British as they found themselves at war with France.

The Seven Years’ War was a European war of hegemony principally between these two powers. Johnson was a local actor, the person who saw what had to be done on the ground. He and his allies played a military role, and they advised the Seven Fires of Canada to stay neutral. The Seven Fires, small forces compared to the Six Nations, were allied with the French and had to rapidly understand how to protect themselves from a war that was vastly larger than them. When the French called them to a strategy meeting to defend Fort Île-aux-Noix at the south end of the Richelieu River, they made two conditions, that the French supply 5000 troops and that they be given time to assess the strength of the advancing army. In the world context, New France was simply not important enough to send that many troops, so the Seven Fires chose neutrality over the option of becoming cannon fodder.

After the war, Johnson and Brant were faced with a difficult peace. Without the French, the real enemy of the Six Nations became fully evident – it was not just the Thirteen Colonies, it was the vacuum left behind by the French, leaving the British to feel that they no longer needed the Indigenous people. General Amherst made the transfer to governance poorly, proving himself incapable of dealing with the disillusioned Indigenous allies and he stooped to trying to poison his opponents in the Pontiac uprising. Johnson and Brant managed to get Great Britain to issue the Proclamation of 1763, establishing a western border to the 13 Colonies, and Johnson took over negotiations with Pontiac. Through the 1760s, though, the exploding population of the 13 Colonies became increasingly difficult to contain. In 1768 they established a new border conceding a large parcel to the colonists and did so under pressure, neglecting to consult properly with the Indigenous Nations that would be affected.

In early July 1774, 600 Six Nations leaders gathered with Johnson and Brant at Johnson Hall (called Fort Johnson today), the always open home of the Johnsons. They were there to discuss how to deal with the collapsing border, but following the protocol of the Six Nations, it would be fully five days before Johnson’s turn to address them came. This was a system he knew and had experienced before, and he talked for hours in the hot sun on the afternoon of July 11. The body language was as expressive as the voice, and as he finished he had spasms and was led to his room to lie down. Joseph Brant was with him and he said, “Joseph, control thy people. I am going away.” Two hours later, those gathered in vigil in the late afternoon heard Molly raise her voice in the death wail of her tradition. Johnson’s death would mark the beginning of the end. Britain was exhausted financially at the end of the Seven Years’ War. A tax on tea to help it deal with flooding in what today is Bangladesh gave the colonial elite an opportunity to stage a tax revolt in Boston, manipulating their citizens. Their issues included the right of French Canada to maintain its Catholic religion, and the border that the Proclamation had created.

Five of the Six Nations remained allies of the British. The sixth, the Oneida, who were still buffered by the remaining Mohawk land, felt they could negotiate with the monster that crossed the Proclamation border.

The Seneca, the largest Nation, also known as the Western Door, comprised fully half of the Haudenosaunee population and was the furthest away; their villages and fields were still intact. The rebels, moving west, found their huge fields and villages and set fire to everything, including food stocks. They would never forget the quality of the land they had burned.

When the British king, George III, sued for peace, the rebels agreed to meet in Paris. The original peace agreement involved the recognition of a buffer state where the Indigenous Nations would be respected, but the American negotiator John Jay felt he could do better. He met separately with the British prime minister, the Earl of Shelburne, who sought to promote trade with the new nation. Shelburne conceded all the land to the west as far as the Mississippi River. The Haudenosaunee allies were not even invited to the treaty as their land was simply given away. Even Joseph Brant and the British military in the colonies that would become Canada were not consulted or informed until after the fact.

The Haudenosaunee are comprised of six Nations who saw William Johnson as their ambassador. Indigenous peoples lived on the land. They did not have the concept of ownership of land as the Europeans did. In 1763, the British had taken the land that the French had until then claimed and the Indigenous Nations living on it could stay there by their good grace. William Johnson was the superintendent of northern Indian affairs. His role was to protect the interests of the king. Molly and Joseph Brant grew up with a totally different understanding. This is the crux of the problem that reconciliation is supposed to deal with—it is the difference between a market economy and a gift culture. Your currency in the gift culture is the goodwill that you invest in others, the trees, the animals, the waterways and the spirits are all members of the family. In hard times and in good times, you share. This gift culture is not a recent invention. You will find it among Indigenous cultures the world over. It has existed in some form in the Americas since before the Pyramids of Egypt were built and in all that time, weaponry was not developed as it was in the market economy and the religious traditional cultures of Europe and Asia. That does not mean they did not have wars – of course they did, but they were never the norm.

At the time of the creation of the United States, when this was all playing out, the governor of the remaining British colonies that we now call Quebec and Ontario was Sir Frederick Haldimand, who voiced his reaction: “My soul is completely bowed down with grief.” Like all of the British military and many of the colonists, they were in shock, especially when the prime minister of Britain, Lord Shelburne, explained his reasoning: “The Indian nations were not abandoned to their enemies; they were remitted to the care of neighbours… who were certainly the best qualified for softening and humanizing their

hearts.”

Within his powers, Sir Frederick Haldimand tried to address the disastrous situation. He created the Haldimand Tract, a parcel of land “…situated between the Lakes Ontario, Erie and Huron and I do hereby in His Majesty’s name authorize and permit the said Mohawk Nation and such others of the Five Nation Indians as wish to settle in that quarter to take possession of and settle upon the Banks of the River commonly called Ours [Ouse] or Grand River, running into Lake Erie, allotting to them for that purpose six miles deep from each side of the river beginning at Lake Erie and extending in that proportion to the head of the said river, which them and their posterity are to enjoy for ever.”

Joseph Brant knew this land and had influence on its choice. He had even created a ford to cross the Grand River, which came to be called Brant’s Ford, and eventually Brantford. The British colonial governments, though, did not honour Haldimand’s pledge and over time governments have whittled it down to less than five percent of the original commitment. Brantford, Waterloo and Kitchener are all located in the original tract area that was once recognized and then taken away.

Molly Brant had remained a stalwart supporter of the Mohawk cause, acting as a spy for the British during the balance of the war. She was obliged to flee and eventually moved to Kingston, near two of their daughters, where the British supplied her with a house and a pension. She also received a good settlement from the distribution of her husband’s estate.

Still later, the surveyors who located the railroad along the bottom of the river’s valley would certainly have seen it, and perhaps they even indicated it on their first plans. If they called it anything at all, that name is lost to us too. Even the many passengers who came up the line after 1891 seem at best to have observed it passively. It remained unnamed until the first skiers found a purpose for it.

Aleksander Olsen, a Norwegian engineer who moved to Montreal to design grain elevators, won five combined ski jumping and cross-country competitions at the Cote des Neiges jump between 1911and 1916. The jump was on Cote des Neiges across from Decelles. Like many other Norwegians, he took full advantage of our winters, skiing wherever and whenever he could. Cote des Neiges and the park boasted trails lacing all over the mountain, but Olsen and his friend Sverre Øsbye did not limit themselves to Mount Royal Park. They used the train to go up to the Laurentians where the snow was deep and conditions always reliable.

The steam engine could not pull the whole train past Ste. Margeurite Station, so it had to stop there and pull the train up to Ste. Agathe and Square Lake one half at a time. Olsen and Øsbye were not likely to have had the patience to wait for that kind of manoeuvring. Outside the window, the snow looked too tempting. Abandoning the train, they took off through the woods along the North River.

Some of the early hills they identified served only as landmarks, means of finding their way back to the railroad station at the end of the day. One of these markers was that same rocky outcropping whose name had still not been established. Olsen and Øsbye used it to orient themselves from their first winter visit in1911. They could see it from anywhere in that part of the North River Valley, and, with Olsen’s engineering training, it was easy to judge the angles of view and find their way back to the station to catch the home-bound train.

Mont Baldy: Painting by Théodule Huot, Ste. Adele, courtesy Normand Huot

In my childhood on Lac Raymond, we went for outings down the falls below the lake, and we learned about the mountain. In fact, it developed significant religious value to me because my mother invoked it when she shared her oft-repeated lesson of how faith could move a mountain. I would look at it and imagine it being moved. If those early skiers had known that they may have had less faith in it as a landmark, but it would not have stopped them from trying to conquer it. Olsen and Øsbye did. With other courageous—or crazy—young men, they climbed it and found their way back down, a good day’s exercise.

After Olsen and Øsbye returned to Norway in 1916, skiing continued to gain popularity in the Laurentians. In 1917, Émile Cochand opened the first dedicated Laurentian ski resort not far from the bald mountain, and soon trails were being marked through the woods and skiers glided from hotel to hotel. Øsbye stayed in Norway, creating the first commercial ski wax, but Olsen returned to Montreal with his new wife and son, Kaare. He continued to work in construction, and in the 1930s he used his professional skills to design and rebuild the ski jump on Cote des Neiges, the site of his earlier championships. His construction was a turret-style ski jump, known for its size. Jumping had become so popular that 3000 to 4000 spectators would come out to watch the competitions, which could include 150 or more contestants. Coming from Three Rivers, New England and Ottawa, they were often accompanied by military bands playing ‘oom-pah-pah’ and spectators milling around. The cross-country aspect of the combined races took the contestants from the turret ski jump up Westmount mountain, down across Cote des Neiges Road, up Mount Royal, around the Cross, through Outremont, back down to Decelles and across Cote des Neiges, where organizers would shovel snow on the road and the tram lines to allow them to get back to the starting point.

Skiing became so popular that people, following the pioneers to the Laurentians, even began to regularly climb the bald mountain and race down as best they could, like Olsen and Øsbye had done. Contestants and participants in these races included people like Pierre Cochand, Viateur and Emile Cousineau – and my mother, Pat Paré. She shared the story of Heinz von Allmen, who at one time ran the ski school at the Alpine Inn. He made it down Mount Baldy in 57 seconds, the second fastest time recorded, and thereby earned the nickname Heinz 57, the well-known steak sauce. Emile Cousineau held the record for the fastest time, at 56 seconds.

Kaare Olsen remembers his father telling him that he and his friend Sverre Øsbye called the rocky outcropping Mount Baldy, and the name stuck. Today, many people know the mountain that way, and the road running along the North River near Ste. Marguerite Station is called Rue du Mont Baldy, but if you want to get a really good look at it, you might want to put on a pair of skis and ski along the linear park over the old railroad line along the river. You might even have to get off the line and ski into the woods, but you won’t get lost if you see it. You can always use it to find your way home.

Thanks to Kaare Olsen of Hudson, Normand Huot, and the late René Bauset

Season’s Greetings!