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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The long title is followed with a plea to be exonerated

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lafontaine withdrew his candidacy and led his supporters away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?