Sacrilegious in Prescott Ontario, but people are good

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

First, we again spent a leisurely morning on the rooftop of our B&B in Brockville.

We started our drive to Ottawa with various stops along the way. Our first stop was at Prescott another lovely riverside town.  We parked along the river and walked along the lovely riverfront and went for stroll.

We passed Shakespeare’s Garden which had some lovely flowers. Always worth a stop in my opinion. I love gardens. Sadly, I am too lazy to garden.

After that, I made a series of mistakes.

Then we saw 2 lighthouses. I also love lighthouses and we saw many of them in eastern Canada. first one was Prescott Rotary lighthouse named after the local Rotary Club no doubt. It is a rather small lighthouse and I doubt it ever operated.

The second lighthouse we saw was the Prescott Heritage Harbour Lighthouse.

Later I realized we had missed the best lighthouse of all, the Windmill Point Lighthouse. It is located on a height of land near the town of Prescott not in the town so we missed it. We would have had to travel a bit farther east, but had I known about it, I would have meandered there.  So it was the fault of inadequate research that I did not know it is there. A little advance research on a place is usually well worth the effort. I was bad again. That was mistake no. 1.

This was not the last mistake I made this day. Not by a long shot! But first we stopped for lunch at an Irish Pub. That is never a mistake.  This one was called O’Heaphy’s Irish Pub. And here we did something truly remarkable. We did not purchase any liquor. Just lunch!    It was sacrilegious to avoid liquor in an Irish Pub but we did it. And the lunch was great.

I ate chicken tenders and Chris dined on bangers and mash.  A friend of mine once said all Irish food is abominable, but this is a slight exaggeration. We had to eat inside the pub, rather than the patio because all the tables with chairs were taken. That was pity, because it was a beautiful warm afternoon. Inside the pub, there were 3 television sets going in sports bar style. I hate that style. Huge TV sets everywhere you look. No matter how diligent you cannot avoid these huge moving screens which draw your eye to them no matter how hard you don’t want to see them This bar though had sports on only 1 of them. The other two played religious preaching, but thankfully without sound. Sermons inside an Irish Pub really would be too much. That would also be sacrilegious too.

Maybe none of this should be surprising because earlier I misread a sign: as “God and Country Club.”

After that we set out for Ottawa our destination, where we had arranged to join my niece Shannon, her husband Colin, and daughter Teddy.  But half-way there when we stopped at a Tim’s for a donut and coffee, I realized what my big mistake of the day was. I had left my credit card at the gas station in Prescott earlier in the morning.  I couldn’t reach them on the phone so had to drive about half an hour back hoping they found it.  This was not my kind of meandering. And here I learned a valuable lesson. Most people are honest. A customer had spotted my card at the gas pump where I had self-served gas and the staff had it waiting for me to came back. Needless to say, I was very grateful. People are good.

After that we continued on to Shannon’s home where we had a delightful meal with them and their parents Harv and Barb Lane who had been at the same celebration of life.  Here we had another kind of celebration. She and Colin are outstanding cooks and hosts. Colin also took me for a spin in his BMW electric and show me how fast it could accelerate silently. It went 0 to 90 km. inside one city block in an instant.  It was frankly, astounding to a rube like me. The future is here.

Life was good again. Thanks to good people. Even though I was sacrilegious.

Taking Chances Under a City

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

A great source of pride in the community of Brockville to this day is the tunnel built for the Brockville and Ottawa Railway to join the timber trade of the Ottawa valley with the St. Lawrence River Ship route. It was  blasted underneath the city in 1860. It is called the Brockville Railway Tunnel, or the Brockville Tunnel.

It was the first railway tunnel built in Canada. Since 2017 it has been opened to the public as a free seasonal tourist attraction.  It was in actual use until the mid-70s.

I was a bit apprehensive to walk through the tunnel because water was dripping from the ceiling, but I learned on our short walk that the tunnel was designed to leak. Those engineers must know what they are doing. Right?

To me it seemed weird to have a tunnel is exists right under the city with water constantly leaking into it. How can that possibly be safe?

 

Samuel Keefer; who at the young age of 30 had been appointed to the highest engineering position in Canada and became the chief engineer of the Board of Public Works of the United Provinces, and he was opposed to the tunnel project. Instead, he recommended the rail line run around the high grade of the town from the west side of the city avoid the main hill and avoid going under the city.  That would have sounded a lot simpler to me.

However, in those days, Canadian railway builders were adventurous and decided to build a tunnel. Sometimes it seems those builders loved tunnels. They managed to convince the town of Brockville and other municipalities who would benefit from the tunnel to contribute to its construction. And it worked though financing was always in trouble right up to the time it was completed.

The bottom third and top third of the tunnel are lined with stones that are held together in part by water lime.  held together by water lime. The middle third is unlined and because water drips constantly it has created colourful formations along the walls.

The tunnel was built between 1854 and 1860 to allow the fledging Brockville and Ottawa Railway to connect the Brockville industrial waterfront area to the outlying areas lying between the St Lawrence and Ottawa rivers.

In 1853 a company was hired to construct it and signed a binding contract with them to do that. However, the next year they ran out of money and there was no federal government to guarantee completion as so often happens in modern contracts. A public celebration was held in 1854 with full masonic honours, but that was not good enough to guarantee completion. In 1855, notwithstanding the contract they ran out of money. Surprise, surprise, the projections were wrong. The municipalities had to pour in money to complete it.

Yet despite the problems it was completed and became the first of many railway tunnels in Canada.

Are Land Acknowledgements worth the Effort?

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Indigenous Treaties, Indigenous--Reconciliation

Brockville, like so many other places in Canada is treaty land and the people who live there are treaty people, as are we in Steinbach. Some of my friends are tired of land acknowledgments. Not me. I find them interesting and I believe they are worth thinking about when you hear them.  Here is the land acknowledgment I found on the website of Southeastern Ontario tourism the region where Brockville is located:

Land Acknowledgement

“We would like to acknowledge that the land we identify as South Eastern Ontario is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee (Ho-de-no-sau (“sho”)-nee), Anishinaabe (“anish-naw-bee”), and Huron-Wendat Peoples. South Eastern Ontario honours and respects the land, the people, and the Treaties. We are extremely thankful for the original tour guides of these lands and all that they have shared. All those that reside, work, and play on these lands are treaty people and we must honour the treaties in a mutually beneficial and equitable manner.”

 

What I want to acknowledge is that various peoples live here. Not just descendants of European settlers.  The settlers and their descendants are here because they entered into agreement with the local Indigenous groups to occupy it. Those European settlers and their descendants benefited tremendously from those treaties. The Indigenous people also benefited from those treaties. Everyone who lives there today, is a treaty person. We should not take those treaties for granted. Treaties are important for everyone. And as I have been saying, we should keep them up to date, or we will regret it.

The problem is that too many liberals see an injustice, mouth platitudes agains them and do nothing real to address thinking the find words are enough to prove their moral worthiness. Indigenous people and Canada need more than that.

Treaties have their deficiencies too. It all fine and good to signal our moral worthiness by making fine sounding statements. Acknowledging that one is aware of the fact of dispossession that occurred in America, and Canada too, when European settlers arrived in vast hordes but as

However, having said that, land acknowledgments have their deficiencies too. Kathleen DuVal wrote an interesting and critical article for the New York Times about land acknowledgements from an American perspective.

Du Val said, all too often, “they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations.” That doesn’t mean the acknowledgements should be abandoned, it does mean those of us who like them need to get real. We have to actually do something or persuade our political leaders to take action on our behalf.

Du Val said this, “Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. What I disagree with is the word “instead.’  Rather I would say, “In addition to.” We need to do both. The acknowledgments alone are clearly insufficient.

She also pointed out, that the Native Governance Center in the U.S. said that unfortunately land acknowledgements have often “become an excuse for folks to feel good and move on with their lives.” Journalists Graeme Wood and Noah Smith have criticized such acknowledgements as “moral exhibitionism.” Land acknowledgements that lead people to think that is all they need to do  can become harmful and we must work hard to make sure we don’t fall into that that trap.

For example. Du Val claims that land acknowledgements can reinforce the harmful “myth of Indigenous disappearance. That myth is a long-time mental block in the US but I am not sure it is as common and in Canada. Perhaps my Canadian indigenous friends can tell me if I am wrong about that. If I am, then we must take active measures to disable the myth too and must not allow land acknowledgements to stand in our way.

Indigenous People in Canada and the U.S. deserve more than that. They deserve sincere engagement on the part of their countrymen and women. Its time for action following our words.

 

 

 

From Ancient Indigenous People to Resistance Against American Intrusions

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Brockville is a city in Eastern Ontario in the Thousand Islands Region, one of the most beautiful places in Canada. We did not venture into that area this area, as we decided, unusually for us, to explore the city rather than the surrounding countryside. We had visited the Thousand Island region in the past and loved it, but today it was time to explore the city.

Brockville was previously inhabited by the St. Lawrence Iroquoians and later the Oswegatchie people. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians established a cluster of palisaded agricultural villages in the vicinity of what became Brockville from about 1450 until the 1500s. They were farmers! Before that the Point Peninsula People, as they are now called, inhabited the upper St. Lawrence River from at the least the Late Middle Woodland Period.

 

In the archaeological cultures of North, the Woodland period spanned a period from about 1000 CE until European contact in the 16th century. The phrase “Woodland Period” is a term used to describe prehistoric sites falling between the Archaic hunter-gatherers to the Mississippian cultures.  The Eastern Woodlands cultural region covers what is now Eastern Canada south of the Subarctic region, the Eastern United State, all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a period of constant development in stone and bone tools, leather crafts, and textile manufacturing. The people also cultivated the soil and constructed shelters. Many Woodland peoples used spear and atlatls until the end of the period when they were replaced by bows and arrows. The southern Woodland peoples also used blowguns.  I was not aware of any of most of that before this trip.

Increasingly the people used horticulture and developed what has been called the Eastern Agricultural Complex that consisted mainly of seed plants and gourd cultivation. They also became less mobile over time and in some places constructed and occupied villages and even cities. The period from 1000-1400CE was a period of what has been called “intensive agriculture,” which was likely continued until about 500 years ago. The people also made use of pottery that arisen earlier during the Archaic period in some places. The forms of pottery were widely diversified.

During the period of 1000-200 BCE the Early Woodland period, included times when people engaged in extensive mound-building, regionally distinctive burial complexes, and traded exotic goods across a vast part of North America that involved substantial interactions with other Indigenous peoples of North America. During that time, many people relied on both wild and domesticated plant foods and mobile subsistence strategies to take advantage of seasonally available resource such as fish, shellfish, nuts, and wild plants with which the people were intimately experienced.  Pottery then was widespread across North America.

By 1751, the Oswegatchie people had occupied much of the north shore of the St. Lawrence in the region we travelled. They withdrew from the North Shore of the St. Lawrence after negotiating with the British in 1784

Later it was settled by United Empire Loyalists and the city of Brockville became named by one of Britain’s most famous Generals, Sir Isaac Brock. English settlers first arrived in 1784 when thousands of refugees arrived from the American colonies after the American Revolutionary War. They were often referred to as United Empire Loyalists because they continued their allegiance to King George III.  They struggled with the American colonies in the years 1776 to 1783 and these skirmishes seriously divided the loyalties among people in some of the American colonies such as New York and Vermont.

 

The British capitulated to the Americans in 1782 and when the six-year war, which ended with the Americans who remained loyal to the British crown being treated harshly by the Americans who saw them as traitors. Many of them lost their properties in America.

Many Loyalists chose to flee north to the British colony of Quebec and Great Britain opened up the western regions of Canada at the time called Upper Canada and later Ontario. In fact, the British crown purchased land from the First Nations so they could allocate land to the loyalists in compensation for their losses and then helped them to establish settlements.

The first settlement by loyalists in the area arrived in 1785 and the first settler was William Buell Sr. Christiane and I walked on a street named after him in Brockville.  Later in the evening we dined at Buell Street Bistro. Buell was an ensign who left the King’s Rangers in the state of New York. Locals called the first settlement Buell’s Bay in his honour. Later, in 1810, the name was changed to Elizabethtown and then even later, Brockville.

 

General Isaac Brock was a celebrated as a hero in the area and even a saviour by some in view of his success in repelling Americans and securing their surrender of Fort Detroit during the War of 1812. He was fatally wounded while leading troops up the heights near Queenston.

Brockville became the first incorporated self-governing town on January 28, 1832, two years before the town of Toronto.

A patent medicine industry developed there around 1854 and features such illustrious products as Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills, Dr. McKenzie’s Worm Tablets, and later Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. Those must be good.

Brockville along with many other towns in Canada West [now Ontario]  were targets of the threatened Fenian invasion after the American Civil War ended in 1865. In June 1866, the unruly Irish-American Brotherhood of Fenians invaded Canada! The raids were launched across the Niagara River from Vermont into Canada East (now Quebec).

Those unsuccessful raids were a significant catalyst to the confederation of Canada as the people of what became Canada saw their neighbours to the south as lawless ruffians who must be resisted.  Not that differently than today in other words. A year later, in 1867 the new Canadian Prime Minister John A. MacDonald called upon volunteer militia in every town to organize to protect the country from these American rabble rousers. That led to the organization of the Brockville Infantry Company and the Brockville Rifle Company (now called The Brockville Rifles).

Now in 2025 the American president is trying to lure, or perhaps bully, Canada into becoming the 51st state and make what he calls one big beautiful country.

Who ever said Canadian history is boring? Probably many, but not me.

 

Slipping the Surly Bonds of Earth at Monkey’s Speedway

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

Our purpose in going to Brockville on this trip was to attend the celebration of life of my late cousin Ernie Neufeld who died this year after falling down the stairs in his home. But before we got there we had a problem. Steinbach was in the news on account of overland flooding as a result of extensive rains. We were worried that our house might have been flooded so we called our neighbour Anne who had our key. She said water was very high in our backyard and hers so she had gone to check on our basement and found we had a big problem!  But it wasn’t what we thought. Our basement was dry. But it was stinky. It turned out that our freezer had been accidentally unplugged and all the meat inside it was thawed out and rotten. Stinky rotten. And we are on the first leg of a 5-week trip across eastern Canada more than a thousand miles away. That was my big problem. I had accidentally unplugged it when I was checking things out the day before we left. My bad. My very bad.  We were lucky to have the nicest neighbour in the world. She and her granddaughter cleaned it out for us! That is carrying neighbourliness to a very high level!

As I said, when we were in Brockville Ontario we attended the celebration of life of my cousin Ernie Neufeld.  It was held at the yacht club in the harbour in the centre of town near these buildings.

 

When I was growing up, Ernie was my closest cousin so I wanted to pay my respects and celebrate his life. It was a life well worth celebrating.

Ernie was 2 years older than I and much more sophisticated. After all, he lived in the Big Smoke—Winnipeg. So, he was the teacher; I was the student. He always willingly and happily taught me what I, as a rube, needed to know. For example, he taught me how to smoke. He also taught me that girls liked to kiss, though it took me a few years to find that out. After all he was 2 years older and much more advanced than I was.

Since there were many of his air force and Air Canada buddies at the celebration, I chose to speak  about his first flight which I had witnessed.  I thought this would be an appropriate topic because Ernie became a pilot when he joined the Canadian Air Force in Greenwood Nova Scotia where he met an elegant, and an exotic, young beauty, Margie, who became his bride. I was mesmerized. Then if that was not exciting enough, he moved from the Air force to Air Canada, because he wanted to get away from the military bureaucracy, but found that the one at Air Canada was even worse.  I learned this from one of his friends who also spoke. My  most exciting experience with Ernie was his first flight which I witnessed as a young lad. Ernie was also a young lad.

At the time I was visiting  in Winnipeg, as I did at least once a year. He and his mother lived with our Oma. Oma was fantastic!  She loved western movies. At least so we thought, for she took both us downtown by bus to see them. What a great Oma.

But getting back to his first flight.  I’m meandering again. One time, we went bicycle riding to Monkey’s Speedway in Winnipeg. This was a series of pretty large hills in Winnipeg near what later became Polo Park, and right beside the Assiniboine River.  The area was undeveloped at that time. So boys took it over, much like homeless people would today. Boys turned it into a park for riding bikes. The object of our endeavors was to drive to the top of a hill on our bikes and then down at incredible speeds. I could not believe how fast we rode. One of those hills had a smaller hill at the bottom. As we careened down, and after we hit that small hill,  we literally flew into the air as if on a ski jump. It was stunningly exciting.  But on one jaunt, Ernie flew so high into the air that “he slipped the surly bonds of earth,” and when he landed back on terra firma, he broke his arm when he crashed at the bottom.  His first flight ended in a crash. We had to call 999 [now 911] for help to rush him to the hospital. The police came first and they took us both to the General Hospital (now the Health Sciences Centre) where his broken arm was treated and put in cast.  It was all very exciting. But not too much fun for Ernie.

A friend of Ernie’s read this poem that apparently is often read at the death of air force pilots:

 

High Flight

By Jon Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

of sun-split clouds,—and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,

I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air ….

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or even eagle flew—

And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

That was the day that Ernie first slipped the surly bonds of earth. I don’t know if he also touched the face of God but I hope so.

 

Not surly: Soup of the Day in Brockville Ontario

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

Church in Brockville Ontario

 

Today we woke up at 5a.m in Mattawa so we took our time. I read some more of Barbara Huck’s book on the Canadian Fur Trade routes. It is endlessly fascinating. We did not want to eat in the restaurant of our motel so we hit the road instead. We were on the road by 7:20, which for us is extremely early.  We stopped for breakfast at Deep River, home of Canada’s nuclear energy facility where our cousin Erich Vogt worked, before he became a professor in nuclear physics at the University of B.C.

For what might have been the first time ever, I ordered food from the senior’s breakfast at age 75.  I have always thought the portions for seniors are too small. This one was fine. The restaurant was called the Bear’s Den.  I particularly enjoyed the toast made from real home-made bread.  To quote God, I said about the meal: “It is good.”

Later in Brockville, we wanted to enjoy a dinner at Finnegan’s Irish pub because they advertised that their Soup of the Day was Jameson’s Irish whiskey with a side of ginger. That sounded pretty good to us, but the kitchen was already closed by the time we got there. We crossed the street where there was another Irish pub, called Thousand Island Brewing Co.  Lots of Irish in this town.  And they like to drink. Of course, they do; they’re Irish.  We were convinced that the waitress was not Irish. She wasn’t surly.

We liked it so much in this town we decided to stay and an extra day after the celebration of life.

 

 

Insect Armageddon in Mattawa

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada

 

We ended the day in Mattawa Ontario along the Ottawa River. As I had learned from my Barbara Huck book, French explorers Champlain, Brulé and Radisson all passed through this area on the way further west. I guess they also returned on the way east.   It was a regular stop on the fur trade route.

When we arrived in Mattawa , we selected a motel fairly quickly. Too quickly it turned out. Unless we had reserved ahead of time we usually found a motel or B&B on line.  Often that worked fine. Often not so fine. This was one of the ‘not so fine’ days. Quite often, particularly in Northern Ontario, just when Christiane thought she was securing a great place to stay  she discovered her phone was “out of bars,” which meant I gathered, she lost the technological connection and was thrown off course. No towers were in range.  That is what happened so we had to find a motel the old-fashioned way. Scoping it out where there were slim pickings.  That’s what ’s we did. The motel looked acceptable and had a real nice dining room overlooking the Ottawa River.

Mattawa is found at the confluence of the Mattawa and Ottawa Rivers in Nipissing District Ontario. I had never realized it before but Huck drew to my attention that “Today’s Ottawa River—with dozens of dams and reservoirs—is a docile, domesticated descendant of the wild waterway the fur traders knew.” Just like the Winnipeg River. And just like so much of Canada. So much of our country has been domesticated in the name of progress. Today, as we sat in the restaurant of our motel the river was a like placid lake. There was a lone boat anchored in the middle of it with a diligent fisherman enjoying the wonderful day. I guess domestication is not tall bad. Domestication has its place. My wife told me that so I am convinced.

Huck described it this way,

“Then [during the fur trade] particularly between Mattawa and Montreal, the river was a punishing, and often deadly, series of cataracts. But for fur traders enroute to the Great Lakes, it was nearly 500 kilometres shorter than the alternative route down the St. Lawrence and through Lakes Ontario and Erie.”

 

And of course, to the instruments of capitalism in the big cities distance and time were all important. The safety of the men not so much. Of course, who knows perhaps the voyageurs might have chosen the shorter and more dangerous route on their own. To them as well, time was money.  It was not just the greedy capitalists who appreciated money.

Our motel referred to itself as “your outdoor adventure’s dream.”  Nightmare would have been a better description. It looked really good. Right on the shores of the Ottawa River.  When we tried to secure a room, we were told we would have to go to the restaurant first.  We did not mind; there was no other restaurant around and we had noticed that the food looked good. We selected a seat by the window overlooking the river and drank in the view. It was outstanding. The river was like glass. There was one boat anchored in the middle of the river with a lone fisherman. It looked idyllic. It was a tranquil day with a fisherman or woman basking in the sun. The temperatures this day were very warm for autumn. In fact, I think it was record heat that day.

We started with drinks. Christiane had a Jameson and I had a Captain Morgan dark rum in honour of my trip to Wawa in 1967 with my buddies. That was my drink of choice that summer. We toasted the Cap’n. We were under age and just learning to drink. We were very stupid in other words. Today, we were smart. So at least I thought. Of course, now that I think of it, we thought we were smart in 1967 too.

I am sorry but the photograph I had of this site has disappeared into the digital ether never to be seen again. You will have to visualize it. My bad. Again.

After we settled in to our room, we thought we would open the screen window rather than air-conditioning as we thought (wrongly) that the AC was not working. Then we noticed an unwelcome sight. The window sill was covered—literally covered—in a pile of dead black flies about an inch or two thick, it seemed. It was rather disconcerting.  Actually, it was downright creepy. We wondered what caused the flies to come here to die? Was it the record heat wave? How long had they been lying there? Speculating did not help us to accept the scene. It was black fly Armageddon.

But it was late at night and we did not want to try to find a better room. This town had very few. We tried our best to clean up the corpses and put them out of our memories. Sometimes travel is not for the faint of heart. When you travel, you have to be prepared for everything.

This might not be the worst motel experience  we ever had, but it was definitely a contender for that crown.

Mattawa River Tremors

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Geology

 

We had followed the Mattawa River from Lake Nipissing to the Ottawa Valley where it flowed into the Ottawa River at Mattawa. The east flowing Mattawa River was a very important river for a very long time.  According to Barbara Huck, in her book on the fur trade routes of North America that  I was using as sort of tour guide to this area,

 

“The east flowing Mattawa River follows an ancient fault line in the Precambrian bedrock. Though strewn with rapids and falls, for more than 6,000 years it was the main highway from the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence. Appropriately Mattawa means “meeting of the waters.” The cataclysmic fracturing of the Earth’s crust that produced the valley with its soaring walls and visible thrust lines occurred about 600 million years ago. Even now there are tremors along the fault line, which may explain the ancient stories of spirits in the cliffs.

There was more cataclysm about 11,000 years ago, at the end of the last glaciation, as melting water from the receding ice sheets roared down the fault into the Ottawa Valley. The raging ancestral Mattawa carried great boulders with it, between Pine Lake and McCool Bay. These huge cobblestones pave an area that today is more than 15 metres above the river.”

 

All of these things that fascinate me now, were of no interest to me more than 50 years ago when I travelled this way with my buddies who had so long ago graduated from Grade 12 with me and ventured out to our road of discovery. What a pity! We are too late smart.

 

And as Barbara Huck added, “The modern Mattawa is tame by comparison, a 65.5-kilometre swath of spectacular scenery that echoes ancient native traditions, and the stories of the fur trade.”

 

The area was beautiful. And the history interesting. And we were not in a rush. Life was good; until it wasn’t. Stay tuned.

 

 

Pluralism around the Sault

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Moral Humility, Pluralism

 

 

The Clergue blockhouse at Sault Ste. Marie

 

The Clergue blockhouse was right beside the Ermatinger house and was part of the original North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. Both of which were right beside our hotel.  Of course, I don’t think too many elites stayed in this block house. That was for the lessers.

This area of North America where Lake Huron and Lake Superior meet, including Sault Ste. Marie, Ignace Michigan, the Mackinac Straits, and St Joseph’s Island, were vitally important in the fur trade. There were many varied First Nations, and the French and English, and later the Americans and Canadians. Barbara Huck called it “The Crossroads of Humanity.” Often they fought each other; at other times they lived together peacefully. As Huck explained,

“For a half-century. Michilmackinac [a little south of Sault Ste, Marie] flourished. Living at a crossroads of humanity, the people of the straits were at home with diversity, unfazed by racial, linguistic, or religious  differences. A multilingual, multiracial community evolved as French traders married local Odawa and Ojibwe women. Prefacing the Metis community that would grow up around the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in Manitoba a century later, their mixed blood children soon became the dominant population of the straits.”

In Manitoba as well the Métis people became dominant, for a while.  When Manitoba became a province of Canada in 1870, 80% of the people were Métis. A lot of Manitobans have forgotten this. Some of the Indigenous people had left and the hordes of European immigrants, including Mennonites were not yet there.

It was also interesting what happened after America declared its independence from England. As Huck said,

“In 1775 the New England colonies rebelled, and the British turned to their new-found native allies.  Weighing the situation, the Odawa, Ojibwe, Winnebago, Sauk, Fox, Menominee, and Sioux decided that as rigid and obtuse as the British might be, they were not as bent on clearing and settling the land as the American rebels were.”

 

Where many nations live together, they have to make serious efforts to recognize each other and not assume, that all wisdom resides in their own community. They did learn that in the area around Sault Ste. Marie. Sadly, such lessons are sometimes hard to learn and too often not passed on to the next generation. I am a great believer in pluralism. It breeds humility, something always in short supply. Live and let live. We can all learn from each other. None of us have a monopoly on the truth. Pluralism is not always easy, but it sure beats warfare.

As Sally Gibson wrote in a chapter of Huck’s book,

“Sault Ste. Marie has long been a stopping place for travellers. Once a seamless zone of trade, the area is now separated by the Canadian-American border and twin cities name Sault Ste. Marie on either side of the St. Mary’s River Rapids. The rapids drop almost seven metres over less than three kilometres, draining Lake Superior. Travellers today can enjoy the natural beauty of the area and find remnants of the fur trade that stimulated early European settlement.”

 

Of course, once European countries arrived on the scene it did not take them long to make claims on the land. That’s what Europeans (later Canadians or Americans) do.  As Gibson said,

“The territory around Sault Ste, Marie was claimed for France by Sieur de Saint Lusson in an elaborate ceremony…recognizing the importance of the location, New France granted a seigneury on the St. Mary’s River to Chevalier de Repentigny in 1751.”

 

Of course, Gibson did not say by whose authority France did that because none of the people from Europe had any authority to make such grants. Americans always claimed land by conquest, but the locals in Canada had never been conquered. And the locals had never ceded the land. So there really was no basis for the grants. France could have used some humility.

Chevalier de Repentigny farmed the property and fortified it but he left within 5 years as soon as the 7 Years War broke out between France and England. After the French fell in that war, the English took over, but they really had no authority either. Of course, that did not stop the English from granting exclusive rights to the land in 1765 to an English trader Alexander Henry. He was given authority to the Lake Superior area. What did mean? I would say, as a recovering lawyer, that such a grant would be void for uncertainty. What area was covered by the grant, if the grant was otherwise valid?

I have always wondered what would be the legal effect of the United States placing a flag on the moon?  Would that give the Americans ownership of the entire moon?  Half the moon?  The light side of the moon? A square mile? An acre?  Or no part? How can you make such a decision? When you get right down to it claims of “ownership” are usually dubious at their root. Once more that should generate some humility.

Take another example. Indigenous people roamed the North American continent for thousands of years. Many of them were nomadic. Others were more sedentary farmers. What part did each First Nation own? How can you tell? By what right?

Really all claims of ownership are dubious?  Whether you are talking about the jungles of the Amazon or the plains of North America or the city of Steinbach?  All of them are fundamentally dubious!

I taught real estate law at the University of Manitoba Law School for about 10 years and nothing I learnt or taught there gave me any more certainty.

Life of the Elite During Fur Trade

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, History, Indigenous People After Contact

 

 

Ermatinger House, Sault Ste, Marie, Ontario

Without realizing it, when I last read Barbara Huck’s book, Exploring the Fur Trade Routes of North America, she was writing about Sault Ste. Marie! In fact, about places right next to our hotel. Was this coincidence or miracle? And our hotel was minutes away from what she talked about in the book.

Within a couple of blocks of our hotel in Sault Ste. Marie we visited some of the places referred to in the book by Barbara Huck that I was reading that very morning. Huck even had photos in her book of the same buildings I photographed like the one above. There were some weird coincidences on the trip and this was clearly one of them.

First, the stone house of independent fur trader Charles Ermatinger was built on the shore of the St. Marys River, is obviously not an ordinary house. As Sally Gibson wrote in Barbara Huck’s book on the Canadian fur trade, the house was ‘constructed in a classic Georgian style, with ground sloping to the water, it was an imposing sight for early 19th century travellers on the waterway.”I  accept that. I certainly was impressed. Thousands of visitors go to see the house each year. It has been completely restored and refurnished.  She wrote that the house is underpinned in the basement, which I did not see from outside, by cedar logs at least 38 centimetres in diameter and “has stone walls almost a metre thick.” It was built to last through dangerous times.

This house was part of the North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. The Ermatinger family lived there until 1828 when they moved back to Montreal. But Ermatinger was an independent fur trader after he left the company in 1808. No doubt he and his family, consisting of a wife and 13 children, enjoyed life there.  His wife was Mananowe (Charlotte) and was the daughter of a prominent Ojibwe policy maker by the name of Katawabeda. The occupants were the elites of 2 of the founding nations of this country; Indigenous and French. That too was impressive.

As Gibson explained, “In this gracious environment, the Ermatinger family offered hospitality to both area residents and weary travellers.” Apparently, invitations to the annual caribou dinner at the house were keenly sought by locals. I know I would love to have attended one of those. It was established as a National Historic site in the 1960s.