Oldkingston00machuoft.Pdf
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
MAULE A METROPOLITAN TORONTO LIBRARY TORONTO PUBLIC LIBRARIES REFERENCE LIBRARY METROPOLITAN TORONTO LIBRARY CANADIAN HISTORY THE STORY OF OLD KINGSTON. TO THE MEMORY OF THE GOOD MEN AND TRUE, WHO BUILT UP OLD KINGSTON ; AND TO ALL CITIZENS OF TO-DAY WHO FOLLOW THEIR TRADITIONS AND EXAMPLE THESE PAGES ARE CORDIALLY INSCRIBED. ROBERT RENE CAVALIER DE LA SALLE. First Seignior of Cataraqui and Commandant of Fort Frontenac. The Story of Old Kingston BY AGNES MAULE MACHAR " Author of of the True "Stories Lays North," of New France," " s Marjorie Canadian Winter," " Roland Graeme, Knight," etc., etc. TORONTO THE MUSSON BOOK CO. LIMITED METROPOLITAN TORONTO LIBRARY i f* **T*iiiivTt*fi t "tmtscwfstmstff CANADIAN HISTORY Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, by The Musson Book Company, Limited, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and eight, in the Department of Agriculture. 372, /) / PREFACE. It has been said that they know not England who only England know. On the same principle, we can not be said really to know our own time, unless we know something of the events that preceded it and helped to determine its character. To a community, the consciousness of its past gives the sense of con tinuity which is the principle of its collective life and the nurse of its patriotism. Fifty years ago Canada was a young, compara tively undeveloped country, hardly conscious of pos sessing a history. The romance and adventure of the early days of French Canada were to our fathers a sealed book, and the more recent history of British Canada seemed almost to belong to "current events." But now the researches of historians and Historical Societies have placed within our reach the varied treas ures of our past, with its noble achievement and adven ture; its struggles and privations; its conflicts and its gains. And we know that Kingston in particular has a story of which she may well be proud, and which all her citizens should know. Nurtured in sacrifice and hardship, inured to repeated disappointments, she has proved the "uses of adversity" in teaching lessons of steadfastness and energy, which have developed her growing life and moulded her still plastic institutions. Her history is now for the first time presented as a connected whole, and as it is so interwoven with that 5 Preface. of the country, the background of contemporary events has been indicated in the following pages sufficiently to make the story they contain intelligible to readers who may not be familiar with our past history. But "Old as the "Story" is of Kingston," the persons and events of the present generation have not been touched upon, except so far as was necessary to complete the story of the past. It may well be hoped that the future of the modern city will prove worthy of the staunch and high-minded founders of the old town of an earlier age, in holding fast its honourable traditions of honest work, steadfastness of purpose, reverence of spirit, and loyalty to duty and the good of the community. The author desires heartily to acknowledge obliga tions to the works of Margry, Mahan, Parkman, Mc- Mullen, Dent, Canniff, and other Canadian authors; to the Life and Letters of the Hon. Richard Cart- wright, the Essay of C. W. Cooper, the Records of the Ontario Historical Society, and to valuable his torical articles in the Queen s Quarterly. \ CONTENTS CHAPTER. PAGE. PREFACE 5 I. THE FOUNDING OF FORT FRONTENAC 9 ^ II. FORT FRONTENAC UNDER THE FRENCH EEGIME 24 III. THE FALL OF FORT FRONTENAC 40 IV. THE COMING OF THE LOYALISTS 54 V. SETTLEMENT AND EARLY DAYS 66 VI. NAVAL AND MILITARY CENTRE AND FIRST SEAT OF PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENT 82 VII. THE CLOUD OF WAR 99 VIII. To ARMS! Ill IX. NAVAL EXPEDITIONS FROM KINGSTON 127 X. AFTER THE WAR 143 XI. A GROWING TIME 161 XII. A POLITICAL CRISIS 179 XIII. KINGSTON AS THE CAPITAL OF CANADA 200 XIV. AN EDUCATIONAL CENTRE 222 XV. CHURCHES AND CHARITIES 246 XVI. SIXTY YEARS AGO 266 APPENDICES. DECREE GRANTING TO LA SALLE THE SEIGNIORY OF CATARAQUI. LIST OF MAYORS OF KINGSTON. The Story of Old Kingston. CHAPTER I. THE FOUNDING OF FORT FBONTENAC. The period of two centuries and a quarter though falling far short of what is considered antiquity in the Old World constitutes a somewhat venerable age in the one we distinctively style the "New." On a continent where the vestiges of even a moderate antiquity are few and far between where the most ancient traces of European civilisation are little older than three centuries the citizens of Kingston may justly claim the honours of age for their loyal old city, whose site, during two hundred years as Cataraqui, Fort Frontenac, or Kingston, has played an important part in the history of Canada, ranking, in military importance, next to Quebec itself. It is not easy to call up a mental picture of the Canada of two hundred years ago: since the country we know by that name to-day had, save in its nat ural conformation, no existence. New France, or "Canada," as it was by that time generally known, was little more than a line of scattered settlements along the banks of the St. Lawrence. In order to realise its aspect as it was then, we must sweep away, in imagination, the busy and substantial cities of the 9 The Story of Old Kingston. present, the towns and villages, the harbours and shipping, the roads and railways, and conjure up in their stead a vision of the trackless forest wilderness, the haunt of the deer, the wolf and the beaver, as well as the battlefield of the fierce wandering tribes that waged a no less destructive warfare with each other than with the wild beasts of the forest. The relative position of British America must also, in some degree, be reversed in our mental picture. For Nouvelle France, under the Most Catholic King, Louis Quatorze, occupied nearly the same territory with our Eastern Canada, while the north-eastern por tion of the United States so far as it had then been explored was claimed by the English and Dutch, and held by their garrisons. The period at which our "Story" begins is July, 1673 the thirtieth year of the reign of Louis XIV., and the thirteenth after the restoration of the Stuart dynasty little more than a century after the "men of the Mayflower" had landed on Plymouth Rock. Boston and New York were as yet little more than villages, and Quebec and Mont real only insignificant hamlets defended by palisaded forts. On the morning of July twelfth a date to be remembered by Kingstonians the observant crow, hovering over the blue St. Lawrence, a few miles below Kingston, or the contemplative crane, fishing solitary on some tufted rock, beheld a strange flotilla, unlike any before seen amid these sylvan solitudes, emerging from the devious mazes of the Thousand Isles. Canoes, manned by French soldiers, and gaily painted bateaux led the way; then came large war- canoes, filled with imposing figures in glittering French uniforms, amid whom might easily have been 10 The Founding of Fort Frontenac. distinguished the stately figure and clear-cut features of the Great Ononthio, Count Frontenac himself. On either side came another squadron of canoes, one filled with French soldiers and one with Indian allies, while two others, following as a rear-guard, closed the mar tial cortege. The Governor himself, as we are told in the Journal of the expedition written by the Abbe D Urfe, had carefully arranged the order of approach, with a view, undoubtedly, to the impression he hoped to make on the savage mind. But why had the dignified French Viceroy under taken., with such a retinue, an expensive and tedious voyage from the rock of Quebec to the outlet of Lake Ontario an almost unknown point in the midst of unbroken wilderness? And why was he so desirous of impressing a gathering of roaming Indians with the power and prestige of his country? For the answer we need only recall the circumstances in which the gallant "Pioneers of France in the New World" had been, for more than a century, struggling with the adverse forces of Nature and human savagery, in order to establish the colony of New France on a stable foundation. In the seventeenth century the supremacy of North America was still actively contested by the three great nations which had shared in the honour of its dis covery. Spain, fortified by a papal bull, had early pre-empted a vast southern region under the name of Florida the ; Fleur-de-Lis floated over a great northern area, styled New France; and Great Britain, with adventurous Dutchmen by her side, was pressing her way inwards from her chain of settlements on the eastern seaboard. Between the latter, especially, com petition was naturally keen for the "sinews of war," 11 The Story of Old Kingston. i.e., the fur trade, then the mainstay of any northern colony. The ferocious Iroquois, or Five Nations, were, through their geographical position on the water-shed of north-flowing rivers, the chief purveyors of this important traffic in the northern area occupied by the French, Dutch and English settlers. They had long been the scourge and terror of New France, and though a temporary check had been imposed on their destructive raids by the brave Daulac and his gallant comrades of the "Canadian Thermopylae," a border warfare had for years harassed the European settle ments.